Word Up: Der Altweibersommer

der Altweibersommer m Indian summer

Happy to report that a late summer in Germany is called an Old Wives' Summer, and nothing more incendiary than that.
We had been having warm weather for the better part of six months until last weekend.  That being said, the long warm months didn't so much seem like the good fortune of an indian summer as like being stuck in a season on repeat.  Like Groundhog Day, you know, if it had been set in a pleasantly warm summer weekend instead.  Then the weather decided to get cold, rainy, and decidedly unsuited to any of my clothing.  Already, the very first onset of fall has brought out the toques, goose down jackets and 10-foot-long (soccer team) scarves.  This doesn't make sense to me.  If you are wearing all of your winter clothing now in the middle of October, what are you going to do when the temperature actually dips below freezing?  There is nowhere to go but colder!

Geschmack: Amerikaner aka The Black and White Cookie

Germans may not get Seinfeld, but they do get the Black and White Cookie, known here as the Amerikaner. If the Black & White Cookie is all about racial harmony, the Germans are making a pretty clear statement with their baked goods.  It is also widely available in the segregated all black or all white version.

Having first discovered that I could get the Black and White Cookie here, around the corner, in Germany, I took the literal, typical, unfamiliar-immigrant approach and called it the "Schwarz und Weiß Keks."   Nobody let me know I had it all wrong, possibly because they wanted to avoid the 30 seconds of uncontrollable mirth that now happens every time I ask for an Amerikaner.  Each time that word comes out of my mouth it's like I have fulfilled for the bakery staff all of the stereotypes about Americans in that one brief moment of ordering a baked good.  Next time I should add one of the terrible, heavy, thick-as-mud doughnuts they call American-style to my order and the staff can die and go to heaven.  Man, can't we all just get along?  Look to the cookie!

Wirklich? Really?: Jugendschutz

   I really love the Tatort, Germany's answer to CSI.  Sunday evenings from 8:15 the Tatort (literally Crime Scene) runs for an hour and a half, and each week, the series alternates among a nation-wide selection of wackily incongruous departments of city detectives.  This means that every week you come face to face with a different dialect, and, unfortunately, sometimes, the same plot - ideas must be scarce on the ground at this time of the year because I have seen two weeks running of former-alcoholic-detective-faced-with-a-potential-misbegotten-child dilemmas.

   But, 8:15 on a Sunday is not a great time to catch a TV show when your weekends are your only chance to escape Stuttgart thanks to cheap weekend train tickets.  Plus, TV shows generally screen at weird quarter-hour intervals here and then last for frustratingly long amounts of time, which means that when a channel tries to schedule a 44 minute American TV show into an hour-and-fifteen minute slot, they have to introduce extra advertisements.  But rather than just have longer advertisements at the intervals clearly indicated by fades-to-black and dramatic cliffhangers, instead German TV programmes have one or two excessively long advertisement periods where you could make dinner, clean your kitchen, and forget that you're even watching TV before the show comes back on, in addition to hiccupy little 30-second breaks to even it all out.  To add insult to injury, and because you might have read War and Peace in your downtime, the broadcaster then replays a minute or so of the action from before the commercial break.
    Anyway, to avoid all that wasted time and catch up on my Tatort, I had the genius idea of watching the on-demand version of the show after it had aired.  But, on the Das Erste site, the public broadcaster responsible for this German gem, what did I find but this message: Aus Jugendschutzgründen stehen Ihnen die Videos jeweils ab 20:00 Uhr bis 6:00 Uhr zur Verfügung, or, to protect young people, the videos are only available after 8PM.  I don't know any kid who can navigate the internet well enough to find the Tatort who goes to bed before 8, but I guess Das Erste knows best.  Heaven forbid a tween should see one of the Kommissars doing something as outlandishly disrespectful as eating Currywurst in the morgue.


image via t-online.de

Word Up: der Lehrstuhl

Lehrstuhl m department chair (academia)

   Because I am in the middle of grad school applications, the recent German class lesson on vocabulary words for university was unusually relevant.  Usually our topics are things like A Hundred Words for Depression or How to Explain Why You Have Been Shoplifting.  Besides the usual combination of thematic and trick questions to expose potentially unacceptable immigrants (How many years do students usually study in your home country?  Is private contact between students and professors appropriate in your homeland?), we learned all the names for the various tiers of hierarchy within a university department, from HiWi (work-study assistant) to Professor (natch).  As you can expect, in Germany there are a lot of different, narrowly defined degrees of seniority.  

   Of particular interest was the title for the position of department chair at a university, Lehrstuhl, which, predictably, almost literally translates (guess what "Stuhl" is in English?)  There is one important difference.  When I asked if we could say, "I am the department chair" as well as "I have the department chair," my instructor seemed to think that was a pretty ridiculous question.  "One cannot be a chair," he smiled.  Too right, I think.

image via amazon.com

Word Up: der Indianer

Indianer(in f) m Red Indian, see also indianische

    Have I mentioned that Germans lack something called political correctness?  Case in point. This definition is straight out of my Pons, one of the standard reference books in Germany, published in 1995.  Remember that whole "Get over it - it's the nineties" thing?  Apparently they didn't do the nineties in Germany.  And I think they missed out on some key civil rights issues of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s as well.
    This fearless political incorrectness is not restricted to dusty books - I had the experience of seeing it come to life last weekend at the annual Cannstatter Volksfest parade.  Stuttgart's version of Oktoberfest, the Volksfest draws its psychic inspiration from a big bronze vat, the city Can of the aforementioned Cannstatt, which is escorted to the fairgrounds by the mayor, about a hundred marching bands, an Iggy Pop lookalike and an extremely bored Duke of Württemberg (understandably seeing as I doubt he has any duties other than appearing in floats at parades, and possibly no property other than said float).  Each float gave out candy to the watching kids, or in the case of the agricultural groups, offered samples of their wares.  There was a lot of free beer for a Sunday morning.  There was local wine.  There was sauerkraut.  There were dirndls and lederhosen and even a moustache appreciation club.
    Present among the many cultural groups who also feted the famed Can was a Retro Americana club, complete with a General Lafayette, an Edgar J. Hoover, twenty southern belles, gas station attendants, a few cowboys carrying a Confederate flag, and a small group of furred and feathered men and women who were clearly going for Native American but ended up, for obvious reasons, bearing more of a resemblance to extras at Medieval Times.  To be fair, Germans seem to have no problem with thousands of Americans not to mention American celebrities showing up at Oktoberfest in the stripper-friendly version of Bavarian traditional dress, so maybe what seems like cultural appropriation is only a little friendly tit for tat.
    And it's not the Germans alone who are taking the kind of liberties that would get some major frowns in North America.  I picked up a similarly offending copy of French Elle in Frankfurt (What kind of cosmopolitan multi-lingual Eden is this, a mere two hours from the conservative all-German, all-the-time pretzel-fest that is Stuttgart? Now I know why the train was standing room only.)  Published every week, yet still managing to weigh in at 296 pages (how much can any one person really read about how polka dots are trending right now?), French Elle wants its readers to know that clogs are only to be worn in the presence of other females for fear of ruining the feminine mystique, that for several good-looking French philosophers, being television moderators is an extension of their research rather than a mad grab at fame, and that too many feathers combined in a single outfit can make you look like a "Peau-Rouge." Heaven forbid.



Hermes ad via French Elle