In Freiburg, Germany, the church bells ring every 15 minutes all night long. Sidewalks, and even some streets, are paved with stones rather than asphalt and concrete. Coffee is rich, strong and expensive.

Germany is unlike the United States in many ways beyond such cultural differences. I am spending a year here, teaching German history to Bates students and doing research. The editors of the Sun Journal and I thought that it would be worth looking at Europe through the eyes of a Mainer and at the United States from the perspective of Europe.

Europe holds a fascination for many Americans as a source of culture, a vacation spot and an ancestral home. So every couple of weeks I will report on what I see and learn here, mainly from Germany, but also as I visit other European countries. Because we are in the middle of a heated presidential campaign, in which international relations play a key role, politics are part of any understanding of the relationship between Europe and the United States.

My columns will not be mainly political, but I will address political issues where they seem relevant.

I am still gathering first impressions here, and certain contrasts are obvious. Freiburg, in the southwestern corner of Germany next to the French and Swiss borders, is an incredibly beautiful city. Public gardens are filled with flowers, trees grow along many streets, and public spaces are constantly cleaned. Houses are much closer together than we are used to, and the small yards are filled with shrubs and flowers. The small stones that are used in the sidewalks are carefully arranged in geometric patterns or composed into pictorial representations of the nearby buildings. Much more effort and expense has been directed at creating an aesthetically pleasing urban setting than I have seen in any American community.

The attention to the environment is a strong element of German public life, and I will return to this theme in later columns.

In other ways, Germans are very much like Americans. The media coverage of the Olympics focused on German athletes and the sports in which they perform successfully. I waited impatiently to see the semifinal basketball game between the U.S. and Lithuania, but not one minute was shown live. Instead the German teams in handball and German pole vaulters got air time. On French television, the French tennis star Amelie Mauresmo played for the gold. Only late at night could I find out that Lithuania, the European champion, had defeated the American NBA stars.

National pride in individual athletic accomplishment seems universal, and the German media commentators expressed sentiments familiar to any American sports fan. Athletes who did not achieve expected victories were “disappointments;” a bronze medal could be a “failure;” the questions asked of athletes in interviews were silly and irrelevant.

Maybe the basketball results from the Olympics show something deeper about Europe and America. Although the individual American NBA stars were more physically talented than most players from other nations, the teamwork of smaller countries was clearly superior. On a wider scale, European countries value cooperation more than individualism, in ways which can seem strange to an American.

The most remarkable evidence of cooperation here is the recent creation of an international currency, the euro, which has replaced national currencies across western Europe. Francs and marks have disappeared, and so have the inconveniences of changing money at borders. The European Union has taken the principles of free trade far beyond anything that Americans seem willing to do.

Recently, high figures in our conservative administration have claimed that the lack of support from western European democracies for the American invasion of Iraq demonstrates that Europe is “old,” that European thinking is outdated, even that Europeans do not have the courage or will to recognize and fight their enemies.

On a continent which has been devastated by wars between nations nearly every generation, the willingness to subordinate national differences and traditions to international cooperation is unprecedented. Is this evidence of “old” ways of thinking? From a European vantage point, American nationalism and the determination to reject international cooperation that have characterized our recent foreign policy are what seem outdated.

That is a big difference: Germans, and Europeans more generally, are working much harder to cooperate with other nations. Given their recent history, it’s no wonder. Perhaps they are not behind, but several steps ahead of us.

Steve Hochstadt lives in Lewiston and teaches history at Bates College. He can be reached at [email protected].