Hans Rindisbacher, a professor at Pomona College outside of Los Angeles, was crossing an empty intersection on foot one night when a passerby on the sidewalk behind him started shouting angrily at him.  "Are you color blind?" the man roared, pointing at the red "Don't Walk" sign.  Rindisbacher was momentarily taken aback--there was, after all, no car in sight in any direction--but then remembered he was visiting Germany, where even minor transgressions of regulatory, business and social conventions can lead to loud confrontations.
     Germans often yell in public at perfect strangers, as well as neighbors, over what they perceive as the flouting of proper order, says Rindisbacher, who grew up in German-speaking Switzerland and now specializes in German studies.  You can expect to be dressed down by whoever happens to be near you for walking on the wrong path, ordering at the wrong window, or placing the wrong kind of trash in the wrong bin.  This can be unsettling for visiting Americans, who back home might be annoyed at the fellow who slips into the 12-items-or-less line with 14 items, but typically would not criticize a stranger's behavior out loud.  Being a visiting foreigner who doesn't know the ropes won't win you much slack in Germany, either, notes Rindisbacher.  In fact, he says, Germans tend to be even more expressively annoyed at the noncompliant behavior of people they perceive to be clueless outsiders.
     Rindisbacher suspects that Germans' outspokenness towards those who don't do things a certain way dates back centuries to the tradition of guilds--organizations of craftsmen who kept tight control on the training and employment of workers in most fields, be it bricklaying or accounting.  A career in a guild-dominated field meant first being taken on as an apprentice who could expect to be browbeaten for years by a demanding "master" intolerant of the slightest deviance from his meticulous techniques.  Eventually the apprentice would become a master expected to treat his own apprentices in exactly the same way.  Though the guilds are long gone, their impact is still felt in Germany via powerful labor unions and a body of workers' rights regulations that makes it exceedingly difficult for companies not only to fire or transfer a worker, but even to get them to do things differently.  While looser, more dynamic American-style business practices are starting to take hold in Germany, says Rindisbacher, the how-dare-you-not-do-it-this-way culture is tough to kill, and spills beyond the workplace. 
     The German expectation of order has also been associated with the peculiarities of the German language, which unlike English is a highly structured and consistent one with few exceptions in grammar, spelling or pronunciation.  English, for example, permits a certain amount of improvisation in how the parts of a sentence can be arranged, but German demands sticking the verb at the end of a sentence so that a listener or reader must sometimes wade through a long, complex parade of nouns, adjectives and prepositions before finally getting to find out what the fuss is all about.  Having to learn to speak in this somewhat rigid and ponderous fashion surely has an effect on how people think, or so the theory goes.  Actually, this once widely accepted link between the German style of thinking and its language had fallen out of vogue over the past few decades, but it is being reasserted by scientists in the wake of brain-scan studies that seem to support the notion of strong language-thinking links.
     There may be another language-related reason why Germans can be less tolerant than others of mess: they don't really have a word for it.  The closest is the word unordnung, which means "un-order," but that leaves Germans able to think of mess only in terms of what it is not, rather than having a concept for mess as a condition in its own right.  It's like understanding coolness only as "un-warmth."  It may be harder to appreciate something when the only way to conceive of it is as the absence of something else, especially when that something else is generally cherished.  Many English words and phrases that refer to mess-related concepts and processes are utterly untranslatable into German in any meaningful way, adds Rindisbacher.  "Yard sale" is an example.  Relatively few Germans have yards or garages, he notes, and if they did they wouldn't have hundreds of excess possessions with which to fill them, let alone expect others to buy.
     The strong brand of environmentalism one encounters in Germany also has a whiff of excess order to it, says Rindisbacher, particularly when it comes to recycling.  A pile of undifferentiated trash feels to some like a form of uncomfortable lawlessness, in that it invites the close proximity of items that don't normally belong together.  "There's nothing wrong with a piece of fruit, a pair of underpants and a Teddy bear, but if you throw them together then you have something awful," he explains.  "It violates the social order of everyday objects."  The sorting of trash required for recycling restores some of this order, he notes--and Germans, as a rule, recycle with zeal.
     Germans aren't less mess-friendly than Americans in all ways.  For one thing, says Rindisbacher, they tend to be more relaxed than Americans about their work schedule, taking more breaks, lingering longer at social meetings, and knocking off sooner.  They can also be highly innovative--especially when they're expected to be, as in the case of automobile and other engineers.  And when it comes to waiting in line, they are freewheeling to an extent that would appall most Americans, says Rindisbacher, often forming shapeless swarms beside cash registers, shouldering in front of each other, and walking around barriers intended to keep crowds queued.  That's not because they don't respect the rules for lining up; it's because there aren't any widely accepted rules for lining up.  Rather, everyone seems to have their own.
     Incidentally, though Milgram was too horrified by his results with Americans to take his "shocking" experiment to Germany, other researchers performed it there, and found that German subjects were 30 percent more likely than American subjects to administer to innocents what they believed were lethal levels of electricity.