Leipzig

If, like me, you come from Thailand, which is known in Germany as the “Land of Smiles,” it is only logical to be interested in smiles. In my country we believe that a smile a day can give you a day longer to live.

This has been confirmed, by the way, by researchers at Wayne State University in the United States. They discovered that the broader a person’s smile is, the longer they live. They reached these findings by analyzing the photographs of 230 baseball players. They were able to divide the players into three groups: 1) the non-smiling players, whose average life expectancy is 73 years, 2) the group with partial smiles, whose average life expectancy is 75 years and 3) those with broad smiles, whose average life expectancy is 80 years.

For the past few days I have been walking around the city office building of the Leipziger Volkszeitung compiling related data. I have secretly put the Leipziger I encountered into three different groups as well, namely the “smile” group, the “exerted smile” group and the “scowl” group. Of course, it is not easy for me to differentiate which of the people I encounter on the streets are genuine Leipzig natives. In order to avoid a high error ratio, I exclusively observe salespeople in the nearby shops as subjects for my personal study.

It should not be all that difficult to guess into which group the majority of my subjects fall. Yet, I am most impressed by the “exerted smile” group. The members of this group do their duty as good hosts. As soon as they see an Asian – an entirely foreign-looking visitor – they make an effort to smile. In some, you notice a slight smile about the corners of the mouth. Others have a bit of a shy smile, which is somehow charming. The smallest group is the “scowl” group, yet I encountered members of this group in places where one would least expect them, namely at tourist information counters. Of course, they are sick of answering the same questions day in and day out. On the other hand, they have a job that one should do with a smile, don’t they? After all, no tourist would go to them if they had not gotten lost or otherwise had questions or problems they cannot answer or solve themselves. Visitors to a tourist information office are very worried people. The first thing they expect, therefore, from a resident of Leipzig is a sweet smile to make them feel secure and welcome. This city does have more than 1.8 million tourists visiting it every year and no less than 350,000 of them are foreigners.

Over a cup of coffee at Coffee Baum, Germany’s oldest café, Jirayuth, a Thai student obtaining his doctorate in International Business at the Universität Leipzig, held that the natives in Leipzig do not smile as much as people in southern Germany, for example, and that this probably has something to do with the fact that Leipzig is not an important city for tourism or that the people here had lived for a very long time in a socialist system. During our conversation, I repeatedly glanced over at the people having dinner in front of the surrounding restaurants… Sure enough, Germans can sit together for hours, eating and drinking beer without smiling at one another. Not smiling is part of their natural disposition. Yet many of them make an effort to give one another a slight smile.

Professor Dieter Zapf, a psychologist at Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, told journalists that professional smiles, like those that flight attendants or salespeople have to adopt, are exceedingly damaging to health. According to him, this type of smile can cause high blood pressure, stress and depression.

In my opinion, smiling is a personal right. No one can force someone else to smile. Not smiling does not infringe the rights of other people. If you can have problems with hypertension or stress from smiling, then you ought to refrain from it.

So, it is time for the people of Leipzig to decide between “smiling” and “not smiling.” If they do not wish to smile, then the travel guides will only cite the name “Leipzig.” But, wouldn’t it be tempting to give Leipzig a nickname like “Leipzig, Germany’s only smiling city”?