There is an old joke about a Briton, a Frenchman and a German who go for a walk one day in the countryside. “Ah,” says the Briton, “a butterfly! What a wonderful word. Just the sound of it conjures up the image of this tiny fragile creature fluttering from flower to flower.”
“Mais non,” says the Frenchman, “our French word papillon is clearly superior. Such music, such gentleness.” The German looks aggrieved. “And vot,” he says, “is wronk with Schmetterling?”
I never found it terribly funny. Largely, I think, because of old war films, German has a certain reputation in Britain for sounding, as the comedian Dylan Moran once put it, like typewriters eating tin foil being chucked down a flight of stairs. This is not entirely fair. In my ears German is, if not exactly mellifluous, then certainly satisfying and dramatic. What actually is wrong with Schmetterling?
Unfortunately, though, reporting on German politics does not give you much opportunity to savour the more aesthetically pleasing registers of the language. The country has had quite enough showy oratory in its modern history; today the cardinal virtues for most of the politicians in the Bundestag are caution and ambiguity.
The abstract nouns and impersonal constructions pile up and cover the facts, as George Orwell wrote about Latin words in English, like soft snow.
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I used to dread having to listen to Angela Merkel’s press conferences. Mumbling and scarcely ever modulating her tone of voice, she would glue together assemblages of waffle so long and winding that they would make an ancient Greek historian blush — and then, worst of all, once in a while she would stick the knife into one of her opponents so deftly and suddenly that you found yourself questioning whether you’d really heard what you thought you’d heard.
Translating this stuff is harder than it sounds. The language of the House of Commons is still pretty lively, particularly when MPs and their spin doctors issue off-the-record briefings. Their German counterparts, however, tend to deal in the currency of raised eyebrows and subtle insinuation.
Often they will convey their displeasure by choosing a word that sticks out like a sore thumb in German but sounds innocuous when you put it into English. Particular favourites are Handlungsbedarf (need for action) and Baustelle (literally a “construction site” that requires more work, but often implicitly meaning a total shambles). Do you amp the translation up to British standards? Or do you render the words literally, even if they sound mystifyingly flat?
By far the most laborious part of the job, though, is the interviews. The first challenge is simply writing down what people say. In English I’d use shorthand, a kind of condensed phonetic script that allows you to transcribe speech in real time while freeing up your attention to concentrate on what is being said.
This isn’t really an option in German, although one of my colleagues, a German-born reporter for a British newspaper, used to translate everything in his head on the spot and jot it down in English. My addled brain ticks too slowly for that, so I usually end up putting the interviewee on speakerphone and hoping that the Dictaphone gets a recording clear enough to be transcribed.
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Then there is a convention that you have to get the quotes approved before they can be published. I don’t especially mind this on the whole — we all misspeak or get minor details a little jumbled up from time to time — and normally it’s only a formality.
After one big political interview, though, the press officers eviscerated the transcript so thoroughly that there was almost nothing useable left by the time they were finished, and I had to ask them to reconsider and think of the poor British readers who would have to put up with this flannel.
There are other niggles. German is famously good at compound words that stick concepts together. Some of them are easy enough: bodenständig (literally “ground-standy”) means down-to-earth, and gewöhnungsbedürftig (“habituation-requiring”) is an acquired taste.
Others are a nightmare. Weltfremd (“world-foreign”, or more idiomatically “unworldly”) often only makes sense in English if you render it as something like “detached from reality”. Sendungsbewusst (“mission-conscious”) really means “imbued with a sense of a sacred mission”, which is an appalling mouthful by anyone’s standards.
This applies to some of the colloquial phrases, too. The other day an interviewee said he’d been sauer aufgestossen (“sourly belched”) by something. It’s what Germans say when they have acid reflux, so I just left it at that and figured readers would be able to work it out in context.
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Mark Twain, who spent a few weeks trying to learn German in Heidelberg, said afterwards that it had finally taught him what eternity was meant for. That’s a little pessimistic. The US state department reckons that its diplomats require 36 weeks of intensive lessons to acquire fluent German, which is 12 weeks longer than you need for Spanish or Italian but less than half the time it takes to get really good at Arabic or Mandarin. This sounds about right.
My advice is to avoid Duolingo like the plague and instead focus on nailing down the grammar at the start, which is mind-bendingly tedious but makes things a great deal easier after the first six months. Then you can graduate to real German. The Slow German podcast by the Munich-based journalist Annik Rubens is especially good for building up your confidence, or you could follow the example of Heinrich Schliemann, the 19th-century adventurer-archaeologist, and go through the German translations of books you’ve already read in English.
For those who prefer to fake it until they make it, one of the characters in the Netflix series Unorthodox, which is set in Berlin, suggests you only need to know three words in order to give the impression that you can speak German: echt (“really?”), genau (“exactly”) and stimmt (“you’re right”). To these I would add eben (“that’s true”), Wahnsinn (“that’s crazy”), and doch (a multi-purpose word for contradicting what the other person has just said). Alles Gute – good luck!
