Tuesday 26 June 2007

The language of Goethe

Folklore is the expression of the soul of the German people. Goethe led the way in writing poetry in folkloric style, a style which was emulated by poets who followed him, a style which still endears his poetry to the masses today.”

It’s been thirty years since I was in the BDR as a young English teacher. When I left, I never thought I’d come back and so threw away the dictionary. Now I‘ve had to go back into the museum of my mind, find the lost room, unlock the door, throw open the windows, take off the dust covers – and there, somehow, my German treasure house is still intact, apart from a little oil needed to grease the wheels. In fact, it’s been so long that I can’t actually remember ever speaking German! It’s a little bit scary.

Of course, things have moved on since then. There’s the new technology to catch up with. So I’ve had to learn the German for mobile phone: das Handy and the mobile phone emporium is das Handy Shop. Then in so many bars you get live music: Live Musik or sometimes there’s just a DJ: Live DJ (happily).

Every so often I get stuck for the right expression. I never like to stop in full flow so just throw in a word from another language (usually French). I find you can use die Nostalgie; die Philosophie; die Melodie usw. This seems to do the job and people tell me how good my German vocabulary is!

The easiest conversations are professional because here again German has adopted a lot of the English international development language. Some attempt has been made to integrate a German ending. For example you have ‘evaluation’ become
die Evalueirung. Der Monitoring sort of sounds a bit German, but then - oh why bother making it even look German: let’s just use der Gender Mainstreaming!

As always in a foreign country it is the everyday that is problematic, rather than debates on philosophy and politics. Because it is in the everyday where you expect things to be most familiar and yet you constantly feel as if you’re in a parallel universe – things are just that little bit different.

At the local orthopedic practice, which clearly caters for, and employs, a lot of people from eastern Europe, the doctor barks at me: “What, don’t you speak Russian?”

At the Postamt, I shamefully have to ask where the post-box is (no, they’re yellow and on the other side of the pavement!) but also am forcibly impressed by the notice that says:

Achtung!
Sie werden heute ueber unser Girokonto angesprochen!

(Attention! Today you will be spoken to about our Girobank!)

At the hairdressers – well, I’ve learned that hair stylists all over the world have their own understanding of what I want to look like, whatever language we’re speaking – I just sit back, smile and pay the tip.

So it’s always comforting to get back on the internet; that’s my medium and in Berlin every other cafĂ© has wifi for free. You can sit in the sun, drink white wine and surf: what better working environment? I can do everything online! I was told for train journeys you go to www.bahn.de (our equivalent would be www.train.uk). I follow the German order here thinking: why not try the same for flights www.flugzeug.de (www.aeroplane.uk )? Yes!

However when I come to put new entries on my blog, I see that the instructions on blogspot are in German! (All the adverts come up in German too: how do they know, I ask myself?) Later I check my blog stats to see who is reading and find a lot of hits in northern Germany. Oh no, I think, the police are tracking me as a suspected terrorist planning violent action against the G8 summit! But then I realise it was probably just me uploading my entries in the local bar. Which also feels bizarre…


Bridging the gap

We don’t have wifi (I should say wireless lan) in the flat. I tell my landlord he has to move into the 21st century but he’s proudly fixed in the 19th, has no knowledge of the internet and doesn’t speak any other language than German. Still we manage to get on well, because we’re both very direct, have a good sense of humour and after all, we have to negotiate the important intricacies of shared living – whose turn is to buy the toilet paper and, oops, who left the lights on all night?

I just love playing with language. Like little children, that’s how you learn how to do it. My landlord comes in with his friend from their traditional Saturday afternoon pub-crawl (Kneipenbummel)

Wie geht’s? Besoffen? How’s it going? I say (Are you) drunk?
Verneunftig! he says. (We’ve been) sensible
Verneunftigerweise besoffen? I ask. Sensibly drunk? (Lots of laughter)
Ich auch! I say, me too…

Because there’s no easier way to get your tongue round those polysyllabic German words – and some are longer than that. Try the word for gender equality: Geschlectergerechigkeit (nice!) and another favourite at the moment is Entwicklungsnichtregierungsorgansiationen = development non-governmental organisations. The thing always to remember is that when we actually say those things in English, we don’t mind the gap either.

Noam Chomsky - before he became known as a political analyst and activist - first won worldwide fame as a socio-linguist, with the groundbreaking concept of the difference between the surface and deep structure of language. You have to track back from the words that are used (the surface structure – or code) to the speaker or writer’s actual intention (the deep structure - the real meaning).

The intelligent reader here will begin to see how this might relate to analysis of political rhetoric. Unfortunately in our so-called sophisticated society, so much use of language has become a self-serving commerce along with everything else.

I would say that genuine communication is more to do with paralinguistics : that is, the ability to pick up clues in a new context from your own knowledge of the world and to read one another – because you want, simply, to have real human contact and share fundamental life experiences for non-profit-making purposes.

Svenja Cussler, a German film maker who collaborated on a documentary of female genital mutilation in Mali, put into words for me what impressed her most there: “In Africa, people really see who you are. When they reach out to greet you, it’s not to check if your suit’s from Armani, they’re feeling the quality of your soul.”

(So, all in all, I seem to get by pretty well in the language of Goethe.)

Rainbow in Berlin

Last weekend I woke up in the very middle-class Schoeneberg district of Berlin to find I was in the middle of Europe’s largest gay and lesbian street-party.

Schoeneberg has in fact been the gay centre of Berlin since the 1920s and outside the local metro station there’s a plaque commemorating the thousands of homosexuals who were persecuted under the third Reich: one reason why the gay scene in Berlin is pretty politicised. The rainbow monument has just been re-erected - this is also a reminder of the pink triangle used to stigmatise homosexuals in the concentration camps.

Now in its 15th year, the festival was founded by Schoeneberg’s former mayor - Dr Elizabeth Ziemer, who’s gay, and this year, Berlin’s gay mayor Klaus Wowereit received the Rainbow Award. However, walking through the one mile of back streets where the festival takes place, I was handed a number of leaflets by support groups and services – from counselling for young lesbians to gay parenting - which indicate that even in Berlin being gay is still not easy. And the local Green Party newsletter highlights the fact that the Berlin Senate will be closing the AIDS and STD advice centre in north Schoeneberg which is recognised as a model of integrated practice and success in prevention, particularly with young migrant women working as prostitutes.

The party finished with a concert by Berlin’s favourite women’s group Die Kusinen. A nice touch here was the little old couple (man and woman) sitting out on the balcony of their second floor apartment with a great view of the main stage while the fabulous blonde foursome played heavy metal to a backcloth of ‘Sexual Democracy’.

The rainbow theme continued for the whole of last week. I passed on the Gay Night at the Zoo “singing and swinging among elephants, tigers and penguins with Danny van Blond” and the boat trip on the river Spree, which culminated in the finals of the Durex gay top-model model contest - part of its better and safer sex campaign. But I caught up with the annual CSD parade on Saturday 23rd June - which involved thousands of people in a 5 kilometer-long loud colourful movement across the city, from the memorial church at Kurfuerstendamm to the Victory statue.

The motto this year was “diversity seeks work” with the parade constituting a massive demonstration of Berlin’s gay and lesbian community against discrimination in employment.

In fact, one of Berlin’s larger employers, the combined public transport service BVG has had an equal opportunities policy since before European law was implemented in Germany and they are one of the main sponsors of rainbow events.
These actually started on the 9th June with the Berlin Respect Gaymes – an initiative championed by prominent gay sportsmen and women, aimed at promoting tolerance and sexual democracy among school-children through friendly competitions open to all. Because unfortunately, according to the BVG magazine, the word “gay” is still the worst taunt in the playground. *

Things don’t seem to change. But at least there was a very low-key police presence, unlike at the anti-G8 demonstrations in May – and during the actual G8 summit. I’m afraid to say the Berlin police force are tied up in trying to prevent self-styled “autonomists” from senselessly setting fire to cars in Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain districts. Meanwhile I read that the Telecom workers, after five weeks of strike action, have had to concede defeat, returning to work with longer hours for lower pay.

We had a heat-wave in April and giant hailstones in June. It even rained on the CSD parade. The environmental lobby have yet to see any concrete steps taken by Angela Merkel’s government to address the problem of carbon emissions - despite G8 statements.

I love Berlin, but Germany’s political climate is such that you only get to see a rainbow once a year.



* My landlord tells me that, unbelievably, the other common taunt is ‘Opfer’. This means ‘victim’ and is the word used in the many memorials in Berlin to the millions who died in the holocaust.