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For some reason, your story reminds me of the two German graduate students in my Law school during my freshman year. I wouldn't have known them at all, except they were in my Legal Research class. One of them was quite tall, blond, handsome, aristocratic, the other was shorter but still quite tall, darker but still somewhat blond, etc. And the less Prussian of them had a wife or girlfriend, who was my first example of what my brother calls "Euro-trash." I learned to speak German in high school, and my husband is half German, so I felt a sort of kinship with them, which the Prussian one sneered at, and the lesser one tolerated, until the day I saw him and his wife/girlfriend, in the student union, stuffing their knapsacks with napkins, sugar packets, ketchup packets, and so forth. They smiled at me, and I grimaced back, and kept walking. I knew they felt perfectly entitled, and the depth between us was too deep to ever bridge. |
