The other night, I was asking Heidi about the Kaiserslautern Zoo. “It’s nice,” she said. “Of course, it’s not a big zoo. But they have two lions, and lots of smaller animals. They have a petting zoo with goats and horses. And they have Erdmännchen.”
“Erdmännchen?” I was immediately captivated. I knew die Erde means the earth or the ground and das Männchen means a manikin or fairy-tale dwarf. “What kind of animal is an Erdmännchen?”
“Oh, you know, they live in the ground, in big groups, and they all stand up together and look around.”
Das Erdmännchen is a meerkat!