Germans are bound by the fattest rule book in the world. No wonder they freak out at Fasching.

Even if it's not verboten, don't push your luck too far...

                                        
Fasching passed uneventfully this year, though not without the usual pain and discomfort. Most Germans must have heaved a sigh of relief, climbing out of their sweat-filled cow or donkey costumes. Happy to see the back of this time of year known as the "fifth season", and return to the regulated Ordnung which characterises their lives for the rest of the year.

Alles in Ordnung – literally “all in order” – is one of the most common phrases in German – even more popular than “OK”. Another favourite is ordnungsgemäß – “according to rules”. Not that Germans really need any rules at all. They intuitively know what is and isn’t “in order”. They simply say “Das muss sein” or “Das darf nicht sein”. Saying that something “must be” or “isn’t allowed to be” justifies everything – no further explanation is required.

Germans not only keep a tight reign on themselves – they’re also quick to reprimand others. They pass comment on everything, from opening the window and causing a draught (a very serious offence, it seems), to sitting in a sauna without a towel (I tried this once and was immediately sent out). But it’s from disciplining each other on waste disposal that Germans seem to derive greatest pleasure.  What is it about waste disposal that gets them so excited? When I first moved to Germany neighbours were always leaving me notes on rubbish bins. We had about six various bins, all colour coded. Mix up codes and put waste in recycling, for example, and you got enough notes to fill a whole container. I used to come home from work to find a trail of post-its all up the garden path, stuck on every available surface.

Funniest note I ever received was after parking my car in a terrible hurry. Skew-whiff and half over the kerb, it was nonetheless no great obstacle to either traffic or pedestrians. I came back to find some smarty puss had stuck a memo on the windscreen, saying something like “If you have sex as badly as you park you’ll end up with a stiff neck too.” Chucking the note in the nearest recycler I remember thinking what a charming way Germans have of connecting two totally unrelated activities.

Orderliness and civil obedience go hand in hand in Germany. You’d be amazed at things Germans obediently refrain from doing: hanging up washing outside on Sundays, tuning pianos at midnight (luckily, I’ve so far resisted all temptation to do THAT) and – take a deep breath – denying a chimney sweep access to their home.

..and don't dare think about hanging up washing on Sundays

German legislation is at its most creative, however, when it comes to curtailing its citizens’ fondness for frolicking around in fancy dress. Turning up at a meeting or demonstration in a mask or false nose, for instance, will earn you a hefty fine or 12 months imprisonment. This so-called Vermummungsgesetz is suspended during Karneval, for obvious reasons.

Germans can’t possibly know every single rule though. When I moved into my first flat I put up a satellite dish to watch the BBC. I was just tuning into Teatime News when my landlady burst in, saying it was verboten and demanding I take the dish down. I politely recited the German Civil Code, which charters the right of every foreigner in Germany to watch television in their own language. Ah so. Alles in Ordnung, came the calm and orderly response. For a while everything remained calm and “in order”. Until we tried planting a small shrub in the garden – without permission – which really is verboten.

Peep over the garden fence and you'll see how Germans over-exaggerate when it comes to avoiding anything that’s the slightest bit verboten. Like letting leaves pile up on your lawn any higher than 5 inches. Only this would explain why I’ve had several neighbours who go around shaking tree branches before raking up the leaves – presumably in order to halve the workload.

Germans might take civil obedience to ridiculous extremes, but when it comes to forking out for fines they eagerly conspire to outwit the law. Take, for example, Blitzer-Meldungen.  Nothing, as Brits might think, to do with The War. Blitzer are speed traps, and Germans love phoning their local radio stations to warn listeners about where they risk getting “blitzed”. You can almost hear them purr with pleasure, patting their backs in self congratulation, as they reveal the whereabouts of these loathed devices. Brits loathe them too of course, but take the attitude it’s “a fair cop” – you speed, you pay. The idea of deliberately stopping the car to warn fellow motorists on public radio makes most Brits curl up with laughter.  

The typical German seems constantly looking out for pitfalls in life, guarding against whatever atrocities might strike. Something which the press must take part blame for. Doomsday warnings like “Werden die Deutschen impotent?” (are Germans losing their fertility?) and “Sterben die Deutschen aus?” (are Germans dying out?) are widespread. The latest online “Spiegel” carries an interview with a “Population Expert” from the University of Bielefeld. Written in typical Endzeitstimmung style, the message is that Germans needs an extra 500 000 immigrants by 2025, or they’ll die out.

Of course things are rarely as bad as they seem. Not even in Germany. After living here 14 years I secretly enjoy a bit of disorder once a year. I can’t wait for Fasching 2014.

 

Why do I have to mispronounce my name to make myself understood?

Sinking? Thinking? With Germans you can never be too sure......

There are so many things I love about living in Bavaria: The extremes in climate (ice-cold winters, sizzling-hot summers), lovely clean public swimming pools everywhere, and some of the best bread in the world. Not forgetting of course the local brew. Considering about half of Germany’s 1250 breweries are here in Bavaria it’s not surprising that most of the local festivities are beer driven. Last year I finally went “native”, dressing up in Lederhosen and dancing on beer tables with the Bürgermeister. It felt great. I even began liking niederbayrisch, even though I find this local dialect mostly incomprehensible.

Moving to Germany over 13 years ago I was scared stiff of those big black Audis which creep up on you on the Autobahn, headlights flashing furiously, forcing you to pull over into the slow lane. Worse still when I accidentally threw an old hairdryer into normal rubbish, a neighbour saw this and reported me to the police. I’ve since learnt to live with impatient motorists and intruding neighbours. But one thing I will NEVER get used to is how Germans misuse and mispronounce English words in their own language. And how I have to mispronounce them too in order to be understood.

 

Just look how German is flooded with English words in advertising: “Get the London Look!” (Rimmel), “Drive alive!” (Mitsubishi) or Douglas’ confusing invitation “Come in and find out!” Smooth, smart slogans - and all totally meaningless.

 
Advertisers please note there is a London Eye but no London Look, that being alive is an absolute minimum requirement for driving a car, and “come in and find out” sounds more like a challenge to find the shop exit.

Teachers are forever reminding pupils that “Handy” (mispronounced “hendy”!) is a mobile phone in British English. Maybe we should also explain that this word is used by native speakers only as an adjective, to mean "helpful" or "useful". 

Mispronunciation, if you're not careful, can be a matter of life and death, as highlighted  by language trainers Berlitz in a popular advert. “We’re sinking!” - a ship’s Mayday call to German coastguards - is tragically misunderstood as the officer enquires “Oh ja, and vot are you sinking about?”

Hearing so much English mispronounced is slowly “germanising” my own English too. I recently phoned the cinema to ask for times of Woody Allen’s “From Rome with Love” (pronounced by young Germans as “luff”, and the older generation as “low-ver”) Asking about this “Vooty Ellen luff-feelm” made me feel foolish but at least we understood each other.

But nothing makes me feel sillier than having to mispronounce my OWN surname, Howe, as “How-ver”.

This helps prevent people spelling it “Hau”, “Hovi” or “Howi”.

To be on the safe side I would spell it out too. All four letters: “Ha-O-Vee-Ay”. Until I found it simpler just to pronounce it correctly, referring to another oft-used English word in German – “Know-how”.

When it came to setting up my own language service I didn’t need to think too long about what to call it: Know Howe for English.

 

Swimming with the Germans

Ask an Englander what he likes best about Germany and he’ll  say Bier, Wurst and trains that run on time. Most Brits haven’t travelled on Deutsche Bahn. 

But any Brit who has ever lived in Germany will tell you this country is Weltmeister for one thing in particular - outdoor swimming pools.

When I first came to Germany I thought a Freibad was just that – a free bathe.  I soon discovered you have to pay – but not much. Most public pools cost less than three Euros, leaving plenty cash for pommes, pizzas and other poolside goodies.

Most Brits associate open-air pools with their worst childhood memories, either on holiday at some awful campsite or in their school pool, with its bitterly cold, piddle-green water. Or worse still, shivering on the poolside all lesson as a punishment for splashdiving.

Not in Germany, where school kids actually seem to enjoy lessons at their local Freibad. Kids obediently swim alongside poolside teachers, armed with clip boards and stop watches. Good German discipline. Kein Splash-Diving.

The pools are run with military orderliness – and are sparkingly clean. Toilets all have McDonalds-style tick-box charts on the wall, with an official stamp and signature showing how often they’re cleaned.  And they smell better than McDonalds too.   

Brits marvel at the wonderful network of open-air pools because there are so few in the UK. London, for example, has a population of around 8 million but only 15 open-air pools. Munich is eight times smaller in population but has twice as many outside pools. In my area alone there are four within almost walking distance, including an olympic-size pool and a Waldbad in the middle of the forest.

Older Germans are particularly keen swimmers. Frühsportler arrive at 6 o’clock in the morning and plough up and down the pool as if they’re training for the Olympics. Don’t dare get in their way - they can get quite angry. Middle-aged Germans, on the other hand, don’t actually go to swim at all. They just lie, read, eat salt sticks and watch. Some even bring their barbecues. They seem happy spending all day lazing around on the “Liegewiese”  – a lovely green lawn next to the water.

Our local town has only 14,000 burghers but a pool lawn almost the size of the English Garden in Munich. It feels like a park too. There’s almost always someone pushing around a lawnmower or trimming hedges. And it’s über-tidy - Germans don’t know the word litter lout.

I’m not sure what swimming arrangements they’ve made in London for the Olympics, but I think we could learn a lot from the Germans.

Does Christmas really have to start in September?

 

Alarm Alert, Achtung! Christmas is coming..

Nougat marzipan sticks, stollen, and lovely spicey ginger-bread cookies with delightful names like Lebkuchenherzen and Spekulatius. Washed down with a nice pot of clove & cinnamon tea. Mmmmm...

Germans do this sort of thing very nicely, very gemütlich, particularly when you’re snuggled up to a log fire on a dark and dank winter’s evening, with the promise of snow on the way.

Visiting Aldi the other day, however, with temperatures a pleasant 19 C, and the local Freibad thronging with Frühsportler (queuing up at six o'clock in their bathing robes ready to rack up 50 lengths before breakfast – very German), I'm amazed to find the rummage tables overflowing with Christmas clutter. And doing a roaring trade too, as housewives jostle for foot space, preparing to pounce on the last remaining supplies of marzipan hearts fancily packaged in Christmas-tree shaped woolly stockings with a bobble on the end.

It’s all too much for me. Grabbing the first pack of lebkuchen I can lay my hands on, I head for the check-out, to find the queue for the only point open (Aldi has a total of four check-outs in Mainburg – I’ve never seen more than two in operation at the same time) slowly snaking down the central aisle towards the frozen foods and special offers.
 

On the way home we call at the local konditorei. As Matilda presses her nose and lips against the cake counter screen, leaving a string of dribble running down the glass, I hover between ordering kaffee with sahne or frothy milchschaum. Describing the scene of mayhem I have just experienced at the discounter, Frau Lutzenburger serves me and offers up a helpful explanation: “So are we Germans. We think if we do not get our things quickly then we will get nothing”.

Ah so. This might explain why holidaying Germans rise at the break of dawn to reserve the most desirable poolside chairs with bathing towels.
 

Leaving the store I deliberate whether it might pay to pop back to Aldi for a few more lebkuchen, just in case they sell out by the weekend.

Christmas, by the way, is still three months away.

German humour no oxymoron

At the count of three all laugh please. Eins, zwei.....

Henning Wehn, self-appointed German ambassador to Britain, once said “Brits think we have a no sense of humour – and we don’t think that’s funny.”* Yet some German humour does manage to transcend language boundaries, as testified by Loriot. Even the world-acclaimed Huffington Post reports the sad news of his death, announcing “Germans often cited him as proof of their sense of humor”.

I suspect “Die Zeit” is exaggerating a little when it compares Loriot as a German cultural figure to classical writers Friedrich Schiller or Wolfgang Goethe. Yet there was certainly something very special and unique about the comic who could make unexciting activities like taking one's place at a concert or eating a hard-boiled egg look so hilariously funny.

And who can forget the noodle on the upper lip sketch :-). My favourite sketch, however, was Deutsch für Ausländer – a spoof on all those diabolical audio courses, which were supposed to teach us poor Brits but actually ended up making German grammar even more incomprehensible than it actually is.

Loriot will be missed, but his sketches, films and cartoon's will run for many more generations.

* Check him out, he’s really funny: Henning Wehn - the funny German

Old friends, new ideas. A good day!

An ancient Ukrainian proverb says there’s only one thing better than making a new friend, and that’s keeping an old one.

Old friends aren’t necessarily only ones you went to college or grew up with. Having lived in Germany almost 12 years I’ve found some of my oldest friends here belong to an organisation I’ve been a member of almost as long: Munich English Language Teachers’ Organisation.

Yesterday we met up at Gasteig for a day-long workshop, and it was great to catch up with so many fellow expats from Britain, America and Australia - even Zimbabwe. And when expats meet they love to talk! Not only about obvious things like hourly rates, who’s hiring who, and why men should also listen to Woman’s Hour on Radio 4! But also what it’s like, for example, bringing up children bilingually in Germany. It was interesting talking to fellow Brits with children of school age. Kids who answer their parents in German when spoken to in English. Worrying for a moment about Matilda, I was reassured this is quite natural in bilingual families. Tower of Babel here we come.

The title of the training, before I forget, was “Ways to motivate and make them talk!“ and we were lucky to have a very experienced expat British teacher trainer from Salzburg present and let us try out a whole range of communicative methods. These ranged from games, songs, rhymes and raps and story telling to how to use the hilarious video “Rowan Atkinson in Hell“ in the classroom. I won’t dare show that particular clip at my school, but have collected plenty other material to jazz up my lessons!

We came out beaming like kittens licking cream off our lips. And looking forward to trying out some of these ideas in our classes – regardless whether we teach primary school kids or topdogs at Siemens.

And I also felt that for a few hours on a rainy Saturday in Munich I’d had a wonderfully welcome “fix“ of fellow native speakers and all things English to help me survive life amongst the natives of Lower Bavaria. The next big MELTA event won’t be till Christmas but I’m already longing to get in there again!

My home is my facebook

I like....

How do you judge how popular someone is? It used to be by counting the number of cards hung up around the house when you visited them at Christmas. This worked well in theory, except many people kept on bringing the same cards out every year, stringing them up so thickly until you could hardly see anyone across the room. Besides, it always made me wince when I compared this awful British tradition with the tasteful way Germans decorate their homes at Christmas.

Nowadays of course we measure a person’s popularity by how many friends they have on Facebook. But I’ve been wondering recently what actually took us all there in the first place?

I joined FB as a low-cost way of keeping in touch with family and friends back in England. A place for exchanging horror stories about travelling home with Ryan Air and swapping chocolate fudge cake recipes.

But I haven’t really been doing any of that. I currently have 22 friends, compared with my most popular virtual friend, Chris from Down Under, who boasts 643 followers (heck, that’s almost half the population of Australia). I’m also friends with two expats living in Germany, and three back in the UK. But of my FB friends live here in Bavaria, and some just down the road.

Before Facebook one of the most popular networking sites was “Friends United”. Its purpose was for old school “mates” to link up and exchange playground memories. Millions of mates – myself included –  paid a 5-pound annual subscription, before realising we’d been duped. Why pay for something you can get free? When Facebook arrived we deserted en masse. And that’s where an amazing 70% of all Brits now hang out – both at home and work.

Two million German teenagers also hang out there, with roughly 70% in each class I taught last semester confessing to “facebooking” daily. Some of my best lessons are on the pros and cons of social networking. Recently I showed the documentary “Facehooked” and asked if pupils ever worry about megaphoning so much about their lives to the world at large. Most students seem aware of the risks involved, but regard these as a fair trade-off for so many benefits.

Facebook is of course miles ahead of all its rivals. And unlike those very early social networks it’s no longer about searching for long-lost friends, all asking the same questions like “How are you?” (–OK, thanks), “Any kids yet?” (–No, but we’re practising) “So what do YOU do in life?” (–Well, personally, I just get on and live).

And Facebook lets us not only make friends, it also help us keep them. “What are you doing RIGHT NOW?” sounds so much cooler than “How are you?”.  And there are so many FB tools which I’m still dying to try out: I’ve never actually “poked” (“Freund(in) Anschupsen!”) anyone and one of these days I’d just love send some soul a virtual bouquet of flowers.

Facebook can be addictive – like when you log on at bedtime with the sole purpose of wishing all your friends goodnight. And should you ever feel insomnia creeping in then just scrolling through the oh-so predictable comments to every goodnight announcement will help stave away any boredom. It’s the networkers’ equivalent of my favourite childhood programme “The Waltons”, which finished every single time with the words “Goodnight John Boy. Goodnight Mary Ellen, Goodnight Elisabeth….”

I just wonder how long Facebook will reign supreme before something more “techy” takes over. Will it be replaced by a neckband with a built-in microphone that allows us to record our every thought 24/7? Imagine it beaming our innermost feelings onto a cyberspace station, and feeding Big-Brotherly highlights to subscribers. Wow.

Sorry, I’m starting to get carried away. You'll find me back on earth next week, once again enthusing about the joys of living in rural Bavaria. And if not then please do me a favour. Log onto Facebook and gently poke me.

You never know, if I’m in the right mood I might even poke you back.