Linguae francae

Last weekend Elisabeth and I visited my son in Zürich. On our way, we had coffee at a rest stop. The guy serving was a Yugoslavian speaking a rudimentary High German, with a client trying Swiss German on him. Since no communication was possible, the Swiss guy eventually switched to a guttural-sounding High German. While meditating on the scene, an even better example came to my mind. The other day, I overheard two charming ladies living in our housing complex —one English and the other Spanish— conversing in German, their lingua franca.

In the Middle Ages, educated Christians used Latin as a common language, particularly useful for travel. As my neighbor, a former Latin professor, pointed out, this was not Cicero's language but Küchenlatein (dog Latin). Latin was not only the language of the Church but also the language for writing treaties. Not only one but two peace treaties ended the Thirty Years' War in 1648. For the Protestants, it was the Instrumentum Pacis Caesareo-Suecicum Osnabrugense in Osnabrück; for the Catholics, it was the Instrumentum Pacis Caesareo-Gallicum Monasteriense in Münster.

This practice changed with the Rastatt Peace Treaty of 1714, which ended the Spanish Succession War, written in French. The politically dominant power in Europe, France, imposed the use of its language and greatly influenced manners and culture in the 18th century. 

Frederic the Great spoke better French than German, though his written texts often passed Voltaire's scrutiny and required corrections. Until the beginning of the twentieth century, French was not only the diplomatic language but the lingua franca of Europe's educated circles. 

A mixture of Low German and French is the old consul's opening line in Thomas Mann's Nobel Prize-winning novel Die Buddenbrooks, set in the nineteenth century: "Je, den Düwel ook, c'est la question, ma très chére demoiselle!" Is this a reminder that the Hanseatic city of Lübeck was part of the French Empire from 1811 to 1813?

Born out of the resistance against the Napoleonic occupation, a strong aversion for the French developed in Germany that Turnvater (father of gymnastics) Jahn articulated as follows, "Deutsche, fühlt wieder mit männlichem Hochsinn den Wert eurer edlen, lebendigen Sprache, schöpft aus ihrem nie versiegenden Urborn, grabt die alten Quellen auf und lasset Lutetiens stehende Lache in Ruhe! (Germans, feel manly and high-mindedly the value of your noble, living language again, scoop from its primitive never drying up spring, dig up those old sources, and leave Lutetia's puddle alone!)."

The dominance of the French in Europe slowly changed after the First World War, when American English replaced Voltaire's idiom as the lingua franca. There was only one field in which German was a must at the time: physics. The geniuses of New Physics, like Hans Bethe, Max Born, Walther Bothe, Albert Einstein, James Franck, Pascual Jordan, young Werner Heisenberg, and even Niels Bohr, the Dane,  lectured in German. So the Americans coming to Göttingen to study quantum mechanics also trudged through Goethe's language.

In those days, transatlantic communication was by letter. A young American scientist had prepared a thick letter, but he wanted to know its weight to determine the necessary postage before posting. So he went downtown Göttingen, entered a stationery shop, letter in hand, and addressed the attractive young lady on the other side of the counter, "Fraulein, haben sie eine Wiege, ich möchte etwas wagen (Young lady, do you have a cradle, I would like to dare something)." Even when she blushed, he did not notice that he had mixed up the vowels, "Fräulein, haben sie eine Waage, ich möchte etwas wiegen (Young lady, do you have a pair of scales I want to weigh something)."

Nowadays, English is the lingua franca of the world, although Professor Henry Higgins once claimed, "In America, they haven't used it for years." 

Luther saw in a language above all a communication vehicle when he promoted die gemeine deutsche sprache, das mich beide, Ober- und Niderlender, verstehen mögen (the common German language such that those speaking High German and Low German may both understand me). But he also continued, "Die sprachen sind die scheyden darynn dis messer des geysts stickt (Languages are like sheaths in which stick the spiritual knives of understanding)." 

Luther's remark makes me sometimes feel sorry for the English language used by so many for communication, but spoken by so few. This is why I always admire those who master a language perfectly.

At CERN, where I worked, the two official languages were French and English, but we mainly used a mixture, Franglais, for communication. During meetings, I read the lips of native speakers arguing in their mother tongues, sometimes paying more attention to their formulations than to what they actually said. 

Once, I was mistaken about one of my colleagues, let us call him Fred, whom I admired for his perfect English and his beautiful handwriting. Fred once went to England with another Englishman, Frank, and a German to discuss a delicate technical problem with a British firm. 

In the evening, after a few glasses of whiskey, the firm's boss pointed to the German and said, "You are German." Then he addressed Frank and declared, "You are British." Finally, he turned to Fred, saying, "And you nearly fooled me!" This was not gentleman like, for later, I learned that Fred had fled Nazi Germany as a young guy and made a particular effort to make English his mother tongue during his schooling in the UK.

Another colleague at CERN I admired not only for his perfect French. Albert, a Grande Ecole graduate, was in charge of the authorization process for the LEP storage ring with the French authorities. The main document had been submitted, but the French administration requested clarifications, which my staff and I provided in the form of Technical Memoranda (TM) written in French. 

One morning, my telephone rang, "Albert here. Could you see me in my office? We should discuss your recent document." I asked, "Is something wrong technically?" He retorted, "No, it's the French." I replied, "But the French was polished by my French secretary, and I have other things to do." He became so angry that I had to give in. So I spent the whole morning going through the French text of the TM with Albert.

 

When he retired five years later, he threw a party. On that occasion, I thanked him, "Albert, avec toi j'ai bien appris le français (Albert, with you, I have learned French well)." He looked at me and sounded disappointed, "C'est tout ce que tu as appris de moi? (Is that all that you have learned from me?)."

Coming back to my original topic. Clearly, American English is today's lingua franca. Many English technical terms have been directly integrated into German. But resistance is building up. The Deutsche Bahn was particularly eager to replace German words with what they considered English terms. So they changed Fahrkartenschalter to Ticket Counter, Auskunft to Service Point, Kurzzeitparken to Kiss and Ride, and Mieträder to Call-a-Bike. Recently, Die Bahn started paddling back, applying a Teutonic face-lifting to their naming practice.

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Weimar, German History in a Small Thuringian Town

When my son was in Frankfurt on a business trip in May and was stranded there for a long and lost weekend, he likely had read my blog about Weimar when he spontaneously decided to visit the town. He came back full of fascinating experiences, telling us stories and impressing Elisabeth, so she wanted to see Weimar, too.

We went there for a long weekend, staying in (where else?) the Elephant Hotel three weeks ago.

I felt happy showing my wife the Weimar that I know so well. 

Before we went, it happened that a week earlier, in a small bookshop at Kirchzarten near Freiburg, Annette Seemann, who had previously published a Weimar travel guide, gave a presentation of her latest book: Weimar, eine Kulturgeschichte. Her reading was overbooked, and I was lucky to find a seat. 

In a panel discussion, the editor of the cultural section of the Badische Zeitung attempted to have the author cover the content of the entire book. That was a problem because the amount of information in the already thick book, resulting from laborious work, presented many detailed facts. 

Still, the text occasionally lacks a deeper analysis. Nevertheless, I learned quite a lot, for example, about the Reformation and that Luther visited Weimar several times. Anette Seemann's tome will complete my collection of books on Weimar, which I shall present in a future blog.

Red Baron, then a young scientific hopeful in Munich, still remembers his first visit to Weimar in 1959. In November 1958, Nikita Khrushchev issued the Berlin ultimatum that caused Hamburg's press baron Axel Springer in January 1959 to start a campaign in the Federal Republic with the slogan Macht das Tor auf (Open the Gate), selling* pins with the Brandenburg Gate. Later, in 1987, President Reagan visited the Berlin Wall and, looking at the Gate, modulated Springer's slogan, imploring the right person: Mr. Gorbachev, open this Gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall!
* for 20 Pfennig a piece

In the fall of 1959, a left-wing Gesellschaft für fortschrittliche Politik (Society for progressive politics) in Munich posted an answer to Axel Springer: Wir machen das Tor auf (We open the Gate), offering a bus trip at a moderate price to Gera, a small industrial town in Thuringia, and as a lure,   a detour to Weimar. Together with a friend and a couple of other students, we seized this unique opportunity to visit Weimar, the hometown of Germany's literary quadruple stars: Goethe, Herder, Schiller, and Wieland. However, before that, our delegation had to suffer heated political discussions in Gera.

The political slogan in Gera's theater:
Germany's fate will be decided between the forces of peace and the military adventurers in the West.
Note: This and the following scanned slides are more than 50 years old.
Despite image processing, the quality is poor.

With my friend, we fought virtually back-to-back against devoted followers of the communist regime. Initially, we felt somewhat lost against their arguments, which were supported by "hard facts," until we noticed that the achievements presented were not as "hard" as they seemed. So, I started to invent "supporting numbers" myself. I became so successful in defending "Western values" that my East German counterpart, a trade union official, sought help. He frequently asked a journalist from the Neues Deutschland, the official government newspaper, "Antworte du dem doch mal" (You should answer him instead).

The following day, we were shipped to Weimar. It was in November. A pale sun illuminated the square in front of the Goethe-Haus, which was closed on Sunday morning. When we walked to the Goethe-Schiller monument, the sun disappeared. The two geniuses of German literature stood gray against the gray front of the Nationaltheater, which had been a symbol of hope in 1919 with the adoption of the democratic Weimar Constitution.

 
We soon had to leave the magical places to visit Weimar's other heritage, the concentration camp Buchenwald. Here, during the introduction, the East German propaganda machine went into high gear, asserting: In West Germany, new concentration camps are under construction. 

Luckily, we had some law students in our group who were much better at their words than the physicists. They branded the lies and cheap propaganda, resulting in an icy silence. Full of shame, our group eventually visited the horror place in silence, unmolested.

The classical suum cuique is here perverted at the entrance to the concentration camp.

Inside the camp.
Note the GDR flag and the Russian soldiers in the back on the left.

My second trip to Weimar took place 30 years later, in April 1990, but this is another story, as well as Elisabeth's and my most recent trip. Stuff for future blogs.

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