The German Language

A discussion log-jammed

My best friend and I often engage in spirited discussions about this or that.

We can talk about politics, we can talk about religion, we can talk about the Church, we can talk about business. After all, we’re best friends, right?

Sometimes, but not too often, our discussions have ended in hurt feelings. It’s a sad thing, and it occurs entirely unpredictably.

Recently, we hit an incontrovertible log-jam on the subject of the German language. Since then, I have been pondering this, and wondering if the stalemate (so to speak) might have had something to do with our age difference. My best friend is 20 years younger than I.

My assessment

I was born in February, 1942. Not quite a year after my birth, the U.S. was finally switching its World War Two efforts away from North Africa to concentrate more directly on . . . Europe, Germany, and Adolf Hitler.

My best friend was born in 1962. By that time, she would have been surrounded by adults who would really rather forget the grisly details of the horrific war. In my memory, it was recent. In hers, it was ancient history.˜

So when we couldn’t reach understanding on definitions involved in the discussion, I went to the dictionary. This gave me my answer, in part.

I had said the German language was “guttural.” That’s when I knew I’d hit some sort of nerve, but like the true idiot that I am at times, I went diving right ahead.

The dictionary says “guttural” comes from the Latin, “guttur,” or throat. In English, it means either “all of the throat,” or, “produced in the throat.”

It means a sound produced by placing the tongue at the back of the throat close to or against the soft palate. It means a language characterized by such sounds. As in “achtung.” Or so I thought.

My best friend’s favorite high school teacher, Frau Lindsley Rinard, taught German, among other things.

I’ve had the good fortune to meet Mrs. Rinard and to get acquainted with her a little bit in recent years. What a delight. She is at the very least the equivalent of my own education hero, the late Lucille Rockne, a superb teacher who put up with me in the 1950’s. Latin. English.

When my best friend pronounces the German word for “attention,” (“achtung,”) she most likely does it exactly the way Mrs. Rinard taught.

I would hazard a guess that my best friend was Mrs. Rinard’s favorite student, favorite among all the students she encountered in her entire teaching career.

At this point, I lose purchase on my lifelong belief that the German language is always guttural.

So I back off ten yards and punt. I look up the word “German,” believing Webster will back me up, confirming that it’s a guttural language.

Surprise surprise, Webster betrays me. An online dictionary says guttural can mean “harsh,” but refuses to say the German language is specifically guttural.

Webster does, however, support me in this other, more distant, way: Guttural is an “utterance that is strange, unpleasant or disagreeable.”

Here’s where I began to understand. The Frau Rinard with whom I have visited in person a couple of times is not capable of uttering something that is harsh, strange, unpleasant or disagreeable, no matter the language in which she says it.

However, when I as a child was watching the newsreels at the movies, the German language soundtrack was, at the least, unpleasant.

There’s a scene where thousands of people in a crowded city square are looking up at Adolf Hitler, perched on a balcony. They raise their right arms to him in the Nazi salute and chant a thunderous “sieg heil. Sieg heil. Sieg heil.” The chant and its echo haunt me to this day.

That’s disagreeable. Always will be.

But my best friend wasn’t there when I was watching the newsreels. She wasn’t born yet.

My prejudice?

Those same newsreels showed starving people being released from prisoner of war camps when the Yanks finally swept through Germany.

The newsreels show the piles of dead bodies. The films show the marching Nazis doing the goose-step, eyes right to the Führer. This parade was supposed to cause us to be afraid. It worked.

I remember in particular a film in which a “German Jeep” comes over a slight rise at speed, its front wheels rising off the road. The thing is loaded with German soldiers who are bristling with weapons.

The vehicle was manufactured for the war effort by the Volkswagen company which had been nationalized by Hitler. It has an opposed four-cylinder air-cooled engine, placed in the rear. It has a sharply sloping hood, topped with a spare tire.

In the film, its front end is coming off the ground because it is built with too much weight in the rear. This is for traction – the purpose for which four-wheel-drive is used in the Yankee Jeep.

When the “VW Bug” passenger car appeared in this country in the 1950’s, it didn’t take much imagination to see that it was a civilianized version of the German Jeep.

Bugs aren’t cute. They’re underpowered, prone to over-steer, hazardous, and over-rated. To say nothing of ugly. My lip curls when I see one.

Just my prejudice, I suppose.

She wasn’t there

My best friend has at least one fond memory of a Volkswagen. An acquaintance loaned her a VW Bus to use in making a move in California.

But she wasn’t there for the newsreels.

At the Grand Canyon

My best friend and I took a vacation once which included the Grand Canyon.

We were on our way home, and we stopped at the east end of the national park at a place called Desert View. We wanted one more chance to see the beauty. We were dawdling, not really wanting the trip to end.

I walk slowly anyway, and soon we paid for it. A group of tourists, loudly, excitedly speaking German, emerged from a bus and began walking rapidly toward the canyon rim viewpoint.

One particularly anxious man found my progress too slow, so he pushed us out of the way. Yes. Pushed us out of the way.

Was he rude simply because he was German? I thought so at the time. In fact, I half expected some lack of manners from these people, because I had heard the language they were speaking. It was harsh, strange, unpleasant, disagreeable. To me.

But wait! Have I ever been pushed out of the way by someone speaking English? Or Spanish? I surely have, more than once. Hey. I went to junior high, didn’t I?

A stupid tourist, an oaf, can come from anywhere. Some come from Japan. So in that case, German speech brought my prejudice bubbling to the surface.

I wanted to say something harsh or guttural to the guy, but I felt the gentle pressure of a calming hand on my forearm, holding me back from confrontation.

My best friend. Her perspective is priceless.

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Word of the Week: Pulchritude. It ‘s from the Latin, pulcher, meaning beautiful. In English it has come to mean physical beauty. It’s a good word for my best friend, who is, ahem, pulchritudinous.

Next week’s word: German, with a small G.

˜ Editor’s Note: While I’m not always in agreement with my best friend about the “sound” of the German language, Please: Never Forget what happened in Germany, Poland, Russia: The horror and atrocity is truly too much to ponder. I sometimes fear historical whitewashing is replacing truth with lies.

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