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Writing to Santa in Germany

by | Dec 2, 2024 | , , , | 0 Comments


Children in the United States often write to Santa Claus for Christmas. The US Postal Service even has a website to help them do so. It’s the same in Canada. In fact, many countries around the globe have a Santa or Father Christmas letter-writing tradition.

That includes Germany, where children can even write to the Easter Bunny (Osterhase) for Easter as well! But, as usual, it’s not that simple in Germany. German kids (and their parents) must first decide to which “Santa” they want to write! There are three different options.

Deutsche Post map of Santa post offices in Germany

A map of the seven Santa post offices in Germany. PHOTO: Deutsche Post AG

Depending on their religion, their location, and their personal convictions, children in Germany will want to write to either the Christkind, the Weihnachtsmann, or Saint Nicholas (the saint, not Santa Claus). But that’s not the only decision they have to make.

Step two is deciding to which of Germany’s seven localities they want to send their letter! The first city in Germany (actually West Germany at the time) to offer a Christmas-letter address was Himmelsthür (“heaven’s door”) in 1965. Since then, over the years, six more cities in both eastern and western Germany have jumped on the Santa-writing sleigh. Other Santa cities: Engelskirchen (“angel’s churches”), Himmelpfort (“heaven’s gate”), Himmelpforten (“heaven’s gates”), Himmelstadt (“heaven city”), Nikolausdorf (“Nicholas village”), St. Nikolaus (St. Nicholas). (Note that all of the towns have names related either to angels, heaven, or Nicholas.) So, which of the seven Christmas post offices will it be? read more…

Germans, Austrians and Swiss in Hawaii

by | Nov 4, 2024 | | 0 Comments


I’m once again visiting Hawaii, this time on the island of Maui. Since 2010 I’ve been on a continuing quest for Germanic-Hawaiian connections. Even here in the middle of the vast Pacific Ocean, 12 time zones away from Europe, there are many more than one might think. I first wanted to see if there were any direct historic ties between the Sandwich Islands (now better known as Hawai’i) and the German-speaking countries. I didn’t have to look very far. Aboard the Resolution, the ship that transported Capt. James Cook to his discovery of the Hawaiian archipelago in 1778, were a German-Swiss artist (Johann Waeber) and three German sailors.

Like Christopher Columbus before him, Cook is a controversial European explorer among the native inhabitants who managed to survive his “discovery”. Historians have recorded the damage wrought by Cook on these remote islands, but unlike Columbus, he did not survive his expedition. The Hawaiians had tired of the captain even before he left after 19 days. Upon returning to Hawaii following a storm in February 1779 to resupply and repair his two ships, the British seafarer was killed during a pointless skirmish over a stolen longboat.

Since Cook’s arrival, Hawaii has been influenced – positively and negatively – by other haoles (outsiders), including Americans, British, French, Germans, Portuguese and Asians. It turns out that people from the German-speaking parts of Europe have played some key roles in Hawaiian history. If you study Hawaii’s past, you’ll run across many German names: Hackfeld, Hillebrand, Isenberg, Chamisso, Lemke, Pflueger, Schäffer, Spreckels, and Zimmermann, to name just a few. At one time, the island of Kauai in particular had a sizable German population. The island’s main town, Lihue, was nicknamed “German Town” – in part because the German sugarcane planters on Kauai imported fellow Germans to work in the fields. The first of an estimated total of 1,400 Germans had arrived in Kauai in June 1881. There were German Lutheran churches and schools in Lihue and Honolulu (Oahu).

Pearl Harbor

Pearl Harbor: The iconic USS Arizona Memorial (right) was designed by an Austrian-born architect. The USS Missouri (“Mighty Mo”) is anchored nearby (left) as a museum. The Missouri was the site of the Japanese surrender signing in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945. PHOTO: Hyde Flippo

During a previous visit to Kauai, I researched three historic forts built by Hawaiians in the early 1800s with the influence of a Bavarian-born adventurer named Georg Anton Schäffer. The largest of those forts was erroneously named “Russian Fort Elizabeth”, a mistake that was not corrected until June 2022, 206 years after the fort’s construction.

World War I pretty much put an end to the German presence in Hawaii, but I want to concentrate on several enduring legacies: some German ones and a more recent Austrian one. read more…

The Singular/Plural Conundrum in German and English

by | Sep 30, 2024 | , , , | 0 Comments

Nouns That Are Singular in English but Plural in German – and Vice Versa
English-speaking students of the German language soon encounter the odd situation of common nouns that are singular in English but plural in German. The opposite also occurs, with singular nouns in German being plural in English. For German-speakers learning English it’s the same problem of course, only in reverse.

Berlin police car

A police car (Polizeiwagen) in Berlin. “Die Polizei ist schon da.” (The police are already there.) PHOTO: Hyde Flippo

One of the first plural/singular examples that German-learners encounter is “the United States of America” (die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika / die USA). In American and British English, the USA is grammatically singular. It is singular despite the fact that the “United States” is obviously a plural noun phrase. But English-speakers do not say “the United States are…”

German grammar is usually very logical, and here it logically goes with plural rather than singular. Since “USA” stands for the plural die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika, that noun phrase and the USA are also plural in German:

  • Die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika sind eine Weltmacht. (nominative plural)
    The United States of America is a world power. (“are a world power”)
  • Sie kommt aus den USA. (dative plural; aus is a dative preposition)
    She comes from the USA.

The Civil War Myth
There is a popular myth that in the USA itself, the United States was plural until after the War Between the States. But upon closer examination that explanation falls apart. Linguistic researchers have found that it actually took about four more decades following the Civil War (until the early 1900s) before Americans commonly said or wrote “the United States/USA is…” rather than “are”. The Civil War may have played some role in the grammar change, but it was actually more complicated than that. If you’d like a more detailed explanation, see The United States Is… Or Are? from vocabulary.com.

But language is a funny thing. Just because you’ve learned/been told that “USA” is a plural noun in German doesn’t mean it remains embedded in your English-oriented mind when you’re speaking or writing German in a German-speaking environment. Even after many years of speaking German as a second language, I sometimes catch myself about to make that mistake. read more…

Mae West: The German Girl

by | Aug 19, 2024 | | 0 Comments


When Mary Jane West, later the stage and film star Mae West (1893-1980), was growing up in Brooklyn and Queens she was known as “the German girl.” Her mother, Mathilde/Matilda West (née Delker), had been born on 8 December 1870, probably in the Kingdom of Württemberg, now part of the state of Baden-Württemberg in Germany. Known as “Tillie” to friends and family, Matilda had to learn English, which she spoke with a German accent since arriving in the US in 1882 with her mother and five siblings. Tillie’s German father (Mae’s maternal grandfather), Jacob Delker, had come to New York a year earlier.

Brooklyn-born Mary Jane “Mae” West always carefully controlled the mythology of her life story, including her age, her marital status, and her parents’ background. West embellished her autobiography with versions of her life in that did not always reflect reality. This is one reason why many aspects of Mae West’s ancestry are unclear or even conflicting. West claimed that her maternal grandmother Christiana had French/Alsatian roots, and her maiden name was French-sounding Brimier. But Christiana’s maiden name is also recorded as Brüning. Mae West even claimed some Jewish background, despite baptismal records verifying that the Delkers, her mother’s family, were German Lutherans, as they declared upon their arrival in the New World.

Mae West in GO WEST YOUNG MAN

Mae West wrote and was credited with the screenplay for the 1936 Paramount film GO WEST YOUNG MAN, in which she co-starred with Randolph Scott and Warren William. Directed by Henry Hathaway, the film’s camerawork was done by the New York City-born German-Jewish cinematographer Karl Struss (1886-1981). Besides the screenplay, West had much more say in the production than was normally the case for film stars at the time. PHOTO: Paramount publicity photo

Conflicting Information
Some books and online sources about Mae West (including Find A Grave and Wikipedia) offer inaccurate information about the Delker family, in part caused by Mae West’s own fanciful and misleading claims in her autobiography and interviews. But the confusion is also the result of people not doing adequate research. A prime example of this confusion originated with West’s claim that the Delkers were related to the well-known, much more prosperous beer-brewing dynasty of Peter Doelger (Dölger). According to Mae West, her branch of the Doelgers changed their name to Delker when they left what is now Germany. read more…

German Influence on the Spanish Island of Mallorca

by | Jul 29, 2024 | , , | 0 Comments

After 14 years living in Berlin, I joked that our summer vacation plans are the true sign we have fully integrated into German culture. We were finally going to Mallorca.

We had never heard of Mallorca before moving to Germany. It is simply not on most North Americans’ radar. Its neighbor, Ibiza, with its annoying lisping pronunciation, is much more well known. But in Germany, the Spanish island of Mallorca is referred to as the 17th Land (German state) by some segments of the population. There is good reason for the affinity. Mallorca boasts over 300 days of sunshine a year, stunning landscapes including more than 30 Blue Flag beaches, abundant restaurants and hotels from budget to luxury, low cost of goods, and plentiful and inexpensive transport options.

But how did Malloca become the place for German visitors? I was curious to find out more about this in my week at a resort on the east side of the island. Mostly I just swam in the pool and enjoyed the beach vibes, but I can confirm that the clientile was heavily German (with a decent smattering of visitors from the UK, France and other European nations). Signage was always in English and German as well as Spanish, with programs also offering German translation. It was fascinating to be in this German enclave while the landscape was decidedly tropic. Still looking for answers upon my return from the trip, I did a little digging and this is what I found about the German Influence on the Spanish island of Mallorca.

What do you call it – Mallorca or Majorica?

First up we had to reconcile what we should call the island. I saw “Mallorca” and “Majorca” getting tossed around interchangeably, but what was correct? Mallorca is the official Spanish spelling of the island and how it appears in most German publications. Majorica is the typical English spelling. Germans have also adopted their own pet name, Malle.

Regardless of how you spell it, Mallorca is pronounced ma-yor-ka. The name Mallorca is rooted in the Latin phrase insula maior, which means “larger island”. This was in comparison to Menorca, “the smaller one”. In Medieval Latin, this became Maiorca and later finalized into Mallorca.

Mallorca pool

Why come to Mallorica? 300 days of sun is a good place to start PHOTO: Erin Porter

read more…

The Father of Sliced Bread Was a German Iowan

by | Jul 15, 2024 | | 0 Comments


We take pre-sliced bread for granted. It has even become part of the language: “It’s the best/greatest thing since sliced bread.” But Iowa-born Otto Frederick Rohwedder did not begin selling his pioneering bread-slicing machine until 1928. It could automatically slice a thousand loaves of bread per hour.

At first bakers were not enthusiastic about Rohwedder’s invention. They claimed that a full, unsliced loaf helped keep the bread fresh and flavorful, the way it had for over 30,000 years of bread baking. But another food-prep invention two years earlier would helped promote sales of his new bread slicer.

Pre-sliced bread loaf

A pre-sliced loaf of bread like this one was unknown before 1928, when the German American inventor Otto Rohwedder perfected his revolutionary bread slicing machine. PHOTO: Fran Hogan, CC-BY-SA-4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

A fellow Iowan had developed the first practical pop-up toaster. Charles Perkins Strite’s new toaster was designed for restaurants and produced four evenly toasted slices. Previous toasters could only toast one side at a time, and it was difficult to consistently cut toast bread into equally thick slices by hand. Variations of Strite’s 1926 commercial toaster would soon become common in home kitchens around the globe, and help encourage the sale of pre-sliced bread for toast and sandwiches.

Today, even in Germany, pre-sliced Toastbrot is popular, and pre-sliced bread can be found all around the globe, even if the thickness of the uniform slices varies by country and region from 10 to 18 mm (0.39-0.71 in), or in some cases as thick as 24 mm, or just under an inch (“Texas toast”).

Who was Otto Frederick Rohwedder?
Otto Rohwedder (1880-1960) was born in Des Moines, Iowa to Claus Rohwedder (1845-1922) and his wife Margeretha née Jannssen (1848-1920), as one of the couples’ five children (four boys and a girl). Claus had come to Davenport, Iowa from his homeland in the district of Dithmarschen in what is now Schleswig-Holstein in 1866. He met and married his wife in Iowa in 1869. read more…

Day Trip to Wittenberg, Germany

by | Jul 1, 2024 | , , | 1 Comment

Coming out of the pandemic, my family limited our long-distance travel and started exploring places closer to home. These day trips from Berlin are some of my favorite places and we have re-visited often. But I am always looking for somewhere new.

Enter the Deutschlandticket! For a similar price to the monthly city transportation ticket, you can travel all over Germany – albeit on regional rail, no ICE. We used this to visit Rostock and Warnemunde, as well as having access to local transport in Dresden and Hamburg. It has been a real motivator for us to explore the areas around Berlin and led us to a day trip to Wittenberg on May 1st, a holiday. Known as the site where Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door of the church in 1517, effectively launching the Protestant Reformation, it also makes a nice little day trip.

Wittenau Germany

Wittenberg PHOTO: Erin Porter

read more…

CATAN: Klaus Teuber’s Pioneering Board Game

by | Jun 21, 2024 | , | 0 Comments

New Energies: German Game Designer Klaus Teuber

When you hear the term “board games” you may think of typical tabletop games such as chess or checkers/draughts, Go, Monopoly, Pictionary, Risk, Scrabble, Sorry!, and many others. But we’re going to talk about a special kind of board game known as German-style games or “Eurogames”.

CATAN red box

The current box for Klaus Teuber’s game of CATAN® (TRADE • BUILD • SETTLE). The original 1995 board game was named “The Settlers of Catan” and commonly called “Settlers” or “Catan”. Shortly before his death, Klaus and his son Benjamin created the New Energies version released in June 2024. Learn more below. PHOTO: Catan GmbH

Board games have a very long history going back to ancient times, including the Ancient Greek game called petteia, which later evolved into the Roman two-player strategy board game named latrones (“game of soldiers”). From written records, we know that the Ancient Egyptians had similar board games that preceded those found in the Greek and Roman worlds. The Aztecs and Maya, in what is now Mexico, had similar board games. The many cultures in Asia were no exception as well, such as pacheesi (aka “parcheesi”) in India.

Modern board games come in many varieties and are still popular today all around the globe. They can be classified in many categories, including these:

  • Abstract strategy games – chess, checkers, Go
  • Auction games – Hoity Toity/By Hook or Crook (Adel Verpflichtet), Power Grid (German-style games)
  • Count and capture games – bean/stone games, mancala games (Muslim world)
  • Cross and circle games – Yut, Ludo, Aggravation
  • Deduction games – Mastermind, Black Box
  • German-style board games or Eurogames – Catan, Carcassonne, Decatur, Carson City, Puerto Rico

There are in fact many more varieties of board games beyond what we have space to list here.

Catan - Teuber book

German game designer Klaus Teuber on the cover of the German version of his memoir: “My Journey to CATAN”. PHOTO: Catan GmbH

The Latest Version of Catan
The reason I’m posting this blog is because I recently learned that a new special edition of CATAN was being released this summer, in June 2024. I knew that CATAN was designed by a German, but I didn’t know a lot about the game or its designer. Catan: New Energies introduces a new element into this popular community-building game: climate change.

Unlike Klaus Teuber’s original The Settlers of Catan game, which is set in agrarian, Viking times on the island of Catan, Catan: New Energies is also set on the island, but in the present day, with contemporary environmental issues. Co-designed with his son Benjamin Teuber, among other things, players must make choices related to green energy or fossil-fueled energy. There are energy tokens and other elements related to environmental concerns. (The key word mentioned in the New Energies rules is “pollution”.)

But New Energies doesn’t preach about climate change. The energy options are merged into the game along with other elements. Players can win using a variety of solutions, even opting for less green alternatives, as long as the end result is enough points to come out on top. But if the players in a game pollute too much, too soon, the game ends, and the player with the most points wins, as sort of a consolation prize.

Faithful to German-Game Principles
But New Energies remains faithful to the basic principles of Eurogames How are “German games” different from typical non-Eurogames? Catan: New Energies and all of Klaus Teuber’s games share a few important baseline rules that you won’t find in Monopoly, Risk, and similar simulation board games.

As a general rule, German games similar to Catan share these criteria:

  • Social cooperation: In contrast to Monopoly’s cutthroat approach, Catan and similar games encourage cooperation and negotiation. Auctions and negotiating are part of the game.
  • No elimination: At the end of the game, all players are still in the game. Yes, there’s a winner (based on points), but no one is left sitting alone watching others finish the game.
  • Low randomness/luck: The element of chance or luck is reduced in German games. Luck is not completely eliminated, but chance is far less a factor than in a typical dice-throwing or card-drawing games. Chance or randomness arises more through not knowing what strategy other players are using, as in real life.
  • Game designer names: Most German games bear the imprint of their creator(s). German-game designers such as Teuber have a reputation that carries over to new games they design.
  • Time limits: Anyone who has played Monopoly knows how a game can go on forever. Catan and other German games set a time limit (one hour or 90 minutes; no more than two hours) and use a point system that determines the winner. Whoever has the most points (not cash or hotels) when the clock runs out is the winner.
  • Themes: German games have a theme that shapes the play and course of the game. Catan and its many variations all have a basic premise or theme. Other game examples include: Puerto Rico (develop plantations in 18th century Puerto Rico); Carcassonne (build a medieval landscape with walled cities, monasteries, roads, and fields); Power Grid (expand a power company’s network and buy power plants)

In a 2022 Nikkei Asia magazine interview (quoted in Teuber’s NYT obituary), Klaus Teuber said this about why he thinks Catan has become so popular: “There may have been a good balance between strategy and luck. For example, roulette is only about luck, and chess is all about strategies. However, if you win in Catan, you think, ‘My strategy was good,’ and when you lose, you might think, ‘I was just out of luck.’ This is the same as life.”

Klaus Teuber’s Story
Klaus Teuber (TOY-bear) was born on 25 June 1952 in the village of Rai-Breitenbach, West Germany, now a district of the southern Hessian city of Breuberg. The city lies below the historic hilltop Breuberg Castle (Burg Breuberg) that dates from the 13th century. It is one of Germany’s best preserved castles.

As a child, Klaus enjoyed playing with toy soldiers. In school he liked geography and was fond of making maps. He also enjoyed history and chemistry. He later studied chemistry and became a dental technician (Zahntechnikermeister). He had his own firm (Teuber Dental-Labor) near Darmstadt. Not particularly happy in his dental work, Teuber began to dabble in game design in the 1980s.

His first success came with a game inspired by Patricia A. McKillip’s fantasy trilogy The Riddle-Master. After refining “Barbarossa” (German title: Barbarossa und die Rätselmeister) for seven years, he found a publisher, and the game won Germany’s prestigious Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) award in 1988. Teuber would win that award three more times, for the games Adel Verpflichtet (Hoity Toity) in 1990, Drunter und Drüber (Wacky Wacky West) in 1991, and Die Siedler von Catan (The Settlers of Catan) in 1995. That game, now known simply as Catan, became Teuber’s biggest success, and long before his death in 2023, his wife Claudia and two sons, Guido and Benjamin, were helping run the family business, Catan GmbH.

Klaus Teuber had also won another German game award, the German Games Prize (Deutscher Spielepreis, DSP), established in 1990. The DSP honors German-language board and card games marketed in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Unlike the Spiel des Jahres, the DSP awards are determined by industry insiders, retailers, and interested game players. The award is sponsored by the Friedhelm Merz Verlag, a publishing house in Bonn. The annual award ceremony takes place in the city of Essen, one day before the opening of the International Game Days (Internationale Spieltage) event. Teuber won the DSP in 1990, 1992, 1995, and 1997.

He also won the second-place DSP award for the card-game version of Catan in 1997. In addition to his first place wins, Teuber placed in the Top 10 of the annual DSP awards for his other games: Timberland (1990), Drunter & Drüber (1991), Vernissage (1993), Galopp Royal (1995), Entdecker (1996), Löwenherz (2003), and Elasund (2006).

The Pioneering Game of Catan
Teuber’s original board game, The Settlers of Catan, with its theme of Viking settlers in Iceland, is credited with launching a greater “social” era for board games, introducing cooperation with bargaining and bartering among three to six players as part of the winning strategy. Another one of Teuber’s brilliant strokes was the use of “hexes”, hexagonal tiles to represent the resources of wood, ore, brick, wool, and wheat. With the huge success of Catan, Teuber was able to become a full-time game designer in 1998. As is common with most Eurogames, Catan now has many variations and so-called “expansions”, add-ons with new themes or options for the stand-alone games, including the latest CATAN®: New Energies variation.

Before New Energies, other standalone variations of Catan were introduced over the years, including: A Game of Thrones CATAN®, CATAN®: Dawn of Humankind, CATAN®: Starfarers, CATAN® Histories: Settlers of America – Trails to Rails, and CATAN® Junior (for younger players).

Catan online: Catan Universe offers an online community and digital versions of the Catan games for use on smartphones, tablets, Mac computers, and Windows PCs. The website is in English, French, German or Spanish. You can download the Catan app (Android/iOS) for free (with in-app purchases). With a web browser you can even play a sample game for free without registering.

CATAN: New Energies layout (box)

The German-style board game CATAN was invented in 1995 by the noted German game designer Klaus Teuber (1952-2023). To date CATAN has sold over 40 million copies in 40 languages. This latest version (2024), CATAN: New Energies, introduces environmental elements that affect the outcome of the game. PHOTO: Catan GmbH

Amazon.com also sells the original Catan board game for 3 to 4 players. (A 5-to-6 player extension is also available.) Amazon.com: “Set sail to the uncharted island of Catan and compete with other settlers to establish supremacy. Strategically gather and trade resources like ore, brick, lumber, grain, and wool to expand your settlements.” Note: Amazon.com offers many other Catan game variations, but “New Energies” is not one of them so far. However, you can preorder Catan: New Energies directly from the Catan Shop.

Two Companion Books and a Memoir
With Teuber’s collaboration, the Catan story also became available as a novel written by the German historical fiction author Rebecca Gablé (the pen name of Ingrid Krane-Müschen). The Settlers of Catan book was published in English in 2011.

Klaus Teuber later wrote his own Catan novel in German. CATAN – Der Roman, in three volumes, was published in 2022 by Kosmos-Verlag, only a year before Teuber’s death in 2023. (The English version, Catan: The Novel (1) was published in October 2024 by Blackstone Publishing. A Spanish version is also available.) Before that, in 2020, Teuber also wrote a memoir titled Mein Weg nach CATAN (“My Path to CATAN”), his personal story about how he came to create the world of Catan in a game format, back in 1995. The 2021 English version, My Journey to CATAN, translated by Geraldine Klumb and published by Aconyte Books as a special limited edition (1,000 signed copies) is unfortunately no longer available, either from Amazon or the CATAN Shop.

But the official CATAN cookbook is available! CATAN®: The Official Cookbook (Board Game Cookbooks) came out in hardcover format in September 2023. “Recipes inspired by the best-selling board game” declares the book’s cover. With this book, Amazon says, “…fans of Klaus Teuber’s iconic game can now fuel up while road building and negotiating trades. From snack-worthy appetizers to feast-level entrees.”

I hope this post will inspire you to play CATAN with friends, but in any case I find Klaus Teuber’s life story a very interesting one.

– HF