Author Archives: Clare Dunkle
Last night, Joe and I were watching a show on Bavarian lumberjacks. “This is great!” I said. “Now I’ll learn how Germans say ‘Timber!’” And how do Germans say “Timber”? They yell, “Obacht!” Die Obacht means care or attention, so …
Inside Strasbourg Cathedral
Cathedrals look like rooms. But they act like cities. Take the Strasbourg Cathedral, for instance. I walk inside the door, and I say to myself, “This is nothing but a very large room. It has the same thing cathedrals always …
This weekend, my daughter chuckled over my using entspannen in an English sentence. But I love the word! The verb spannen means to tighten, stress, stretch, or otherwise put tension on something. The prefix ent- suggests something at a distance. …
A Prodigy of Grandeur and Delicacy
Did I say we would be going inside the Strasbourg Cathedral on Friday? I lied. It’s Monday, and we’re still lingering on the steps. But I can’t help it. The facade of this cathedral is one of the most beautiful …
This weekend, I opened up my Rheinland-Pfalz bus-and-train circular and learned that the Reiss-Engelhorn Museums in Mannheim are hosting an exhibition that will run until late April dedicated to der Schädel. More than 300 items are on display: carved, painted, …
The Capitol of Christmas
The doom and gloom of November is behind us now, and Advent season has arrived. All over the continent, thousands of Christmas markets are setting up: tiny ones in small villages and enormous ones in the great cities of Europe. …
The German adverb mal is one of those highly useful, largely untranslatable words that foreigners can’t get right. Das Mal means time, and mal also has to do with time–it even means “times,” as in drei mal drei, three times …
An Easy German Cake
So you’re new to Germany, but you want to bake a real German cake. Or maybe you’ve wandered into the baking aisle at Globus, and you can’t figure out what half the ingredients are for. Here’s an easy coffee cake …
The other day, Heidi and I happened upon an entire professional football (soccer) team walking down to a game. Somehow or other, that incident brought us to today’s word. Der Schmaus is a feast–an especially tasty meal that is eaten …
The Guest Who Wouldn’t Leave
When I arrived in Germany, I had a heart-to-heart with passport control at the airport. What if I needed to stay past ninety days? He told me, and our conversation ended with the friendly warning: “Take care of this, or …