Un-German

"Mommy, was the airplane kaput? " The 7-year-old daughter of an American mom and her German husband, a pilot for Lufthansa, had some urgent questions when her parents told her about the recent crash into the French Alps. The German people, too, reacted with confusion and questions.

That mom, Jennifer Crawford, living in Hamburg,  "described the overall atmosphere as one of “real devastation, tearfulness, and such despair” that one of their own—and a Lufthansa pilot, no less—might have done something so “grossly un-German,” so utterly “out of character” for a typical German."

"She said everywhere she went, she heard people talking about the incident with genuine perplexity and sorrow: “You never see Germans express emotion, but when they talked about this, people would cry.”

"They’re taught from day one when they’re born to be efficient, to not be wasteful, to not break things, to be balanced . . . People are saying this does not happen in our country, we don’t do that!”