Stuttgart is Germany's great happy medium. Bayerishce Gemutlichkeit without Bavaria's reactionary politics and right wing Catholicism. Proximity to revolutionary France taught the local elite to give a little and up their game. I taught one week entrepreneurship courses in the Hochschule Der Medien in Stuttgart three times on Erasmus exchanges from 2015-17. The professors I worked with took us to the Ludwigsburg Xmas market and on a private evening tour of the Ludwigsburg Schloss and to a restaurant housed in a building built in the 1450s. The castle's tour guide explained how the castle's 2000 servants were paid the equivalent of 10 euro cents/month in the 1790s. No wonder they and Beethoven initially welcomed Napoleon.

Enjoy Schwabish high social capital and eat lots of Maultaschen.

But there's plenty of corruption in Germany too. Ask any local about the delays and cost overruns in the Stuttgart train station renovation project and you'll get an earful about it.

In 1973 when hitching across Germany a Lutheran pastor who spoke excellent English gave me a ride. When I asked him where he'd learned it, he said he'd been a POW outside Dallas and told me the day he was captured was the happiest day of his life, including his wedding day and the birth of his son. That day he knew he would live.

80 years ago the USA launched the operartion that would save Germany from itself. Now the roles are exactly reversed.

Aphorism on the German language from a Berliner friend of mine: "life is too short to learn German."

I've been trying since 1967 and I'm still waiting for the verb at the end.