German `Cultural Scripts': Public Signs as a Key to Social Attitudes and Cultural Values

Abstract

This paper is based on the following set of assumptions: (1) Ways of speaking characteristic of a given speech-community constitute a manifestation of a tacit system of `cultural rules', or, as the author calls them, `cultural scripts'; (2) to understand a society's ways of speaking, we have to identify and articulate its implicit `cultural scripts'; (3) to be able to do this without ethnocentric bias we need a universal, language-independent perspective; and (4) this can be attained if the `rules' in question are stated in terms of lexical universals, that is, universal human concepts lexicalized in all languages of the world. In various earlier publications Anna Wierzbicka tried to show how cultural scripts can be set out and justified with reference, in particular, to Japanese, Chinese, Polish, (White) Anglo-American, Black American and Anglo-Australian cultural norms. In this paper she applies the `cultural script' approach to German and compares German norms with `Anglo' norms (that is, norms prevailing in English-specking societies). Wierzbicka notes that in recent decades great changes have undoubtedly occurred in German ways of speaking and, it can be presumed, in underlying cultural values. For example, the dramatic spread of the use of the `familiar' form of address (du, as opposed to Sie), and the decline in the use of titles (e.g. Herr Müller instead of Prof. Müller) point to significant changes in interpersonal relations, in the direction of more egalitarian informality. At the same time, she shows that evidence of contemporary public signs which are discussed here suggests that some traditional German values, like the value of social discipline and of Ordnung (order) based on legitimate authority, are far from obsolete. She also shows that in studying such values we can rely on concepts more precise and more illuminating than `authoritarianism' or `authoritarian personality', often used in the past in analyses of German culture and society, and that the `cultural scripts' approach offers a rigorous and efficient tool for studying change and variation, as well as continuity, in social attitudes and cultural values. Above all, the author argues that rather than perpetuating stereotypes based on prejudice and lack of understanding `cultural scripts' help outsiders grasp the `cultural logic' underlying unfamiliar ways of speaking which may otherwise look like a strange collection of idiosyncracies—or worse.