Angela Dunn Weblog: An Observer Abroad

Normally I couldn’t give a hoot for soccer, or football. Until there is a world or now European Championship. Now I devour the sports’ section of the local papers every day, scrounging for gossip about the players, looking for analysis and predictions about the outcome of future games, opinions about outstanding players and disappointing ones. About new stars and sudden has-beens.  I don’t actually watch all the games because if you have been following this blog you will know that we don’t have a TV. Thus actually watching a game means finagling an invite to a friend’s house or going to a public viewing event and paying two euros to follow on a huge screen.  Luckily we were invited to a friend’s house last week when Germany scored two beautiful goals in the first 25 minutes in a cliffhanger of a match against Portugal that reasserted the German team’s right to hope for more. I do love a hero. And the Germans came up with a couple of heros that night. The Germans, of course, are never the liebling of other nations. We all moan for the Brazilians at the World Cup - they play such acrobatic and quick soccer - while the Germans typically plod forward, set up their combinations, and get on with it.

Soccer is all around. Flags fly from cars and windows - mostly German, but also Turkish, French, Spanish, Italian, Croatian. In offices and staffrooms, petty betting takes place. In schools, the children wear the jerseys of their favorite teams. Last week I wrote a note to my son’s fourth grade teacher who had been assigning merciless amounts of homework. I gently reminded her that when my other son was in fourth grade, the class didn’t get homework when the home team played. Even the employees in the production facilities at the Daimler plant in Stuttgart get the evening off on Wednesday when Germany meets Turkey in the semi-final.

At my local Italian grocer’s the conversation was ripe with speculation on Saturday. Domenico - who must be crying a river since last night when Italy was kicked out in a penalty shoot-out by underdog Spain - says there will be trouble in Germany, no matter whether Turkey or Germany emerges the winner. Certainly there will be celebrations. The Turkish form the largest ethnic minority in Germany, and the team’s tremendous success at the EM has been accompanied by an outpouring of pride. The papers warn not to underestimate the Turkish team. And unlike Domenico, some reporters believe that the match could actually lead to better understanding between the Turkish population in Germany, and the Germans. Es bleibt spannend!

The first two words of German I learned are telling. Either about the person I am, or the person who taught me the language. Or both. Those words were “schön” (beautiful) and “lustig” (funny). We were living in China at that time. My husband - and teacher - was a lecturer of German to students at the Foreign Languages Institute in Beijing. I remember visiting an art exhibition in Beijing with them, and stopping before every painting, I would utter either “schön” or “lustig.” The weird thing was, it worked. No one was the wiser.

Actually I brought two other words to the relationship, but neither was very helpful in communicating on a daily basis. One I had learned as a teenager from the TV series “Hogan’s Heroes”. “Blitzkrieg” was not a word that made small talk with Germans easy. My other word - “Oberschenkel” (thigh) might have gotten me further - faster-, but instead my husband and I started small.

He taught me all the parts of the body, one by one, and I repeated them one by one: Augen (eyes ), Nase (nose ), Mund (mouth ), Schulter (shoulders) and so on, down the line. When people ask how I learned German, I tell them “pillow talk”.

I have been gathering evidence in my own unscientific and amateurish way that the Germans have a spiritual attachment to their forests, and I believe I have a strong and emotional case for this claim. Yesterday morning I met my girlfriends for our Sunday morning power walk in our local mini forest.  Martina, at the head of the group, greeted the forest with a loud “Hello trees, here we come!” By the time we were on the home stretch an hour later, Doris and Heidi were in a deep discussion about the scents of different trees. “Warm pines,” smiled Heidi with a look of deep satisfaction on her face, ”in southern France.” Doris, who was brought up in the Black Forest, claimed that it has a deep, dark scent, worthy of its name. 

On the weekend, in the company of two of our best and oldest friends, I asked how many poems they could think of off the top of their heads with “der Wald” as a theme. They immediately mentioned Eichendorff and Goethe. And the first time I visited Germany, my hosts took me for a walk in the woods, which was criss-crossed with neat paths. In Canada my husband was always befuddled by the forests. Because there are no foot paths, no signposts. There is a reason we refer to it as “the bush”. Unless they are national or provincial parks, the Canadian forests are wild and forbidding for people on foot who are not equipped to fight mosquitos, underbrush, bears and poison ivy. Not that the German forests are tame, but they are civilized, welcoming, signposted, and open to the public.

Last week in Berlin at SAPPHIRE, I enjoyed the conversations I had with slightly unorthodox SAP customers like Ecotricity, an alternative energy company started by an ex-hippie who once powered all the mobile phones for the stage crew at the Glastonbury festival with wind energy. Ecotricity was a finalist in the SAP Quality Awards, an event at which I also had the good fortune to speak to the folks from the Spanish arm of Médecins Sans Frontières. The three Spanish members of their project team were the only presenters that day not wearing suits and ties. In fact, the black t-shirt that Ricardo wore sported such a brutally honest slogan that I had to ask him about it. “I am HIV positive,” it read. He explained that he worked on an awareness campaign in the border area between Uganda and Kenya, where there is a huge migrant population and where entire villages are wiped out by AIDS. “There are only children and grandparents,” he said. The interesting thing about both of these customers is that while they remain true to their values, of providing clean energy (Ecotricity) and saving lives (MSF), they want to improve and scale their business with SAP software. Hats off to them.

But then there was Berlin. Coming as I do from the provincial nest of Heidelberg, where the students are clean and shaven and study law or economics, and where my neighbors pluck the errant grass growing between the bricks in their driveways and terraces, I could finally visualize what the Germans mean by one of their most spot-on words - “spießig” - or white-bread and middle-class.

So I took advantage of being in a city where I have friends and stayed out late. Instead of going to the evening event on the program (the Zucchero concert on the last night of SAPPHIRE, explained to a visiting colleague as “light Italo-pop” by our PR guy), I went to Acud, a divey joint in Berlin-Mitte where my dear friend and fellow Canadian expatriate Robin Draganic plays a regular gig as bassist in a saxaphone trio. I was impressed at how well he and the drummer - whose bread and butter job is at the Friedrichspalast (a music hall and Berlin institution) - communicated with their instruments.  Instead of playing standards, they play their own compositions. Robin also introduced me to the Bebop Bar in Kreuzberg where he hosts a session every Sunday night. There is an astonishing amount of talent in Berlin and a lot of it shows up to play at the Bebop - twenty-year-old sax players, keyboard artists, singers, and drummers.

There is nothing spießig about Berlin. Quite the opposite. 20% unemployment. Before the wall came down it was always a safe haven for draft dodgers. This is the Germany I imagined before I came here - the one populated by Fassbinder characters in leather, artists all.

Mighty relieved I was when a tech blogger at SAPPHIRE told me that the first three months of his blogging experience were horrible. It took him three months to realize the difference between journalism and blogging - the latter in his words being “informed opinion.” My three months are not yet up but I have neglected my poor weblog sadly. I find there are very private things that I want to express in words, but not here. Which might lead me back to a diary, or to fiction writing. And then there are aspects of my job that I want to discuss here (for example, frustration with the performance feedback culture), but am afraid these will break our rules of conduct and our bloggers’s code. Yet that would be informed opinion. I welcome informed opinion on this quandry.

But this week I had an upskilled moment of my own. I received an e-mail from an American colleague in which she used the word “asks” as a noun: “Thanks to everyone for getting back to me on the asks of Bjorn for our upcoming event.” (All names have been changed to protect the innocent).

Only now, after several days, have I discovered that the writer didn’t even mean “needs” as I initially suspected. She means our requests of Bjorn’s time. Our “asks” of him. A friend of mine argues that American English is exciting because it is always alive and changing, is the open source of language - open to influences from music, politics, and now from new media. Of course, he is right. Although purists would reject such words out of hand, corporate-speak, as ugly as it can be, is always evolving and often exciting.