The GW Expat Blog

All Posts

Going to the Doctor in Germany

by | Oct 31, 2022 | , , , , | 0 Comments

I recently spent a week semi-anxiously waiting tests results from my doctor. They had told me it was going to be 4 or 5 days (business days) and the test was on a Tuesday, so I kept an ear out for a ring through Tuesday – just to be safe. On Wednesday I assumed I was in the clear and breathed a sigh of relief. At least – I hope I’m in the clear. Unless they somehow missed my results or neglected to call or any number of things that can happen at a doctor’s office and do. Maybe I should call them just be safe?

Hospital in Berlin Photo: Erin Porter

Such is the nature of doctor visits for many foreigners like me in Germany. Not only is there handling of important medical manners with its own distinct vocabulary in a different language, there are a range of protocols and expected behavior that can be quite different from what you are used to.

In this post, I’ll point you to the many helpful posts on health-related topics here at German-Way, as well as give a rundown of what to expect when visiting the doctor in Germany.

read more…

The Crazy Bavarian and Kauai’s Russian Fort

by | Oct 17, 2022 | | 0 Comments

Germans, Baltic Germans, and Native Hawaiians

So how many German connections for a so-called Russian Fort on the Hawaiian island of Kauai could there be? More than you might expect. We’ll start with a Bavarian/Franconian physician and adventurer named Georg Anton Aloysius Schäffer (1779-1836), who was employed by the Alaska-based Russian-American Company. In that capacity, Schäffer briefly worked with Native Hawaiians, Native Alaskans, Russians, Baltic Germans, and fellow Germans in Hawaii to construct not one, but three fortifications on the island of Kauai. Before getting kicked off the island of Kauai by King Kaumuali‘i in 1817, Schäffer’s delusions of grandeur had led to political tension all across the globe, from St. Petersburg, Russia to Hawaii and New Archangel (now Sitka), Alaska. Besides the Schäffer debacle, there are other Germanic elements, ranging from the many Baltic Germans in the service of the Russian Empire at that time, to a Russian tsarina who was born a German princess. How a “Russian” fort in Kauai finally got a Hawaiian name 206 years after it was built is quite a story.

New signage at former Fort Elizabeth

The information display at the former Russian Fort Elizabeth in Kauai now displays its Hawaiian name: Pā‘ula‘ula (Hawaiian Fort and Residence of Kaua‘i King Kaumuali‘i). In June 2022 the Hawaii Board of Land and Natural Resources voted unanimously to rename Russian Fort Elizabeth State Historical Park. The fort complex in Waimea is now known as Pā‘ula‘ula State Historic Site. PHOTO: Hyde Flippo

The Russian Fort That Wasn’t Russian – and the Russian Agent
Many years before “Mad Vlad” Putin started his war of Ukrainian conquest in February 2022, a campaign had begun with the goal of changing the name of Russian Fort Elizabeth Historical Park, a Hawaii state park on the island of Kauai. On one side of the controversial debate were people, mostly Russian Americans and Russians, who wanted the site’s name to remain as it was, or at least have a dual Russian/Hawaiian name. On the other side were mostly Native Hawaiians and their supporters, who were proposing a Hawaiian name for the site. In May 2022, federal criminal charges were filed against Elena Branson (aka Elena Chernykh), a dual US-Russian citizen alleged to have acted as a secret agent for Russia, and who had failed to register as a foreign agent in the USA while lobbying to keep Fort Elizabeth’s “Russian” label. Before the charges were filed, Branson/Chernykh had already returned to Russia to avoid prosecution.

Twenty years before the Russian agent incident, in 2002, Peter R. Mills, a professor of archaeology at the University of Hawaii Hilo, had published Hawaii’s Russian Adventure: A New Look at Old History (paperback edition, 2018), in which he advocated a reassessment of the fort’s history and its name. The central theme of his book was that the so-called “Russian” fort was in fact a Hawaiian fort, built primarily by Native Hawaiians and sponsored by a Kauaian king. In his book Mills argues that, although the Russian-American Company (RAC) was behind the construction of three forts on Kauai, it was only due to King Kaumualiʻi’s approval and efforts that the forts were constructed. Kaumualiʻi was the last independent royal ruler of the islands of Kauai and Niihau. The Hawaiian islands were not all united under King Kamehameha II as the Kingdom of Hawai‘i until September 1821. Before that unification, Kauai had been a separate kingdom that kings Kamehameha I and Kamehameha II had long tried to conquer.

It was this royal Hawaiian political situation that Schäffer was able to exploit for a time – until he went too far. The Franconian doctor had studied medicine at Würzburg and had ended up as a ship’s surgeon for the Imperial Russian Navy and the RAC. Although many of the men working for the RAC and the navy were Baltic Germans, Georg Schäffer had been been born in Münnerstadt, Bavaria. He had a talent for learning languages, which helped him advance his career, which took him to St. Petersburg, Russia, where he and his German-born wife, Barbara, later lived and had a family. His wife wrote him letters (in German and Russian) from St. Petersburg while he was sailing across the Pacific, and later during his time in Hawaii. read more…

How to Celebrate German Unity Day

by | Oct 3, 2022 | , , , , | 1 Comment

Today is a national holiday in Germany, Tag der Deutschen Einheit or German Unity Day. Like every year, I feel it is almost forgotten until it is upon us. It honors the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rejoining of East to West Germany. So it is strange that a day commemorating such an important occasion is often treated as an afterthought.

Maybe it is because the date itself seems somewhat arbitrary.  In a country with such layered and complicated history, choosing a neutral date can be a challenge. Unevenly split between East Germany’s national day (Tag der Republik) on October 7 and the little commemorated June 17 national holiday in West Germany, October 3rd was chosen as the date in the 1990 Einigungsvertrag (German Unity Treaty). The actual date the Wall fell on November 9th 1989 was ruled out as it coincided with the infamous events of Kristallnacht, the anti-Jewish pogrom in 1938. (Refer to Hyde’s full write-up on the date and significance in the first link.) The date of November 9th is still celebrated, however, on important anniversaries.

Berlin Wall

The Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate in November 1989. PHOTO: Lear 21 (Wikimedia Commons)

Once the date was selected, there was still the issue of how exactly to celebrate. Only hardcore nationalists (which usually translated into Neo-Nazis) could be caught flag waving in Germany. Patriotism is a complicated subject in Germany even today. One of the only socially acceptable time to sport a little face paint or a flag at international sporting events. So, what is one to do for the holiday?

How to Celebrate the Day of German Unity read more…

Louisiana’s German Names and Connections

by | Sep 19, 2022 | , , | 0 Comments

Louisiana: The Pelican State, the Bayou State, the Creole State

No. None of Louisiana’s nicknames, official or otherwise, offer even a hint of how much of an impact German-speaking immigrants have had on the state. In fact, despite having lived in Louisiana as a university student, I had delayed my research for the state, leaving it as one of the last ones I was working on for a survey of German place names in the United States, thinking it would have very little in the way of Germanic connections. Boy, was I wrong.

Obviously, the state is more associated with French than any other language or culture. (Does “French Quarter” ring a bell?) But Louisiana (La Louisiane), named after Louis XIV, King of France from 1643 to 1715, is full of multicultural surprises. The first European explorers to visit Louisiana (in 1528) were Spanish. However, their interest in the region soon faded, only to be revived 150 years later.

In 1682 the French explorer Robert Cavelier de La Salle dubbed the region Louisiana to honor the aforementioned king. In 1699 the first permanent settlement in the territory, Fort Maurepas, was founded near present-day Biloxi, Mississippi by Pierre Le Moyne d’Iberville, a French military officer from Canada.

The boundaries of Louisiana and the lands claimed by France and other European powers changed over the decades. The vast territory was pared down later to the territory roughly south of present-day Illinois and the Great Lakes. The western boundary extended farther west than today. But Mobile (Alabama) and later Biloxi first served as the capital of La Louisiane. Before the United States acquired the territory in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, France and Spain both made efforts to control New Orleans and the lands west of the Mississippi. New Orleans (La Nouvelle-Orléans) was founded in 1718 by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville.

The L’OBSERVATEUR newspaper in St John the Baptist Parish, Louisiana kindly reprinted this German Way blog post in their 28 December 2022 edition. We thank them very much for that. You can read the reprint here.

But guess who showed up in the territory only two years later. The Germans. To be more specific, German-speaking colonists from the Rhineland, Alsace, Strasbourg, Baden, Bavaria, and even Switzerland. The area they settled is known as the “German Coast.” Some of their descendants can still be found in Louisiana today. read more…

Lost Luggage in Germany

by | Sep 5, 2022 | , , | 1 Comment

This summer people were ready to forget they ever heard of the Coronavirus and get back to travel. Everyone I knew had travel plans whether it was by train (many via the brilliant 9 euro ticket plan), by car, or by air.

But no sooner were tickets booked than reports of major problems started making the rounds. Flights were being cancelled at an alarming rate as airlines still hadn’t recovered from the worst of the pandemic and didn’t have enough staff to man the flights. On top of that, Covid is far from finished and kept sidelining the staff that was available. The rate of baggage mishandled was up 24% with 8.7 suitcases per 1,000 international passengers not arriving on time.

My family booked flights for Croatia and were white knuckling it til we departed, but our flight went off without a hitch. My father-in-law was not so lucky. His bag got lost on his way to Berlin and we didn’t hear a word about it for the next two weeks. It was only when my husband and daughter went to drop him back off at the airport that they braved the lines, uncertainty, and sea of suitcases to retrieve his luggage.

Learn from our mistakes and find out the best resources for retrieving lost luggage in Germany.

BER Luggage room

A sea of lost luggage at BER PHOTO: Ian Porter

How to Prevent Lost Luggage in Germany read more…

Das schönste deutsche Wort – The most beautiful German Word

by | Aug 22, 2022 | , , | 0 Comments

Wortschatz is a “word treasure”!

Recently I happened to stumble across my copy of the book »Das schönste deutsche Wort«, first published back in 2005. That book was the result of a 2004 contest that encouraged people all across the German-speaking world – and internationally, not just in Germany and Europe – to select the German word they consider the “most beautiful” and to express their reasons for choosing that word.

Scrabble - Deutsch

A German Scrabble board. PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons (German)

Of course there is no single “most beautiful German word.” Despite the fact that a top winning word was chosen, that was not the primary goal of the contest. Everyone has their own choice or choices for that honor. That is why the book title is in quotation marks. The contest was aimed more at demonstrating just how rich the German language is, and to encourage people to look at and hear German words in a fresh new way. Each contributor chose their own most beautiful word. The friendly competition produced thousands of German words chosen and defended by thousands of people all over the world. Indeed, the contest helped prove just how rich, varied, and interesting German vocabulary is. The German word for “vocabulary,” Wortschatz, translates literally as “word treasure” in English.

Mark Twain and “The Awful German Language”
Mark Twain seemed to have it in for the German language. While amusing, his essay titled “The Awful German Language” really says more about Samuel Clemens than about the German language. Twain’s battles with mastering the language of “poets and thinkers” (Dichter und Denker) are understandable but exaggerated to extremes in amusing Mark Twain style. Samuel Clemens did travel in Germany and Europe, and truly knew of what he spoke (or tried to). But German-language-bashing is far too easy and a rather cheap shot. Those who speak German or who have learned to speak it know that it is far more beautiful than most people think.

The Contest
From 4 May to 1 August 2004, the Deutscher Sprachrat (German Language Council) sponsored a contest that encouraged people all across the German-speaking world to select what they consider to be the “most beautiful German word” and to justify their choice. The result was about 12,000 German words submitted by about the same number of participants, aged 11 to 98, from all across the globe. Besides Germany, entries poured in from many countries – from France, Thailand, Spain, the UK, Russia, Japan, the USA, Kenya, South Korea, Austria, Italy, New Zealand, and other nations. About 25 percent of the entries came from outside of Germany.

While most of the entries came from average people, a few were contributed by notable personalities in Germany, including the American-born entertainer and author in Germany Gayle Tufts and the German humorist Loriot (Vicco von Bülow, 1923-2011). Other contributors were university students, fashion designers, politicians, government officials, and young children.

Favorite German words were chosen for many reasons: their sound, their look, their emotional resonance, their imagery, their meaning(s), and their building-block elements. Some words were chosen by several different people and listed with the varying explanations for choosing them. “Liebe” (love) was the most popular word, followed by “Heimat” (homeland, hometown) and “Glück” (luck, happiness). But nouns weren’t the only words submitted. Verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, interjections, prepositions, and many other grammatical forms were in the mix. read more…

It’s Never Too Late to Learn German

by | Aug 8, 2022 | , , , , , | 1 Comment

I was a little embarrassed to tell people I was taking German courses. Not because I think language courses are embarrassing. Quite the opposite. I think they are incredibly valuable. I was embarrassed because it has taken me so long to get there.

After over a decade in Berlin, I finally took my first German language course.

It’s not that I couldn’t speak German at all. I’d have been in serious trouble if I couldn’t manage a trip to the grocery store or KiTa chitchat. My vocabulary and comprehension are well beyond my German skill level. But without having studied grammar, my speaking was seriously affected. I could get my meaning across, but like a fairly slow child. With my Berlin-born daughter entering Erster Klasse (1st grade) and no move out of Germany at the horizon, it was well past time to get my language skills together. And as my German instructor said, “Besser spät als nie” (Better late than never).

I just finished my first course and am excited to move on to the next levels. Before I do that I thought I would share a little summary of the class and what other language learners – either new to Germany or new to the language – might expect.

Berlin Elementary School

This is a German elementary classroom, but I felt like a school kid learning German for the first time PHOTO: Erin Porter

read more…

Karl May: German Westerns, Winnetou and Old Shatterhand

by | Jul 25, 2022 | , | 0 Comments


If you’ve never heard of Winnetou, Old Shatterhand, Kara Ben Nemsi or Old Surehand, you probably didn’t grow up in Germany or another German-speaking country. Those characters created by the German author Karl May (1842-1912) are as well-known in Germany and a few other European countries as the Lone Ranger and Tonto, or Tarzan are in the English-speaking world. Unlike traditional American-style Westerns, May’s stories favored the Indians over the cowboys/frontiersman (Westmänner in May parlance). He portrayed his Native American characters as intelligent, noble people who appreciated Nature and were generally more honest and trustworthy than the paleface frontier people they encountered. In doing so, May (pronounced MY) also romanticized the life and culture of American Indians, sparking a longtime cultural and literary debate in Germany that continues to this day. May also had errors and inconsistencies in his novels, which were written and revised over many years at different times.

Book: Winnetou II

The Apache chieftain Winnetou (left) is one of Karl May’s best known fictional characters. His German friend Old Shatterhand is equally famous. This book, Part II (Vol. 8) of the Winnetou trilogy, was first published in 1893, although May had first invented an early version of Winnetou in 1878. The book pictured here, part of the classic “green volumes” (grüne Bände), was published in Bamberg, West Germany by the Karl-May-Verlag (founded in 1913) with a 1951 copyright. The postwar German division and the Soviet Occupation Zone led to the publisher moving operations from East Germany to Bamberg. A Radebeul office opened in 1996. PHOTO: Hyde Flippo

Neither the Tonto nor the Tarzan portrayals in American movies and television managed to avoid stale stereotypes and tropes. Neither Tonto nor Tarzan spoke English very well. The original Tarzan, as written by Edgar Rice Burroughs and first published in 1912, was well-spoken, but none of the Johnny Weissmuller movies were based on the original novels. On the other hand, Winnetou, Karl May’s Apache chieftain, speaks perfect German/English: Er sprach ein reines Englisch. (“He spoke perfect English.”) – Winnetou I.

The Tonto sidekick character was invented (for the radio series) so that the Lone Ranger, played by Clayton Moore in most of the later TV episodes, would have someone to talk to. The good part was that the TV Tonto was at least played by the indigenous Canadian actor Jay Silverheels, a rarity in movies and TV of the 1950s. The US television series aired on the ABC network from 1949 to 1957, with an amazing 221 30-minute episodes. For the 2013 Lone Ranger movie, there was criticism aimed at a non-indigenous actor (Johnny Depp) playing Tonto. (See Hollywood Indian Sidekicks and American Identity from Essais.)

Tonto and the Lone Ranger

The LONE RANGER television series featured Clayton Moore as the masked title figure and Jay Silverheels as Tonto, his Indian sidekick. PHOTO: American Broadcasting Company

In the German Winnetou “sauerkraut Western” film adaptations of the 1960s, as with Tarzan, the movie scripts often deviated from May’s original stories. Many Europeans’ understanding of the Winnetou character (and American Indians in general) are still based on the film versions, over which May’s estate had little control. American actor Lex Barker (Alexander Crichlow Barker Jr, 1919-1973), who also played the film Tarzan, portrayed Winnetou’s friend Old Shatterhand – who comes from Germany. To this day, Barker is best known in German-speaking Europe for his Old Shatterhand role, for which he even received German film awards. The French actor Pierre Brice (pron. BREECE; Pierre-Louis Le Bris, 1929-2015) had a long career based on his Winnetou role on screen and in live pageants. In East Germany, the popular “Indianerfilme” (not “Westernfilme”!) featured the German-Serbian actor Gojko Mitić as Winnetou. More recently, in the 2016 made-for-TV movie Winnetou – Der Mythos lebt (“…the myth lives on”), Winnetou was played by Nik Xhelilaj of Albania. No, none of these guys was a Native American or even related to one. read more…