That is why, instead of reading simple German stories, or listening to German tapes, or studying irregular verb conjugations, I spent the days before my departure from Poughkeepsie packing up my dorm room and constructing a homemade travel journal from scratch—like a veritable angst-ridden MacGyver—out of a cardboard box, an old pillowcase, rubber cement, thirty sheets of leftover printer paper, and the sewing kit my mom had insisted I bring along to college in case any of my trousers of choice (men’s wide-wale cords four sizes too big) sprung a leak. I decorated the cover with a curlicued EUROPE ’95 and an artistically rendered ankh, before tucking it safely into my navy-blue JanSport backpack, right on top of my stupid pouch of Drum tobacco (I’d recently started smoking roll-your-own cigarettes, just like that excellent role model, John Travolta in Pulp Fiction), and my hulking “compact” German-English dictionary, which I’d won as a prize for being the year’s top-achieving freshman.
After stuffing the contents of my incense-reeking dorm room into a storage trunk for the summer, I parted my fluorescent-yellow hair—recently shorn into a scraggly pixie and bleached in the dorm bathroom—and fastened it down with two little-girl’s plastic barrettes. I lugged my bulging suitcases onto a Metro-North train to Grand Central, then a bus to JFK, where I disembarked breathlessly at the international terminal for the first time in my life. At the gate, I made out the silver-gray Peter Tork coif of Herr Neudorf, the jovial seventy-two-year-old from Bamberg who had been heading up the Münster program since shortly after the erection of the Berlin Wall.
“Oh, Webecca!” he said in his accent as thick as the Black Forest. “I can tell you’ve been up to NO good! NO good! I call your muzzah, and I tell her EVEWY-SINK! Come, come. Evewy-one else is alweady awwived!”
It turned out Herr Neudorf’s charms were universal, for he’d secured for our group an out-of-use first-class lounge while we waited. He led me in and motioned for me to take my place in the circle of young people already seated on the floor. (You can always locate the group of American college students at any international gate in the world, for they will be the ones sitting in a circle on the floor.)
I recognized Anneke, the Dutch girl with the milky-white skin and ethereal smile who sat next to me in Frau von der Haide’s class. I waved, and she scooted over to make room for me. “We’re going to be roommates at the youth hostel in Cologne!” she said.
“Is it going to be weird for you to change planes in Amsterdam and not stop?” I asked.
“A little,” she said, “but it’s a great airport. You’ll like Schiphol.” She pronounced it SCKGGGGCKHIP-pl, which I surmised was the correct way to do so.
“German is going to be so easy for you,” I said. “I mean, isn’t it pretty much just Dutch but meaner?”
“That’s a sweeping generalization, isn’t it?” said the guy sitting on the other side of me, a petite but elegant-looking hippie leaning against an army duffel and a clarinet case. He’d been in Frau von der Haide’s class, too, but he’d sat on the other side of the room.
“Oh, hey, Fernando,” I said.
“You can call me Freddie,” he said. “Frau von der Haide called me ‘Fernando’ on the first day of class, and it sounded so nice in her accent I never wanted to correct her.” It was true; even the way she said Schlumpf (Smurf) sounded charming. (Die Schlümpfe, huge in Germany, was originally a Belgian cartoon, which in retrospect makes a tremendous amount of sense.)
Just then, another latecomer ambled in—a handsome Korean kid wearing a baseball cap that looked like it hadn’t been washed since the 1986 Mets won the World Series. Freddie turned to greet him. “What’s up, Justin?” he asked. “You ready for a valuable immersion experience in German language, history, literature, and culture?”
“I’m ready for a nap on the plane.”
That wasn’t a bad idea, of course—but who could indulge in such trivialities as sleep on her very first ride on a 747, where the towering blond flight attendants changed outfits in the middle of the night, and they served dinner and then breakfast, both of which were somewhat edible? If I napped, I might miss the free white wine, or a hot towel, or the end of Disclosure, the movie where Demi Moore sexually harasses Michael Douglas, which KLM Royal Dutch Airlines played in its uncensored entirety. By the time we disembarked on the other side of the Atlantic, I felt like my teeth were growing hair, and due to sheer exhaustion I almost keeled over and fell out of my seat into the aisle of the much smaller plane that flew us from Amsterdam to Düsseldorf, but I could sleep for all of 1996. Now was the time to see if I could do some of that magic “immersion” and get myself fluent before the bus docked in Cologne, our first stop in the whirlwind two-week bus tour that was to serve as a general introduction to all things Teutonic.
I mean, I’d definitely been practicing my German. Or at any rate, I’d continued to be the best student in my German 101 class. Every test, quiz, and one-page “mini-essay” (about such prescient, intellectual topics as whether I owned a cassette player—I did!) had come back scrawled with As. There had never been a class-time exercise that I had not been able to master. So although I had never so much as read a single sentence of Goethe, Mann, or even the great unassailable Kafka in the original—nor had I ever had a single conversation with a German, other than the beloved and overly enunciative Frau von der Haide—as far as I was concerned, I was pretty much a native speaker, especially given that anything I didn’t already know I would acquire through magic.
This is not what happened. What happened is that I spent the next two weeks speaking very loud English on the bus and making a general Arsch out of myself on the few occasions I had to speak to an actual German. This wasn’t magic at all. It was, like, hard! The thing is, Frau von der Haide was still right. German’s not a categorically difficult language. (Really, check the five-point scale of difficult languages for native speakers of English. Spanish and French are ones; German ranks a two; the fives include Mandarin, Arabic, and Korean.) And yet, German’s ease comparative to Farsi and Uzbek (both fours) notwithstanding, the dulcet vernacular of Nietzsche and Wagner has the undeniable characteristic of sounding mean and nasty to the untrained ear, and of requiring a near-total grasp of some voluminous grammar conventions to communicate even simple concepts. This can make it seem hard when everyone around you is talking at Autobahn speed, and you have no idea what they’re saying, but it sounds like they might be ordering you to murder a kitten, immediately.
To say in German something as banal as “I live in the red house,” you have to use the dative case, which gives special endings to the words for “the” (das becomes dem) and “red” (rot becomes roten, unless you take away the “the,” in which case it becomes rotem, which in and of itself is enough to send most reasonable English-speakers screaming away, rot in the face). If you use the wrong word ending, the person you’re addressing may think that a red house lives in you, or that you are trying to be a red house, or that you are pondering both your own existence and that of red houses in general. At the very least, it will be abundantly clear that you are suffering from some sort of acute intellectual malady, one that can only be cured by your interlocutor switching into heavily accented, questionably ordered English (“Are you not meaning that you instead to school will go?”).
So instead of magic, this is what happened during my first week in Germany after one year’s worth of study, all of which took place in a heavily controlled environment, requiring only the regurgitation of a finite set of (TOTALLY USELESS) vocabulary words, recited on cue and only after substantial inner-monologue rehearsal, all with the context of less-apt classmates fucking it up spectacularly to make me look like a genius by comparison. The first time I attempted to utter a full sentence to an actual German in her actual native land was on the day our group landed in Düsseldorf and then drove to Cologne. I needed to inform the tiny-spectacled receptionist at the Cologne Youth Hostel—where the door handles looked like toilet flushes and the toilet flushes looked like door handles; where the first floor was actually the second floor and sixteen-year-olds could get beer at reception—that my fold-up bunk bed was stuck in its “up” position, and thus locked to the wall.
I broke out in a cold sweat despite the day’s heavy, almost tropical warmth (air-conditioning, or Klimaanlage, is dismissed by most Germans as an indiscriminate typhus factory). I shuffled down the stairs and repeated in my head, over and over, the most accurate description of my situation that I could muster: Mein Bett ist geschlossen, a sentence that literally means “my bed is closed,” but whose erroneous use of “is,” rather than the (INCOMPREHENSIBLE) German passive voice, conveys a more permanent, existential, perhaps sensual state, rather than the bed’s actual state of being temporarily lodged vertically; and, furthermore, whose use of “my” conveys one’s permanent, actually owned bed, rather than one’s transient accommodations in a youth hostel. A more accurate rendering of the state of affairs would have been Das Bett in Zimmer 405 geht nicht auf (“The bed in room 405 won’t open”), which at the time I could not have come up with if I’d had two months. So, “my bed is closed” would have to do, and I repeated it over and again in my head, in Frau von der Haide’s effortless, melodic accent: Mein Bett ist geschlossen, Mein Bett ist geschlossen, Mein Bett ist geschlossen.
I tiptoed to the front desk, where the back of the receptionist’s spiky blond head was currently turned to me as she made a harried intercom announcement in fluent French, for the benefit of the chain-smoking Francophone schoolchildren currently sharing the hostel with us.
The word for excuse me in German, Entschuldigung (literally, “apology”), is long and difficult enough that a native speaker can tell from its first syllable just what kind of rube she is dealing with—especially given that there exists some sort of physiological conspiracy in my throat in which it knows, instinctively, that I’m attempting to communicate in a foreign tongue and thus at the exact moment I attempt a word, fills with phlegm. So, despite—or perhaps because of—my intense staircase journey of rehearsal, what first came out to the German receptionist was ENTSCHBLURGHUNK, followed by a coughing fit. (It did get her attention, and so was a successful utterance according to today’s more progressive language-pedagogy approaches.) Throat half-cleared, I then managed to eke out Mein Bett ist geschlossen, heavily Americanized and utterly without context, which resulted in the first of what would, in my life, be hundreds—thousands—of quizzical German what in the ever-loving fuck just happened here looks.
Unlike the Germans I’d meet who would immediately and sanctimoniously switch to English without prompting, however, this receptionist was patient—knowing, as she did, that my group was at least trying, unlike those degenerate French enfants. So she nodded with increasing amounts of comprehension as I sputtered out the word Wand (“wall”) and then made what I hoped was the universal hand gesture for verticality; she then managed to extract my room number and informed me that her colleague would be right on it. And, bless her spiky little soul, she did this all based on my effectively proclaiming to her, unprompted, that the bed I owned back at home was shut like a door.
So, while it was possible to be understood in German even if I didn’t speak it well, not everyone was patient enough to allow that to happen. This is understandable, given that rather than a week’s worth of magic, it takes years of protracted study and immersion to develop what the Germans Germanically call Sprachgefühl, or a “feeling” for what “belongs” to a certain linguistic situation—such as when a bed is actually yours, rather than simply located in a room in which you’re staying. What’s more, two seconds spent thinking about whether that bed is in motion toward the wall or stationary against it (and thus whether to use the dative case), and your conversation partner has (patient hostel receptionists aside) already gotten bored and started yelling at you for buttering your bread incorrectly.
Once the receptionist’s colleague had been dispatched to unlock my bed, I resisted the urge to collapse into it and instead embarked on a series of wholly banal activities that, given that they were banal things happening in Germany, took on monumental significance: I boarded my first S-Bahn, short for Schnellbahn, or “fast train,” the commuter rail that links the bucolic towns that surround almost every major German city with the center. (The Jugendgästehaus Köln was located, as most youth hostels are, far from anywhere anyone could get up to any sort of good trouble.) I learned the hard way that the doors of a German train do not open automatically at every stop; rather, you have to push the giant flashing button, one that says, coincidentally, PUSH HERE TO GET OUT. (Even in thwarting me, the Germans were unassailably efficient.)
I walked down my first certifiably old street (“Julius Caesar twod on these cobblestones!” said Herr Neudorf). I saw my first Gothic cathedral close up—the staggering Kölner Dom, which took over six hundred years to build, measures 134,000 square feet, and was pretty much the only part of Cologne left standing after the Allied bombing. I saw my first German street signs (the font, bold and sans-serif, was so precise!), my first German traffic light (so stern! No wonder Germans don’t jaywalk), my first German trees (so erect!), my first German German people, from a safe distance away (please don’t say anything to me, please please please). And, most important of all, I sat my corduroy-clad ass on a splintering wooden seat in my very first German Biergarten, and ordered and consumed my very first legal beer. Frau von der Haide had explained to us that every region in Germany has a local specialty, and Cologne’s is the Kölsch, which Herr Neudorf took great pains to tell us was klein, aber stark (“small, but strong”). I didn’t see why we needed a warning—just because I hadn’t slept in thirty hours and was too chickenshit to order any food, and those teeny tiny “strong” beers cost two deutsche marks each, which, I couldn’t help but notice, was actually less than it cost to buy a thimble-sized glass of room-temperature mineral water. Halfway through my second Kölsch, I chanced a look up at the sky and almost fell backward off the bench.
“Vorsicht, Webecca!” said Herr Neudorf. “Klein, aber stark.”
“The stars here!” I said. “They’re brighter than they are at home. I swear they are.”
“Aber auf Deutsch, Webecca!”
“Die … Sterne? Hier?”
“Ja…”
“Sind … um, SEHR, uh, stark. Starker. Stärker?”
“Gut! Aber das ist das Bier, Webecca. Das Bier. The beer is stwong as well!”
My inaugural entry into my artisanal travel journal that night, in overly careful penmanship that matched the affected prose:
25.05.95 [I’d already adopted the German backward dating system.]
Köln.
This room is small and odd, but adequate. I am rooming with Anneke, who is a delight as always. I do believe the two of us will be great friends. Also befriended Freddie, the earnest Peruvian guy with the goatee from the other side of the room in v.d.H class, and Justin, who was supposed to graduate this year and is doing some experiment where he doesn’t wash his hair for a month. Ordered beer in German; did passable job. May take a few more weeks before I am fluent, though.
Freddie had to pee and so he went into a bar called Zippys, which turned out to have a clientele consisting only of gay men over 60. Köln is center of German gay culture, and Freddie could have gotten a lot of free drinks, but he didn’t want to give anyone the wrong impression because he is straight; already making moves on this very cute tiny little girl from another college who speaks way better German than all of us; didn’t get her name.
Tonight I saw the Dom. Latticework spires against the darkening sky, lit up green. Bats flying around. Understand, finally, why some people believe in God.
What I didn’t commit to posterity was that so moved by the Dom’s sheer immensity and intricacy had I been that I laid out fifty pfennigs for a votive candle—which, like the other thousands of Catholic pilgrims who come there to marvel and pray, I was supposed to light for someone, but which instead I slipped into my backpack as a very cheap souvenir, unsure whether that counted as a mortal or venial sin.
And then, religious contraband stowed safely in my JanSport, I was off on a two-week crisscrossing expedition through the Federal Republic, employing what all ethnographers would agree is the best form of cultural immersion: fourteen days sequestered on a tour bus with a bunch of other Anglophones, taking heavily curated tours of churches and museums, given either in English or in halting, gesticulation-heavy beginner’s German. The first two weeks in a new country are normally when you get out all of your most significant cross-cultural faux pas, which then either devolve into permanent faction or resolve themselves in mutual enrichment and understanding. There is, however, little opportunity for culture clash when the new culture can’t puncture the rarefied bubble of American eighteen-to-twenty-one-year-olds with similar interests, who dip in and out of tourist attractions at predictable intervals and never go anywhere without each other. Here’s a baroque monastery! Here’s another one! Put on these special slippers so you don’t blemish the five-hundred-year-old floorboards! This is a painting by Caspar David Friedrich! Martin Luther preached a sermon here! These two castles built on opposite sides of the Rhine were occupied by warring brothers who shot at each other all day long! The bus tour was beautiful, and exciting, and provided a tremendous amount of enrichment, by which (as Dave Barry would say) I mean beer. But it also felt like watching 3-D television.
