#24: German, High and Low
I’m taking a break for Easter and handing over the reins to the writer Ashley Gould, who today writes about her forays into the German language. Enjoy!
Maurice
Often I find myself wondering about words - and how they came to mean what they mean.
I believe that many of those who have learned a foreign language will be able to relate to my thoughts about the nature of an encounter with a foreign language.
We language students tend to notice things about a foreign language that natives don’t seem to notice because they were born into it.
In my case, I was born with Serbo-Croatian as my mother tongue and English as my father tongue. I consider German my stepmother tongue.
Being born into these first two languages, it would be difficult for me to say how they look from the outside or sound to anyone to whom they are foreign.
As for German, I landed in it from the outside, as an Ausländerin.
And as one, I learned to understand it piece by piece, by examining the individual parts of this composite language, and then assembling the parts to comprehend what is communicated.
This tactic was good as it helped me understand words individually, but it has also been proven inefficient when aiming for broader contexts.
Later, I learned that native speakers sometimes tend to say things “durch die Blume”, which literally means through a flower, or metaphorically using flowery language to soften criticism.
I imagine there must have been moments of cultural misunderstanding, in which, as I was being told something through the flowers, I didn’t get the message because I was too focused on wondering how it is that these flowers grow out of the cracks between the composite blocks, and perhaps missing the subtle nuance of the pollen-powdered point they are trying to make.
But that is how we were taught to learn the language at language school: not to be scared of the long words that German is notorious for, but rather to dismantle them, understand them as separate beings, and then put them back together - that’s when their meaning magically presents itself in its unambiguous form.
An example of such a long word many a German student must have heard early on in their learning journey is Donaudampfschifffahrtsgesellschaftskapitän.
Admittedly, it does look intimidating, but once dismantled, it simply means a Danube steamship company captain. Taken apart, it really isn’t that terrifying, and suddenly we see that German is, in fact, a flexible, LEGO-language in which we can just shove nouns, adjectives, and verbs into a word to convey meaning.
As a foreigner, after having experienced this epiphany, communicating has become surprisingly easy.
Moreover, it is precisely this potency, which German is also famous for, that had me fall in love with it as a literature student.
That, and the allure of the words coined during literary Romanticism and the philosophy of German Idealism.
German seemed to have the magical ability to symbolize entire concepts in a single word.
I was a romantic and idealist, and the choice of studying literature had already made me highly susceptible to terms such as Weltschmerz, which literally translates to “world-pain” and describes the psychological state of being deeply melancholic about the discrepancy between the reality of the world and an ideal state.
Luckily, soon enough came Nietzsche with his Lebensbejahung, or the attitude of radically being life-affirming, of embracing and loving and living all of life’s aspects, pleasurable or painful, in Amor Fati or “love of fate”.
To love it all, the good, the bad, the painful, the known, and the unknown.
We are here, this is what we have, whether we understand it or not, we are human.
We are alive. We are all here because of Geworfenheit, which literally translates to “thrownness”, according to Heidegger.
We are just thrown into this world without being given a choice. But still, choices need to be made constantly.
And unfortunately, bad choices can lead to horrific consequences.
Big ideas and ideals can be seductive, and verführerisch in German, or misleading, and can lead to horrific leaders instrumentalizing pompous, powerful ideas for populist principles.
Heidegger joined the Nazi party, and Nietzsche’s terminology has been criminally twisted and tarnished by the same powers.
False friends exist on all fronts, and this concept also exists in linguistics. In language, false friends are words that misleadingly look or sound similar but have different meanings, often leading to translation errors and misunderstandings.
Some of these misunderstandings could even have lethal consequences.
Das Gift, for instance, sounds like a present, doesn’t it?
People are mostly flattered to receive gifts.
But nein - don’t take it in German—it’s a trap and means “poison”.
Or take it carefully, as every poison can also be a cure (in moderation).
Alle Dinge sind Gift, und nichts ist ohne Gift; allein die dosis machts, daß ein Ding kein Gift sei.
All things are poison, and nothing is without poison; it is the dose alone that determines whether a thing is poisonous
Paracelsus, Swiss alchemist (1493–1541)
At the end of the day, we will all die from something eventually.
But only in English.
And this is because eventuell in German means “perhaps”.
So, as far as dying goes, whether you perceive life as a gift or das Gift, it is nice, in language at least, to keep the option of immortality open.
On the other hand, I wouldn’t like to be a lover misunderstanding the word “eventually”.
Will it happen perhaps, or sooner or later?
Then again, as they say, there is no fairness in love and war, and what is certain anyhow?
Only change is constant. The rules upon which languages function were made up only to try to normalize what is already there.
When we learn languages, along with the rules, we always learn the exceptions that confirm the rules.
And what is most alive and playful is precisely that which breaks the rules and transgresses, and shows us the translinguistic, playful nature of language. Just as we can wonder about words from the outside, some words wander off into another language altogether and take on a completely different life independently, like Gogol’s Nose.
In German, these are called ausgewanderte Wörter, or emigrated words.
One example originally stems from the question, was ist das? (What is this?) In German, that became a little roof window in French and Turkish.
And this was due to some soldiers in the 18th century or so pointing at a rooftop window, asking, “What is this?”.
The French then understood it as the name for this ventilation window. When or why it went to Turkey remains a mystery, at least to me.
Perhaps it’s just chic to say anything in French, even “vasistas”.
Isn’t it cute when something seemingly foreign wanders into our lives and our languages and opens a window into the sky?
I wish we could all be that free to cross borders and open upward-looking perspectives, instead of being verführt by some Führer to close borders, perspectives, and hearts.
On this note and for the end, I would like to share perhaps one of the most beautiful ideas I’ve encountered through German and Friedrich Schiller’s words:
Der Mensch spielt nur, wo er in voller Bedeutung des Worts Mensch ist, und er ist nur da ganz Mensch, wo er spielt.
Or in English: “A person only plays when they are fully human in the truest sense of the word, and they are only fully human when they play.”
So be fully human, don’t go astray, and don’t forget to play!
You can follow Ashley’s work at her Substack newsletter.
Thanks for reading!
What else happened this week?
✈️ Merz asks Syrians to “go home”
💰 Money-Saving Tip of the Week from Smart Living in Germany
You’re probably happy that winter is finally over – but now might be a good time to think about the next one. Prices for seasonal items usually drop once demand is gone, so while everyone else is focused on spring and summer items, you can often find better deals on things like coats, thermal clothing, ski gear, warm blankets and daylight lamps for next winter.
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