DStiego

Yes. I don’t want to invalidate people’s bad experiences, but I think it’s a more general problem and not specifically xenophobia. What you describe can happen to anybody!

The same is true for speaking English, which is considered very high status in Germany. If someone has a strong German accent, they’ll be made fun of. I always find this ironic because the people laughing usually don’t speak much better. (Not that I would care; I love people’s accents.)

Can you give examples? I'm curious which of your beliefs have changed

I don't think it's an obvious joke.

In general, you can totally be against the way immigration is handled in one place while being an immigrant elsewhere.

The family you mentioned likely considered themselves different from the immigrants that they complained about.

I'm not agreeing/disagreeing with these people I don't know, but the general point is fair.

There's two things at play here:

1. Defensiveness; one could describe it as "Stockholm syndrome"

2. What outsiders don't understand about the language thing is that it's not about how much German you need to get along in daily life. That's a similar challenge everywhere in the world.

The crux is that in Germany, correct use of the language is a social status thing, more so than in other places. Any person, whether German or foreigner, who appears to have difficulty with the language, is easily looked down upon.

I see two big problems:

1. A "meta-problem": While many Germans agree that things are bad, people favour completely opposite solutions.

My meta-solution to that would be decentralisation and letting more things be decided locally, but unfortunately Germans are united in favouring centralisation these days.

2. There's a strong superposition of "things are bad" and "we are still the best"; a high degree of defensiveness and stubbornness. This was accurately described as "presumptuousness" in another comment.

Correct. German culture is to take any idea to its conclusion, until the idea is dead.

This is one of the most accurate descriptions I’ve seen here. Germany is a country with immense potential. All one can say is “what a shame”.

That’s good life advice.

Great design is more about consistency than uniformity.

Just imagine how hard it would be to read a text if all the words had a similar shape! You want them to look very distinct while the predictability of the layout helps you read (which is consistency).