Have you ever found yourself wondering: “Man, what is up with German?” Sure, we all have! Well, I’m here to answer that question once and for all.
You see, I was a teenage diplomat. During my heyday in the ’90s, I roamed the wilds of Eastern Europe, haggling out porous treaties and quixotic peace accords like it was more or less my job. Back then, the boundaries between nations moved rapidly and often; I once spent a whole afternoon sprinting after a Serbian border guard with a traffic cone, trying to cross into Bosnia-Herzegovina, as he single-handedly annexed his neighboring country one meter at a time.
One day, I stopped at a Hungarian gas station to use the ladies’ room. When I walked in, everything was fine; when I walked out, I discovered there’d been an uprising. The exit was still sovereign territory, but the coolers were being held by Croatian freedom fighters, and the snack food section had been seized by Austrian insurgents.
I knew if I could make it to the slurpee machine (universally acknowledged as a demilitarized zone), I could vault the Twinkies and make it to the front door—but the poorly mopped no-man’s-land between the Fritos and the Twix bars was swarming with Schwarzenegger’s pissed-off countrymen, armed with knocked-off Chinese AK-47s. My only chance was to show them my diplomatic credentials and convince them I was on their side. There was, however, one minor hitch: apart from the angry shouting of Nazis in the three Indiana Jones movies that exist, I didn’t know a syllable of German.
Thinking quickly, I invented a rudimentary Internet on my Trapper-Keeper. As I searched frantically for some hidden key to the Teutonic tongue, I became increasingly daunted by mountainous stack-words like Streichholzschachtelchen (small Czech matchboxes) and Kraftfahrzeug–Haftpflichtversicherung (motor vehicle liability insurance). I was on the brink of despair when it suddenly hit me like a world-destroying asteroid: these weren’t larger words constructed from smaller words. They were tiny fragments of a vast, universal whole.
Immediately, my quandary was recontextualized. Learning a foreign vocabulary in five to ten minutes can be difficult even at the best of times—but any idiot can learn a single word. Twenty seconds later, I took a deep breath, approached the recently established Austrian frontier, and said German. The whole thing.
When I was done, the insurgents glanced at each other, nodded solemnly, and waved me through. Didn’t even ask to see my papers. Clearly, I was their people. Ich bin ein snack-aisler, motherfuckers!
Ever since then, I’ve been working on a new definitive German-English dictionary. It’s a bit tricky, as we don’t really have a word that translates directly to their entire language, but I remain optimistic. Someday, all of us will know—man—what is up with German. Till then, my friends, buenos noches and arrivederci.
————
Rivka Crowbourne is an aspiring writer, poet, and martial artist who wishes you infinitely well.