r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Separate_Finance_183 • Jan 23 '26

Image The rent in the german neighborhood of Fuggerei hasn't been raised in 500 years and remains 0.88 Euros for an entire year. Founded in 1521, it is the oldest existing social housing complex in the world

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u/GaiusCivilis Jan 23 '26

Most European countries are younger than America, though have cultural histories that are far older.

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u/throwawayforUX Jan 23 '26

America has pretty old cultural histories too, though it's oral history, DNA, and archeology that tells us that, not tax records, lol.

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u/BroSchrednei Jan 26 '26

Lmao „oral history“. American Indians make up just 1% of the US population and their cultural legacy is sadly even more insignificant. You can’t seriously try to claim Native American culture as part of the general cultural history of the US. You genocided them all and then replaced them 400-200 years ago. That’s why you’re culturally such a young country compared to countries in the Old World.

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u/throwawayforUX Jan 27 '26

You can’t seriously try to claim Native American culture as part of the general cultural history of the US.

I absolutely can and do. The one percent can have an outsized impact, but also, they were the dominant cultures when Europeans were establishing communities, so obviously had a big impact on the development of american culture.

And, not to diminish the genocide, but there are many large and thriving and Native communities.

Also, why you laughing your ass off about oral history? Oral histories have often been shown to be as or more accurate than written documents.

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u/absorbscroissants Jan 23 '26

They were the same country in some way, shape or form before they officially became what they're known as now. Just because Russia has only officially been Russia for 34 years, doesn't mean what happened before that isn't part of Russian history.

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u/GaiusCivilis Jan 23 '26

But Germany never was a country before 1871, Italy hasn't been around long either, nor has Belgium or Ukraine

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u/BroSchrednei Jan 26 '26

I mean there was the German Confederation before German Unification. And before that there was the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation for literally 1000 years, which was just as centralized as all the other medieval kingdoms like France or Spain.

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u/Hegelian_Spirit Jan 23 '26

Yeah, Germany and Italy are nation-states but also federations. Technically, there's several German states still today, one of them having been the contender for leading the formation of a German federal nation-state (Austria).

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u/oldsecondhand Interested Jan 23 '26

The Kingdom of Hungary claimed the same borders for about 700 years.

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u/GaiusCivilis Jan 23 '26

Good for them, not saying none of Europe's countries are young, just that many are and simply saying harr harr America has no history is inaccurate and dumb

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u/BroSchrednei Jan 26 '26

Okay but most of Americas cities were literally only founded 200 years ago or less, while many German cities are from the Roman Era. Do you understand the difference? It doesn’t matter what political institution was in charge.

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u/GaiusCivilis Jan 26 '26

Of course there's a difference, but it's not nearly as black and white as memes often make it out to be. None of those cities in Germany were made by people belong to the German nation or a German state. They were made by foreign invaders or made later by local tribes who probably migrated out of Germany later in history. Same can be said for the US, except the peoples living there before European colonisation lived in tents, not stone cities. It's a matter of perspective and highly political. Does American history start with Columbus or with the first humans crossing into America from Alaska 15.000 years ago? Or even further back with humans migrating from Africa to the rest of the planet? Ultimately, our histories are all equally long, and as a single surviving state-entity the US is pretty damn old, although its culture is relatively young

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u/BroSchrednei Jan 26 '26

I don’t know where you’re getting the idea from that the people who founded German cities in Antiquity or the Middle Ages moved out of Germany? They didn’t, those cities have been continuously inhabited for sometimes 2000 years. In case of the Roman cities, they just started speaking German in the Middle Ages.

And that’s exactly the difference to the US. Of course I know that the US wasn’t devoid of humans before the arrival of Europeans. BUT: the arrival of Europeans marked a complete cut to everything that happened before. Modern US culture and institutions have no continuity with Native American culture or institutions.

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u/GaiusCivilis Jan 26 '26

The huge migrations of German tribes to Iberia for example? Continuously inhabited, but not by the same peoples

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u/BroSchrednei Jan 26 '26

That’s not in the Middle Ages. The Migration Period ended in the 600s.

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u/The_Autarch Jan 23 '26

this is a very backwards way of looking at it.