Catharina Coenen
English remains the most beautiful of languages. It will do anything.
Maya Angelou
schweigen, v.
Imagine if silence were something you did, instead of something you heard (or didn't hear).
In English, the verb to silence takes a direct object, someone or something to be shut up.
In German, to silence is intransitive: something you do, but not something you can do to someone.
Der Wald steht schwarz und schweiget, go the words of a still-popular German song, written by Matthias Claudius in 1779, about the risen moon: "The woods stand black and silent."
Except that these woods, in German, are not "standing silent," but they "stand and silent," as in "execute an action," and what they do, as they stand, is to emit no sound, convey no message; they fail to chatter or to sing.
Their schweigen is not a refusal, it is an act—not a "no" but a "yes," not a "failure" but a "win."
investment, n.
An American high school teacher asks, with disarming earnestness, why I would think it important for American students to invest in learning any language other than English. After all, the teacher argues, English is spoken pretty much anywhere most of his students would ever want to go. So, wouldn't all the time and effort that might go into learning, say, German, be better spent on more math, or shop, or sports, or on gaining greater skill in pretty much any other enterprise?
In the late 14th century to invest meant to put on official robes. I imagine wearing English like a vestment, a shawl to connote ceremony.
I try to explain to the teacher that learning a language is not mechanical, that words and phrases open doors inside the mind.
"Besides," the teacher says, "computers will make translations automatic very soon."
Übersetzung, n. f.
Übersetzung, in German, means "translation," but Übersetzung also signifies how two cogwheels relate to one another: the number of turns one has to take relative to the other, the fact that, if they are to move together, the smaller one will need to spin much faster than the larger one.
The closest English translation is "gear transmission ratio."
Note that any geared device can change the speed, torque, and direction of a force.
Note that any word may be a geared device.
Blindgänger, n. m.
Google Translate says: dud
also: dead loss
also: misfit
When German newspapers report that a construction crew has found a Blindgänger, they don't mean that the backhoe excavator's bucket clunked against:
a thing that fails to work properly or is otherwise unsatisfactory or worthless, or
a venture or situation that produces no profit whatsoever, or
a person whose behavior or attitude sets them apart from others in an uncomfortably conspicuous way.
What they mean is that it's time to evacuate the entire district, including all of the folks in the nursing homes and hospitals who are hooked up to machines. They mean it's time to stop the trains. They mean it is time to bring in the specialists who can
defuse a five hundred-pound, unexploded bomb from World War II. Or,
in case the detonator cannot be removed safely, that it is time to also evacuate everyone adjacent to the transportation route, along which intrepid workers will operate machines to gently—oh-so-gently—ferry the Blindgänger to a place where it can be detonated. Or,
for bombs too dangerous to lift or touch: that it is time to explode the dud right there and to rebuild whatever it destroys.
In Berlin alone 7,300 Blindgänger have been removed in one of these three ways since 1947. The city government assumes that there are likely 3,000 more.
Blindgänger are part of life in Germany, part of the cost of doing excavations, part of plowing any field.
Übersetzung, n. f.
Translation, from Old French, translacion, first appeared in English in the 14th century, when it was used to describe the process of taking a saint's body or relics from one place to another.
In English, the ferrying of a Blindgänger from Berlin's center to an abandoned quarry for detonation, then, might be sacred, an act commanding not only concentration but mindfulness, respect.
Schweigen, n. n.
My father has a favorite joke, about a movie from 1955: Das Schweigen im Walde, which would translate as what? "The silenting in the woods?"
The joke is that posters proclaimed this movie to be "ein hundertprozentiger Tonfilm," i.e. a film that spurted sound for 100 percent of its duration.
Did my father make this up? He would have been seventeen—ripe for cracking teenage jokes about a suffocating post-war world.
But no, the Tonfilm subtext on the movie poster may well have been a real and necessary clarification: there is a predecessor silent film by the same title from 1929.
The joke, then, is on the advertisers, who failed to recognize the irony.
The joke is that an entire generation was blind to its own silence.
Blindgänger, n. m.
Literally: "blind walker."
The first recorded uses of Blindgänger date from right after World War I. Maybe the word arose as a way to describe that bombs failed to reach the target they were aimed at.
The proto Indo-European root of "blind," *bhel-, means to "shine, flash, or burn."
Who, here, is blind or blinded by a burn or flash? The pilot? The bomb? The war? Or the construction worker pulling levers on the backhoe? The farmer plowing his field?
Or is it the child stumbling through a family, a country where explosions and silence happen inexplicably, the child who learns to tip-toe, who can't tell you why, exactly, she feels so afraid?
Heimat, n. f.
Das Schweigen im Walde was iconic for an entire genre of post-war movies, the Heimatfilm. Heimat could mean home, homeland, or native country. But the meaning of the term is so heavy, so tied to a German idea of soul, that Nora Krug's 2018 graphic novel about unearthing her family's wartime history was titled Heimat in German only—the English edition appeared under the title Belonging.
Which means that Heimat is about affinity for place—and that it carries connotations of the English verb "belong:" to be the property of, to be a member of, or to be rightly placed somewhere.
All Heimatfilme were about place: the Alps, the Lüneburg Heath, the Black Forest—sparsely populated regions, where the intended audience decidedly was NOT at home.
Heimatfilme were never about bombed-out Berlin, where Berolina Films were produced and screened.
What Germans wanted after the war, after the bombings, after pamphlets and films about the concentration camps, was Das Schweigen im Walde, to feel at home within the silenting of made-up forests, mountains, heath.
übersetzen, v.
The verb übersetzen originates from the middle high German ubbarsezzen, which meant to "to take something from one place to another." If you stress the first Umlaut, the verb still means to take yourself, or something, or someone across a river.
Move the emphasis to the third syllable, and überSETzen becomes "to translate"—to carry something from one language into another, a meaning it acquired somewhere between seven and nine hundred years later.
To be German means to hope that you can take a boat from one language into another, across the Rhine, the Danube, the English Channel: it means that words can ferry you across a difference.
In English, the verb "to translate" replaced the Old English awendan, from wendan "to turn." The motion, here, is different: a translated world looks fresh and new because you've changed direction. Before English words were translated, carried across, they were turned around.
In English, translating began as a new perspective, as opening a different way.
schweig, v. imperative
In German, "Schweig!" commands someone to do something.
In English, "Be silent!" asks someone to be a certain way.
I want to believe the German is only meant as a temporary injunction against a telling.
I want to believe that the English is not an actual request to change identity.