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Reading German Novels to Learn German

by | Dec 30, 2024 | , , , | 0 Comments


I can’t really explain precisely how a painting of the North Frisian island of Sylt and a crime novel series set in the same region of Germany caused me to write this blog post. The painting was a very recent discovery, but my longtime habit of reading German novels for fun and vocabulary building goes back to the earliest years of my path to fluency in German.

Painting of the Strandpromenade on the island of Sylt by Detlev Nitschke

Detlev Nitschke was born in Berlin in 1935, but most of his paintings are impressionist-style cityscapes or landscapes set in the era between 1880 and 1912. This example shows the beach promenade on the German resort island of Sylt, one of the North Frisian Islands. Nitschke’s original paintings have generally sold at auction for between €1,000 and €12,600, depending on the subject, size, and medium of the work. The record price of $14,263 USD was set in 2021. PHOTO: detlev-nitschke.de

Although my American family has deep German roots on the maternal side, I did not begin seriously learning German until I was in college – way past the ideal time to learn a language (before puberty!). My main reason for studying German was obvious: I had married a lovely lady from Austria, whom I had met in the USA. If I wanted to communicate with Elke’s family in Styria (Steiermark), I needed to speak German. Although her four siblings all spoke English to some degree, her mother knew little more than “thank you” and “Hello!”. Her father had died when she was still very young.

By the time Elke and I paid our first visit to the family home and farm north of Graz, I was fairly fluent in High German, which her eldest brother and mother spoke. But I soon discovered that the local Styrian dialect was quite a different matter. Although I had trouble understanding the locals, the family and I could communicate pretty well, so I wanted to improve my German skills – in the same way Arnold Schwarzenegger, born near Graz, had to work on his English in the US.

At that time, Elke’s married older sister worked in a bookstore in Graz. She helped me select some books to read, mostly fiction, but also some non-fiction. I even borrowed some books from one of Elke’s friends. I found the dialogue in the novels helpful for learning everyday German that I could actually use. With a German-English dictionary, I would look up words I didn’t know and couldn’t decipher by context. read more…

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…