> this shift pattern is just standard on German cars with manual transmission

"Standard?" Hmm. We have two cars with manual transmission, a VW Sharan and a VW Up:

The Sharan has R at the top left, then (reading across) 1 3 5 with 2 4 6 below; so 6th is at the bottom right.

The Up only has 5 forward gears, but for some reason they decided to put R at the bottom right (so down from 5th... you can probably see where this story is going)

I have once, and only once, been driving along at motorway speed in the Up, in 5th, and briefly thought I was in the Sharan, and started trying to change up to 6th, except the Up only has 5, and you're heading for R, not 6th. Happily I didn't complete the change...

Not just press down on shift knob, but a bit to the side too.

On my old Jetta (left hand drive), it was more like "Up and to the Left a little bit", and not a straight throw from first.

Reverse lockouts came around in the 80s or so, so his 914 wouldn't have one. On older transmissions you're free to try to ram it into reverse at 100 kph if you really want to try.

First time I rented a German car I yelled out in the parking garage for help! Some kind strangers explained this to me about the reverse and I got on my way.

I had a '92 Nissan Sentra as my first car in the early 2000's, a hand-me-down from my older brother - it also had this dog-leg shift pattern. Looks like it wasn't just German cars that had this transmission.

Definitely burned out a clutch early from learning to drive and learning to drive stick at the same time, but damn do I miss it sometimes.

From a video I saw recently I think some of the old lancias (group b stuff) were similar, the pattern was not shown but the driver referred to being careful with first so as not to launch the car in reverse.

So I’m guessing this was one of the standard gear patterns in the late 70s / early 80s euros, back when car affordances were often nebulous concepts.

My Ford Contour SVT (Mondeo in the UK I think?) had a collar under the shift knob that you had to pull upwards to shift into reverse. Had never seen that before, and I felt awfully embarrassed to ask the guy selling me the car how it worked.