US Election Mania in Germany

I wrote this little anecdote up for Daniela at the US Embassy. We had coffee the other day along with the other two Fulbright kids who helped with the Building Bridges conference. We started talking about the election and I mentioned how surprised I was to find a lot of interest in the election among my students. She said that that kind of information is really good for them to know, so that they can convince people in Washington to send good speakers to Germany. So I wrote this up for her:

In the course of working as a Fulbright Teaching Assitant in Berlin, I was recently asked by one of the teachers to give one of his classes a brief overview of the election process and and introduction to the candidates. I was concerned that our complicated system might be difficult for them to understand in English, and that the topic would be utterly uninteresting to them in general. The U.S. Election is all over the news here in Germany, its coverage even eclipsing a lot of domestic political issues. However, I never imagined that this interest might have penetrated the consciousness of a class of 11 graders. I was totally shocked by how knowledgeable and interested the students in the class were. The normally somewhat rowdy and talkative class listened attentively as I tried to explain the basics of the electoral system. When I asked them what they knew about the candidates, several students piped up at once naming the top contenders. When I pressed them for more information, some of the students were able to give me very up-to-date details on who the candidates were, what they were saying, and how they were being perceived. Not surprisingly, while their knowledge of Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama left me agape, they knew almost nothing about the slew of candidates on the other side of the party line. In Germany, interest even among the youth, in this election is astonishing. You would be hard pressed to find students in an American school that were more knowledgeable and enthusiastic about the election. And my school is by no means elite. On the contrary it is one of the schools in Berlin with an undeserved bad reputation. It is a school in which every one of German's ethnic and religious minorities are well represented. The interest these students have in the direction of American Politics can well be said to represent the feelings of the broadest spectrum of the German population.