>Saying "this material will float in water" is of an entirely different order than statements like "Germans don't love democracy and hate themselves".

And yet, many individual observers have said just so over a great period of time. And not just prejudiced foreigners, but germans themselves (like Mann and tons of others, from Nietzsche to Schmitt). Then one could also see the empirical evidence, prevalent notions at various times, and so on... It's not like what a population/country tends to do is opaque. History is recording just that.

>What does "loving democracy" mean?

A lot of things, including being observed fighting for democracy (or the inverse), historically producing more autocratic regimes, a country's most celebrated philosophy/literature/poetry tending to prefer e.g. elitism or a strong state, the degree of individualistic and democratic ideas in people (as measured e.g. by polling), and so on.

>If 10 people all want ice cream, that's 10 people wanting ice cream individually, not "the group wanting ice cream". We can say this is as a shorthand, as long as it's understood that in reality, it refers to the actual people.

Well, if we want to predict how popular ice cream will be in a country, the potential for an ice cream market there, and so on, we can just use the shorthand. Whether this or that individual person in the large group hates ice cream is irrelevant, if the group tends to love it (e.g. US and, say, pizza).

There's also the fact that with cultural matters (and heck, even with food matters), if many people want ice cream, they influence others people to want it to, create a favorable environment for the sale of ice cream, it influences policy and laws, and so on.

So, "that's 10 people wanting X individually" misses the big picture of group dynamics.

For large numbers of N, N people wanting X individually is different than "a person wants X" times N.

In other words, the aggregate is greater than the sum of its parts.

>Can you show me a use for ascribing these characteristics to Germans?

As a crude example, a great use for ascribing specific characteristics to Germans would be when determining whether to start a beer business in Germany or in Dubai. Where would you go?

Or how about considering credit attitudes (Germans abhor credit and debt, and pay almost everything with cash/debit). One good consideration when establishing a credit card company there and relevant to many other economic ventures...

https://www.dw.com/en/times-change-but-german-obsession-with...

https://qz.com/262595/why-germans-pay-cash-for-almost-everyt...

That was a trivial example.

The same concerns can have profound impact, e.g. in foreign policy. An outright (expressed) concern of the diplomats that created the ECC (later EU) was the containment of Germany.

They didn't think Germany was just "some individuals that happened to act in an individual manner as to cause a world war twice", and that once they were old/dead nothing could be said of Germany as a danger (as new, entirely unique individuals replaced them), but saw it as a culture with a tendency to dominate other the rest:

"The German question produced the Europe of today, as well as the transatlantic relationship of the past seven-plus decades. (...) Americans and Europeans established NATO after World War II at least as much to settle the German problem as to
meet the Soviet challenge, a fact now forgotten by today’s realists—to “keep the Soviet Union out, the Americans in, and the Germans down,” as Lord Ismay, the alliance’s first secretary-general, put it. This was also the purpose of the series of integrative European institutions, beginning with the European Steel and Coal Community, that eventually became the
European Union. As the diplomat George Kennan put it, some form of European unification was “the only conceivable solution for the problem of Germany’s relation to the rest of Europe,”

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/germany/2019-04-02/n...