I Am Now Integrated
If I’m sounding a tad more Teutonic today it’s because I recently - and rather unsuspectingly - took part in an integration ceremony. I have now an urge to barbecue nine months of the year and buy jars of Nutella large enough to hold all my written correspondence with German bureaucracy. Other side effects include worsening of pre-existing syntactic complications, also commonly known as the inability to write sentences containing less than three subclauses or syntactic non-linearity, together with an increased belief in the all-healing powers of homeopathy.
It all started with yet another letter from the unending sea of paper that life in Germany entails (I have yet to reconcile this epistolary enthusiasm with the equally Teutonic fondness for forests). This latest missive congratulated me on passing the so-called German language test for immigrants and invited me to a ceremony where two very official sounding officials would hand over my certificate. The letter also encouraged me to bring along my children, who would be freed from school upon the presentation of said letter. Since my progeny currently amounts to zero I wondered if it would absolve my fiance from attending his pre-planning planning meeting instead. Though, like most children, he would probably sit at the back and play during the whole ceremony. And I don’t want to take his iPhone away.
I had no choice but to attend the event sans better half and non existent quarter halves. Thursday afternoon thus found me in a chalk-smelling mossy green locale in Antonstrasse’s Volkshochschule, together with the 20-odd other recipients and their children, partners and other assorted family members. I was one of the few people, it seemed, that had arrived without an entourage, a camera, or a recent visit to the hairdresser. I had already gathered that I wasn’t part of the usual demographic, not only was I the only female there dangerously close to her 30s without descendants, I was also in the rather lucky situation that I did not need the certificate for visa reasons, nor would it have any effect on my professional prospects. My posts might often give the wrong the impression, but I was there just for the love of German. I’m a professional linguist, I can’t live in Berlin and not learn the language. Yet there are many people that don’t - hence the integration courses. All the people gathered that Thursday in room 305 had successfully completed such a course. The only non-compliant element to be found, much to the chagrin of the representative of the integration ministry, was the sound system. Microphones rarely want to integrate.
We all waited patiently in our seats while I tried to discreetly eyeball the cake table. A couple of babies started loudly protesting, perhaps also piqued by the lack of Hanuta bars (Danish butter biscuits at a German induction ceremony? I thought I was there to be integrated, not the other way around) While I pondered the symbolic ramifications of baked goods, the integration ministry delegate successfully integrated the microphone. What followed was a predictable speech on the importance of language to German society. Partly catering to the linguistic level of the attendants, partly to hammer the message home, her rhetoric was littered with keywords such as “society”, “community”, “common language”, and “increased opportunities”. She reminded me of a nationalist Buddhist monk repeating a particularly cherished mantra. We were then serenaded by a capella version of the national anthem. I really wanted a Hanuta bar. We were called individually to receive our certificates. One by one we went up and were handed a red rose and our certificate by the two official looking officials. I also found out why so many of the recipients had been to the hairdresser. We were meant to greet the suits and then have our picture taken sandwiched between them as a memento. I had not been coiffed nor did I have a photogenic baby to accessorise my certificate and rose. Merely my awkward smile. If I had known in advance that the pampers count was going to be this high I could have borrowed one - I live in Prenzlauer Berg after all. For an integration ceremony I was feeling rather out of place.
The capella group reappeared and gave us a Spring hymn, for which they received some integration singing roses. Then the teachers were honoured with some more red buds too. Maybe Interflora was sponsoring the event. I would have preferred Hanuta. We all politely clapped. Then people broke off to get some tea, Turkish tea, coffee and decidedly non-German biscuits. Alas, I had another appointment, and left with my rose and certificate, soon to be accompanied by an integration Ritter Sport.
Always the Exophone, Never the Ex-phoney
I’m writing you this letter to tell you I’m on my way
I’m coming home
And nothing, nothing, nothing can’t get in my way
Babe, I’ve changed…
– Goldhawk Road, Tina Dico
Some time ago I was labelled fat-skinny by Grazia, a rigorous publication with impeccable scientific credentials, and a respected authority on nutrition and €4,000 must-have ostrich bags. Now, I would never normally harbour doubts against such an assertion, but I have occasionally pondered whether fat-skinny is yet another hare-brained collective delusion courtesy the thick-thin Grazia writers. It is, after all, the year of the rabbit.
Now my beloved Guardian (et tu, Brute?) informs me that my voice inhabits a grey zone, a metaphorical one, as opposed to the physical space occupied by my semantically indecisive body mass. You see, I have been put into the “exophone” box (provided that my fat skinny body fits, of course). Exophone, derived from the Greek prefix “exo”, meaning “outside” and the word “phone” denoting “voice” or “sound”, refers to the phenomenon of writing in a language other than the one you were born into. Like I’m doing right now. At this very instant. Have you found any syntactic incongruity yet? A suspiciously foreign word choice that grates on your native ears? A dubiously placed preposition perhaps? If you haven’t, you’re probably going to now.
I grew up speaking Danish and Spanish. Does my Spanish background betray me? Perhaps my vocabulary is characterised by a marked preference for Latin etymology rather than Anglo-Saxon. Anglo-Saxon, i.e. Old English, is a West Germanic language. So is Danish. Well, it is actually a North Germanic language. I’m sure all you Germanic connoisseurs detected a certain je Norse sais quoi in my writing*. What can I say, it’s in my blood. My Spanish plasma does not contain red blood cells, it contains rrrrred blaaad sills. I am an exophone, forever condemned to a self-imposed linguistic exile, forever shackled to this phoney feeling.
The addition of German to my linguistic repertoire is not going to help matters (and it will certainly upset the North versus West Germanic equation, as I assume that German is Omni-Germanic). Not that I speak Luther’s language fluently, not by any means, but I have established friendships in which German is the main medium of communication. The German I is not as fully-fledged as the English I, the Danish I, or for that matter the Spanish ¡ay, caramba!. Which one is the real I? Is it a combination thereof? I have spent roughly a third of my life in each of Denmark, England and Spain.
Most of my adult life has taken place in England, so it is only natural that I should formulate my adult thoughts in English. They’re few and far between to begin with. Most of my half-baked ideas and fully-fledged rants are product of over-dinner conversations with my English fiancé (I should’ve probably plumped for the Anglo-Saxon “betrothed”, but I have no dowry and Richard III is no longer king of England). It is only natural that I should want to record these exchanges and conclusions in English. Why would I want to translate them into Danish or Spanish, stripping them in the process of subtle yet vital nuances and removing them from the original context. Because I can’t feel in English?
Karen Blixen: Not included in the Guardian’s list.
The term “exo” in “exophone” implies an emotional disconnection, a semantic slap to the face. And I never liked metaphorical violence, or real insults for that matter. The linguistic essentialism latent in the term troubles me. Am I unable to express genuine emotions in English? Perhaps the 1985 Spanish me is somehow more real than the 2011 English me. Maybe I have an immutable mother tongue kernel to which I’m no longer loyal. That would be rather unfortunate, because for the past 10 years English has been the language in which I have loved. I was proposed to in English, I accepted in English. In fact my constant bad punning and penchant for wordplay could be read as an ongoing love letter to my future husband, a homage to the linguistic treasures I’ve stumbled across during our decade-long dialogue.
Or maybe I am destined to forever be the exophone, never the ex-phoney, because I will always be phoney, a linguistic transvestite masquerading as an English speaker. Pity, I actually prefer the newly coined “ex-phoney” , which is a misleading hybrid just like myself. The prefix “ex”, like “exo” denotes “out of, from out” but it normally precedes words borrowed from Latin. The “phoney” found in “ex-phoney” is also not a corruption of the Greek “phone”, as some might assume, but an alteration of “fawney”, a gilt brass ring used by swindlers, from the Irish Gaelic “fáinne”, meaning ring. You could say that “phoney” is a phoney “phone”, an etymological red herring. No wonder a phoneys like myself likes it. So to recap, “exophone” is made up of two Old Greek components. “ex-phoney” is composed of the Latin suffix “ex”, cognate of the Greek “exo” and customary chaperone of Latin nouns, plus an Irish Gaelic corruption disguised as a Greek word. A true linguistic mutt.
“Exophone” is, on the other hand, a pure Hellenic neologism coined presumably by exophonic people themselves, who wanted to put their Classics degrees to use and whose dabblings in the Greek language should, according to their own linguistic intolerance, be as genuine as the Sirtaki dance in Zorba the Greek. Confused yet? You should be.
All this fancy terminology cobbled together from two dead languages, Latin and Old Greek… who since the 6th century has been able to claim that Latin is their mother tongue? Apart from the Pope, of course, whose views are, incidentally, also stuck in the Dark Ages.
Thanks to the enthusiastic coining of these exophones, Latin and Old Greek now boast a larger semantic pool than they did in the times of Socrates & co. Because nobody actually speaks these languages anymore, it is quite common to encounter accidental amalgamations of Latin and Greek roots. The word “television”, for an instance, is a well-known example, consisting of the Greek word “tele” (far) and the Latin word “visio”. These hybrids are known as heteroradicals (the Pope is a huge fan), “heteroradical” being, of course, also a heteroradical word (from the Greek “hetero” meaning “to differ” and the Latin “radix” i.e. root). You might be shocked to hear that some purists dislike these heteroradicals. I believe these are the same people who get their pedantic panties in a twist every time they suddenly encounter a split infinitive. I am more astounded by the fact that a purist should show opposition to a word containing “hetero” and “radical”.
I am also slightly perplexed by people who can so authoritatively argue about an obsolete language that has been relegated to scientific nomenclature and intellectual pomposity. And also used to label, in the best Foucaltian fashion, linguistic dissidents like me, who have spent most of their adult lives thinking, dreaming and being perplexed in an adopted language.
Some time ago I went to see Tina Dico in concert. Danish by birth - her surname is actually Dickow - this singer-songwriter spent a large part of the last decade living in London. I actually attended a gig at the Union Chapel during my own London years. And now she was in Berlin, touring after her recent return to Denmark. She was no longer based in the British capital and yet the city had left a visible imprint. Her Danish cadences had, like mine, been gradually eroded and I even detected the hint of an Estuarian accent. Dico has always composed in English and her songs often revolve around the themes of exile, belonging and travelling. Berlin’s Admiralspalast was thronged that evening with the Danish diaspora and as the opening chords to “Count to Ten” echoed throughout the hall, they rose to their feet, as if following an invisible command, and enthusiastically accompanied Dico in her tales of transience and topographical dislodgement. They were all singing in English, united by their Danishness. Singing in Berlin, many accompanied by their German partners. I could hear one of them waxing lyrical about Dico’s English lyrics in fluent German to her partner. I guess I had stumbled into an exophone convention.
*Anglo-Saxon purists, I have some bad news for you! (apart from the obvious fact that you’re Anglo-Saxon purists in the 21st century): The UK (particularly northern England) attracted some - presumably very lost - Vikings on the way to Mallorca in the ninth century. As a result, English contains large swathes of North Germanic words. In fact, “Words of Scandinavian origin rarely look or feel foreign to modern English-speakers. They have been completely assimilated, and most denote everyday objects” (From The Secret Life of Words: How English Became English, Henry Hitchings.)
I Think, Therefore I Am (German)
In a day and age when professional alarmists fret about the dumbing down of humankind - because all medieval peasants were avid readers of the Literary Review - it is reassuring to know that thinking is positively thriving in at least one country. Germany is rather fond of pondering, dissecting, mulling, musing, ruminating and other mental gymnastics. Germany has been the main exporter of dry philosophy since time immemorial, before the French started smoking and hanging out in cafés. Often it is sublime and other times it is tad too dense. Martin Heidegger’s magnus opus Being and Time was according to Roger Scrutton “formidably difficult - unless it is utter nonsense, in which case it is laughably easy. I am not sure how to judge it, and have read no commentator who even begins to make sense of it”. This incidentally is often how I feel when I peruse the politics section of Süddeutsche Zeitung.
George Bernard Shaw claimed that “an Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable” . A German, on the other hand, feels uncomfortable when he thinks he is being moral. Can he ascertain this morality? How do you define morality? And what social forces cause him to question his morals in the first place? Which role does the concept of moral play in today’s society? At this point, and to assuage his (or her!) guilt, a German feels compelled to write a 5,000 word editorial in the Tagesspiegel consisting of 10 line sentences containing 20 subclauses interspersed with 30 brackets and asides written exclusively in the passive mode, so they can bring out their entire collection of “geworden gewesen wurden haben” verbs they have been keeping for those special occasions. Whatever the conclusion (spoiler: it might be America’s fault), rest assured that readers will be reminded of their victimhood. In an Advanced Capitalist Society we are ALL victims. Blame it on the Advanced Capitalist Society. Whatever an Advanced Capitalist Society is (clue, a German philosopher* is its main analyst). But if it weren’t for an ACS (I’m not German, and got tired of typing) there wouldn’t be editorials, debates, opinion of the day. There wouldn’t be any Tatort!
With this in mind I recently came across a piece in The Economist on Muslim immigrants learning about Germany’s Nazi past. Action Reconciliation Service for Peace (Aktion Sühnezeichen Friedensdienste), a peace organization founded to confront the legacy of Nazism, is running a series of seminars and tutorials about the third Reich targeted at immigrant women who want to know more about this episode in history. This has provoked controversy and much soul searching in Germany and its brooding inhabitants and led to yet another wave of editorials. I don’t know about you, but at this point I’m expecting editorials whenever Facebook changes its layout. Anyway, on the one hand there’s scepticism in certain quarters about the genuine interest of immigrants in the Holocaust. The course is partly funded by the interior ministry who is eager to prevent anti-Semitism and discourage Islamist extremism, as well as reach out to the country’s large Muslim community. There are, of course, many Germans who welcome interest in Hitler’s regime on the part of guest workers and encourage them to contribute with their thoughts on the subject. The whole kerfuffle is Germany in a nutshell:
The unspoken assumption is that there is a middle ground between German remorse and indifference. As enlightened Germans, the seminar-givers see the Holocaust as a unique crime committed mainly against the Jews. Yet they must make room for the views of women whose backgrounds have little to do with the persecution of Jews and who may have suffered horrors of their own. Taking their experiences seriously matters as much as instructing them. There is a risk of “relativising” the Holocaust, says Astrid Messerschmidt of the University of Education in Karlsruhe. Yet the German version of history “cannot be imposed from above”.
Most fraught, says Mrs Weduwen [who organises the seminars] , are discussions of the Middle East. The women learn that both sides in the Israel-Palestine conflict have grievances. The message can receive a hostile reception when Israeli commandos storm ships trying to break the Gaza blockade. Mrs Boumekik is involved in educating Arab families who blame Jews for the conflict. That is like assuming Muslims are terrorists, she says. With hostility to Muslims mounting in Germany, some women draw parallels with Nazi racism.
To a German pundit, this news item is a dream come true. Sod Advanced Capitalist Societies! It contains National Socialism + Collective Guilt + Immigrants + Women in Headscarfs + Israeli-Palestinian Conflict = Editorial Gold! Throw in a healthy dose of nuclear energy, a sprinkle of homeopathy with a side of Hartz IV, and I guarantee you that Germans will be thinking for a very very long time. Anyway, I don’t know what these poor women have to do to integrate into German society. They’re already willingly taking part in a 60-hour tutorial about the Nazis (and knowing Germans I suspect this is one session). Maybe they could engage in a 7 hour debate on what it means to be German, and whoever refrains from rolling their eyes and beating other participants over the head repeatedly with an unabridged copy of Being and Time gets a German passport.
* I actually happen to like Habermas
On Compounds
Some German words are so long that they have a perspective […] These things are not words, they are alphabetical processions. And they are not rare; one can open a German newspaper at any time and see them marching majestically across the page, - and if he has any imagination he can see the banners and hear the music too. They impart a martial thrill to the meekest subject. I take a great interest in these curiosities. Whenever I come across a good one, I stuff it and put it in a museum.
The Awful German Language*, Mark Twain
I came across this word today:
Straßenverkehrsordnungsfwidrigkeitsverfahren
Something about traffic… its semantic dimension escaped me, as I was too busy trying to jot down all the letters in an intelligible sequence. Or so I’ve been told. I probably missed one anyway. I guess I could work out its meaning from scratch by separating all five components and reassembling again, but by the time I reach the fourth noun I’ve forgotten the three previous. I fall prey to morphological uncertainty and I’m no longer sure whether the noun consists of five parts or seven fish. German compounds stretch my short-term memory beyond the reasonable. I pity any goldfish wanting to take up this language. Although I’m sure that there are other sound reasons for this glaring lack of German among aquatic pets. Perhaps a tax on sandcastles…
Wo waren wir stehengeblieben? I seem to have lost the thread. Oh yes, compounds! Now, I do not have anything against this Teutonic penchant for soldering words together, but occasionally there must be a limit to this over-enthusiastic DIY coinage. If you’ve passed the three-noun threshold, you should perhaps consider pouring your thoughts into a “sentence” instead. You know, this universally-used structure with subject, verb and object - the daring might even add an indirect object to the mix (the Germans can’t get enough of indirect objects, because that gives them an excuse to wheel out the dative case and thus further perplex the unsuspecting Ausländer!). The humble sentence is a well-tested syntactically-sound platform that can support most human thoughts. You should give it a go! I’ve conducted many exhaustive - if not unwilling - tests and I’ve reached the conclusion that, by replacing these four-atom-word-compounds with sentences**, overall comprehension increases by 100% and compound induced migraines drop by 100%. We must put a halt to this compound malaise! If we don’t contain this promiscuous orgy of syllables soon, German will take over your Wernicke’s area and have a compound party! (Actually, that sounds like a riot.) German texts are already on average 30% longer than most of their counterparts; left unchecked they could easily double in size, and then there would no hope left for me or those poor goldfish.
* German speakers and Germanophiles, do not take umbrage. There is no need to get offended. I’m onto my fourth language and can assure you that all languages are equally awful. Otherwise they wouldn’t be worth learning.
** Should be used as part of a balanced syntactical diet. Anybody found replacing compounds by a myriad of never-ending subclauses in their writing will be repeatedly battered in the head with a copy of Noah Chomsky’s Syntactical Structures.
My least favourite German compound
Normally I love German’s ability to coin new words by sticking existing words together like Lego, but today I came across a rather cynical recent(ish) compound: Lebensabschnittspartner. Let me break it down for you. It consists of “Leben” (life) + “Abschnitt” (episode/period) + “Partner”. Given current divorce rates, I can understand the cynicism, and yet. Would you really like to be a partner-for-current-life-period? Just because, like Picasso, you’re having a blue period, there is no need to label your relationships. Although, I’ll give you that, I can see why Henry VIII might have found it a valuable addition to his vocabulary.
Not only is it glaringly unromantic, but also rather ungrateful. Nothing is guaranteed in this life, including love. This state of affairs has remained unaltered since, well, forever, so I have no sympathy for these spurned lovers. Perhaps more marriages end in divorce than in earlier periods, although it is rarely mentioned than in earlier periods it was also rather common to croak at the ripe age of 50. So on average people are still together for the same amount of time.
Also, they can play the “realism” card to their heart’s content, as if they hadn’t realised that the the human heart is rarely powered by logic. Otherwise we would stop buying lottery tickets, sending peace envoys to the Middle East and supporting the England football team. Realism is often conspicuous for its absence, more perhaps that we would like, but this is still infinitely better than to assume that Schrödinger’s cat is already dead. You will never know until you have opened that box. Pandora’s attempt was famously unfortunate, but what is rarely mentioned is that after all the evil spirits have been freed, a single one remained in the box. This was Elpis, or “hope” in Greek.
What Herr Müller did next…
I have been attending a language course for the last two and half months, and inflicting my tortured German on poor unsuspecting Berliners, those poor souls. But it is rather gratifying to be met with fewer blank stares and furrowed brows. Some people have even started replying to me in German. This can, of course, also have its downsides. You have spent the last ten minutes carefully constructing a question in your head, blurt it out and are rewarded with a long stream of unfamiliar words speeding down the pronunciation Autobahn. Here is an example: “Excuse me, where is the salt?”, “Ah, the salt is [incomprehensible] aisle [incomprehensible] mustard [incomprehensible] left [incomprehensible] pink chihuahua? [incomprehensible] penguin on fire???” “Thank you”, “You’re welcome”.
“Wortschatz”, German for “vocabulary”, is in true Teutonic tradition a compound consisting of “word” (“Wort”) and “treasure” (“Schatz”). Mine is currently emptier than the German treasury. Sure, I can tell you what my name is, where I come from, what my hobbies are and whether Herr Müller is in the Biergarten (which takes dative) or going to one (accusative). This does not make me a great raconteur or a beguiling conversant, unless you’re interested in the whereabouts of Herr Müller. And fortunately my affections are otherwise engaged, as the only ice breaker than I can think of when faced with a particularly cute native is “Was kostet es?”. Might work a treat at the farmers’ market, less likely to impress the locals outside Oranienburger Straße.
Also, I might be able to describe the weather in Hamburg (sunny apparently, according to my textbook) but I am left desperately wanting in the hairdresser department. It doesn’t cover sentences such as “I was thinking a geeky Betty Page meets kooky Blade Runner…can you picture it?”. Essential stuff, not whether Herr Müller is at the Biergarten, climbing the Zugspitze or eating a Wurst. Surely I am not the only one more interested in knowing how he gets into Berghain on a Saturday, or what vernacular he might be inclined to use upon finding out that his bike has been stolen while he was trying to get into Berghain, and then recognizing it the day after at the Mauerpark Fleamarket. You know. Important stuff.
Ich versuche deutsch zu sprechen
Learning a language is like bringing up a child - no matter how many you have already, the new arrival will always be demanding. By the time you are onto your fourth, you expect it to be demanding, you know it will be demanding, you are absolutely certain that it will be demanding, yet this is no consolation. Nobody ever found solace in cynicism. Total immersion is the only option to get to grips with a language’s nuts and bolts, with its syntactic soul, morphological contours and semantic depths. The new language, initially just white noise, slowly metamorphoses, first into individual words, flashes of meaning discerned here and there, and then later into fully fledged sentences, no longer part of a cacophony.
I am currently trying to immerse myself in German, in the hope that it will be my fourth adopted language, joining those other demanding brats (Danish, English and Spanish). Learning a language is obviously not the same as total immersion. You can learn a language without plugging yourself into the Grammarmatrix. You dutifully attend your language course every day, then go home and switch off. But if you are in the Grammarmatrix, that is not an option. You can never switch off. Once you have looked below the surface, you can never return to your safe monolingual existence. You are provided with some rudimentary building blocks - a set of Duplo - to start with. You are given some essential regular verbs and their conjugations in the present tense, the basic (nominative) personal pronouns, some numbers and a couple of possessives thrown in for good measure. Familiar now with a few of these building blocks, you start seeing them everywhere. Duplo pieces are simple, clumsy, childish. You long for proper Lego, the tiny adaptable pieces that constitute your native tongue, and admire the beautiful, and often unintelligible constructions you constantly come across. I am currently at the Duplo stage, enthusiastically mashing my blocks together like a toddler dreaming of high towers and aeroplanes.
I will have my tower.
Inside I’m Dancing: German Greetings
Very few people would describe German as a musical language - it lacks the mellifluous qualities of Italian or the fluctuating rhythm that characterises Norwegian. Like all tongues, German is rich and expressive, and apparently rather suited for singing about unconsummated tragic love, Rhine maidens, legendary spears and other ring-related activities and crypto-Christian imagery. Deutsch is many splendid things, but melodious ain’t one of them, not compared to Mandarin.
It is no surprise then that recently arrived Auslanders often wonder about the large number of singing Germans they regularly come across, and start to ponder about the potential side-effects of consuming cheese for breakfast. “HAloooooooooooooo” they will coo like an over-excited wood pigeon. Or the equally startling, and for a German, high-pitched “CHU_Huuuuuuuuuuuuuus!”, as if they have just walked into a particularly minimal and sharp Bauhaus table.
What is the function of these over-stretched epic vowels, almost as long as a Wagner opera? Perhaps it is the vowel equivalent of Nietzsche’s Übermensch- the über-vowel? No, they are just what Germans use to greet each other, “Hallo” obviously being “hello” and “Tschüss” being the equivalent of “Bye”. They are the informal and more widespread versions of “Guten Tag” and “Auf Wiedersehen” despite their glaring non-Teutonic brevity, hence the elongation, I guess.
An Introduction : Berlin…Is That Outside Zone 6?
My name is Rocío Rødtjer, and until last month, London was my home. Sure, I wasn’t born within the sound of ‘Bow Bells, but neither was Vinnie Jones. And I have never addressed anybody as a ‘guvnor’, but neither has Vinnie Jones outside a Guy Ritchie film.
A London wardrobe staple: the raincoat.
After a decade in the capital though, I too was convinced that a cuppa was a solution to all life’s ills, and was rarely seen leaving my glorified North London shoebox without my trusty 5 quid Boots umbrella, replaced within a month, alas, after disappearing down the great umbrella vortex known as the tube. And when the tube would, inescapably, become a victim to yet another ‘signal failure’, I would exchange sympathetic glances with my fellow passengers (only time when interaction was allowed) and would inwardly curse Transport for London, and not London Transport. This discontent would later be vocalized by an Evening Standard board, that would make up for the complete absence of verbs with nouns. MANY nouns (Black Monday Tube Chaos: Commuters Horrible Ordeal). For a collection of the Standard’s finest apocalyptic verbless visions see:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lmg/sets/69593/
And yet I’m typing these words in Schöneberg. Just west of Mitte, this Berlin neighbourhood, was the setting of Isherwood’s ‘Goodbye to Berlin’ (of ‘Cabaret’ fame), as well as being the place where Kennedy later gave his famous ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ speech. And in between these two, Goebbel delivered his infamous ‘Total War’ on Postdammer Strasse, 15 min down the road from our house.
My current hood: Schöneberg
How did I end here, you might ask? Well, about three months ago my better half got offered a position at Nokia’s Social Location Department. Which just happens to be in Berlin. The thought of leaving zone 2 horrified us at first, but then we slowly began to warm to the idea. The ability to be able to swing a cat in your living room without having to move to Kent, or to east Croydon for that matter, where I’ve been told that a cross cat is the least of your problems, greatly appealed to us. All those shiny carpet-free continental square meters waiting for us for the price of an Islington bedsit (in Holloway prison). Also, having grown up in Copenhaguen and northern Spain, I was seduced by the prospect of experiencing seasonal weather once more, instead of spending 9 months of the year in opaque tights and a raincoat.
London was my home though. I had come to love its strange and idiosyncratic ways. I had even developed a penchant for Marmite, despite fighting the inescapable feeling that this is how it must feel to lick on a battery. I spoke the language, even when I arrived ten years ago, when my vocabulary was more limited and my accent would swing between Spanish and Danish, depending on the mood.
I don’t speak German, hence the title of my blog ‘Wie bitte?’. I believe the gist of it is ‘sorry, could you repeat that?’…. Or in my case ‘I have no idea what’s going on, I’m trying to get to Alexanderplatz but I no longer know if I’m east or west, and I can’t even say “I don’t speak German” although my completely ignorance of your most august language should be quite obvious by now. But I’m nice. See? I’m smiling. Where’s Alexanderplatz again?’
Or something to that effect.
Wie bitte?
Becoming _vaguely_ conversational is definitely one of my chief aims during our stay. Although so far my pronunciation of ‘Ich’ has been described as belonging to the Hamburg dialect. And the seemingly innocuous ‘Wie geht’s dir?’ had people in stitches and elicited the comment ‘You sound like a Bavarian!!!’. Which I don’t think is meant as a compliment in Berlin. With my luck, I’m sure I’ll sound like a Berliner in Bavaria.
