Anyone learning German (or any other new language) soon learns that language and culture are inseparable. Knowing a language without knowing its culture is like a baseball pitcher who can throw a mean curve ball but has never been in a ball park. He's got the mechanics down, but he doesn't have a true feel for the game — or its culture.
I'm not saying you have to have been in Germany, Austria, or Switzerland to be able to speak German, but I am saying you don't really know the language until you also know something about the culture. The baseball player may know HOW to throw a curve ball — but not WHEN to throw it. Knowing when to say "Auf Wiedersehen" is just as important as knowing how to say it.
Come on, you say. Any idiot knows when to say good-bye. Well, yes and no. If you've ever been in a German shop or boutique and started to leave, you know that it is the custom that shopkeeper and customer exchange an "Auf Wiedersehen!" as the customer exits the store. Whenever I return to the US from German-speaking Europe, I have to get used to NOT saying good-bye to the salespeople when I leave an establishment. And they seem just a little cold for not saying "so-long" to me. (Although it may happen that an American shopkeeper says good-bye, in German Europe this is the rule rather than the exception.)
Because we have already absorbed most of our own culture by the age of five or six, we later tend to make cultural assumptions that may or may not be appropriate for a different culture. And culture involves deceptively simple things — like when to shake hands (or not) or how to use a knife and fork. Our cultural knowledge comes from the "motherland" just as much as our language, and they don't call your native language the "mother tongue" for nothing. Our culture teaches us what is appropriate to say and do. When we leave that culture, we can be at a disadvantage.
Another cultural aspect strongly tied to language, and which we addressed in an earlier feature, is the matter of Sie and du—the formal vs. the informal "you" that one encounters in German and many other languages. It required a two-part feature just to scratch the surface of that cultural element!
Okay, so what can you do about this? Goethe, the great German philosopher-poet, said: "There's nothing more terrible than ignorance in action." ("Es ist nichts schrecklicher als eine tätige Unwissenheit.") So here are some links to information that can help you avoid a faux pas or two.
My own site, The German Way and More offers many chapters on German cultural topics — both big "C" and little "c" — as well as links to a variety of sites in German or English. Business in the German-speaking World is one chapter, while you may want to read another on Health and Fitness that explains why it is so difficult to get an aspirin in the country that invented that pain-killer! You'll also find numerous links to sites related to Austria, Germany, or Switzerland.
On that same page, among other links, there are three particularly useful collections of Germanic Web links: Angela Lilleystone's outstanding Germany Today!, Robert Shea's German Resources Page, and Prof. Andreas Lixl's German Web Trails.
Deutsche Leute: Famous Germans