The Toastmasters Club, or Toastmasters International, is a place where professionals meet to work on their public speaking skills. In general, a Toastmaster is someone who is diplomatic, and capable of communicating his/her views in a poised, diplomatically-toned and gentlemanly mannerism, together with outstanding skill and appeal.
I happened to go to a Toastmasters Club in Cologne towards late 2011. It was the most horrible experience one would ever want to associate with the very name ‘Toastmasters’. The manner in which a man, who was apparently the outgoing President of the club, spoke was extremely deplorable. I was asked to deliver an impromptu speech – an evaluation of a speech made by one of the members- which I did in a haste. I wrote my key points on a shabby little piece of paper (the only one I had with me). The so-called ‘president’ was asked by another member to give an evaluation of my short evaluation. This was when the cat jumped out of the bag, and the allures of a distinctly post-Nazi upbringing were so clearly shown.
This guy started, with an extremely haughty tone – as if to imply that he was the most gifted public speaker around, or the model toastmaster. His comments were all ‘it bothered ME that…, it disturbed me that….., it was not so pleasant for me that….etc’. It was all a big ‘I, me and my’ rant. Added to that, he was extremely impolite, and by his choice of tone, words and gesture, it was crystal-clear that he was intent upon downgrading me, and showing his supremacy above me.
What type of supremacy is it? What is at interplay here?
It is a supremacy in terms of public speaking? Was he trying to imply that he was a better public speaker than me? I don’t think so. If that was his goal, he could have given a better speech, without hammering one person. Secondly, he was much more polite and diplomatic in his evaluation of another ‘evaluation’ of a previously presented speech. Unsurprisingly, that speech was delivered by a white German woman. She largely exceeded the time allowed to her, and even when the ‘paper signs that denote time limits’ were red, she kept on talking, moving around as if she had a problem in her anatomy, extremely overpowering, unpresentable, and on a Toastmasters platform, simply atrocious and disgraceful.
What made the ‘president guy’ be so rough with me and all niceties with her?
Well, the answer is clear. He seems to be strongly affected by something I notice on a nearly daily basis since I came to live in Germany: what I call an essentially post-Nazi mindset. German authorities deeply despise the word ‘Nazi’ and anything and everything National Socialist. It is clearly written in the law anything related to Nazism is illegal and prohibited. But one simply can’t kill history. National socialism was the dominant ideological current that shaped life in Germany in the 20th century. Everything that Germany and Germans went through, and the transformations the state went through, are all inextricably linked to National Socialism. In such a country, only the brain-dead could possibly conclude that because National Socialist symbols are banned, the National Socialist mindset is not infused into people’s minds.
In contemporary Germany, the remnant of (or the present-day form 0f) the exclusivist National Socialist ideology is present in one key area: the way many Germans tend to perceive foreigners, or individuals who look ‘foreign’ in their eyes. If you apply for a job, and if your name does not sound European, and if you do not ‘look’ European (i.e. white), very often it is likely that your application will find its way straight into the wastepaper bin. You will get systematically rejected from one employer to another. The only exception is if you apply for blue-collar jobs and especially menial jobs including cleaning, washing dishes in restaurants etc. If you are a multilingual, cosmopolitan, well-qualified foreigner with colored skin and a non-European-sounding name, then YOU BECOME THE OBJECT OF MUCH CONTEMPT AND DOWNGRADING…This is a generalization indeed, and I really hope I’m wrong. But my experience so far has shown me that this issue quite considerably persists in this society.
To the so-called outgoing president Köln Toasmasters Club (whom I can only describe as a pseudo-Toastmaster) looked at me with this discriminatory and exclusionist mentality. Whatever I do, the white German woman who talked before me will be seen better than I am. This shows how racially conscious and brainwashed some individuals in the younger generation of Germans are. This is where it is quite frustrating, that exclusionist and exclusivist ideologies still tend to haunt some youth in this era of globalization, the global village, constant ethnic, linguistic and cultural mixing and unprecedented cosmopolitanism. Hitler may be long dead, National Socialism may no longer be the ideological current that dominates the German government. But the core of the Nazi ideology, which stemmed from an essentially exclusivist discourse (and the exclusion of all those who do not correspond to the exclusive ‘norm’ is the flip side of the coin) does not appear to be a spent force. I would not be surprised if there are foreign professionals out there who are forced to believe that this ideology constitutes a huge glass ceiling for them.
This is a daring reality that I have been forced to come to terms with almost on a weekly basis since I moved to Germany. I really hope I’m wrong, and that what I’m saying above is a fringe matter – one that concerns a minority……
