>>17734142German culture is weird. It was this hyper nationalistic hub of high art and academia, then after the first world war it became a decadent libertine ghetto used by the rest of europe as the place to commit sex crimes, then nazis, then half the country spent 50 years in crippling poverty and brutal occupation by a militant jingoist autocracy, and then emancipated into an engineering and manufacturing hub for an america-centric trade network. Each of these phases in its modern history had their own distinct cultures and they've crossed through all of them in about 2 lifetimes, which naturally causes a lot of generational conflict and weird artefacts left by periods so different from the 'now' that they feel like ancient history, but actually only happened when your parents were in college.
Austria had a more natural transition from imperial power to modernity, so it's sort of like Germany without all the weird cultural baggage that modern Germany has.
