 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community Matters here. Good morning to Think Tech Hawaii and J. Fidel's global connection show. My name is Martin Bespang. I'm today's guest. Jay will probably join us soon. And until then, I will tell you a little bit about the topic of the show. The topic is, as I called it, inclusive Germany. So I'm sitting here in the capacity of being native of Germany. And if you've seen my face before, in my other capacity, I'm a host here for Human Humane Architecture always on Tuesdays in the afternoon. A little bit of promotion for that. But let's talk about Germany. That's what Jay was interested to see what Germany looks like in 2017 and compare some things. And maybe we start out with some data. Germany has a population of roughly 80 million people, whereas the U.S. has a population of, which is four times as big, about 320 million people. Both cultures and countries hit number one and two as the top destination for immigration. The United States leads, and Germany is the second following that. And so what does that mean? What kind of impact does that have on life, on everyday life? That's what we're going to talk about. And I provided some images that we will show in the background here. These are two projects that I've been doing with my family business over the last decades, which are public projects. This one here is an on-grade, a light rail tram station. And the other one we're going to show is a kindergarten, both public projects. And the guys you see here is a local emerging architect who visited me last summer. And we were just sitting down and having a coffee and looking at what's going on. We were positively surprised if we can walk through a couple more pictures, maybe do picture number six right away, that you see the United Nations on that platform. You see a diversity of people. However, coming back to the facts and numbers, Germany pretty much consists of 80% or 90% Germans and only a lower percentage of other people from the European Union and then until now a rather small percentage of people from all over the world. However, as you can see in this picture, this has changed recently dramatically because as you guys probably know from the news, we have created what we called the Willkommen School Tour, which is translated to be the welcoming culture of Germany. And what that means, we're going to tell you in a minute after a short break when our host J. Feidell will join us. See you in a minute. We all play a role in keeping our community safe. Every day we move in and out of each other's busy lives. It's easy to take for granted all the little moments that make up our every day. Some are good, others not so much. But that's life. It's when something doesn't seem quite right that it's time to pay attention. 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Please join me every Thursday at 1 p.m. for the Voice of the Veteran. Aloha. Hello, everyone. I'm DeSoto Brown, the co-host of Human Humane Architecture, which is seen on Think Tech Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. And with the show's host, Martin Despeng, we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live, but other aspects of our life, not only here in Hawaii, but internationally as well. So join us for Human Humane Architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. Ted Rawson here, folks. You're a host on Where the Drone Leads, our weekly show at noon on Thursdays here on Think Tech. We talk about drones, anything to do about drones, drones, remotely piloted aircraft, unmanned aircraft systems, whatever you want to call them, emerging into Hawaii's economy, educational framework, and our public life. We talk about things associated with the use, the misuse, technology, engineering, legislation with local experts as well as people from across the country. Please join us noon on Thursdays and catch the latest on what's taking place in the world of drones that might affect you. So I'll pick it up again, yeah. Okay, we're back, and I'm with Martin today, and Martin is going to help us transition from what he was talking about the first few minutes until now, until my late arrival. Martin, what were you talking about, and how does that transition to what we're going to do now? Well, it's totally fine, Jay, and we started to talk about Germany and compare it to the United States as far as numbers, number of people living there, but also ranking, we're both ranking number one and number two as far as the most popular immigrant destination. United States, we don't know how that will be in the future. Why is that? Why is Germany... Punctuation, we had an on-the-street interview of a woman from Sweden, and I said, well, what do you think about the migrants in Sweden? She says, we're not kind enough to them. We do not take care of them the way I think we should, the way my generation thinks we should. We admire Germany. Germany takes care of them. Why is that? Well, this is a great transition from before the break because I closed with introducing a term that I think has been installed to describe, and that's called Willkommenskultur, and it means welcoming culture. That's how society tries to phrase what it's supposed to do and what it wants to do, and my partner, Suzanne, who wanted to be on the show, and you also said it's interesting to talk about why she isn't on the show, because her family business got hit by Harvey, hit heart, and so that's another thing we might want to talk about, global connections and how our reactions and actions were. How much time you've got, Mark? Sometime. But we also talked in front of the show, so I'm also representing her opinions here, and we talked about this just before the show, and we said, if we look back at our culture, we have been welcomed by Americans, and I just had the privilege to become American, too, while keeping my German citizenship. That's wonderful. And so, thank you. But I wouldn't be here if Americans wouldn't have us out after we screwed up pretty badly at the beginning of the last century. And our current Chancellor Merkel is the one who had facilitated, we should say, as our leader, this welcoming culture. And she has always all been welcomed, because she's from former East Germany. And so, the whole Germany has welcomed back. She's not alone. She's popular. People like her. She's popular, yes, in general, yes. But, of course, there's, let's say, if you create a culture that is human and shows humanity and humility, there's always people who disagree with that and don't like that. And unfortunately, the media are going to dwell on these people, right? It actually accelerates it somehow. It leverages it to a little attention, but it's raw meat kind of news as it takes more oxygen than it should. So, you know, you probably can ask sociologists about this phenomenon of how much burden do we Germans carry with us? Yeah, I'll ask that question. How much burden do you carry with you? I carry a lot, and I'm happy that I carry that, because in high school, all the way through high school, the Holocaust was addressed a lot, and my oldest son still had a Holocaust survivor brought in high school, and that's one of the last ones, because they die out, and he was in his 90s, and he broke out in tears in front of the students. So, you know, my son and his peers are lucky to have eye-witnessed that that was real, and that's really important. How does he feel about it now? He feels good. I mean, it was a burden, but it's a good burden to carry because it reminds us of not let this happen again ever. Did he get that from you also? I mean, how do you feel? I got that. I got that. I mean, the more the generations are removed from it and the more it remolds, you know, the more abstract it gets, so it's important that society addresses that in current, you know, discourses and readings and talks. Well, dwelling on it for a minute, you know, there are people, actually many people, some say even an increasing number of people who deny the Holocaust, say it did not happen. There are people who, you know, either don't know or deny or forget what happened, and they carry, if you will, a brand new kind of anti-Semitism in Europe and in the U.S., even in Hawaii, actually. Think about that. That's really scary. That's really scary. And I was brought, thanks to my parents, thanks mom and dad, was brought up very liberal and said to tolerate everyone. And maybe our way of making up is our work as architects and the pictures we're going to show you. You know, I think there's really something to that because what you do is a gift. Yeah. And I, you know, we show the train stations in the back and you see black people and brown people and yellow people. And this is in Germany. I was just pulling the numbers. You know, Germany is as predominantly white as America is. Sure. And so we have the majority of the population is from Germany and we have a minority of other Europeans. That's changing. That's changing. And that's this sort of which we call the migration wave. And I think personally, this is awesome. And if you have the integration with them, Martin, because you know, there are incidents. I'm sure they're in the German papers. Certainly once in a while through the U.S. papers about migrants who don't behave, migrants who get in trouble, migrants who treat women badly, who abuse, who abuse not only the women, but the whole system because I don't know why. And I wonder if this is a problem. I guess it must be a problem on a small level because there's a larger problem on it. And maybe it creates a right wing that wants to, you know, fight back to that. But how do you feel the integration of these migrants is going? I'd like to answer with maybe bringing up picture number, let's say number eight. So this is the other project. I just visited with some Hawaii students emerging architects last summer and we were visiting that kindergarten that at the very right from the top, we make reference to a show from the previous urban transcendence days. And this one was called Woody Kakey Garden. And I did what we call in architecture a post-occupancy evaluation to see evidence-based design performance and see how does it work, you know, architecturally and more recently socially. And I'm really proud of my kindergartener, the director, Ms. Savitsa, whom I interviewed. And she said already then, it's just awesome. We got kids from all over the world and I say, how about the Syrians now? She said that is even better because we were lacking them. The more the better, the diversity is better. She said it's great and said, well, we got along. If we don't, we work it out, you know, and we're in our community. And at the same time, this trace is to Harvey. At the same time, this is an off-the-grid kindergarten. This is the first, which I call, post-fossil kindergarten for the city of Hanover. So these kids grew up going home, teaching their parents that the furnace they have, they don't need. And they teach the kids that they get along with everyone in the world. That is beautiful. Isn't it? But coming back, so I phrase this up front positively, because I think this is important. And then there is like in every system, there are exceptions to the rule. And this is maybe bringing number 14. This is something that Suzanne provided. This is from her hometown, from her little community. If we get picture 14. And this, what you see in the center there, is housing, is new housing that this little community provided for the new migrants. And this is high standard. This is nice, wood siding. How many families are in there? I have to guess, you can probably, you see a guy at the very bottom right, down there, so you can probably say there's probably like maybe 16 families in there. And it's pretty nice standard. And it's a gesture from the society. It's free. It's free, yeah. And they're welcome. And at the very top right, you see an addition to the high school in town, which they had provided shipping containers. And also the music still in there. You're a shipping container guy. But not that kind of. This is what gets me going to do it better, right? So there are some people, yes, who basically say, well, our kids end up in shipping containers, whereas the foreign kids and foreign people get more privileged, right? Right, because of resentment there, yeah. Yeah. But quoting Suzanne who said, if a society wants to be in harmony and in balance, everyone needs to be happy. And we cannot then sort of privilege some over others. We got to be fair. And people who come and have nothing, they need decent housing first and foremost. And if our kids have to sit in some shipping containers for some hours, that's fine and fair. And it should be, right? Fair is fair. Yeah, yeah. So I mean, you're talking about a pretty literate, intellectual, moral approach. And you're talking about you and Suzanne and the people who build that housing and who are, you know, your, you know, your comraderys, your like thinkers. But is this generally held? I mean, I know there's always going to be a 1% of, you know, fascists and reactionaries and skinheads and whatnot in the present company, but, you know, how is this generally held, this view? Other, I mean, is it noticeable that there's that other 1% that is making trouble? If I walked down the street in Hanover or any city in Germany, would I be able to find people like you and Suzanne? I think, I mean, it will tell, you know, at the next election, which is coming up soon, you know, doesn't Merkel get reelected or not? There are those who would like to unelect her. She's a candidate again, so she's not opposed to it. And we will see, because mainly she... She hasn't changed. No, she hasn't changed. She's stuck on her morality. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And she says, you know, we had to do this. There's even no question for her. And I believe, and you can probably pull polls and do statistics and can see how many are with her. And I think, I believe, as far as I know, the majority is with her and is with an attitude. And then there is a minority that we need to talk to these people and educate these people to say, think about it. I mean, think about, and maybe ways to make it more clear to these people is when someone says, well, why would I support the education of a refugee who wants to be a doctor in our country? And you know, education, I avoid to say education is free. I prefer to say in Germany, everyone pays for everyone's education because that's the way it is, right? But it is free to the individual. There's no cost to the individual, yes. The same thing in France, isn't it? Yeah, but there's a cost to society and every taxpayer, some parts of their tax dollars, euros, sorry, go to get evenly distributed to all public schools and all public universities. And that's a pretty good system. Yeah, and in the notion, it's not social, it's so much as you want an educated public because an educated public is a better country. It means the relationship between the citizen and the government, the citizen, the community is better. I mean, I can see that and I admire that in Europe, wherever it happens in Europe, and I really wonder honestly, and you took out American citizenship, so you have to deal with this. I wonder why it hasn't happened here and there's no real talk about it, is there? No, that's true. We've seen this in history. You've got to make the ordinary everyday people the average Joel, you've got to and Josephine, you've got to keep them happy, you've got to make them happy. So you've got to make sure there's social equity for everyone and if there's inequity, people start to get frustrated. So you have to sort of balance this out but constantly educate. If you educate, if you tell people, well, Germans don't make enough love to sustain their culture, right? Statistics again, we have a little less than 1.5 children we produce, right? And that's not enough to sustain our culture. So even from that point of view, we need these new citizens to sustain and then we get more, I was preparing for the show, I was trying to label my caption, my pictures, and one of them I called the United Colors and that reminded me of an advertising campaign by the fashion brand Benetton way back when I was a kid in the 80s. They were ahead of the times. I do remember it very well. So this sort of united colors of... Of Benetton, yeah. And it said so much. It was much more than clothing. It was, it was. And I think the message was clear. It didn't come across as just being sales pitchy. So Suzanne, again, her hometown is a very typical, small town and very sort of strong heritage. That's Bavaria, by the way. That's Munich. That's what Americans can consider to be the most... That's where they have the beer. Exactly. The Lederhosen, the Durndl, all of that, right? And she said, well, when I grew up, you know, I hardly ever saw a black person. And all of a sudden I see like black people, you know, walking by my house and being integrated. And then there's... You were pointing out the cologne tragedy at Christmas is the rape, the massive rape, you know? Okay, that's what we hear. That's what we read. But if we see, you know, black people walking by our house and being happy and chitchatting and not causing any trouble. And engaging with us. Because that's the real thing. And, you know, coming back to my kids, they always were watching TV and the news and about Muslim and, you know, this sort of weird, strange world out there. And they weren't sure. And I was really happy once that had Muslims in their class and some of them became their friends. My oldest son Joey. And all of a sudden he was like, well, these are the same people as we are. That's the same again in the projects. If you stand next to these on the train station and I ride the train public transportation exclusively in Germany. No car. And I've never been afraid, you know, of anyone throwing a bomb or stabbing me. Although every once in a while, yes, it happens. It occurs. But it's not this paranoia, at least not for me. Well, I want to go to that. I want to go to this whole notion about the migrants are there, okay? Some of them don't behave very well. But some of them do. And so what's the new Germany going to look like? Because Merkel and hopefully the people that re-elect her believe in the new world, the new Germany. Really, it's the new Germany. And have all the people from very diverse groups. And by the way, I would add to that footnote that, and this is a Thomas Friedman book that came out recently called Thank You for Being Late. That's a time book. But one of the points that he makes is that of the migrants that come into Europe, one-third are from the Middle East and two-thirds are from Africa. And I expect that that's the percentages of migrants that are coming to Germany as well because that's the general rule of it. So clearly, I mean, are they getting along? Are they speaking German? One of the problems in these countries is they never learn the language of the country. Are they reading, writing, speaking? Are they following the customs? Or are they maintaining a sort of separate, insulated kind of old culture, you know, country, their origin country culture? I mean, how's that working? Is there an assimilation? Well, that's a... I think integration is the key word. And I ran a show in our human human architecture that was called The Grand Waikiki Grand. So my building here in Honolulu, is the most culturally diverse place in the United States. And I keep saying and insisting that my place where I live is the most inclusive place in Honolulu. The Waikiki Grand. Yeah, yeah. And we got people of all kinds. That's why you're there. I know what it is. Which we pointed out in the show. You want that. You know, and this is the headquarters of the gay community. And I'm not gay and I've never been in touch with gay people. And I grew up with, like, being tolerant. So, of course, I was. But I had some, you know, I didn't know. So it was kind of... And I didn't even find out until I was probably running around and telling my colleagues what a great place I had. And they gave me a look and said, oh, you never told us. And I said, what guys? So it's really teaching me, you know, to be open and not having this paranoia or being suspicious. And we have a good track record in Germany. Because this didn't start now in the 70s, right? When the economy was doing well, Germans all of a sudden didn't want to do the dirty jobs anymore, right? So they also had migrants. And they were asking next door in Turkey. And the Turkish people didn't have that many jobs. And they came. And now we have, I mean, the two guys who were visiting me, you know, Chris Cegüeta and Shiraz, we went to a dinner place, right? And the students in Germany live off dinner. Because the dinner is the cheapest and most delicious fast food you can get. And we owe that to the... Well, I should take you to the döner store. We have one here in downtown pretty close. So it's basically a bun. And then you have coleslaw and meat in there and salad and tomato. So it's like a Turkish burger, right? And it's three euros, and you're like filled up for the most of the day, right? And we owe this to Turkish culture. So this is a new idea. The idea is that we welcome the new cultures. And we are building a new culture in the country. We are preserving certain things that are German that's fundamental, but we also are taking other things. We're building a sort of collective culture. And it's remarkable that enough people feel that way that it's happening. And I suppose, if not right away, then soon enough, enough people who are migrating into Germany will also feel that way, that they're players in the development of this new combined culture. I would say so. That's something. I think what's important that it's not a melting pot, what the United States have been called. I think it's important it's a quilt. A quilt. Yes, a quilt. And you can still identify the pieces. If you look at it from a distance, it's a unified pattern, right? But if you look up close, you see the patterns, the individual pieces that it's stitched together with. And I think that's pretty awesome. And with a Turkish, now you have two generations of Turkish who grew up in Germany, right? And they have German nationality and they speak German. They can get to be citizens. That's not a problem. What do you have to do to become a citizen of Germany? You know, honestly, I have to do more homework because I never had that problem. But I can tell you a lot about what I had to do to keep my German citizenship while not losing it while getting the American. No, this is not automatic. And that makes me a little mad about my culture, my original culture, because there's little information about that. So if you're even more naive than I am, you just apply for the American and you automatically to use your German citizenship. One of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation with you are many reasons, and I hope we can do it again, you know, sort of connect the dots. It's very important for us to connect the dots with faraway places and cultures to learn from them. One of the reasons I want to have this conversation with you is because we live in a very dynamic time. You're a bit dynamic. The migrants are changing things. It may not be big numbers, you know, relative to the entire population, but it's going to be, and it's not going to be just Germany. It's going to be every country there. And then in the U.S. things are changing backwardly, in my opinion, but that's just me. And we're losing ground every day and you're here and in the face of all of that, you take out American citizenship. All right, I hope you know what you are getting into, yeah? While other people are trying to take out citizenship elsewhere in the world. And then you travel. You do your profession in Germany with about three officers there. And then you come here and teach at the architecture school. So you're involved in a sort of a global arbitrage of ideas of cultures. And you make the trip a couple, three times a year, whatever it is. And you can compare not only the place in a static fashion but the place in a dynamic fashion. So my question to you, you just came back from a summer in Germany. Okay, now your return. And you're looking at this arbitrage in cultures. What did you learn this summer, Martin? What did you learn in Germany, about Germany, and what did you learn in Germany thinking about the U.S. and watching it devolve under our present Trump administration? And let's use picture number 15 as the background illustration for that talk. One picture's worth a thousand words. Which shows me, if we can get 15 please, which shows me at the very left here just holding my fresh American citizen certificate in front of that Obama mural close at the end of Ward and Kapoleani Boulevard. And at the bottom right we see me in line with 65 other aliens at that time who local boy, Broderick pulled through. In fact, the morning after the tragic election of the president. So we're the lucky ones which I'm pretty sure he said, okay, let's get these people in as long as we can. And at the very top right was the evening of the election, the president election. And we, as a therapy, we attended the mayor's reelection. And this is my German consul, honorary consul, Dennis Seller, who looks a little, you know, look at his face. That tells a lot. And we're actually more celebrating that I kept my German citizenship at that point. Which is sad because I think I'm in many ways, I probably would argue I'm in many ways maybe more patriotic than some American in sort of a Americano way in a very sentimental, romantic way. Well, immigrants are often more patriotic than the Americans. That I more wanted to see the good things, which I still believe in. But sort of the answer to your question would be that sort of having been in Germany and coming back, it's almost that I feel like we are in Germany with our welcoming culture almost like where America was in its founding phase. Where we're just saying we need all of you guys to make this work out. The more of you the better. Together we can work this out. And I think somehow you use that great term of D. Well, I use D evolution. There's evolution and there's D evolution. So we have to do something to remind us Americans that we should return to that welcoming spirit, to that spirit of inclusivity. And my therapy for that is the privilege which you mentioned to be at school and to be around the emerging generation. And together say there is no boundaries between us. We're all world citizens and we have to make an impact of what as you know from our human human architecture show I call planet and people frankly architecture and that's addressing my discipline. Especially valuable here. We got to save the world of course with whatever we design has to stop global warming that gets us back to Harvey. But at the same time and as important and recently increasingly more important for me I've been going back and looking at my buildings if they're holding up their energy performance is still the same but increasingly I look back how they're socially performing. And if they basically support inclusivity and humility and humanity and that gets me going and I think that's what we have to remind ourselves on a daily basis how lucky, how spoiled we are how privileged we are where we live in both cultures Western cultures and that we have to be loyal to the ones who are not as lucky as we are and you know they come from from areas where either political or natural catastrophes have destroyed pulled the carpet under their feet and we're so privileged I mean you know Suzanne tells her kids we go back to Germany there's no earthquake there's no hurricane there's no such thing it's one of the safest places on earth and so if we're on that on that island not geographically but as far as safely we have to let other people join that island and going back to that when I was mentioning the perception of if I'm a citizen who's maybe not that educated a little narrow minded but if you tell these people well if this refugee you support his medical school by some euros of your tax money and you get into a car accident and that's the guy who has to be there and saves you life wouldn't that be a smart idea be worth every penny right let's make a better society you know some people will say let's make America hate again I've heard that how about let's make America inclusive again yeah absolutely you heard it here on think tech you got Martin this bang just return great to have you back good to be back thank you Jay