Last night, I watched Schreie der Vergessenen, a German ghost story movie. (Ghost stories are ideal for language learners because they follow a predictable–nay, one might say, ritualized–pattern.) At one point, the hero was talking with the villain. He was going to bring her to justice. She smiled and said something I didn’t catch, ending with “…die Zähne ausbeißen.” Wait–did she just say he was going to knock his teeth out? Yes, she did.
In German, sich
Driving in Germany. How bad can it be? Cute towns, charming churches, quaint signs that you can’t read. You’re having a good time until you realize you don’t know where you’re going, and the winter night is closing in fast. Like Hansel and Gretel, you didn’t prepare. And it’s only a matter of time before someone tries to eat you.
What to do? Buy a GPS unit. No matter how lost you get, your GPS can find a way out of it. This is important because you can map out the perfect route before you go, but that route may have to change. Why? Because this may be on your route:
Incidentally, I wouldn’t count on a cell phone’s GPS app as my only guide. Cell phone coverage can be spotty where you need it most, and you may end up waiting forever for new maps to load if you get lost and run off your preprogrammed route.
But maybe you like maps. That’s good! You should look at the map as well before you leave home. Don’t blindly trust the GPS, or you’ll end up learning the hard way that Rodenbach, Hessen, is about 100 miles (173 km) from Rodenbach in the Rheinland-Pfalz.
What makes Germany so hard to navigate without computerized help? It contains a huge number of little towns. To give you some idea of the sheer confusing number of them, Texas contains 1,215 incorporated communities. The state of Rhineland-Palatinate (Rheinland-Pfalz) alone contains over 2,000. And it’s smaller than Vermont!
Add to that the propensity for European signs to point to the next city or town rather than to point in a cardinal direction. The sign above is a good example. It points out the nearest city, Kusel, which is 24 kilometers away. And it points out the next little town. But what if you want to go to a town 10 kilometers away? You won’t find it on the sign.
So buy yourself a GPS unit. Trust me on this. You’ll have a lot more fun exploring the countryside if you know you can find your way home.
To read my latest blog posts, please click on the “Green and Pleasant Land” logo at the top of this page. Photos taken in October, 2011, in various towns in Germany. Text and photos copyright 2011 by Clare B. Dunkle. Texas statistics from the profile section of the Texas Almanac. Germany statistics from Wikipedia.
When I entered Germany, the passport control agent inspected my Lucky Luke comic book. Well, all right, maybe he didn’t inspect it, but he paged through it happily, and he was very glad to know I was learning German from it. So here’s an expression Lucky Luke has taught me: von mir aus. A humiliated villain stomps off, swearing undying revenge. The hero answers, “Von mir aus!”– “Whatever!” or “Like I care!”
With Halloween almost upon us, Joe and I set out into the woods this weekend to hunt for remnants of Celtic Germany. Southwest of Kindsbach, we found the Heidenfelsen (Pagan Rocks): two enormous boulders carved with cryptic figures that rest beside a tiny spring. This spring was sacred to the Celts, and when the Romans came into the area, they too treated it as sacred. Offerings of Roman coins were left here up to the 4th century AD.
To reach the Heidenfelsen and their sacred spring, we walked along a leaf-covered path for about twenty minutes into the forested hills. As we came close to the spring, we saw pink sandstone crags crowning the hill a couple of hundred feet above us. They looked like a natural temple.
The path split here, going upward to pass under the crags or downhill toward what looked like a little picnic shelter. We could smell sweet, cloying incense. The two boulders rested in the shadows under the shelter, beneath the thick, twisted roots of what was once a large tree. Someone had hollowed out room in these roots to leave a flickering red votive candle.
A few inches from the right-hand side of the right-hand rock, the tiny spring flowed out. It ran along a wooden channel, arced out in a waterfall no thicker than my thumb, and flowed away downhill.
Left alone, the spring, the woods, and the hills would have felt peaceful and powerful. But the Celtic deities brought menace to the place. The Celts regularly practiced human sacrifice. These stones almost certainly witnessed torture and murder. And the three seated figures in the photo below project an air of command and impatience. They know what they want.
This is what the stone figures see from their hillside shelter between tree-root and water, between sky-temple and earth-ravine. Nothing but pristine forest. They can’t tell that the world has changed. And maybe it hasn’t.
To read my latest blog posts, please click on the “Green and Pleasant Land” logo at the top of this page. Photos taken in October, 2011, near Kindsbach, Germany. Text and photos copyright 2011 by Clare B. Dunkle.
Die Kelten are the Celts. Southern Germany belonged to wealthy Celtic tribes during the centuries before the Roman invasion. The Germanic tribes drove the Celts out of this region during the Great Migration.
On a foggy evening this week, Joe and I visited Bernkastel-Kues on the Mosel River, and I took the above photo of the St. Michaelsbrunnen, or St. Michael’s Fountain, in the middle of the old town square. How old is this town square? Let’s just say that it was the height of fashion in 1608, when the pretty town hall on the left was built. The fountain is a couple of years older.
Bernkastel-Kues is a marriage of two old towns, Bernkastel and Kues, which stood on opposite sides of the river. There was no bridge between them until the 1870s. Grapevines like the ones in the photo above have been growing here since Roman days, when the poet Ausonius wrote that “from the topmost ridge to the foot of the slope the river-side is thickly planted with green vines.” So the town is full of wine shops and cafes offering wine by the glass.
Bernkastel-Kues boasts many fine examples of half-timbered construction, or what the Germans call Fachwerk: a load-bearing framework of shaped logs filled in by some other material, such as brickwork or plaster. Many of the half-timbered buildings in Bernkastel-Kues date from the 1500s and 1600s. As beautiful as they are, they don’t land Bernkastel-Kues on the Deutsche Fachwerkstraße, or the German Half-Timbered Road, a tourist route that connects some of the most beautiful half-timbered towns in the country.
Germany boasts some 2.5 million half-timbered buildings, and I’m sure they’re all perfectly safe. I’m going to assume that buildings which have lasted for hundreds of years aren’t ready to fall down anytime soon, no matter how scary some of them may look.
To see my latest blog posts, please click on the “Green and Pleasant Land” logo at the top of this webpage. Photos taken in October, 2011, in Bernkastel-Kues, Germany. Text and photos copyright Clare B. Dunkle, except for the excerpt from Ausonius’ “Mosella” translated by Hugh G. Evelyn White in 1919, which is in the public domain.
My friend Heidi recently introduced me to the expression: “Mein Name ist Hase.” This is a humorous way of saying, “I’m clueless” or “I have no idea” or “I’m staying out of it.” I already knew that der Hase is a rabbit. What’s so clueless about that?
It goes back to the 1850’s, when a college student named Victor von Hase ended up in trouble with the law. All he would say in court was “Mein Name ist Hase; ich weiß von nichts“–“My name is Hase; I know nothing.” Other college students of the time thought this was hilarious, and the expression soon spread throughout Germany and the Netherlands as a funny way to say, “Don’t ask me about it” (something college students have to say quite a lot). So deeply ingrained was this in German culture that when the Bugs Bunny Show came to Germany, it was called, “Mein Name is Hase.”
Cynical tourists visiting Bavaria might be tempted to think that the bright murals on the sides of houses there have been painted for their benefit. This isn’t true. The tradition of Lüftlmalerei, or Bavarian mural painting, has flourished since at least the eighteenth century. It’s tempting to misread the German word “Lüftlmalerei” into meaning “air painting” because they often do fool the eye and make solid walls appear to melt away into scenery. But the term apparently comes from the nickname of the style’s most famous painter, Franz Seraph Zwinck, who lived in Oberammergau in the late 1700’s.
Most of the Lüftlmalerei murals depict religious subjects, as in the photograph above, where St. Apollonia and St. Mauritius stand on either side of a sundial. How can I tell who they are? St. Apollonia’s teeth were knocked out before her martyrdom, so she’s holding up a tooth. And St. Mauritius (also known as St. Moritz or St. Maurice) was the Egyptian commander of a Roman legion who ended up being martyred in Germany. He’s one of the few African saints venerated in medieval Europe.
Lüftlmalerei paintings depict other subjects, too. A large mural we saw in the Ludwigstrasse depicted mountaineers placing the cross on the peak of the Alpspitze. And here’s a charming mural that depicts a pensive hockey player:
But perhaps the oddest mural we saw is on the side of the Hotel Zugspitze. This mural depicts … the Hotel Zugspitze!
This sort of of circular reference makes my head hurt, as I mentioned in the blog post on St. Castor a few weeks ago. But maybe the hotel owners wanted to be sure their guests could enjoy the hotel’s nice view of the mountains regardless of the weather.
Photos taken in October, 2011, in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. Text and photos copyright 2011 by Clare B. Dunkle.
The other day, everything went wrong. Fortunately, I knew the German for this: Alles ging schief, or Alles ist schief gegangen. The word schief means crooked and can apply to anything from a cocked head or a picture on the wall to a no good, very bad day. I like it because it sounds like what it is and because it’s quick and easy to say. In fact, I’ve imported it into English. Saying, “It’s going schief!” is more satisfying than the British expression, “It’s going pear-shaped,” and it makes a lot more sense, too.
Friedrich Kellner, shown above in his World War I uniform, was a young man when Germany became a democracy, and he had high hopes that his nation would become a place of free speech and personal liberty. Unfortunately, the young republic inherited crushing problems, and radicals on both sides pushed political agendas of fault-finding and revenge.
In the 1930’s, Friedrich Kellner risked attack to attended rallies in order to speak out against Hitler’s ideas. When the scandal and tragedy of Kristallnacht occurred–the night during which over 1500 synagogues were vandalized and 100,000 Jews were arrested–Kellner and his wife tried to intervene. When he demanded that the guilty be brought to justice, he and his wife were investigated instead. Finally, the Nazi authorities brought Kellner in and warned him that he and his wife would be sent to the camps if he didn’t stop speaking out.
Deprived of the right to speak publicly, Friedrich Kellner began keeping a detailed diary on September 1, 1939, the day World War II officially began. He wanted to document the ease with which a democracy can become a totalitarian dictatorship and people’s willingness to believe propaganda rather than face hard truths. Full of contemporary newspaper clippings and Kellner’s own decidedly anti-Nazi observations, the diary probably would have led to Kellner’s death if it had been found during the war.
Thanks to the tireless efforts of Dr. Robert Scott Kellner, Friedrich Kellner’s grandson, the diary is finally available in German. We can only hope that it will soon be available in English as well. In the meantime, Dr. Kellner has provided a fascinating online writeup of his grandfather’s life and his own extraordinary part in it. Sample diary entries in English and in German are also online.
UPDATE: It is with great pleasure that I announce that these fascinating diaries are finally available in English! My Opposition: The Diary of Friedrich Kellner – A German against the Third Reich has just come out from the Cambridge University Press, and the translator is none other than Friedrich Kellner’s grandson, Dr. Robert Scott Kellner. Both a hardcover and a Kindle version are currently available. Congratulations, Dr. Kellner, and thank you for your tireless efforts to make your grandfather’s voice heard. I hope the book finds a wide readership.
Photos used with the express written permission of Dr. Robert Scott Kellner. Text copyright 2011 by Clare B. Dunkle.