Germany is in need of "humour development aid," says Roger Boyes, the "London Times" correspondent in Berlin. He is distributing care packages in the form of a new book, an autobiographical satire provocatively titled "My dear Krauts". It's the product of a long struggle to understand a deeply confusing nation.
The Germans are a nation of paranoid schizophrenics who can't decide whether to love or loathe themselves, says Roger. "I see myself as a development aid worker on German humour. Basically the Germans need all the help they can get. And I've decided to do my bit. It's not that they can't be funny. In fact they like a good laugh. It's just that they're a bit slower on the uptake. And they don't understand irony."
If you want to know more, you can read the whole book on archive.org. Simply click here, join up (it's free!), then log in, and "borrow" the book which, incidentally, is the German translation so you may need to do a bit of homework first. And if that isn't irony, I don't know what is!
If you are a little stuck with your German, you may wish to read Roger's "To Prussia With Love" which, thoughfully, has been left untranslated.
P.S. Among several other books about Germany, Roger Boyes also wrote "A Year in the Scheisse", but I leave that cultural pearl for another day.
... but, as they say in the commercial, there's more
