As a graduate student, my mother had to take some German and her textbook was Deutsch für Amerikaner by C.R. Goedsche and Meno Spann, published in 1960. I’ve been leafing through it off and on.
This week’s fiction in The New Yorker is all about people trying to express themselves in an intermediate German class, so this might be a good moment to offer the Internet an excerpt from Deutsch für Amerikaner. Here Fred Fletcher, a Minnesotan studying in Germany, and his pals Bill and Larry discuss household appliances and other fascinating topics with their German friend Wilhelm. (Translation mine – this is a hasty translation where the stilted style of the original will come through. It’s a foreign-language textbook, after all. The stiffness of expression is part of the charm.)
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Bill: Of course I am homesick. I want to see skyscrapers again and eat in a restaurant with air conditioning, and last winter in my often-cold room, I dreamed of our beautiful centrally heated houses in Wisconsin.
Wilhelm: You could also complain that we Germans often don’t have a telephone in our houses yet, no refrigerators, washing machines, televisions or whatever else the comforts of modern life demand. In America, of course, you have all that in almost every house.
Bill: And why do you not have it here in Germany?
Fred: You must ask “not yet” because it won’t be long before the Germans also have everything we have in America. It’s only a question of time. The old houses in Germany do look romantic, but it’s hard or impossible to modernize them. In the new houses central heating, air conditioning, etc. are being built in, and they’re springing up like mushrooms.
Wilhelm: You talk as if Germans were Americans. But we have our cultural traditions and you aren’t familiar with them. Perhaps the German does not wish to go along with material progress. Have you ever thought of that?
Fred: I have considered this question in detail and am convinced that the German will not resist modern progress. He wants our standard of living and with this standard of living he will change his life, he will Americanize it.
Wilhelm: We Germans are proud of our wine, which generations of vintners have cultivated through the centuries. For us, that is part of a high standard of living. You Americans are proud of your bathtubs.
Fred: A shiny enamel bathtub into which hot and cold water flow in unlimited quantities is just as much a cultural product as a good Rhine wine that has almost two thousand years of tradition behind it.
[…]
Larry: …it’s nice that some young German man, instead of spending hours in a night club, puts his skis over his shoulders and goes to the Alps with a friend or girlfriend. Such a young man is healthy, strong, has a feeling for nature and […] muscles, and his girlfriend likes him or loves him because he is “a natural person.”
Fred: […] Why didn’t you add that this girl’s mother does the laundry by hand because that’s how Grandma did it, that the girl doesn’t wear makeup like American girls, etc.? Let me tell you something. This girl will soon buy herself a washing machine. In a fashion journal influenced by America she will learn how she has to put on makeup and do her hair to show more “glamour” (there’s no German word for that) and then she will prefer a slim young man who takes her to a night club in his sports car to the romantic with his strong muscles and his deep feeling for nature.
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Well! Sorry, Germans of 1960: The American way of life is coming for you!