Mothertongue Blog

Remember how a young lady from Hagen who refused to shave her armpits entered the charts singing some weird stuff about red balloons? Well, that was in 1984 and Nena has just turned 50. Time for a new German Fräuleinwunder to emerge … and here she is: Ladies and gentlemen, here comes Lena Meyer-Landrut. Lena who? Okay, forget about her last name, she will probably drop that after having shot to international fame. And this will happen, as we all firmly believe in this country, on May 29^th when the Eurovision Song Contest will air.

For the last couple of years, this event that most Germans strangely still call by its French Name “Grand Prix d’Eurovision de la Chanson” (as if anyone ever cared about the French!), has only been interesting to two groups of people.

Firstly, those who have been dead for at least 27 years and secondly those who fancy half-naked Ukranian folk singers dancing clumsily amidst Russian fire-breathers on roller-skates.

Who is interested in watching Latvian presenters dressed to the nines (“Hello Stockholm, I must says that you guys are do a great chob!”) distributing their points to Estonia and Bulgaria? And who wants to watch sad German contestants bound to end up with a total of 3 points (that is, if things are going well). I am convinced that last year’s entry “Alex swings Oscar Sings” was the birth of the new German trend verb “fremdschämen” which means to feel extremely embarrassed about other peoples’ behaviour …

But this year, our nation is holding its breath. The reason is an 18-year-old dark-haired school girl from Hannover, a charming mixture of Björk and Audrey Tautou. She’s so sweet, so natural, so down-to-earth, but without the cheesy bits that being natural, funny and down-to-earth usually entail.

What made her special in the first place was the way she was chosen to represent Germany in the TV show “Unser Star für Oslo”. For the very first time, the audience was able not only to vote for their favourite candidate, but also for the song which the winner would be performing in Oslo. Organized by German comedian and producer Stefan Raab (who took part in the Eurovision Song Contest himself 10 years ago and made it to No 5.), the nation witnessed a kind of alternative TV audition show featuring real people far from the “That is so you!” and “You own the song!” bla bla of numerous other highly polished programmes (just to let you know what is going on in a so-called civilized country: you have Dieter Bohlen, a former member of Modern Talking, heading the jury of the German adaption of “Britain’s got talent” which is bit like Sir Cliff Richard being on the judge panel of a stage diving contest).

With a highly unusual voice and rather understated looks and moves, Lena took the sophisticated pop audience by storm. Her song “Satellite” not only went straight in at No. 1 in the German charts, it was also followed by her other singles “Bee” and “Love me” which were in the Top Ten single charts, a triple success never reached before.

So we are all feeling a bit like we did in the summer of 1998 when the world agreed that Germany would be a great host for the European football cup and when we suddenly had the courage to believe that, hey, we are great people!

So do believe the hype and forget about Nena. Thanks to Lena we can take great pride in our pop culture again. She simply is the most promising cultural representative of our country we have had for decades. Not sure about her armpits, though …

Lena Meyer-Landrut: a charming mixture of Björk and Audrey Tautou

www.lena-meyer-landrut.de |  www.unser-star-fuer-oslo.de

Sabine from Bochum, Germany

How linguistic variations affect where Germans choose to live

Few Germans now say Appel rather than Apfel (apple) or maken instead of machen (to make). The north German dialects that use such variants are mostly dead or dying. But the cultural differences that they reflect still govern behaviour today, says a paper from the Institute for the Study of Labour, in Bonn.

Acting on imperial orders in the 1880s, a linguist called Georg Wenker asked pupils from 45,000 schools across the new Reich to translate standard German sentences into local dialect. The results were used to compile an atlas of linguistic diversity. The new paper shows that Wenker’s dialect regions still define the comfort zones in which Germans prefer to live. When people migrate within Germany, they tend to go to places where dialects resemble those spoken in their home region 120 years ago.

German dialects, formed by geography and political and religious fragmentation, express deep-seated cultural differences. These persist even though borders between petty princedoms are invisible (and often no longer audible). Even small differences count. Swabians share Baden-Württemberg with Badeners. Both spoke Alemannic dialects. But Swabians, who say Haus (house), have a bias against living in the neighbouring old grand duchy, where they say Huus.

That trade is livelier among regions that share a language is well known. The paper’s authors think they are the first to find a similar effect within a single language in one country. They measure migration not trade, because the data are better and cultural factors matter more. The best predictors are still Wenker’s maps. “Even when we don’t speak dialect, the cultural territory is still there,” says Alfred Lameli, one of the authors.

Does this confuse cause and effect? Regions may have similar dialects because earlier generations migrated and their descendants follow suit. To rule this out, the authors looked at the way communist East Germany weakened social links that encourage migration. After unification, they found, the old migration patterns came back, suggesting that migrants respond to cultural factors more than to social ties. It seems that neither television, nor the autobahn, nor even the Kaiser, has created a single country in Germany.

Mar 18th 2010 | BERLIN | From The Economist

According to a survey by the German government, over 25 per cent of German employers admit to spying on job applicants on the Internet. Young people in particular are all too careless when revealing too much information about themselves on social networks such as Facebook and MySpace. Apparently, applicants are not invited for an interview if inappropriate remarks or photos are found online.

Okay, no employer wants their staff to be racist or to have a criminal record. But it’s unlikely they’d ever discover this information by looking on the net. It’s frightening that recruiters no longer seem to trust their own social skills by not inviting someone for an interview just because they polished off a bucket of sangria with a couple of mates on a holiday in Mallorca 17 years ago. Trying to find this one snapshot could take hours, whereas any trained interviewer should be able to find out after five minutes of one-to-one if someone is a complete idiot or not.

Could it be that the current disastrous situation for the German job market is partly down to human resources wanting to know before inviting web designer Marlene, 28, well-trained and open-minded (as she puts it), for an interview, how she did in the Mariah Carey look-alike contest in 1997?

Do you honestly believe that companies are doing the best they can to overcome the ongoing economic crisis if managers find the time to check if Martin, 31 from Essen, an experienced and enthusiastic engineer, recommends the book “Chat-up lines in 300 languages” in his Amazon list of favourite books?

Dear would-be detectives and amateur spies in German offices, remember what David Brent aka Ricky Gervais said in the brilliant mockumentary “The Office”: “Those of you who think they know everything are annoying to those of us who do.”

The good thing about the new inquisitiveness in German offices is that frustrated job-seekers should relax: if you are wondering why you are never invited for a job interview, don’t worry, this has nothing to do with your qualifications. Just blame it on the fact that you were chairman of a David Hasselhoff fan club in 1985.

Sabine from Bochum, Germany

What would you do if the end of the world was scheduled for tomorrow at 11.30 a.m? Apocalyptic visions have always fascinated mankind, never before has a date in history been so significant to so many cultures and religions. Now the common fear is fuelled by “2012”, the blockbuster by German director Roland Emmerich which was launched in November last year. Having risen to fame with “Independence Day” and “Godzilla”, the “master of disaster” has now completed his magnum opus with visual effects to shake your senses: blow-ups and bloodbaths, earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis, even whole continents falling apart. A breathless John Cusack finds himself in a sick world in which only those who pay can escape. The end leaves everyone who claimed to have “been there” or “done that” devastated.

However, all those stars, has-beens and would-bes attending the premiere night recovered all too quickly from the shock, and the question of all questions no longer concerned the end of mankind, but another deeply human fear which is “Is my hair okay?” What a relief that comedian Oliver Kalkofe, renowned for his hilarious parodies of the vanity fair that is German television, was there to comment on the last day of his existence: “Contrary to most other people who spend their lives fearing the future, I would certainly not panic,” says Kalkofe. “I’d be spending a Sunday watching all this crap on commercial television. And then I’d say to myself: Okay, it’s the end of the world. And we deserve it.”

Sabine from Germany

The German elections are less than two months away, and in times like these, with a global economic crisis, increasing unemployment and swine flu, the public are really looking to politicians for answers. Until recently, however, people have been pretty unimpressed with what the potential candidates have had to say and have been rapidly losing interest. That is, until one man showed up and changed it all.

Horst Schlaemmer is a small town journalist who decided to run for election. He wants to become Bundeskanzler (head of the German federal government). Horst Schlaemmer is the alter ego of German comedian (yes, they do exist!) Hape Kerkeling who appeared successfully in an award-winning campaign for VW. His first press conference was broadcasted live on all major news channels: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWD_gf3wkkE

And it looks like his campaign is unstoppable. According to latest polls, 18 per cent of the people think it’s actually for real and want to vote for him. Surely this should make the other candidates question their own approach …

Daniel from Hamburg, Germany

As a measure to fight the worldwide economic crisis and to support local car manufacturers, the German government introduced a scrapping premium of EUR 2,500 for cars older than 9 years.

While this has led to a short term increase in car sales, it has also had (or will have) a number of negative side effects that politicians failed to see:

1. Independent researchers and industry experts predict a dramatic slump in car sales for 2010 when the premium programme will finish, with the risk of numerous bankruptcies among franchised dealers.
2. It has become virtually impossible to find cheap second-hand cars in Germany, making life hard for low-income families, students etc.
3. Second-hand car exports from Germany to Africa are at a record low, opening up this highly interesting market for other economies.
4. Workshops specialising in the maintenance of older vehicles are losing business.
5. Spare parts manufacturers are facing hard times, not only because of the dramatically reduced number of old cars on the road, but also due to an oversupply of second-hand spares from scrapped cars.
6. Foreign brands (mostly French and Japanese) managed to secure more than 50 per cent of all premium-related car sales.

Update on 08/08/09:

German industry experts estimate that more than 50,000 cars that should have been scrapped were illegally shipped to Third World countries instead.

Knowing the mentality of scrapyard owners and second hand car dealers, it was so painfully obvious that this kind of thing would happen, but German politicians can be so naive and gullible at times, it is unbelievable… Some of them even lose their armoured S Class Mercedes while holidaying in Spain…

Jochen from Bremen, Germany