Amerikaner in Berlin III: Die Sprache und so weiter

I learned my first German words in High School. For four years I studied the language and gained a command formidable enough to enable me to earn eight university credits by sitting an exam one afternoon. This was the equivalent of stealing two full university semesters, or one academic year, and I didn't have to crack open a German language book to do it.

That was in 1984. Of course the interim 26 years have left my abilities a bit flat. I can barely order a Schnitzel now without making a grammatical error, or just flubbing the nouns entirely. I've spent much of the past month working in Berlin in a state of angst (a German word, by the by, if one capitalises the 'A,' as one is required to do with all German nouns) and have spoken very little in public, such is my fear of getting it so terribly wrong. However, I have soldiered through, gotten somewhat past it, and also spent a great deal of my free time attempting to communicate with a German friend whose grasp of English is only slightly less shitty than my residual knowledge of his mother tongue.

A few truths about the language have revealed themselves in the meantime, most of which I somehow missed during my formal education, and some of which I already knew about but with which I have become painstakingly reacquainted. I hope you find the following informative and not too preclusive to pursuing any interest you may have had in the German language.

1. The accent is just about always on the first syllable.

I read somewhere, probably a guidebook as I was on holiday in Prague at the time, that every Czech word, no matter how many syllables make it up, is stressed up front. STARopramen, for example. It only hit me a couple days ago that German very closely follows this convention. Here are a few words off the top of my head that fit the bill:

WENiger - less, fewer, minus
TROTZdem - nevertheless
ARbeitsgeber - employer (literally, 'work giver')
BAHNhof - railway station
KERZe - candle
FERNseh - television
DONnerstag - Thursday
Abendessen - dinner
FRUEstueck - breakfast

In the course of this exercise, I've also discovered a few notable exceptions:

geNUG - enough
proBIERen - to try, to practice
zuSAMmen - together
GarNELen - prawns

But the examples in favour keep coming faster than the exceptions:

FENster - window
AUto - car
NOEtig - necessary
WICHtig - important
MITtag- afternoon
SONne - sun
REGelmaessig - regular and regularly (see point 2 below)
LANGweilig - boring

Which is what this exercise is in danger of becoming if I don't move on now.

2. Many adjectives can also be used as adverbs without changing a letter.

langsam - 'slow' and also 'slowly'
kurz - 'short,' 'brief' and also 'shortly'
gross - 'big,' 'large,' 'great' and also 'greatly'
ernst - 'serious' and also 'seriously'
einfach - 'simple' and also 'simply'
gleich - 'same' or 'equal' and also 'equally'

What changes is the constructions around these words. For example, 'kurz' only means 'shortly' when paired with another word such as 'darauf,' as in 'kurz darauf,' or 'shortly thereafter.'

Then again, this is hardly peculiar to German as we can also play this game in English:

frueh - early, both adjective (early morning) and adverb (he arrived early)

But I can't think of another beyond 'early.' Can you?

3. Verbs are a mess

In English, we have pretty much two main kinds of verbs: regular and irregular. The same holds true for German, but there are a few other very common forms with which the non-native speaker must grapple, often from one sentence to the next.

Reflexive verbs: These take the action of the verb and throw it back in the lap of the speaker, sometimes literally. For example, one does not sit down. One sits one's self down:

Ich setze mich hin.

One does not fall in love with someone. One falls one's self in love in him:

Ich verliebe mich in ihn.

And, perhaps most bizarrely, one doesn't look forward to something. One pleases one's self on something (for example, a wedding), and that something must be presented at last in the accusative case:

Ich freue mich auf ihre Hochzeit.

Separable verbs: These gems are a real nightmare. Simply put, when using these in a present-tense sentence, the front bit of the verb snaps off and runs to the end, just before the closing punctuation.

For example, 'aufstehen,' 'to stand up' or 'to get up (from bed).' If you want to say 'I get up at 8:00,' you have to say

Ich stehe um 8 Uhr auf.

There seems to be hundreds of these verbs, starting with 'auf,' 'aus,' 'zu,' 'unter,' 'mit' and any other number of (especially) prepositions. I close separable verbs with the most appropos example:

Ich gebe auf.

I give up.

Fine, you may say, because we do something similar in English, as just shown, but we don't have as a formal verb infinitive 'upgive.' But then, English developed a somewhat diminished propensity for stringing smaller words together into larger ones.

And the rest: There are a few other types of verbs that I won't get into, frankly because I still don't understand how they work, such as the 'zu + Infinitiv' verbs. But I can't close this verb chat without pointing out what I think is a simple truth of good old German irregular verbs in general: there is nothing general about them, except that they are generally highly irregular.

Yes, we have our 'funny' verbs in English. We 'take' something, but after the fact we've either 'taken' it, or we 'took' it. 'To be' is always a nutcase of a verb, as is 'to go,' with its 'wents' and 'have gones.'

But in German, the trouble often follows you through the tenses with even the most innocuous-sounding verbs, starting with the present:

lesen (to read)
ich lese
du liest
er liest
wir lesen
ihr lest
sie lesen

All over the shop, as is 'geben,' 'to give':

ich gebe
du gibst
er gibt
wir geben
ihr gebt
sie geben

There's a great tendency for things to fall apart somewhere around the second- and third-person singular, even in the most common verbs. All you can do is keep using them until they make some kind of sense. This doesn't happen with many of these verbs in a month of half-immersion, however.

If the present tense is a head-scratcher, just look at how things go to hell when the beleaguered past tense is dragged into it:

bleiben (to stay, to remain)
ich blieb
du bliebst
er blieb
wir blieben
ihr bliebt
sie blieben

I'm sorry, but this is just a load of gratuitous vowel-swapping of the most cynical sort. I like 'I stay,' and I love 'I stayed.' But I would grow very uncomfortable, very quickly, if I had to run around slurring like a Scotsman, saying 'I styaed' every time I recounted a holiday tale.

Someone make it stop.

But it doesn't. The twists and turns keep coming and coming: Dragging present participles to the ends of sentences, only to have to leave them there to compete with splintery little bits of separable verbs, depending on which part of which phrase they live in. Swapping 'have' or 'has' as the helper verb in intransitive present participles with 'am' or 'is,' as in 'Ich bin gegangen.' (Literally, 'I am gone,' not 'I have gone,' although the latter translation is the correct one.). Lining up and intertwining complex clauses that ignite train wrecks of pieces of verbs, irregular past tense constructions and stacks of very, very lost prepositions at their congested ends.

And that's just verbs.

4. The case of the abominable cases.

I'm not going to dwell on this. I'm just going to leap to the summary: There are too many cases in German. Couple this with the fact that there are three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and as many definite AND indefinite articles for each, and you've got the makings of a terminal migraine.

I want to take this opportunity to draft a simple love note to the person who so very wisely condensed the indefinite article in English (and, as I understand from a poker game earlier in the week, Finnish) to one, beautiful word - a letter, in fact, the first in the alphabet, unless of course it precedes a word starting with a vowel, in which case we lovingly tack an 'n' on it to make it easy to pronounce. Here's to the progenitor of the word 'a.' I love you, sir, madam or what were you.

Here are just a few ways one can, and must, use the indefinite article in German:

ein
eine
einer
einen
einem
eines

These all mean, very simply, 'a.' As in 'a table,' 'a cat,' 'a house.'

And the definite article, in English our happy 'the,' takes on even more forms:

der
die
das
dem
den
des
derren
dessen

and a few more I can't remember, all meaning exactly 'the.'

Forgetting that a table is masculine (der Tisch), a cat is feminine (die Katze), and a house without gender (das Haus), all three articles change depending on which case they are used in a sentence; e.g., nominative, accusative, dative or genitive (used to show ownership and pretty much gone from common usage, thank GOD!).

5. In order to pronounce some words correctly, one would require glottal surgery.

I've eaten several poppy seed rolls for breakfast in Berlin. The word for these tasty bits of bread is 'Mohnbroetchen.' I have tried and I have tried, but to get the word to come out, I have to stand on my head, hold my left nostril shut, round my lips and exhale through a vuvuzela.

The other word I can't get out without trauma is 'furchtbar,' which means 'horrible' or 'frightfully.' (Another adjective/adverb pair word.) It should be easier than it is, but I've found myself lying in bed repeating the word aloud over and over again, trying to make it sound in the air as it does in my head. Unfortunately, it just sounds furchtbar.

6. Conclusion

I love English. I love its simplicity of article, its disregard for case complexity, its easy verbs and lower-case nouns.

But I also love this crazy Teutonic language with which I've become surrounded. And I intend to continue to become further reacquainted with it in isolation at my desk in London.

So if you hear a vuvuzela honking after the closing ceremonies of the World Cup, it's just me trying to order some bread rolls. Ich lerne noch Deutsch.

Amerikaner in Berlin - Part II: Toilet training

I probably shouldn't mention this, but, during World War II, folklore has it that allied soldiers excused themselves to use the toilet by announcing to their comrades in arms that they were "going to call Hitler."

If the state of German toilets in the 1940s was any indication of the cruelty the average citizen endured for the crime of attempting a good Scheisse - never mind speaking out against the Nazis - then the proverbial saying probably understated their discomfort.

I know not what bygone - and no doubt sadistic - regime was in power when the toilet in my Charlottenburg apartment was cracked free from its hellish mould, but I pray that, like a house in Bradford or Felixstowe featured in 'Homes Under the Hammer,' it innocently suffers from a long overdue update.

The first time I engaged the loo in a sitting position, I was aware of an olfactory disturbance more intense than I've experienced on my own behalf since my mother opened my soiled nappy. Now, let's call it what it is: it's shit. And, yes, it stinks. But clearly, either I had eaten and just passed a skunk steak, or some other demonic force was at work.

It was only when I stood up and the gag reflex triggered that I discovered the root of the problem: my toilet, or 'faecal garotte,' as I prefer to think back on it, was constructed in such a way that whatever came out of one landed - or, more at it, perched itself - on something akin to a hamster-sized wading pool that contained, in its slight concavity, about 200ml of water. And a whole lot of stuff I don't need to tell you about - there in plain view, nearer to anyone, especially me, than even Satan could have intended.

I covered my mouth and nose and backed away in utter disgust. There, in this cruelly constructed little shit ventricle, was half a day's worth of my own, I shall euphemise, detritus, staring up at me and affording me a view of 'what comes naturally' such as I've never been forced to endure.

Who, I asked myself, fanning the bathroom door post-flush, could have thought up a design so...personally revealing, and simultaneously offensive? Isn't it a fact of our existence that some mirrors are simply too disturbing to be gazed into? And what could be gained from this information? Did Germans back in whatever day it was this insane contraption was conceived routinely inspect their own - and perhaps others' - faeces? And for what purposes? Medical? Purely scientific? Shits and giggles (see what I did there?)?

And, more importantly, if I am to LIVE with this choking-stench machine from hell for two weeks, how on earth can I spare myself its inherent sadism?

Of course I learned to reach around after the first 'kaboom' and trip the flush, which ran like Niagara through the poo trough, over a small porcelain lip (I shuddered each time to think how near it must have come to my bits on the way) and down a rather standard-looking toilet drain, which would have better served humanity had it been placed where it should have been: in the bloody centre of the bowl, under the bum.

My employer has mercifully relocated me to a very modern apartment in a high building in what resembles a somewhat Communist rendition of London's Barbican Centre. The loo is rectangular, which I don't mind at all, and looks and works like every other toilet I've ever seen in my life - from greasy American truck stop to dive pub in Scotland.

Each time I use it, and allow the Ikea seat and lid to gently return themselves to a closed position with a satisfying 'bump', I smile just a little, exhale and say a prayer to the plumbing gods, whose much under-appreciated modern works I shall never again take for granted.

Amerikaner in Berlin - Part I: Grin and (Berliner) Bear It

1. Lost in transition

I don’t want to hear another word about ‘broken Britain.’ Say what you will about the place - and perhaps the real reason it was a piece of piss getting out of the country was mainly because I know where the landmines are and can navigate them sans loss of limb – but there was nary a hiccup to adversely punctuate the journey from my flat to Paddington Station via taxi, or to Heathrow via the Express. Just as I had conceived of it, it all followed the script to the letter.

No, the problems only started on the ground in Berlin at Tegel Airport. Yes, my bag spun right in front of me within the minute upon my arrival at the carousel – which was only slightly delayed by the bizarre placement of German passport control just at the end of the jetway, which created a bizarre Philip Larkinesque ‘Traeumerei’ queue in the narrow corridor. But the man with my name on a sign was where he was supposed to be. So far, so good.

Then the fun really ramped up. My driver had done half his homework, which seemed at the moment better than having neglected it entirely. “Hotel Armano? Rosenthaler Strasse 65, 10119?”

“Ja. Dass ist richtig. In Mitte. Danke,” I said, even though the hotel was actually called “Amano.” But being only one letter off in a conversation between people who barely speak each others’ languages is the same as scoring 110% on a quiz. I though that was that, and we’d be off and me in my cushy room lickety.

The next 10 minutes were spent standing stock still just outside the arrivals hall in a van built for 10 passengers (I was the only one), listening to a peculiar digital ‘tick…..tick…..tick…..tick…..tick’ as the driver pecked every character of the address with small plastic stylus into a GRPS device that was clearly designed to do little more than piss off anyone who was doomed to depend on it. I suspected the Russians, but I digress.

Finally, off we went, driving, driving, driving. Into central Berlin – then out of central Berlin, then way, way out of central Berlin and into, nearly 45 minutes later, a Rosenthaler Strasse in what appeared to be a section of rural Poland where the likelihood of finding a hotel was tantamount to spotting a unicorn, even in a place this remote and, frankly, charming.

“Scheisse,” said the driver.

“Scheisse, indeed,” I thought.

We pulled off the road. The heavens opened. First, rain fell in torrents. Then the hail started, barely distinguishable from the next bout of ‘tick…..tick…..ticking,’ which continued for another five minutes.

For convenience, I’ll stick to English for the remainder of the dialogue.

“Do you have the telephone number of the hotel?” asked the driver.

I pulled out the ever-ready stack of stapled travel documents that I collect in advance of any journey involving an aeroplane, whether I’m going on a beach lie-about or a business trip. I like to be prepared in strange lands and strange hands.

“Yes, here it is,” I said, handing the driver my travel tome, flipped to the right page, finger on the number.

He dialled. “The number doesn’t work.” But I noticed, sitting in a position in which it was easy to see what he had dialled, that he had dialled the number as if he were calling from abroad, starting with the “49” country code and adding in the remaining numbers.

Had I been wrong about this? Surely a very obviously German-speaking chauffeur who deals in completing motor journeys in one city, mostly from airports, knows how to dial a phone number in the local numerical vernacular, even if the number is expressed in its international form?

I decided it was time to assume a modicum of control. I rang the hotel from my mobile. The call went straight through.

The receptionist told me to hand the phone to the driver. He wrote down the address, spent five more minutes in another roadside tickfest, then sped away, back to the centre, I hoped, of the German capital.

Ten minutes later, we were off the side of a busy city street, more marathon ticking in the mother f**king GPRS. This happened three more times before the driver, a man, of course, asked me yet again for the number of the hotel.

I was able to explain to him in my 7-year-old's German that the “49” at the beginning was only to be dialled when calling from abroad. “Perhaps,” I said, assuming a similar system to that used in the UK, “one should ignore the country code and start the number with a “zero.”

Six seconds later, the Dummkopf was talking with the hotel receptionist.

Again.

Fifteen minutes later, we arrived at the hotel at Rosenthaler Strasse 65, Berlin 10119. Have a spoonful of that Scheisse.

I felt a bit churlish jumping out of the ueber-van, snapping open the boot myself and hoisting my bag out of the back – with a speed that would have otherwise thrown my back out – before snarling “Danke schoen” and denying him a tip. However, he had collected me at the airport fully two hours before, and none of this had been my fault, although I had thought perhaps it had been when he managed to find the only other Rosenthaler Strasse in greater Berlin upon entering what I thought were the very precise coordinates given him.

But it wasn’t my fault, nor that of my employer’s travel agent. So no tip. Judge me harshly if you wish, but remember: it took less time to fly more than 800km than it took to drive 30. In this age of conservativism, which works wonderfully for me when it’s convenient, I just couldn’t justify rewarding this sort of incompetence and wastefulness.

2. Room with a balance due

And while none of this was my employer’s travel agent’s fault, what WAS their fault was what happened upon check-in at the hotel.

The room: reserved. The room: not paid for. It turned out there was no way to pay for a room reserved through the hotel's website. I mean really. An ultra-modern hotel with marble and slate surfaces everywhere that offers mp3 tours for iPods with a website that doesn’t handle e-commerce? Whoopsie, indeed. No biggie. I just had to expense it, and if only the world had my problems.

3. Suffocatingski

The following morning, I arose, pretty refreshed and bushy tailed, ready for work. I paid for the hotel, ate breakfast (reimbursing me those delicious 11 euros was the least my employer could do for not getting the hotel arrangements right) and strolled carefree with 20 kilos worth of stuff hanging off my back to the office, about 10 minutes away.

I found myself in the care of a very lovely team who were happier to see me than I had anticipated, given that, for the first eight months of the project, programmers and developers had been playing copywriter. Never a good thing, unless said developers are also frustrated novelists who spend their evenings feverishly typing probing dialogue between engaging characters.

Given the stoic nature of the foursome with whom I was to share space, I was certain this wasn’t the case. When I was shown to my desk, it was in a room behind a tightly closed door. Inside were four large men sitting at desks, typing on laptops in monkish silence. I estimated this motley development team at two Russians, a Swede and an eastern European of some stripe. What was most peculiar was that, even though there was a floor-to-ceiling window facing onto a collection of towering trees, gently swaying in the fresh breeze in charming Schoenhauser Allee, the window, too, was firmly shut.

One of the Russians, who sat directly across from me, was an inelegantly overweight man of about 30 years with a Rasputinesque beard who spent the larger part of the day burping full-fat Coke, which he periodically gulped from a litre bottle. Whenever he left the room to retrieve yet another free cappuccino from the machine in the kitchen, he not so much walked there and back as stomped. At first, I attributed the regular rumbling to a loud car stereo, but soon made the connection. And after all, his blood stream must have been 80% pure caffeine. Who could move gingerly on that much jet fuel?

None of the men kept their shoes on while working, and none seemed terribly interested in physical health or personal hygiene. Whenever any of them came into or went out of the room, they almost instinctively shut the door behind them. The room became unbearably suffocating and stayed that way the entire day, even when they all went out to lunch. (I did manage to crank up the aircon surreptitiously, hoping that may draw more of their air out and processed, filtered air in after lunch. No dice.)

‘Why,’ you are no doubt asking, ‘didn’t you just open the window?’ The quick answer is, I was afraid to. This happy, smelly collection of rough, obese geeks regarded this room as their territory, and I was an unexpected interloper – from the creative department, no less - whom they were required to tolerate. That is why the door always remained shut: to maintain and control the border. They would have regarded opening the window or door an affront to sovereignty, an act of corporate warfare. I felt slightly doomed and hoped my two-week contract would not be extended.

At six o’clock, I was never so happy to inhale diesel fumes in the back of the taxi with luggage in tow on the long commute to West Berlin, where I would pop the keys to my apartment in the door, shut it behind me and instantly open all the windows.

4. Twenty-two doors and nowhere to live

It would have all gone perfectly were it not for one missing piece of very basic information. I don’t know how, after a week of planning, I had forgotten to ask anyone for the number of the apartment in which I would be staying at Friedbergstrasse 45 in Charlottenburg.

Uncharacteristically, I had also not printed the information about the apartment from its listing online. However, at the end of this unhappy drama, during which I finally nearly broke down a shed a couple tears, I found that the flat number wasn’t listed anyway. Another 'hats off' to the HR department, whose stock slumped in my mind to a record low.

I rang London. It was after working hours. The HR manager tried to raise someone who could help me in the London office. No one was available. I work in digital communications, somehow, without accessing the internet through my mobile phone. (But, as noted, that wouldn’t have helped, anyway.)

By then, I had remembered that the apartment was on the fourth floor, back of house. I climbed eight flights with two pieces of luggage and found two doors. One flat I could see into clearly through the peephole. At the end of a long hallway was a collection of teddy bears. I turned to deal with the other door.

None of the keys worked in any of the locks, and I began to panic slightly, thinking the inhabitants were just the other side of the door by now, shaking hands steadying a shot gun, which would no doubt go off accidentally.

I took my bags back downstairs and sat outside the building, head in hands. A passing young couple asked me for an address. "Ich habe hier nimmer gewesen. Nein, ich bin hier nimmer...," but they had already walked off, not only instantly aware that I was foreign, but also a flustered language butcher. My heart was not buoyed.

I stood on the stoop and looked through the building. In back, I saw a courtyard. Behind the courtyard was another building. A quick walk through the courtyard and I finally understood German urban architecture: the buildings are half-squares, connected to other half squares, with shared courtyards between, more or less. Reluctant to repeat the key exercise with another nerve-wracked German family, I realised that the small, fourth key on the ring must fit in a mailbox in the rear building.

I hit the right keyhole on the fourth attempt. The mailbox was so overflowing with post that some fell out before I could shut the door again. This had to be the right place, as unsettling a portent as a neglected mailbox was to the condition of the flat assigned to it. But no matter. I knew I had to find the flat with ‘KRENZ’ next to the door, for, for some reason, apartments in Berlin don’t seem to be numbered, but instead bear the name of the owner or occupant. How cryptic. How German.

By the time I hauled everything up another eight flights, I was a sweaty, dizzy mess standing in a slightly dusty but well-appointed apartment. And I’d never been so happy to be in a complete stranger’s house.

5. Not a word

I’ve lived in or near Europe for a decade, so I’ve dealt with just about every mechanical quirk and electronic eccentricity that could send an American into a ‘this place really IS hell!’ xenophobic spiral. So, using a couple of learned incantations and rituals, I managed to turn on the TV pretty easily later in the evening.

The apartment listing did say the place came equipped with ADSL and satellite TV. It did not say the ADSL hated Macintosh computers and that the satellite only extended as far as Germany, Italy and France. Not a word of English is spoken on any of the forty-some channels received through the television system in my apartment. Not even BBC World News made its way up to the fourth floor.

My first reaction was one of mild jubilation. Evenings at home would preclude the possibility of slobbing out on the couch to endless episodes of The Simpsons and House M.D. But when I remembered I brought exactly two books in English, knew absolutely no one in Berlin socially and would be here for two weeks, I broke into a sweat.

But it’s not been all tragedy. A humourless lesbian (I’ll leave it to you to decide if there is any other kind) once said to me, ‘You haven’t lived until you’ve had a period.’ Well, finally, I’ve got the counter bitch-slap to knock off her Birkenstocks: ‘YOU haven’t lived until you’ve watched THREE ENTIRE EPISODES of the original ‘A-Team’ dubbed in German while drinking raspberry vodka on a couch in Charlottenburg!’

Chew on that, Schwester.