I am (almost) a real German student

I am currently choosing classes for my upcoming semester in Tübingen, AND for my upcoming fall semester back at WashU. Crazy, right?! Let’s explore the differences between German and American universities…basically, I will be attending the summer semester in Germany – it will start April 11, and end July 23. Why am I still choosing classes though, with only a month and a half before the semester starts? That’s just how it goes in Germany. Also, there is no central system/website for registering for classes. For seminars, you must contact the professor via email to express your interest in taking their class, and for lectures, you basically just show up. Thus far, I’ve emailed 4 professors about seminars. The one I’m most excited about is “Arthur Schnitzler in the Context of the Wiener Moderne” – love Schnitzler, and a major plus is that we’ll be reading shorter works, dramas and novellas. Slightly terrifying is the fact that the professor wants us to read all 9 works before the semester starts! Here goes…

The other classes I’ve emailed about are “Reality in Realism,” “Dorfgeschichten” (Stories from small towns, roughly translated) and “Drama of the Classical Period.” Hello wonderful German literature. I’ve also inquired about taking a Russian class and received and email saying I’m welcome to do so, and I’ve found around five lectures courses in the history department that I think would be both fascinating and really enhance my understanding of German history/culture/lit/etc. But no, I’m not going to take 10 classes – in Germany, you totally just shop around classes the first week or so, and if you decide you don’t want to take a class anymore you just…stop going. No drop deadline!

So that’s the situation with classes. Until then, I’m just continuing my German language courses (and should be madly reading Schnitzler…).

And now we’ll return to that convenient division between “what I’ve done/what’s happened” and “Bemerkungen” (remarks on Germany).

What I’ve done:

Thursday: Class. Learned a wonderful new grammar construct that allows for nominalization of Nebensetze (subordinate clauses) via use of the preposition “bei.” (for those of you who speak German…Wenn es regnet, gehen wir nicht draußen OR Bei Regen gehen wir nicht draußen.) Super exciting.

Friday: Class. Then dinner with a bunch of people from the Goethe-Institut, organized by our Zivis. I finally met the girl who lives in the dorm with me – she’s Russian and totally fun. Dinner was at an Irish pub (not sure why the Zivis think that is a good cultural experience for all of us people trying to learn German…) and it was totalllllly wack to hear Irish music sung auf Deutsch. Extremely culturally confusing for me. I sat at a table with Asmik (the Russian girl), two Chilean guys, a French kid, and Swiss kid, and an Italian woman. Guess what language we spoke? ENGLISH! So frustrating…everyone’s English is about 100x better than their German (ok, not true, they’re all just wayyy more confident auf Englisch) so I find myself in Germany, wanting to speak German, but with English all around me. The extreme mix of cultures is wonderful, don’t get me wrong, but less than good for my language development.

After that we went to another bar, and then a club. The club was fun but what was most interesting was the insane amount of broken glass on the floor…and when people knocked bottles over and they broke, no one seemed to care. Not sure if that’s a German/European thing, or if we were just somewhere sketchy. I’ll keep you posted on that one.

Saturday: Very chill day, went into the city to get dinner, fun.

Sunday: Also very chill day in which I went to church (I’m really getting down the Mass auf Deutsch, which is super-cool) and the to the “Haus der Geschichte,” a museum about Germany since 1945. I learned to the joy of being dependant on public transportation when I rushed downstairs to catch the S-bahn and saw it pulling away just as I got into the lobby…the next one wouldn’t come for 30 minutes since it was early Sunday morning! Fail. Missed the 10am mass I wanted to go to, went at noon, missed going to the museum with everyone, and ended up just going alone.

Monday: Class with me and only one other student…! Which is just kind of awkward. The other student is a woman from Saudi Arabia, all of our other classmates are from Libya, and she told our teacher she thinks they got bad news this weekend (as Libya is going the Egyptian route). Let’s all keep our fingers crossed for them?

Tuesday (today!): Before class, Asmik and I went to the Poppelsdorfer Schloss (Palace) and walked around the gardens there…big surprise, it was not that exciting as it’s the middle of winter! But it was nice weather and nice to walk around before class. After class (still just me and one other student…) we grabbed dinner with some people from her class: a French guy, a couple from Romania who lives in Paris, and a Dutch guy. And we spoke…English. So sad. I also experienced my first bout of anti-Americanism, as one guy spent a good 10 minutes at the beginning of our dinner explaining to me all the things he hated about America (unhealthy, fattening food was at the top of the list). These criticisms would have been totally fine to express, of course, except he was being very rude and confrontational with me (sorry pal, I don’t run the FDA). Anyways, he went to smoke about halfway through our meal and came back much friendlier, but it was still interesting to experience.

Bermerkungen! Aka the interesting stuff:

1. A lot of stuff on the internet (tv shows, Pandora internet radio, Cleveland’s country radio station, etc) won’t stream outside the US. I am finding ways around this (hellooo country radio from Texas).

2. I’ve purchased three of my books for the Schnitzler class so far – Germany has these little “Reclam” Bücher (books) that have the TINIEST print ever (how you are supposed to annotate them I have no idea) and yellow covers. They’re super-recognizable and I felt SO legit buying them at a bookstore the other day.

3. After a few people on Friday night asked me if I was married with a worried look at my right-hand ring finger, I realized that not everyone wears wedding/engagement rings on their left hand! (The people I alarmed were Chilean, Russian, and German). I turned naturally to Wikipedia and learned that in Germany and Austria, wedding rings are worn on the right hand, leaving me with a bit of a situation: to switch or not to switch? (I wear this ring every day and it only fits on my ring fingers.) My normal rule is don’t go crazy changing myself in an attempt to blend in because 1. I’ll fail and 2. I’m simply not German and usually don’t feel a need to pretend. However I’m not entirely sure I want people to mistake me for married…or do I? Eitherway, I’ve spent the last 48 hours switching it back and forth, and have settled with leaving it on my right hand. It weirds me out less.

4. In class my very first day (not sure why I’m writing about this only now) we learned that in Germany (or at least according to this one teacher), “Herbst ist Herbst und Winter ist Winter” – “fall is fall and winter is winter.” BUT there is both Frühling (spring) and Vorfrühling (“prespring”) and Summer, lucky season it is, is divided three parts: Frühsommer (early summer), Hochsommer (high summer, which is "extrem heiß"), and Spätsommer (late summer).

5. For clarification, Germans capitalize ALL nouns. (I believe the Grimm brothers are to thank for that one.)

6. Today at dinner, people expressed real disgust over the fact that in the US we let people drive at 16, but alcohol is for those who are 21 and over. (This fact is of course not surprising, but I was struck by how they actually seemed disgusted by it, not just “oh that’s strange/different/you silly Americans.)

7. Twix (the candy) do not taste the same in Germany. (I think the American ones taste better).

8. I’ve learned from talking around with people/our Zivis that my accommodations are actually some of the nicest that people from the GI have had to deal with – although we aren’t terribly close to the city, we’re in a safe place (some people are evidently in areas that are genuinely not nice), the S-bahn gets us where we need to go, our rooms are big and clean compared to other people’s, and we have our own bathrooms. Turns out I have it really good…!

9. People at crosswalks drive me INSANE. Basically, Germans are very respectful of crosswalk signals – even if there are no cars or anything coming and they could cross the street very safely, they wait. When the traffic lights are changing and there is that five second interval before you are going to get the green walk signal…the wait. It drives me up the wall, and the only people I see crossing when they’re not supposed to are very young, kinda punk-looking guys, and people send them very disproving looks. This leads really wonderfully into what I learned in class today (good thing about having two students is you can direct class wayyyy more – when our teacher starts talking about German culture, psyche, or lit, I try to keep that going as long as possible):

10. The term “Obrigkeitsdenken” – let’s dissect (and I promise this will be interesting!). “Obrigkeit” means “authority,” and “Obrigkeitsdenken” can be translated (according to dict.cc) as “subordinate mentality,” which I think is a bit too strong. Better perhaps is “authority-oriented mindset,” as “denken” is to think, or thought/reasoning. My teacher said that “die Deutsche haben ein Obrigkeitsdenken” – “Germans have a subordinate mentality/think on authority” – see how this fits with the crosswalk issue?
Then he throws out a second word: “Obrigkeitshörig,” let’s dissect somemore: “hörig sein” means to be a slave, dependent, or submissive. “Obrigkeitshörig” = submissive to authority. He (teacher) then says “Die Deutsche sind Obrigkeitshörig” and follows that up with “Ohne dies versteht man Nationalsozialismus nicht.” Auf Englisch, “Germans are submissive to authority, without this one cannot understand National Socialism” (Nazism). Interesting, sure, earthshattering, no: what I found particularly fascinating was that I, a third year undergraduate student of Germanistik, German studies, have NEVER hear this term! (The sad alternative is that I am the worst third year undergraduate student of Germanistik ever, but I’m really hoping this isn’t true. Cross your fingers for me.) So. In conclusion this is really making me want to take the lecture course on the fascist years in the 20s/30s/40s, in order that I can compare/analyze the different ways Americans and Germans conceptualize National Socialism and its effects.

I’ve been phenomenally successful with the earrings lately.