Omg. I thought it was a feature of Americans being shaky on the fact that other countries exist! Wow. I join you in hoping it's better now, because eek.

Basically, what we learned about black people in European history in the 1970s and 1980s at school: Slave Trade evil, all European nations involved. Colonialism evil, Germany a late comer to the scene and mainly trying to get colonies because Willy had a hang up about his British relations. (BTW, a ridiculous simplifaction, and one that I know is taught differently these days, not least because the genocidal actions towards the Herero by German colonists in the early 20th century became a big subject in Germany in the 1990s (I actually know the publisher who published the first extensive study of the Herero genocide in German), but I was in my 20s then and no longer anywhere near school.) And that was it. People like the first African-German attendant of and lecturer at a German university (18th century, Anton Wilhelm Ano, who taught at Halle), or Angelo Soliman (Austrian-African valet, teacher and leader of the Vienna Free Masons, also chess partner of Joseph (II), but after his death Franz II (reactionary nephew who was Emperor by then) ordered his body was to be mummified and exhibited as an "African Savage"), or Alessandro de' Medici, or the fact that the Alexandres Dumas (grandpère, pére et fils) or Pushkin were mixed race, or that Joseph Bolougne, the Chevalier St. Georges was one of the most successful fencers and composers of the 18th century and the son of a slave, that was all something I learned about after school.

(In fairness: the other reason why kid!me tended to associate "African" with "-American" was that my hometown had one of the largest US garnisons in Bavaria. So the black people I saw as a child in rl, not on tv, were all either Americans or children of Americans. Again, that was a middle sized provincial Franconian town in the 1970s - it would have been already different in larger cities like Berlin, Munich or Hamburg, and by now it's very very different.)

Otoh, different languages are something that's self evident (and self evidently useful) when you live on a continent where lots of them are spoken and where if you don't go on holidays to Austria or the German speaking part of Switzerland you have to speak a different language. The US is so gigantic and continent-spannig that you can live our your life there, experience very different climates and sceneries and still never leave the country and its linguistic sphere. I remember how shocked I was when I participated in a German/American student exchange program and found out a lot US people not just my age but way older didn't have a passport, because they never needed is. this was before the EU came up with the Schengen agreement, so I had needed a passport at the latest when we did one week skiing trips at school, and later at 11th grade the trip to Berlin (still a divided city, which meant you had to cross GDR territory, which definitely meant a pass port). (I had one before because my parents had travelled with us outside the country before. What I mean is that even if you had parents who never holidayed outside of Germany for economic reasons, you would have needed a passport at seventh or eigth grade when school trips across the borders started.)