Twitter4j only collects a specific country

For a project I'm currently working on, I only need to collect tweets from a stream for one country. While Twitter4j's streaming API allows filtering by language, the results are not accurate enough. So I decided to put the filter on top of the filter by checking if the country attribute of the tweet is filled in. This works great when I check if the value is valid:

if(status.getPlace().getCountry() != null) {
            System.out.println("User: " + status.getUser().getName());
            System.out.println("Text: : " + status.getText());
            System.out.println("Country: " + status.getPlace().getCountry());
            System.out.println("Language: " + status.getLang());
            }
        }

    TwitterStream ts = new TwitterStreamFactory(cb.build()).getInstance();
    ts.addListener(listener);

    FilterQuery filter = new FilterQuery(); 

    String[] language = {"country"};
    String[] keywords = {"some keywords"}; 

    filter.track(keywords);
    filter.language(language); 

    ts.filter(filter);

      

        
        
        
      

    

But if I check a specific country for example. I am not receiving any tweets:

if(status.getPlace().getCountry() != "germany") {
            System.out.println("User: " + status.getUser().getName());
            System.out.println("Text: : " + status.getText());
            System.out.println("Country: " + status.getPlace().getCountry());
            System.out.println("Language: " + status.getLang());
            }
        }

      

        
        
        
      

    

It would be great if someone could help me with this.