Die Durhaemmer

When I first started walking with greater intention (absichtswandern?) back in 2021, one of the motivations was that those trans-continental trails I wanted to traverse weren't going to hike themselves. Turns out I was thinking about trans-continental trails on the wrong continent, but whatevs. 

As S approaches retirement and we contemplate spending more months every year in Germany, I realized that my German language skills weren't going to improve themselves. My German is adequate, but not great, and if I'm going to have any kind of social or work life in Germany, it behooves me to be better than adequate.

Thus was born Die Durhaemmer, a German-language review club. The name sorta means The Durhamites--or The Major-Key Hammers. We're using a free online textbook and reviewing one unit or so per week. Participation varies, but we're hobbling along with a core group of attendees after six months, and I continue to meet new and interesting people connected by a shared language interest.

Alongside Die Durhaemmer, I've started using an app called Seedlang, which was created by the same folks who appear in many of the videos used by the online textbook. They have enough of a sense of humor and offer enough grammar explication that I paid for a year's subscription, and I've been refreshing and newly learning swaths of useful vocabulary. The app incorporates enthusiastic verbal reinforcement from its makers: every time you finish an exercise, someone pops onto the screen and says something like "way to go!"--which is how I learned Du bist der Hammer! means "You're da bomb!" So now we have a third meaning for Die Durhaemmer.

I'm looking forward to inserting some of my new vocab into conversations this summer, such as:

Die Fortbewegungsmittel (pl. -) - means of transportation. Same number of syllables as in English. Vroom vroom!

Die Bedienungsanleitung (pl. -en) - service manual. Why use two words when you can just use one?

Der Tacho (pl. -s) - speedometer. How have I gotten by in Germany for the past 36 years without knowing the word speedometer? Plus it sounds like a mix between Taco and Tycho, like Tycho Brahe the astronomer, which makes it fun to say.

My favorite new word so far is Die Gleichung. Gleich means "same." Equations express equivalences, things that are the quantitatively the same on both sides of the equals sign. The word "equation" in English offers a similar conceptual self-awareness as die Gleichung. In fact, there's a shared conceptual origin in both languages, even if the words gleich and "equal" themselves don't share any etymological roots. I find these sorts of connections delightful.   

My current favorite new sentence, courtesy of the app: Was ist die schnellste Geschwindigkeit, die du je gafahren bist? ("What's the fastest speed you've ever driven?") So many useful grammatical tidbits and reminders to cull from that, plus a casual way to segue into using the word Tacho.

Fun facts are rapidly accruing, like why is it das Wort (the word) but die Antwort (the answer), when gender is usually determined by the gender of the final root word (wort)? The interwebs say it's because the formerly neuter noun Antwort hung around so frequently with the feminine noun die Frage (the question), that users gradually made Antwort feminine.

Speaking of linguistic evolution, here's a fun fact about many weak masculine nouns (which I love--masculine nouns are the only ones that can be weak, and whatever their weakness is causes them to add an -n to the end when they're in any case but nominative, because who knows why). Many weak nouns, such as der Friede (peace), are becoming permanently -n-ed (-n-ified?): speakers often now use der Frieden instead of der Friede when peace is the subject. Cool.

I learned at last week's Durhaemmer meeting that one linguistic evolution is the gradual abandonment of the genitive case, which apparently is increasingly circumvented using von (of) with the dative case. Genitive is generally used to indicate a noun that is of something, e.g. "of good courage" in "Sei gutes Muts" ("Be of good courage"--thanks, Der Tod und das Maedchen!), or "the pleasure of the miller" in "Das Wandern ist des Mullers Lust" ("Hiking is the pleasure of the miller"--thanks, Die Schoene Muellerin!). As enthusiastic as I am about linguistic shifts, this one makes me a little sad, as one of my motivations for starting Die Durhaemmer was to correctly deploy the genitive case. We won't even get to it until the free German 102 online textbook, but here it is, already dying. Dang. And yet, to paraphrase the dying John Adams' last words ("Jefferson still lives"), at least we still have the dative. (Dative is the to/for case--e.g. Ich gebe dem Hund den Ball--"I give to the dative dog the accusative ball"). We won't get to dative until the next textbook either, but Die Durhaemmer are a precocious lot, and we're already dativing.

Gentle reader, as you can tell from this post (if you've stuck with it this far), German is giving me as intellectually vast a rabbit hole as I've found physically with walking. The immediate impact is that I speak German a tad more precisely but much more slowly (click click click goes my brain). Looking forward to speeding things up and putting refreshed skills to good use this summer.

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Update: I don't think E has read this post, but he happened to email a long word yesterday that he came across in his research: das Fernwasserleitungsnetz (long distance water distribution network).

Our annual trek

I'm spending the next two weeks back at my ur-blog. Carly is traveling with us this time. (For those who enjoy such things, we have traveled with chickens before.)

We saw a persistent sundog as we approached Chicago O'Hare

O'Hare is celebrating 100 seasons of the Chicago Bears

 

One of the most entertaining parts of O'Hare is the tunnel to Terminal C.

Compound cookies

Want to make Lebkuchen (a traditional German Christmas cookie*)? You need look no further for a recipe than in the classic Bayerisches Kochbuch (Bavarian Cookbook).

We have two copies: to the right, the 18th edition, published in 1938 in Fraktur (the same font as the cover text). The font, coupled with hindsight, makes the pre-war national pride in the introduction rather chilling: to paraphrase, "at the frontline stands the German Woman from the countryside and from the town, securing the national diet and health of the Volk."

Our other copy is the 54th edition, published in 1992 in assorted Courier-ish fonts. National pride has been replaced with more practical advice on the nutritive content and chemical behavior of common ingredients.

You might observe the stylish celebration of white-colored foods on the cover of the 1992 edition: white pork roast, white Knoedel (dumplings), white sauer Kraut (cabbage), and off-white beer foam. It's permissible to spruce up white food with the occasional ornamental vegetable, but unless you want people to eat the decorations, keep the color to a minimum with only a few parsley leaves and a single tomato wedge. Radishes, by the way, are especially useful, because they're white on the inside, so they match the rest of the food after you bite past the ornamental red skin.

But back to Lebkuchen.

When you look up a recipe in the index, you must draw on all your knowledge of the precise German language. Under Lebkuchen, you will find a mere three recipes: Lebkuchen --feine (fine), --mit Kunsthonig (with artificial syrup), and --Weisse (white). Looking for hazelnut Lebkuchen? Well, that's a compound noun, so you have to look under H for Haselnusslebkuchen. Look under E for Elisenlebkuchen, under G for Gewuertzlebkuchen, and under S for Schokoladenlebkuchen. What the heck, scan the whole index lest you miss some other variety.

I made Elisenlebkuchen I. Art (Elisenlebkuchen, version I). They're pretty tasty and would be even better if they could age in a closed container with some dried apples for a month or two. I messed up some of the measurements, so the Lebkuchen dough ran off the Bakoblaten (communion wafer-like rice-flour disks that keep the dough from cementing itself to the baking sheet). Fortunately, I had a silicone baking sheet, so I didn't need to chisel anything off the pan.

For more information on German baking, see this previous discussion on my Wadlstrumpf blog. Here, I'll simply point out the irony of recipes that tell you to weigh out ingredients in grams (a system supposedly more precise than American cup measures) and then to "bake slowly at, oh, I dunno, 150-160^oC, until done."

The Elisenlebkuchen I. Art recipe follows the footnote.

*At dinner last night, as I was talking about the cookies still in the oven, E kept asking excitedly, "what cookies? What cookies are you talking about?" And I kept saying, "what cookies do you think I'm talking about? Think." And E would say again, "you made cookies? What kind of cookies did you make?"--even though he was with me when I was making the Lebkuchen. "Dude: think!" I said. S kindly intervened and explained to E, "Mama calls Lebkuchen 'cookies.'" "Ohh!," said my son with sudden wise understanding. That just goes to show how much better E has internalized German than I have. The -kuchen part of Lebkuchen literally means cake, although no American would ever conceive of Lebkuchen that way. Once again, the perennial issue of cultural concepts for assorted foods rears its head: just as Germans have no mental file cabinet for concepts like pie, Americans have no data storage space that allows a Lebkuchen to be anything but a cookie.

To confirm this claim, I nonchalantly said to S, as he walked by just now, "so would you call Lebkuchen 'cookies'?" and he frowned and said unequivocally, "no. Cookies are Plaetzchen; Lebkuchen are Lebkuchen." There ya go.

Elisenlebkuchen, version I

Beat together until thick and foamy:

5 eggs
500 g sugar

Add:

2 tsp ground cinnamon
3/4 tsp ground cloves
1 knife tip ground cardamom
1 knife tip ground mace (I didn't use any)
Peel from 2 lemons, juice from 1/2 lemon

Whap up in food processor:

100 g candied lemon peel (I used a 113 g container)
100 g candied orange peel (ditto)

Add to batter. Shell and then whap up in food processor:

500 (650) unshelled almonds or half almonds, half nuts. (Seriously? Like I'm going to count and shell 500-650 almonds? The authors provided no explanation of the parenthetical 650. I assumed they meant 500 g--not enough, which is probably why the dough spread off the Oblaten--and used 454 g toasted almonds and guesstimated an additional 150 g toasted hazelnuts.)

Add nuts to batter. Spoon onto Oblaten (you can skip this if you have a silicone baking sheet. Trust me, butter alone on a baking sheet will not do the job. The dough is like cement.) In theory, let sit for a hour. (I skipped that.) Bake slowly at, oh, I dunno, 150-160^oC, until done. (How about we say 325^oF for 20-30 minutes.)

Old stomping grounds

Meine Damen und Herren, we're on vacation....

A gift for the Germans

When we lived in Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Wuerttemberg, Germany, last fall, I blogged regularly about our experiences, almost always from the perspective of a stranger in a strange land. There was much to priase: gun control, clean public restrooms, a functioning multi-party political system, bucolic scenery, walkability, public health care, architecture, art. There was much to feel distressed about: the shadow of the Holocaust, alienated teenagers who beat up strangers on subways, neo-Nazis. And there was much to poke fun at: pop music (good news! "Aloha He, Stern der Suedsee," by the group Die Flippers, is back on youtube.com!), the bizarre and remarkable consistency of Brotzeit menus from one Bavarian restaurant to the next, regional dialects, adult men who pretend to be cowboys on their play ranch near IKEA, and people who vacuum their sidewalks in the fall and shovel snow off of them before dawn in the winter.

Today, to show my appreciation for all those quintessentially German experiences, I offer a gift in return: something quintessentially American. Indeed, it has "Made in the USA" written all over it in proud, indelible ink. Into which category--praiseworthy, distressworthy*, pokefunworthy*--will the inquiring German tourist place it?

We have before us, on this Easter eve, Westwood Baptist Church, in nearby Cary, North Carolina. Too busy shopping at Wal-Mart and Starbucks to properly contemplate how Jesus Christ died on the cross for your sins? Thanks to Westwood's Drive-Thru Easter, you can hear and see the Passion from the comfort of your very own air-conditioned SUV! Church members enact six scenes of the season, beginning with Christ's triumphant entrance into Jerusalem and ending with His Resurrection (for which, reports the Raleigh News and Observer, "Jesus' tomb is fashioned out of the church's Dumpster area, a dark sheet, and a toy pool made to look like a boulder").

Germany, of course, has the famous Oberammergau Passion Play, performed at least once a decade over the past 376 years as a way of thanking God for sparing the town from the bubonic plague in 1633. This year's cast numbers around 2,000--about half the population of Oberammergau. But the play lasts five hours, not including a three hour dinner break, and you actually have to get out of your car for it. Plus, all the stores are closed by the time it's over. So inefficient. In the U.S., it's all about convenience. At Westwood, you get to enjoy "almost an instant worship experience," and you're already in position to drive somewhere else as soon as you're done.

*Neither "distressworthy" nor "pokefunworthy" are real words in English, though I'm sure the German language can come up with legitimate one-word translations for both.