Monday, May 23, 2005
(11:56 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Awful German Language
[UPDATE: A somewhat related question -- does anyone know how to pronounce the name Sloterdijk?]This weekend, I got out of my routine of German-learning, and it is proving difficult to get back on the wagon, especially with the new issue of Harper's sitting on the coffee table. Perhaps, at some deep level, I don't want to learn German. This is, after all, a second attempt, and I have gotten only a little further than on the first. French is an elegant language, which has given birth to much of the writing that is dearest to my heart -- Derrida, of course, and so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.... Greek, as well -- that is a language. A whole other alphabet, bizarre conventions for accents, and perhaps the greatest writing in the history of the world (by definition, insofar as "history" is Western History) -- we have Plato and Paul, together with thousands of lesser figures.
But German. I don't know. I was talking to a Polish woman on the train once, about the new pope, and she said she didn't like him, partly because she didn't like German people. I asked her why, fascinated to learn of this intra-European fetishization of small differences; she said, "The Second World War." Oh. And the authors -- so many greats, of course, obviously, Kant, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, Barth. But what have they produced lately? Not quite the key for the contemporary cutting edge (French, at least for a couple more decades), not quite the repository for timeless truths (Greek) -- not a good position for a language to be in. The German tongue should be forever grateful to the earnest German professors who steamrolled their way through every body of knowledge, although it should also be forever resentful of the lack of wit and verve with which so many did it.
German, it would seem, is always the language that one learns because one has to. It is a language that is assigned, perhaps a nerdy language. Overearnest, overserious. I reflected last night, playing the piano with a French text sitting at my bedside, having been a subscriber to The New Yorker for years: I am cultured now. I have arrived. I have met all the requirements for being considered a cultured person. But replace French with German, and the whole thing falls apart -- not as badly as if I'd learned Spanish, but still rather far down in the hierarchy of cultural prestige. The weirdness of a Kafka or a Benjamin simply can't compete, in terms of culturedness, with the coolness of a Camus or a Derrida. And not even Nietzsche -- sarcasm tending toward insanity is, it seems, the best we can hope for from the German tongue, the apex of its achievement.
I am reminded of a passage from Don DeLillo's White Noise, which I will gladly quote for you now:
My struggle with the German tongue began in mid-October and lasted nearly the full academic year. As the most prominent figure in Hitler studies in North America, I had long tried to conceal the fact that I did not know German. I could not speak or read it, could not understand the spoken word or begin to put the simplest sentence on paper. The least of my Hitler colleagues knew some German; others were either fluent in the language or reasonably conversant. No one could major in Hitler studies at College-on-the-Hill without a minimum of one year of German. I was living, in short, on the edge of a landscape of vast shame.And so am I, my friends. I am not seeking after glamor or fame here. There is nothing glamorous about learning such a language, such an awful language. I'm not even going to do the obvious thing here and close with a German phrase. You deserve better than that.
The German tongue. Fleshy, warped, spit-spraying, purplish and cruel. One eventually had to confront it. Wasn't Hitler's own struggle to express himself in German the crucial subtext of his massive ranting autobiography, dictated in a fortress prison in the Bavarian hills? Grammar and syntax. The man may have felt himself imprisoned in more ways than one.
I'd made several attempts to learn German, serious probes into origins, structures, roots. I sensed the deathly power of the language. I wanted to speak it well, use it as a charm, a protective device. The more I shrank from learning actual words, rules and pronunciation, the more important it seemed that I go forward. What we are reluctant to touch often seems the very fabric of our salvation. But the basic sounds defeated me, the harsh spurting northernness of the words and syllables, the command delivery. Something happened between the back of my tongue and the roof of my mouth that made a mockery of my attempts to sound German words.
I was determined to try again
