Wirklich? Really?: Kevin Allein Zu Hause

Movies in Germany are always dubbed into German from the original language.  Bad decision, Germany.  I mean, what is Robert Pattinson without that wonderfully evocative voice?  Hollywood heartthrobs, French television comedians, and Italian commercials all fall prey to voiceovers, with varying degrees of weirdness.  For one thing, there doesn't seem to be much tonal subtlety to the dubbing.  The delivery usually hits somewhere between manic and bouncing off the walls, which is great for How I Met Your Mother, but not so great for Carlos the Jackal.

Speed reading aside, most of these shows lose something in the translation to German.  Like catchphrases.  One of my coworkers was imitating ET yesterday with vacant eyes, a slowly rising pointer finger, and the line:  "ET zu Hause telefoniern."  Wrong, right? ET phones home, he doesn't spout German grammar exercises. Another coworker wanted to bond with me over memories of would-be burglars tripping over the booby-traps in children's classic Kevin Allein Zu Haus.  The problem here is not only the fact that I thought he was referring to some kind of old-world German morality tale before I remembered that Macaulay Culkin's character is called Kevin in Home Alone.  The rhythm is off.  The words are clunky.  I can't bear to look up Good Times' "Dyno-mite!" "Sprengstoff!" just doesn't have the same ring.

Word Up: noch ein Zauberspruch

Just when you think you are getting the hang of this German thing, you end up at a kids' party where a magician asks for the magic word, or Zauberspruch, and everybody takes a deep breath and intones in bored unison, "Hocus pocus [okay, all good - but wait - what? they're still going-] filibus, drei schwarzen Käter."  That's "fake Latin, fake Latin, fake Latin, three black tomcats" - in case you were wondering.  I was, but I managed to catch on pretty quickly before I embarrassed myself in a room full of 8-year-olds.  You should have seen the looks they gave me when I sang "Happy Birhday" - which for some reason is always sung here in English - without trying to sound like Werner Herzog.

Geschmack: Das Ecksofa

Keeping on the theme of German household basics, it's time you formally met the corner sofa, or Ecksofa.  One part sofa, one part pull-out couch, one part La-z-boy and all parts Ikea, the corner sofa is made for the most uncomfortable lounging experience possible.

It works like this.  Take a double bed.  Stretch it out so it's long enough for two very small people lying down head to toe or one Croatian basketball player.  Upholster it with vinyl.  Add shiny metal legs.  Now cut away one third of the bed to make a banana shape.  Instead of wastefully throwing out this one-third, ingeniously fold it up on top of the bed to make couch cushions so that, should the owners want, the monster bed can be reconstituted in the fullness of its original glory, to the chagrin of any and all normal-sized bed linens.  Make sure the cushions are uncomfortable.  Leave a weird peninsula hanging out at the side for full body "lounging".  Behold, the Ecksofa.

Sadly, despite its apparent multi-tasking capabilities, the Ecksofa fulfills none of its promises.  There is nothing more awkward than lying down on the corner piece, unless it's trying to sleep on the fold-out sofa.  It's like having a giant-sized rubber mattress at your disposal.  Good for swingers, bad for house guests.

image via thomaskachel.de

Wirklich? Really?: Wandtattoos

No matter how many times I emphatically pick English as my language of choice on YouTube, somehow the Internet remains convinced that I am a German.  That means German captions, German videos, and German advertisements - geared for decidedly German tastes.  Most recently that has meant ads for wall decals preceding my every video selection.  Like I said, German tastes.

Wall decals are part of a distinct German interior design trend.  These stickers are made to decorate the (white) walls of German apartments with uplifting words like "Love," "Power," and "Home," in letters that are at least two feet high and usually purple.  You can even order whole texts, mostly in English, of little poems or inspirational sayings that hit the register somewhere between Chicken Soup for the Soul and Hello Kitty. I could be getting this all wrong and they're actually step one of an immersive English language learning course. You can also purchase hearts, flowers, and creeping vines, all in sticker form to brighten up your home.

I would say there are two problems here.  The first one is that German landlords are rigid landlords who take the descriptor "institutional" as a compliment.  That means all apartments look exactly the same.  Well, not all, but mine, my friends', and at least half of the apartments I see on TV, and for the record, I watch a lot of real-estate-inspired television.  White walls are sprayed with plaster to keep you wondering if smudges are dirt or texture; stainless steel doorknobs are of the kind routinely used on handicap washroom stalls; all doors can be locked with a long, old-fashioned key that belongs on the keyring of someone best addressed as "Matron".  There is not a lot of raw potential to work with.  Combined with the fact that Germans seem to feel it is a national duty to buy Bauhaus-ish white furniture, and you have a lot of identical, monotone apartments.  But if I was going to try and make my apartment more homey without painting or betraying my homeland, I can't say that large scale wall decals would be my decorating method of choice.  I guess in Germany, nothing says home sweet home like stickers in a foreign language.

image via wandtattoos.de

Word Up: Oha! and Hä?

Maybe I have been spending too much time in Germany with speakers under the age of 10, but two words I hear a lot of are "Oha!" and "Hä?"  These belong to the great class of words known as interjections.  Basically, if you're in the habit of talking with your mouth full, you will find the interjection much more useful than the phrase or sentence.

To clarify these German examples: "Oha!" is kind of like a cross between "Uh oh!" and "ah ha!" People who have already read their way through the collected works of Dick and Jane might be more inclined to say something like "Really?" or,  for the less erudite, "Oh, shit!"  (Although, of course, in German, as pretty much everyone knows thanks to either Lady Gaga or some weird kid from middle school who was way too into World War II history, a more direct translation would be "Scheiße.")

Gaga-fandom aside, "Scheiße" is another word the under-10 set use very freely without ever once raising the eyebrows of caretakers and surrounding parents.  That freedom, of course, does not apply when translated back to English, a fact that some Germans have failed to note.  One colleague even uses the word "shitloads" as a direct synonym for "many" in any and all contexts.  That's funny when you're talking about how many chicken wings you ate last night, but less so when you're discussing how many new reading materials need to be ordered for the coming school year.

Of all things lost in translation, swear words are one group that is almost impossible to explain to a non-native speaker.  For one thing, I am constantly surprised by the very liberal use of the f-word on German television.  Seriously, these production companies need to send their editors on a road trip across the elementary school parking lots of North America in a convertible equipped with great speakers and a tapedeck full of uncensored Top 40.  Let's see how comfortable they feel dropping the f-bomb in the after-school programming slot after the rage of the PTA has rained down on them.  On The Voice of Germany, one of the nominally English-speaking judges uses the f-word to ramp up his descriptions of everything from pretty bad to pretty good singing.  And I thought that kind of show was made for family viewing - I mean, if it's not appealing to tweens, who else could possibly be watching?

As for "Hä?", in that uncomplicated world without umlauts that the English language has made a reality, it would probably be spelled more like "Heh?" (Poor Germans - in their comic books, even dastardly witches have to cackle with diacritical markings.)  It basically describes the state of confusion summed up by the expression "huh?", only with European flair.  Try it.  It's pretty fun to say.  Hä? Hä. Huh.

Wirklich? Really?: Window Shutters

One of those images of Germany that really stuck in my mind - pre-German living expeirence, of course - was of those big Alpine houses with A-frame roofs and planters of flowers hanging from every colourfully shuttered window.   It's probably Heidi that did it to me, although if I'd only paid attention, I would have realized it took place in Switzerland.  Post-Germany, that image has been pretty much obliterated.  Only the shutters remain.

Windows in Germany are built differently.  They open two ways - tilted inward from a bottom hinge or swinging inwards like a door.  It all depends on how you turn the handle.  As someone who has broken at least one of these handle mechanisms (with the help of a torrential rainstorm, to be fair), I can say that they are not always particularly sturdy.  The window can come off the bottom hinge, or the handle can become disconnected from whatever ingenious clockwork-type mechanism engages the hinges.  To me they seem finicky.  Opening and closing them properly may be one of those skills you have to have learned as a child.  Whether it's to protect the flimsy windows or to protect the precious Ikea furniture inside from light damage or theft, the Germans have outfitted their windows with heavy duty shutters.

These shutters roll down from the top of the window to completely obfuscate all light going in or out.  They are controlled either by a strap from the inside that you can hoist up or down, or by a button that mechanically lowers and raises them. A less tactful visitor might refer to them as black-out shutters.  A very untactful visitor might ask if their hosts also have a panic room.

The sound of shutters rolling up or rolling down is surprisingly loud.  You can hear the individual plates of the shutter clattering against each other as they settle into place.  To me it always sounds like an admonishment, whether up or down: "Get up! Get up! The sun is out and you should be dressed and presentable to the pedestrians waiting for the U-Bahn outside your window!" or "Shut up! Go to bed!  You are making too much noise and I need to resort to going on lockdown to keep out the sound of your television blaring on about the vacation homes of Justin Bieber and Heidi Klum."

When is a Kleenex not a Kleenex?

I seem to spend a lot of time at the post office.  I don't think this is a particularly German experience; rather, this has everything to do with being a stranger in a strange land.  First of all, I love sending postcards, and as a lifelong Stamp Traveller (Happy Canada Day!), I like to pick out flashy new stamp releases to wow my friends back home.   Post offices do have machines that prints stamps to order depending on how much money you feed them, but  the stamp is always the same stylized graphic of the Reichstag in Berlin and (Achtung!) they do not give change, so I tend to steer clear.  Secondly, German postal workers seem unable to read names that are not of indisputably local origin, and because apartments do not have numbers and everything is delivered based on the name on your mailbox, that means a lot of mail does not reach me without an extra trip to the post office.  With suitable identification, of course.

On my most recent trip to send out some packages, I picked up some scotch tape as well.  The cashier and I did our regular song and dance routine where he tries to convince me not to send a package express because it costs too much and I try to explain the very foreign concepts of deadline, urgent, and ASAP.  Germans are very concerned about saving money, especially, it seems, other people's money.  It's the perfect storm of thriftiness and nosiness.  Anyway, after he had rung up the packages, I put the scotch tape on top of the pile.  And, I said, the Tesa.  At which point he looked at me and said, I see you have learned some of our German words.  As if, of course, every other word out of my mouth was not also German that I have painstakingly learned and practiced in order to make transactions such as this one.  Yes, I smiled, I'm integrating.

For those of you who don't know, Tesa is the ubiquitous brand of scotch tape in Germany.  Let us not forget that Scotch is also a brand name, one that, probably because "transparent adhesive tape" is too unwieldy for everyone except off-brand marketers, has become shorthand for the thing itself in all its generic forms.  Germans have their shorthand too.  When is a Kleenex not a Kleenex?  When you're in Germany, of course.  But here it's not just a tissue.  No, here they have their own brands, and so instead of a hankie you pass a Tempo.

New brand names add a whole new dimension to the foreign experience, and make you sit up and realize how many trademarked titles have slipped into your vocabulary.  For example, bandaid.  Bandage doesn't really mean the same thing, does it?  A paramedic applies a bandage; your mom gives you a bandaid.  Here in Germany, bathroom cabinets are stocked up with Hansaplast (of several kinds, which must be confusing).   Or Whiteout.  When was the last time someone asked you if you were carrying around correction fluid in your pencil case?  (I know, it's been a while since I had a pencil case, too.)  For Germans, the answer would be a matter of Tipp-Ex.

There are also some things that have escaped being linked to a brand name here.  For example, Jello is just Wackelpudding, or wiggly pudding.  Popsicle also passed Germany by - here it's the self-explanatory Eis am Stiel, or ice cream on a stick.  Post-it notes are Haftnotizen.  Saran-Wrap is Haushaltsfolie.

But some things remain the same.  Tupperware is, and always will be, Tupper.  In fact, the Germans love this one so much (and Tupperware parties - but that's another story), that they have not only adopted the brand name as the noun but as a verb.  That means you don't just toss your sandwich in a container, you eintuppern it.  TM, naturally.