German pet peeves

Since I wrote about English pet peeves last week, I thought it would be a good idea to highlight some German ones this week and try to explain them to readers who don’t speak German. Why? Because this blog is supposed to be about English and German, and because I deserve to suffer for my manifold sins and wickedness.

Grammar:

Let’s look at wegen + the dative case. This is such a classic pet peeve that I had no trouble finding two video clips to illustrate it.

German has four cases: nominative (the subject, e.g. “he lives here”), accusative (basically the direct object, e.g. “I saw him“), dative (basically the indirect object, e.g. “I gave him a piece of my mind”), and genitive (basically possessive, e.g. “and he gave me a piece of his“) but unlike English, which has gotten lazy, it applies them all over the place – not just to pronouns but to tables, meatballs, birds, planets, whatever.

Traditionally, “wegen” (“because of”) is allied with the genitive case. Look at the English phrase “because of a meatball” and you can kind of see the possessive element. It’s a meatball’s because, so to speak. But some decades ago, “wegen” started losing the genitive in casual speech and taking the dative instead, so that insisting on the genitive now marks you out as an insufferable pedant.

This clip from Pastewka illustrates the point perfectly. Pastewka is basically the German equivalent of Curb your Enthusiasm. Below we have the main character, who just can’t stop making everyone hate him, arguing with a cafeteria lady about whether she only gave him 14 meatballs instead the regulation 15. German has many words for meatball, but in the clip below they are Swedish meatballs, or “köttbullar” — and please note that although in Swedish a singular meatball is a “köttbulle,” the German speakers here are using the plural “köttbullar” as if it were singular (why am I doing this again? oh yeah, my sins) — so when the lady rebukes him at about 1:00 for causing so much trouble because of a meatball (“wegen einem Köttbullar” – dative), he makes sure to say “wegen eines Köttbullars” (genitive) in his reply, which tells us a lot about the kind of person he is.

Incidentally, if you had to put English subtitles on this, that exchange would be a challenge to translate. Suggestions welcome.

Similarly, in this next clip about the fictional childhood adventures of Jan Böhmermann, we see him correcting the school principal at about 0:30 over another dative/genitive issue (“vom Unterricht verwiesen” vs. “des Unterrichts verwiesen”), which causes her to pause mid-sentence at about 0:50 when she’s asking the secretary to send in another student “because of the bullying incident” and change her initial dative “wegen dem” to a genitive “wegen des,” to young Jan’s evident satisfaction.

Denglisch

The use and abuse of English loan words and the importation of English grammatical tendencies into German is known as Denglisch (cf. franglais). People are always claiming to hate it — Marcel Reich-Ranicki called it “lächerlich und abscheulich” (“ludicrous and despicable”) and he’d seen enough atrocities in his life to have a sense of what was worth complaining about — but some people must love it because it’s everywhere.

Sometimes Denglisch is just plain old English loan words like “download”, or “cool,” or “management” (pr. “menechment”) with meanings that are familiar to us.

Sometimes it’s words that exist in English but have taken on new meaning in German, like “Handy” (for cellphone/mobile) or “Bodybag” (for messenger bag/sling bag). Yikes.

Sometimes it’s whole sentences. Why are these words displayed on a store front in Vienna? And what — dare I ask? — is a meat baby?

A grammatical example that springs to mind is the use of “in” with years. In German, things don’t “happen in 1905” — they “happen 1905” or “in the year 1905” but not “in 1905” (“my grandmother moved 1905 to Berlin,” you might say). There’s a creeping tendency to use “in” with years as it’s done in English, which people sometimes remark on.

Die Prinzen, a pop band whose work was once ubiquitous in American high-school German classes, have a funny song about Denglisch. It starts out:

Ich wollte mit der Bahn Ganz spontan in Urlaub fahr’n Und der Typ sagt: “Stell’n Sie sich mit der BahnCard am Ticket counter an Woll’n Sie InterCity, RailMail oder Metropolitan?” “Oh ja, gern. Aber was ist das denn?” “Damit fahr’n Sie stress-free zu Ihrem Meeting im First-class-business-Zug Danach chillen Sie in der Lounge.” “Oh, das klingt ja gut. Und gibt’s an Board denn auch einen Wurstwagen, mein Freund?” “Nee, aber ‘n Servicepoint. Da kriegen Sie ‘n Snackpack for Wellness!”

I wanted to take a spur-of-the-moment train trip and the guy says: “Go to the ticket counter with your BahnCard. Do you want InterCity, RailMail, or Metropolitan?” “Oh, sure. What is that, though?” “It’ll take you stress-free to your meeting in the first-class business train. Then you can chill in the lounge. “Oh, that sounds good. And is there a Wurstwagen (‘sausage car’) on board too, my friend?” “No, there’s a servicepoint. You can get a Snackpack for Wellness!”

Folksy posturing

A correspondent in Switzerland says she dislikes it when certain politicians and media figures import sentence structures from the Swiss-German dialect into high German, with results that sound “more awkward than down-to-earth.” She mentions:

Das ist der Claudia ihre Wohnung (lit. “That’s to the Claudia her apartment”) instead of “das ist Claudias Wohnung” (“That’s Claudia’s apartment”).

Hier ist dem Jürg sein Artikel (same construction as above – “Here’s to the Jürg his article” Here’s an interesting blog post about that construction in Swiss German.)

Der Musiker, wo ich gestern gesehen habe. (“The musician where I saw yesterday”) instead of Der Musiker, den ich gestern gesehen habe (“The musician whom I saw yesterday”).

So that’s a taste of the things that annoy German speakers. And if it seems weird to you that anyone gets mad about whether it’s “wegen dem Regen” or “wegen des Regens,” now you know how significant your English pet peeves really are.