When living in Germany, I found that the Germans were quite blunt in comparison to the United States and discarded a lot of the word fluff and fake friendliness

When living in Germany, I found that the Germans were quite blunt in comparison to the United States and discarded a lot of the word fluff and fake friendliness that I often see people using in the United States. They prefer to be direct and get to the point. There was no need to beat around the bush and hint politely at something. So the attitude of getting rid of the meaningless words and stick directly to the information seems like a very German attitude to me. However, I also found (particularly in written contexts) that the Germans were really big on formality. If you don't use their proper titles, they'll get very upset. If the paperwork doesn't have an official stamp on it, it's meaningless waste paper. If it does have an official stamp on it, then it's holy and undisputed, no matter what nonsense is written on it. I'm surprised that there isn't a flourishing fake official stamp black market because of the importance people place on those things. I find that all the fluff in German written documents revolves around formality, rather than fake politeness. I always got the feeling that all those extra, meaningless words and phrases were more about doing it the proper, formal way (no matter how meaningless that was), whereas in the United States, the people are much more informal, but use a lot of fluff words to convey fake friendliness. German academic writing is ridiculous. There's so much formality and academic vocabulary involved that they'll write long, complex sentences with fancy vocabulary to convey a simple concept. It's about as formal as you can possibly imagine, so it's wordiness and complexity has to compensate.