There seems to be something heavy about the Germans—not, to be sure, about all of them, and not in the same degree or in the same form in those who are. How many of them are heavy? How heavy are they? I don’t know. I can’t imagine. All I know is (as every tourist has observed who has ever got out of the bus) that there seems to be something heavy about the Germans.

Their dumplings, their liturgy, their Blitzkrieg are heavy. So is their humour; they even have a word for the enjoyment of another’s misfortune. […] Fantasists have even said that their women’s legs—Marlene Dietrich being the exception here, as Goethe is in poetry—are heavy. […]

Why is the Germans’ politics so desperately heavy; their scholarship so marvelously heavy; their philosophy, with Will, Duty, and Destiny its central terms, even heavier than their public law and their public fountains? Their language—what is there left to say after Mark Twain’s The Awful German Language?—is so deadly heavy that it cannot be got under way without being pushed from behind. “Strc prst skrz krk,” which is Czech for, “Put your finger through your throat,” is a bit heavy, to be sure, but “Die, die die, die die Äpfel gestohlen haben, anzeigen,” is a no less impossible way of saying, in German, “Whoever reports the apple thieves.”

Milton Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 (1955)