More on foreigners and their exotic tongues
Two reader reactions to my bemusement about Germans taking me for one of their own:
1) From Ward Wilson, of Trenton, NJ:
My friend Richard - a wonderful big Mississippian with a civil-war beard
and a slow drawl went to Paris to play classical saxophone. You know
they always say that thing about "If you just /try/ to speak their
language, they'll appreciate it and everything will go so much more
smoothly"?
Richard went into a corner patisserie or something and said to the
beefy, angry-looking Frenchman behind the glass case: "Ave vous . . . un
. . . croisant du . . . chocolat?" You have to imagine this done
haltingly in a heavy Mississippi drawl.
The big Frenchman leans toward him, hands on the glass case and says, "Spick Anglish! Do nut /waste/ mah tahm!"
2) From Mike Schilling, of the East Bay area in NoCal:
True story: I was out for a walk in Amsterdam and discovered that I was a bit lost. I stopped a passerby to ask directions to the Rembrandt museum.
“Excuse me, do you happen to speak English?”
(*very* irately) “Of course! I went to school!”
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Two anthropological thoughts on Germany
With all the expertise that comes from a full two days in country, en route to Beijing.
1) These people are tall! For my purposes, human beings come in two sizes: Taller than me, and any other height.* I can't help noticing that many more Germans fall into the first category than I am used to encountering -- and don't get me started on the giant Dutch. I had followed the whole academic/journalistic discussion of the fact that Americans are no longer, on average, the tallest people on earth. It's hard to appreciate this when in China, where people are larger in all ways than they were twenty years ago but on average nowhere near as tall, big, or heavy as the typical Yank. In Western Europe you see that the phenomenon is real.
2) I had better start thinking of Germans as a distinctly good-looking people, because apparently they're how I look. In most places where I don't belong, culturally or linguistically, my outsiderness is obvious at a glance. In Asia or Africa: naturally. Even in France -- maybe it's the clothes, maybe the lack of a Gallic je ne sais quoi, but for whatever reason no one ever approaches me there and starts speaking French.
In Germany, they come up all the time and start speaking German. It's happened every time I've been there, and it happened often this time. My point is not: "people in Germany are always speaking German." What I mean is, "people in Germany are always speaking German to me." Which I can't speak back.
It's quite a strange feeling to be assumed to belong -- as someone asks quickly for directions on the street or a shopkeeper starts making colloquial banter, in the quick informal tone you use only with native speakers -- and then have to explain, haltingly, that in fact you have little idea of what's being said. In Germany (or Holland or Sweden), the speaker then usually apologizes and switches to a cultured variety of English, which completes the humiliation. This gives me a glimpse into the experiences of my Chinese-American, Japanese-American, and Korean-American friends who show up in their ancestral homeland without knowing the ancestral tongue.
* Ask me if someone is closer to 5'6" or 5'10" and I'll say, I'm not sure. Ask me if someone is 6' 1 1/2" versus 6'2" and I'll know exactly, since that's the critical zone.
The modern ecology of news: Berlin edition
I love Berlin, and in the late 1990s I wrote a very brief item in the Atlantic's travel section with some reasons why. (Link here; the item in its terse totality is after the jump.) At the time I wrote, I hadn't been back to Berlin since its reunification, and I worried that its smoky, feverishly-doomed evocative nature might have disappeared along with the Wall.
In several visits since then, I've found I had little reason for concern. The place is spiffed up and modernized, but it is still plenty noir! Yesterday it was Berlin as I imagined and remembered it: raw, overcast, pouring rain, the noontime sun very low in the sky as it headed toward twilight at 4:30 and pitch blackness at 5. As we walked through the rain and wind and blear on Unter den Linden, I was thinking: This is so atmospheric! My wife, the reality-based member of our household, was thinking and finally came out and said: This is so miserable!
So we ducked into the nearest dry structure, the Deutsches Historiches Museum. (The difference between visiting Europe and visiting Asia: any English speaker can guess what the name of this structure means. Its counterpart in China, which would be called something like 中国历史博物馆, is more of a stretch.)
This proved to be Berlinish serendipity. We spent several hours inside the museum, fascinated by, among many other things, a display of early-Nazi-era propaganda art. The guard told me to stop taking pictures only after I'd seen this Village of the Damned-style poster of a wholesome Aryan family.
Continue reading "The modern ecology of news: Berlin edition" »
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