What does "a true German" look like? My wife (whose ancestry is pure German as far as 400 years back) is roughly the same type as Marianne, and so are my sister, my mother, my ex-girlfriend, and dozens of other hundred-percent German women that I know here.

There seems to be a common misconception that Germans are a northern people. But where I come from, the cities were founded 2,000 years ago, by the Romans who lived here until about the 5th century A.D. and mixed with both the native Celts and the Germanic tribes attracted to the fringes of the empire by its wealth.

Germany is situated at the very center of Europe, practically at its main crossroads; all sorts of Europeans (and after the two World Wars, even Americans) have sown their seeds here in the course of the centuries.

Marianne is as beautiful as my wife (who last year unfortunately bobbed her hair to chin length after sporting butt-length dark hair for more than two decades), and they both could naturally be mistaken as Turkish, Middle Eastern, Polish, Yugoslavian, Italian, or French - all of which has happened to my wife.

People are people, and all of today´s humans share a handful of ancestors that lived when our species just started out.

Marianne´s beauty is not German, French, Mediterranean; it is human.