In the Rhineland
I have to learn German. And Italian, and Spanish. Trust me, there is nothing more frustrating than being in a country and not speaking the language. If everyone spoke Esperanto, it wouldn’t be so terrible, but English is so damn difficult that, very often, it is almost impossible to communicate.
So I’m in Germany, right? Cologne. It’s a nice enough city, but it doesn’t have (or I couldn’t find) a real “old quarter”. Maybe that’s because it was all bombed to hell in the war. THere’s an enormous cathedral that took 600 years to finish: they started in the 13th century and didn’t get it done until near the end of the 19th century. Sixty or so years after it was completed, the allies blew the thing up. Most of it survived, but the restoration work continues to this day.
Besides the old cathedral, though, most of the center-city dates from after the war. I can only hope that a person from Cologne will read this and show me how wrong I am. Still, the city has a remarkable number of high-quality museums, covering the city’s entire history back to the Romans (Cologne comes from “colonia”, colony in Latin) and an enormous collection of art. THere is even a large Picasso collection. I, of course, went into the EL-DE house, which is a former Gestapo headquarters since converted into a museum of National Socialism. Particularly striking were the cells in the basement in which the secret police held prisoners while they were interrogated; the inmates left etchings and engravings on the wall testifying to the horrors of their imprisonment. This museum did little to glorify the history of National Socialism in Germany. In the US, we tend to both hate the Nazi’s killing of their enemies and admire their aesthetic vision for Germany. Watch the show Man in the High Castle to see what I mean, or look at stills. This museum, however, showed the history in a very different light: dirty, grungy, sadistic, and evil. There was none of the sleekness or aesthetic with which the US associates the NSDAP: this was a story of violence, torture, and how people lived through it all.
Here’s why I want to learn German: I made a very good friend at the hostel in Amsterdam who is French. Really, the only way that I was able to befriend him as well as I did, being as American as I am, was by speaking French. So I passed the last few days speaking pretty much only French, and made a good friend from the experience. I also met Germans in the hostel who seemed equally interesting and nice but with whom I was unable to speak because I don’t know German. In some sense, it is necessary to make friends in the friend’s native idiom: only thus can they express themselves fully. Thus, in order to really befriend the Germans I meet here, I must be able to communicate with them, at least some, in their language.
I, from this experience, have gained a new appreciation for my friends at university whose mother language is not English: they accomodated themselves to me, and understood me in my native idiom, but I wasn’t able to encounter them in their home language. It’s like this: speaking to someone in a language that isn’t theirs is like meeting them at school or in the course of life; speaking to them in their language is like going to visit them at their home, or better, at their parents’ house. It’s not that anybody’s English wasn’t excellent, but that speaking a foreign language is very different from speaking one’s mother language.
There are many people whom I encountered on this trip, and I will encounter more I’m sure, with whom I would have liked to strike up a conversation but with whom i did not share a language. Trust me, it’s a frustrating and painful feeling. Alright, one can identify that one is friendly or kind without language, but one cannot really speak without language (hmm….). Of course, Italian is just as useful in Italy; maybe my interest in German is caused by my being in Germany. Yet, in the eternal words of the girl from the tortilla commercial, “porque no los dos?” And what about Spanish? And I haven’t even mentioned non-European languages yet: in the hostel here I’m staying with someone whose first language is Hindi, and how many tines would Mandarin have come in handy? We’ll see: I met someone the other day who said “so you only speak three languages?”—around here, three is a bare minimum for someone who graduated high school. Five is desirable, and more is always better.
