Term life ins
Schau ins Land Blog: Reflections on life in Germany and German culture
- Jingle Glöckchen
Advent and Christmas are the time for carols, of course, a time when you can close your eyes in Germany and imagine you're in Nebraska. "Deck the Halls," "White Christmas," "Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer," "Frosty the Snowman," "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town" -- on the radio, in the marketplace, wherever you go, you can hear Germans playing OUR Christmas songs.It's not that Germans lack Christmas traditions of their own. By golly, Germans basically wrote the book on them. Christmas trees, hot chestnuts, gingerbread, nutcrackers, mulled wine... Christmastime in Germany is wunderbar! And there are plenty of German Christmas songs, too, such as Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht; O Tannenbaum; and Alle Jahre wieder. Pleasing though they may be in their solemn, sentimental way, they're missing a certain something, and Germans sense it.
Let's call that something PIZAZZ.
Compare the lyrics and melody of "Jingle Bells" with those of Kling, Glöckchen, klingelingeling. See what I mean?
Part of the reason is probably the relative clunkiness of the German language. German jazz vocalist Roger Cicero, who's featured in the next issue of Schau ins Land, says German has "more rough edges" than English does, is "a lot more straightforward" and harder to sing. He's not the first singer to notice.
But a larger part of the reason, I suppose, is the relative stiffness and seriousness of the German people. We've got light and loose ditties like "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus," "Rocking Around the Christmas Tree," "All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth," and "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer." They've got light and loose ditties like... ah... wait a second... um... ?
See what I mean?
Merry Christmas! Frohe Weihnachten!
- That clinking, clanking sound
One of my wife's cousins, now working in Sweden, commiserated with her recently on the phone. My wife lapped it up. Having lived in Germany for almost five years now, she's solidly in Phase II of what I've come to regard as the Three-Phase Expat Acclimatization Process: Phase I is Attraction, Phase II is Repulsion, and Phase III is Equilibrium. Remember, you heard about the 3-PEA Process here first.
The cousin spent a few months in Germany some years back, and he's glad, very glad, to be outta here. The Swedes are more relaxed and tolerant of foreigners, he related, and aren't forever talking about money.
An obsession with money is usually ascribed to Americans. To be more precise, Americans are absorbed in making money or, if need be, borrowing it. Germans' great preoccupation with money, however, is focused mainly on saving it -- and having the grasping state redistribute as much of it to them as possible.
It's remarkable how exercised Germans can get over essentially piddling amounts. Germany is a wealthy country, and German politics often seems to be a never-ending chain of drawn-out disputes over who cops a few more euros from the treasury, be it in the form of child-care benefits (Elterngeld), subsidies to first-time homeowners (Eigenheimzulage), subsidies for private pensions (Riester-Rente), subsidies for business start-ups (Gründungszuschuss), tax deductions for commuters (Pendlerpauschale), or whatever.
Germans' abiding love of penny-pinching was encapsulated in the advertising slogan "Geiz ist geil!" (loosely translated: "Stinginess is cool!"), which has become a mantra of sorts over the past several years. The slogan was launched by the German electronics retailer Saturn to plug its low prices.
There's nothing wrong with frugality, of course -- quite the contrary -- so long as it's not taken to extremes (the meaning of "extreme" being highly subjective). But it often goes hand in hand with a certain small-mindedness.
One of my first memories of Germany was a display of frugality. The year: 1976. The lady of the house where I was staying, in Freiburg, dropped an egg on the kitchen counter. Rather than wiping up the mess and pitching it, which I, a continuously well-fed American, would have considered normal, she carefully collected the innards on a plate. I was struck by her behavior and put it down to wartime want.
Fast forward about 20 years. Then with a job in Moscow, I was subletting my Hamburg apartment to a young German carpenter. Part of our deal was that he pay for his telephone calls and I pay the monthly fees for both the telephone and the connection. During one of my visits, he offered to replace the telephone with one of his own so that I could save some money. I thanked him but said that the amount wasn't really worth the bother. Not worth the bother? he said, surprised. Why, in the space of months I could save enough for an ice-cream cone...
Seen from a foreign perspective, the size of Germans' concerns over small sums seems more than a bit excessive. In an interview several years ago with the newsmagazine Der Spiegel, German rock singer-songwriter Herbert Grönemeyer, who lives in London, described a TV show he'd watched back home in Germany about a German company: "A woman was sitting in a big, beautiful office that in England five people would be working in. She looks into the camera and says, 'My paycheck is for eight euros less. Now I have a crisis,'" Grönemeyer was quoted as saying.
"If someone in England sat in front of a camera and claimed a crisis because of earning 10 pounds less, the person would be institutionalized."
- Make me free, Schatzi!
She asked me to come with her, so I followed her into the room. We were alone. She was attractive. And she wasted no time with pleasantries. "Get undressed please!" she said.
But wait! This wasn't a daydream. This was the Bundesrepublik Deutschland. And the words she spoke were German. Not, "Zieh dich bitte aus!" Rather, "Machen Sie sich bitte frei!" That, gentle reader, could only mean one thing: I'd been led into an examining room. The young blonde was a nurse. The doctor would be in shortly. I hoped it wouldn't hurt.
It did.
What were you thinking?
Sich freimachen, which can also mean "to take time off work," is the official way of saying "to get undressed," literally "to make oneself free (of clothing)." This is the meaning of frei in Freikörperkultur ("free-body culture," i.e. nudism), which is quite popular in these parts.
A body that's been "made free" isn't necessarily one that's been disrobed or allowed leisure time, though. The Nazis -- who advocated freedom through work, not freedom from work -- attached the cynical motto Arbeit Macht Frei ("Work Makes [One] Free") to the entrances of some of their concentration camps, including Auschwitz. Laborers there, as we know, were typically made free of their lives.
Then there's einen Brief freimachen, "to put a postage stamp (or stamps) on a letter," freeing it for delivery -- or rather, freeing it from an obstacle to delivery, namely no prepayment.
Frei (and its English cognate, "free") has an interesting background -- it's a love child. Linguists say an early meaning was "beloved," "belonging to the loved ones" (cf. Gothic frijon, "to love"). A related word is Freund ("friend") -- originally "loved one," "lover." The archaic German verb freien means "to marry"; also "to court," "to woo." Hence a Freier is a "suitor." Today Freier is chiefly a euphemism for a customer of a prostitute, or "john."
For the ancient Germans, frei was a legal term. "Belonging to the loved ones" were kinfolk and fellow tribesmen, and frei came to mean "protected," "enjoying full rights," "not in bondage." The modern meanings of frei developed from this.
They're diverse. Take the three compound nouns Freibier, Freibad, and Freitod, literally "free beer," "free swimming pool," and "free death." While Freibier is what you think it would be, a Freibad isn't a swimming pool that costs nothing to use. It's a swimming pool im Freien, or unter freiem Himmel ("under the free [i.e. open] sky") -- that is, an "outdoor swimming pool."
And a Freitod is neither a death outdoors nor a death that costs nothing, such as one outdoors as opposed to in a hospital, where you're fed through the arm and pay through the nose. A Freitod is a "suicide," i.e. a voluntary -- freely chosen -- death.
Hmm. Could Patrick Henry have had it both ways by blowing his brains out?
- Drei Strikes und du bist draußen
Ah, October! The golden days ache with sweetness and longing, apples hang heavy on the bough, and a man's thoughts turn to ...
... the World Series. An American man's thoughts, anyway. Which brings us to two burning questions: Will the Injun-stomping Sox scale the Rox? And, Mommy, is there baseball in Germany?
The answer to the second question is yes, which is no small source of solace for U.S. expats (or Dominican expats, Japanese expats, etc.) who sometimes simply must get a fix -- in the flesh and not just on the tube -- of the boys of summer. While baseball has become in
