Forever Horst

It has to be said that the Germans get pretty bad press in the UK. A standing joke is that the Germans lack a sense of humour. But one of my favourite comedians, Horst Evers, is German. He has that self deprecating humour that the English are supposed to be famous for, but without the self conceit that accompanies some of the TV comics I have seen on British television. His humour is deadpan and he captures the narratives and absurdities of everyday life. Conversations overheard on a bus, the twilight zone of his flat, forays with the German unemployment office; and believe you me, if you can't laugh at this last point then you are done for.

Writing short stories and sketches about Berlin, he lived in the borough of Wedding for a while where we later moved to. This district in Berlin lay in the then untrendy traditionally working class district of Berlin, with a large population of migrants. After living in hyper trendy Prenzlauer Berg in the former East, I found it a relief to live in an area with a wider demographic and with a high street a bit like Lewisham High street in London. There were old people, poor people and a large Turkish immigrant population.

Wedding was one of those places that was for years threatening to come up, to arrive. From what I have heard, with the property boom in Berlin, it now very nearly has.

One of Horst Ever's first collection of short stories, with the ever so slightly ironic title :Wedding - 37 Stories about the Pearl of Berlin's Boroughs was given to me in 2001 when I first moved there, and again as a leaving present when I moved away in 2009.  Horst Ever lived in Wedding when he first moved to Berlin, from 1987 - 1997.

I will try and translate a few of my favourite sketches:.

In  chapter 4
Contact to the outside world


At the (Unemployment) office

The woman behind the counter has been staring at my identification for a good three minutes. At last she looks up.

"Name?"
"Strobinsky, Horst Strobinsky."
"What?"
"Strobinsky. Horst Strobinsky."
"But it says here Evers, Horst Evers."
"What?! show me,..., ah, no that's right, it's written Evers, Horst Evers, but it is spoken Strobinsky, Horst Strobinsky"
"Oh. Can you spell that?"
Of course. E-V-E-R-S, Strobinsky, Horst Strobinsky."

In Chapter 2.
The flat

Lethargy

Germany. A country in crisis. Everywhere you look. demoralised faces. Alienated from life, prone to depression. No one strives to succeed, rolls their sleeves up, produces economic growth!
              Have the Germans become lazy?
              We wanted to investigate further and came across a shocking find. In the flat belonging to Horst Evers there has been hot wash in the machine for a week. Horst Evers had this to say: " I must have washed and spun it at least 30 times, otherwise it started to stink, but I just can't bring myself to hang it up. Oh well, at least in the end my underwear will be so clean, that everyone will be envious of me."

In Chaper 1

Wedding

In the Night bus

Thursday morning, 3.14am, on the 26 night bus, on some dark street in Moabit.
   On the seats in front of me sit two young men. Through their conduct and their gestures they make no secret of the fact that they are quite drunk. Actually, one of them is even more drunk that the other.
   The other one starts a conversation:
    "Hey mate, what d'ya think, we'll 'av another beer, before we knock off, Ok, hee hee hee hee?"
    His neighbour stares at him.
    "HrrrschajhdrerjfnfdssA...."
   Articulating more hastily this time, the first one makes another attempt,not at all bothered by the fact  that his voice has become more of a hoarse shriek.
    " of course, mate., you're right, but we can knock one more back , no problem, Zwitscherklause, it's on the way, your gonna come with me, eh? come with me, eh, heeheeheeheeheehee?"
"Baurschenschaschaaaa..."
A third run at it.
"We'll do it quick, no big deal, down a beer then hit the sack, eh? We'll do it, eh? We'll do it, eh, heeheeheeheehee?"
"Aschascha...aschaschaaa...ooouuuhhhhhhh...bbrrrbruubbrrrbbb!!!"
Suddenly the head of his friend, who has struggled to get a word out, sinks forward and vomits arduously into his rucksack.
Blankly, the the other one looks on.
"Hey, mate. Is that a yes or a no?"

Horst Evers started reading out his short stories 1990 in cabaret theatre in Berlin and now reads his short stories regularly on Berlin radio, has written many more books, and audiobooks.

http://www.horst-evers.de/

He, She and It

Who's that?

Henry is too young to differentiate between saying "who's that ?" and what's that?" so we have been having conversations lately like this:

"Who's that?"- Henry
"oh that's your teddy bear, Rex"- Me
"and who's that"- Henry
"oh that's a ladybird"- Me
"and who's that?" - Henry
"oh, that's a stone, Henry" - Me

I love these conversations. Suddenly the stone acquires a little personality of its own. It just shows that the way we label things using language can instantly change our perception of them.

The German language is still a source of wonderment and confusion to me. Unlike English, nouns are attributed a Masculine, Feminine and Neuter gender. In German 'the' can be Der (M), Die(F) or Das(N).

So the desk that I am sitting at is masculine, der Tisch. And the computer that I am looking at is also masculine, der Computer, but the keyboard is feminine, die Tastatur. And if I had a laptop it would be swaying somewhere in gender limbo between masculine, der Laptop, and neutral, das Laptop, as it would seem that people are still in disagreement on this one.

The fruit in my kitchen in mostly feminine, though the apple happens to be masculine. Funny that.

I can sort of get used to this way of attributing gender to things, in an abstract way but it jars with me with certain words. For example, das Mädchen, which means girl. It just feels wrong that the word for girl in German has a neuter gender, like Henry turning to one of his cousins and saying, "What's that".

On the other hand, cousin is not a neutral gender word in German. You know immediately if the cousin is male (Cousin) or female (Cousine).

Likewise the German word for friend indicates whether the friend is male (Freund) or female (Freundin).  That's why when Germans speak in English about their female friend or friends, more often or not it doesn't come across the way they intended:

"My girlfriends and I love to go to the beach together"German
"How nice for you"(wow, these Germans are pretty forthright aren't they.)  Brit
"And I am going to see my best girlfriend in Rome,next week"
"Oh, that sounds nice" (How many girlfriends does this woman have!) Briti
"It would be nice to have you as a girlfriend from England"German
"Er ,well.." (Wow, I heard the Germans were direct but...) Brit

On the other hand if you talk about your friend which is a male in German, this is also the word for boyfriend, which could leave your relationship on the ambiguous side.

Is this her boyfriend or just her friend friend?

Usually this is countered by a more emphatic: "MY friend" just so you know for sure.
Or when introducing a male friend I usually say, "this is my friend" - followed by - cough-  "this is a friend of mine" which always sounds wooden and as if you are really overstating that actually you really are not sleeping with this person, but keeping them at arms length so don't get the wrong idea, because he is of mine and not mine!

Whew, then it gets even more complicated and the words get correspondingly longer.

Whereas in the English language we have mostly done away with gender specific job titles, where, for example, the word actor nowadays can mean both male and female, and political correctness has replaced chairman with chairperson, in Germany the division is still there.

So you know whether the chancellor is a male or female, or the head of the company just by looking at the word ending.
If you are addressing a group of male and female students, for example, the gramatically correct way to address them would be by using the male plural for student, Studenten. However it is deemed politically correct to use the female form and make it plural, Studentinnen, and for good measure add und Studenten, so the boys don't feel left out by the feminist linguistic revolution.  Also, you might see StudentInnen, which has a capital letter I as a sort of code to let you know that the boys are included in this one, too, but means you can save on ink.

It's strange that the problem of equality in language has been dealt with in totally different ways in German and English.
Stewardess sounds quite old fashioned now and most people are quite happy to use the term flight attendant and be rid of the feminine ending, without feeling that feminism has received a deadly blow. I personally do not regret the passing of this term or feel that I should make a point of keeping it.

In a series of guidelines on how to formulate language promoting equality, I noticed that it often recommends skirting around the issue altogether (or should that be trousering) by using verbs instead of nouns. So instead of saying, "user friendly" you could say, "easy to use". No person mentioned, ha ha.

Even when the word is neuter and shouldn't really offend anyone, such as the German word for "members", die Mitglieder,  there is  a widespread insistence of putting both feminine and masculine endings on it, which is grammatically absurd.

But I don't think you can have your neuter cake and eat it, even if it is in a good cause. Just have pity on the poor foreign students trying to get their heads around all of this gender bending. The words get really really long and you often have to write two words instead of one.

What if everything was a that? Not a who's that, as Henry would say, but a what's that?

Everything could become neuter including people, which could not only solve hours of soul searching over political correctness, but also alleviate the headaches of millions of students studying German as a foreign language everywhere.

German teachers could go on a sabbatical and learn all the Latin names of flowers if they felt bored.

And now that German just got easy peasy, all those students could use their time in other productive ways. Like figuring out when it is appropriate to address someone as "Sie"(formal) or "Du"(informal) in German.

Hang on a minute. Cancel that sabbatical. Hyacinthus Orientalis is going to have to wait.

Eleven not 7

My 'Trailing Spouses' art group is a source of great inspiration. I don't know why I can't come up with any ideas myself for the group. I feel indebted at this point, but grateful.

Andrea suggested that we compose an "Elfchen"for our next group meeting, which is a bit like a German version of a Haiku poem. It has just eleven words, and has a fixed structure like the following

1: 1 word, - a  colour or a virtue
2 :2 words -  an object, theme, an issue or a person
3:3 words -  describes 2 in further detail
4:4 words -  your subjective viewpoint
5:1 word -   summarise

I wrote some Elfchen(s) in English first but then translated them into German. This was quite an interesting experience as the German version went beyond translation and I realised that another (more direct?) side comes out in me when I write German!

Patty suggested we confine the "Elfchens" to the theme of "Future". The future for me is too uncertain  to think about at the moment, I really don't know where I will be living in less than a year. I decided, though, to  preserve something from today for future reference. The banal moments and surroundings that you forget when you've moved house or  country. So the following "Elfchens" describe my home office at various points of the day.

I really like Andrea's idea of making the Elfchens into a three-way folding book. It will reveal the poems in an unexpected way, like the future does.

Green

Spider plant

Squats my desk

The Flower and the Carbuncle

hoping for green fingers 

Surviving.

yellow

A flower

drawn in crayon

appeared on my window

today

Silver

The computer

Showing Donald Duck,

laughing out loud at

failure

Grey
Courthouse opposite
Law against it?
Prince Charles would say
"Carbuncle"

White

A plastic bag

Left on floor

For how many months?

Three?

Grün           

"Flinker Heinrich*"

Ein illegaler Siedler

Nicht grüner Daumen Dank

Überlebend

Gelb

Eine Blume

Fenstergekritzeltes Gemälde, lebensbejahend

Die erschien gestern. Doch!

Heute

Grau

Landgericht gegenüber 

bricht jedes Gesetz

Prince Charles würde sagen

“Karbunkel”

Silber

Der Computer

Warum nicht die?

Gucken wir Donald Duck?

Nee

Weiss

Die schöne Tüte

Auf dem Boden
Einfach hingeschmissen, wie Schlampig!
Bitte?








*Apparantly a word for Grünlilie (Spider Plant), it's in the dictionary, honest!

                                                                                                                                                                                                             XES4N3QE69NW

Bumpety Bump rider

Illustration by Piia Rossi

For this week’s meeting of the Trailing Spouses Group, we were asked to look at the theme of frustration. I had written this post a while back with the spouses in mind, but frustratingly enough, could never seem to finish it. 

“Hoppe Hoppe Reiter” is a traditional German children’s nursery rhyme, which is as morbid as it is fascinating. Its verses tell the tale of a rider, and the various grim fates that could befall him. He could fall from his horse and what then? He could land in the swamp, give himself a scare by falling into the hedge or worse, be eaten up by ravens. It is a nursery rhyme that is full of what ifs?

Here is the original version :

Hoppe Hoppe Reiter

Wenn er fällt, dann Schreit er

Fällt er in die Graben

Fressen Ihn die Raben

Fällt er in den Sumpf

Macht der Reiter Plumps

And my rough translation

Bumpety Bump rider

If he falls, then he hollers

If he falls in the ditch

Then ravens will gobble him up

If he falls into a bog

Then he will land with a squelch

Bringing up children in Germany, this song has become more familiar to me than the nursery rhymes from my own childhood, and for my children it is certainly more culturally and linguistically relevant than “This is the way the lady rides”, for example. 

It is a “kniereitvers” which literally translated means, “ knee-ride-verse”, so the child sits on the knee, and at the conclusion of the song, the fall, you let the child “drop” between you knees. Children, of course, can’t get enough of it. They love the tummy turning thrill of being dropped, knowing that they will be caught before they really fall. 

For me, though, with its vivid descriptions of bumpy courses, pitfalls, failures and uncertainties, it strikes a chord.

I am not worried about being eaten by ravens when I step out of my front door, but, I still feel, after living in a foreign country for over ten years that I could easily fall on my face by saying the wrong word in German, cannot apply for a particular job because my qualifications are not recognised, and could offend someone by not addressing them formally enough. It probably won’t happen, it is probably just in my head, but it could. As the songs suggest, the dangers are ever present.

I looked up how other people had translated the song into English on the Internet.

What a difference there is between these three interpretations of the same line:

If he falls, then he shouts

If he falls he will be crying

If he falls, then he cries out

The first interpretation suggests defiance, the second defeat and the third a cry for help All valid responses to the topic of frustration and I have probably reacted in all three ways before!

When you come to a new country, I think the most frustrating thing to deal with is learning a new language. Even though I have been here for 10 years, I still need Klaus to check my emails and invoices for mistakes so that I feel I will be taken “seriously”.  I find this hugely frustrating to be dependent on another person in this way. It was my choice, though, to come to Germany but I can imagine the frustration of those who have come here for economic reasons or as a trailing spouse and are struggling to understand the basics.

In translation, there is an attempt to get close to the essence of the language. For me, this nursery rhyme serves as metaphor for the attempt to achieve closeness, not just to a language but also to a culture and way of life, and the pitfalls and possible frustrations that accompany it. But as the simple driving and repetitive tune implies, after falling on your face there’s no alternative but to get back up ‘on your horse’, even though you’ll likely be downed again at the next hurdle and so on, like a comical sketch.

If you can get over the frustration though, there are rewards.  Novels and music and nursery rhymes await you, and you can express some things in German that you can’t in English, which is why a lot of ex-pats speak Denglisch, a mixture of both. But for me, the litmus test of German proficiency is not at your local Goethe Institute but at your local bakery. These ladies guard their wares like linguistic sentries; any slip or wrongly pronounced nuance will be met by a merciless response.

“a what?” then a long protracted silence accompanied by a withering expression that quashes any confidence you ever had in your ability to speak German, even if you have lived there for half your life. This exchange can go on for ten minutes or more, as you are forced to repeat the same word over and over again in front of an ever growing queue of impatient customers, until begrudgingly the baker lady hands over your roll. Eat your heart out, Goethe (or your croissant), these are the true bastions of the German language.