I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: JÜRGEN MARCUS-“Ein Festival der Liebe” (1973).

Schlager (see the end of the book entry below) has become a catch-all term for (European) inoffensive pop music.  But apparently in the 1970s it had a slightly different and more specific connotation/sound.  The more I dove into this explanation, the more confusing it became.  Until someone posted a link to this song.

It’s easy to see how people reacted against the music back when it was super popular–it is so safe and inoffensive as to be totally offensive to any one with artistic sensibility.  But now that pop music has become something so radically different, often aggressive and vulgar and very electronic, this kind of bland, fun sing along is actually charming and kind of appealing.

The chorus is easy to sing along to, you can clap along without anything complicated going on and it’s all happy and sweet (even the ahhs in the backing vocals are super happy).  The music is soft, even the little piano “riff” in the middle is obvious.  I love that the song gets a little “risky” in the end third with a “drum solo” and Jürgen singing a kind of tarzan yell, but it’s all returned safely to th end.

The video is spectacular with Jürgen’s brown suit, big hair and even bigger collars.   It’s quintessential warming cheese.  It’s the school of music that ABBA came from as well.  It’s Eurovision!

And I find it quite a relief from the pop schlager of today.  This song was given example of contemporary German schlager:  Helene Fischer “Atemlos durch die Nacht”.  Her delivery is inoffensive by the music is so contemporary and dancefloor that it doesn’t feel anywhere near as delightful as the 1970s song,

[READ: February 9, 2019] How to Be German

I saw this book at work–the German side–and it looked like it might be funny.  I wished I could read more than the very little German that I know.  And then I flipped the book over and discovered it was bilingual!  Jawohl!

This manual is a very funny book about being German.  It was written by a British ex-pat who moved to Germany many hears ago and has settled down in the country he now calls home.  The book gently pokes fun at German habits but also makes fun of his own British habits and cultural components.

I studied German for one year which makes me in no way qualified to judge the quality of the humor or the accuracy of the cultural jokes.  The book does a very good job of cluing the unfamiliar in on what he’s talking about.  Although there are about a dozen exceptions where no context is given to the ideas that he’s talking about, which is quite frustrating, obviously.

I’m not going to go through all 50 of these ideas, but there are some that are particularly good and some that I found especially funny.

So apparently everyone wear house shoes (slippers) all the time (there is a chance that the floors will be ever so slightly colder than you would expect!).  And they always know to dress for any potential weather–boots, pants where the legs unzip, etc.

Of course everyone knows Germans are exact, so its no surprise to learn that the live by the three p’s Planning, Preparation, and Process.  Unfortunately in German this cleverness doesn’t work, because these three words are translated as Planen, Vorbereiten and Durchführen.   They also must all get insurance (and then insurance for that insurance to make sure its enough).

Speaking of insurance–always obey the red man (the don’t walk guy).  You must never walk into an intersection if the red man is flashing.  Never!

There’s a lot about food.  Like that you must eat a long breakfast.  It’s like touch a truck but to see who can keep eating the longest–with no prize at the end.  There are some good jokes about the vast number of different potato dishes you can make/eat in Germany, but a frustratingly limited explanation of what makes Kartoffelsalat (potato salad) so beloved–only that everyone brings it to a BBQ.  There’s also an explanation of how English bread is like a white and fluffy pillow–a waste of yeast whereas German bread should weigh more than a newborn baby, look the color of swamp mud and have texture like slightly damp concrete.

There’s also drinks, like Apfelsaftschorle.  You never drink tap water in Germany–only fizzy water.  Apfelsaftschorle takes fizzy water and makes it 6% more fun by adding a hint of apple.  And Germans are crazy for it!  It is a riot in the mouth.  Sadly, “it won’t taste like that to you with your funny foreign palate… it will taste to you as it really is–a fractional improvement on fizzy water’s boring taste.”

I would have loved more information about the guy who put “whole bananas put into beer” and the Coke and Fanta mix (Spezi).

Many people talk about how the English language is very hard to learn, but Fletcher points out that English has many things that are hard to learn about it–like its staunch commitment to unphoneticism.  However English

is kind enough to be easy in the beginning, then it ramps up slowly and encouragingly, with minimal grammar.  German just plonks you down in front of a steep mountain, says <Viel Spaß> and walks off as you begin your slow painful ascent.

He says the hardest thing is German is grammar.  There are about 30% that are easy right off the bat (like all days of the week) but “This still leaves 70% that you’ll have to learn by heart so you can decline correctly.  You can also decline to lean them if you like.  See what I did there?”

There is also German directness. You don’t beat around the bush to get someone to do something, no niceties or pleasantries.  You just tell someone to do something and say <Alles Klar>.  You also speak freely about sex .  There’s also the fascinating unexplained FKK (which stands for Freilkörperkultur–Free Body Culture–nudism).

Apparently everyone watches a  show called Tatort (but it is not explained what it is).  Everyone trusts anything written on Speigel Online and always ends every email with LG (lovely greetings), VG (many greetings) or MfG (with friendly greetings).  Even if you rip someone a new one and wish them dead, you always sign off with those abbreviations.

You must also love your car, recycle, and obey the rules (even in the movie theatre where they charge you more to not sit in the bent-neck seats.

He says that one thing that hinders German humor and storytelling is their need for truth.  Klugscheisen (smart shitting) is that people will interrupt every story to make sure all the details are correct and not vague (actually Hong Kong is not a part of China).  They also interrogate jokes–you must judge the joke by how feasible it is.

And most surprising, forget everything you were ever told about fireworks. New Years Eve is when all the nice normal practical risk-averse people are replaced by gunpowder-toting, death-wish- seeking pyromaniacs.

In England we were told

the single most dangerous thing you can do is set off fireworks. Each time you set one off there’s about a 50% chance you’ll die, instantly….  Fireworks are so dangerous that we have a national TV commercial campaign just to remind us about the dangers of using sparklers. Yes sparklers.  Here, I once saw someone deliberately fire a rocket at a woman riding a bike.  It hit her on the chest.  She shrieked.  It just sort of bounced off and fizzled out.  This was quite an anticlimax,  My English education had taught me that she should have spontaneously combusted.

The most confusing thing about he book is when he talks about things like Tatort or either very specific things which maybe British people would know but which I certainly don’t.  Like schlager music.  He talks about how much every German hates it yet knows every word.  A lot of space is given to it but it is never explained.

Throughout the book there’s great art work by Robert M. Schöne.  He has very clean lines and an almost computer graphic style.  His drawings are very funny and you absolutely must flip to the German side to see the ones that are not on the English side.   In fact, flip to the German side just to see German words, which are a lot of fun.

Tschus!