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Giving a talk to a German audience
Presentation culture here rewards substance and structure and is fairly indifferent to charisma, which is good news if you are working in a second language. Expect the content to be dense. A German audience will tolerate, and often prefer, a slide with real figures on it over a slide with one word and a photograph, and the Anglo-American advice to strip everything down can read here as having little to say. What they will not tolerate is a claim without a basis: the question after your talk will be about where the number came from. A Handout with the detail, distributed at the start rather than the end, is normal and lets you keep the talk itself lean. The questions are the part that unsettles newcomers. German professional questioning is direct, specific and often sounds adversarial to an ear tuned elsewhere — Das überzeugt mich nicht, Woher haben Sie die Zahl, Das widerspricht dem, was Sie eben gesagt haben. This is engagement rather than hostility, and the norm from lesson 79 applies: the criticism attaches to die Sache, not to you. Answering it plainly, including with an admission, is what earns respect. Becoming defensive is what loses it. A few mechanics. Whether questions come during or after is set by the chair and worth asking beforehand — Fragen gerne am Ende or Sie können jederzeit unterbrechen. Overrunning is genuinely rude in a way that is hard to overstate: a talk billed at twenty minutes should finish inside twenty, and the chair will stop you. Instead of applause, an academic or internal German audience may knock on the table — klopfen — which is approval, not impatience. And if you are presenting in German as a second language, saying so once at the start is fine and is usually met with patience; apologizing repeatedly through the talk is not. One last note on Yusuf's closing advice. Reading a presentation aloud from a written text is common in German academic settings and unwelcome in most corporate ones. Stichworte, keywords, are the standard compromise, and they have a particular advantage in a second language: they force you to build the sentence live, which sounds far better than a recited one and lets you shorten when you see the clock. The sentences you should write out are the first one and the last one.