{"id":635,"date":"2020-05-15T19:43:57","date_gmt":"2020-05-15T17:43:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/foundagain.home.blog\/?p=635"},"modified":"2022-03-16T21:27:13","modified_gmt":"2022-03-16T20:27:13","slug":"language-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/krisbest.com\/de\/blog\/2020\/05\/15\/language-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Die Sprache als Fenster zur Geschichte \/ Language as a Window to History"},"content":{"rendered":"

History feels closer when it\u2019s written in your own language. This is something that I\u2019ve come to appreciate more and more over the years that I\u2019ve lived in Germany. There\u2019s a unique intellectual and emotional closeness we feel to stories, ideas, and histories that are originally expressed in our<\/em> language – the one that we understand without translation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The last point is critical, because translation is never a purely linguistic exercise. Anyone who has read a book in translation recognises that merely changing the language does not remove the \u2018foreignness\u2019 from the text. Writers addressing their native audience rely not just on a shared language, but on a shared cultural context. Even an excellent translation will still contain cultural references that are unfamiliar, clever turns of phrase in the original language that need to be rewritten or omitted, and subtext that would be immediately understood by the original audience but not necessarily by outsiders.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Translation is an art in itself, and a skilled translator will try to preserve and explain as much of that cultural context as possible. It might require deviating from the literal interpretation of the text, adding footnotes, or seeking other creative ways to convey the original tone and meaning. A lot of effort is needed to bring the foreign reader up to the same level of understanding as the locals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is no simple undertaking, especially for a linguistically complex and culturally rich source text. My favourite example of this comes from the post-war German author G\u00fcnter Grass \u2013 a notoriously challenging read even for native German speakers. Translating Grass is difficult not just because of the linguistic complexity and extensive wordplay, but also because the cultural context in which he set his most famous books \u2013 in pre-1945 Danzig (Gda\u0144sk<\/em>) \u2013 no longer exists. Many of his characters speak in a local dialect that has since died out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Danzig\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Before his death in 2015, Grass famously hosted translation workshops in Gda\u0144sk to bring together dozens of his translators and quite literally walk them through the context. The workshop for the 50th anniversary re-translation of Die Blechtrommel<\/em> (\u2018The Tin Drum\u2019), for example, involved eight days touring locations in Gda\u0144sk, going line-by-line together through key passages, and intensive back-and-forth on cultural and linguistic questions between the author and ten of his translators.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"The<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The effort was immense, but the cultural payoff for the foreign reader is enormous: an immersive glimpse into a time and place that no longer exists, but was nonetheless consequential in shaping the course of history (as the time and place where Germany began its invasion of Poland and started WWII). Foreign readers will still be confronted with references they don\u2019t understand as well as an educated German (or Pole) would, but the translator has brought them that much closer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Unfortunately, translations are never perfect. There will always be a depth of linguistic and cultural understanding \u2013 of closeness \u2013 that can only be achieved in the original.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ever since I got properly good at German \u2013 and by that, I mean good enough not just to understand literal meaning, but to pick up on nuances in tone, register, and subtext, as well as most historical and cultural references \u2013 the language has opened up a new cultural lens for me. I\u2019ve achieved insight into worlds of German history and literature, like Grass\u2019s pre-war Danzig, that were previously only accessible to me through the translator\u2019s eyes, and not through my own. Reaching a \u2018literary\u2019 level of German was an exciting time for me, followed by an explosion of interest in German literature, which then further strengthened my ear for nuance and my cultural literacy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But there was a side effect that came with German linguistic and cultural fluency that I didn\u2019t expect when I first arrived here. Namely, that the darkest elements of German and central European history \u2013 the Nazi period, WWII, the Holocaust, the expulsions \u2013 suddenly felt much more tangible, more vivid, and much closer than before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019d always had a morbid interest in the history of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, but rather in passing. The horror that I felt learning the details in school, and then in books and film, was probably not that much greater than it would be for any other human being with a conscience and a vivid imagination. So when I came to Germany, I was interested in the history, but not overly so. It was simply the horrible backstory of the country I\u2019d chosen to study in, something to feel bad about and condemn, but not a history that I felt personally affected by or attached to more than any other foreign gentile.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What first stirred something more in me was visiting the Jewish Museum after I had been living in Berlin for several months. Of course, the stories told in that museum will move someone in any language. The exhibits gave detail and substance to the lessons I\u2019d had on the Holocaust in school, and personalised it with testimony from survivors. But what shook me on a deeper level was peering into the display cases and seeing the original anti-semitic propaganda, deportation orders, execution records \u2014 and for the first time, being able to read them myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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How many times had I already seen, in books, documentaries, or in school, photos of signs from Nazi Germany declaring villages \u2018Jew-free\u2019, racial slurs splashed across the front of Jewish-owned businesses, or photocopies of deportation forms? Why was it hitting me so much harder now? This wasn\u2019t even my first time seeing such documents in person in Germany; I\u2019d come to Berlin three years earlier as a tourist and visited several history museums. But I didn\u2019t speak any German back then. It turns out that simply being told what a deportation order says, and being able to read the text yourself, are different emotional experiences entirely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Translation is like a filter that stands between you and the history; you can still see it, but the foreignness of the language means that it\u2019s one step removed from your cultural world. The effect of having that filter lifted is like seeing colour footage of the First World War, or viewing the colourised version of a famous black-and-white photo for the very first time. It feels more immediate, contemporary, and relatable. It feels more real<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I thought a lot about that experience in the museum, but the bigger shock was yet to come. It was an evening sometime after my first year in Germany, and I had my TV tuned to a historical documentary on German television, which I was only half-watching while completing some chores. The show was about Hitler\u2019s family and childhood, and involved a lot of interviews with elderly dialect-speaking Austrians that I couldn\u2019t understand. But then it suddenly transitioned to footage of Hitler speaking at one of the Nuremberg rallies \u2014 and that, for the first time, I could<\/em> understand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Nuremberg footage is possibly the most internationally recognisable footage from Nazi Germany, and is something of a symbol for fascism more generally. Every schoolchild in the Western world and beyond has seen at least clips of it. Hitler, at the podium, in a sea of swastikas, screaming in scary-sounding German to a cheering crowd: an iconic moment. I had probably seen it with subtitles before at least once in my life, but I had never given much thought to the actual words he was saying. Something angry, something hateful, something about the Deutsches Volk and the glorious Reich. The footage was burned into my memory, but as a symbol only.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This time was different. It was the same footage that I had seen a dozen times before \u2014 but the unintelligible screaming I remembered had been replaced with words that I could understand. I had never realised that Hitler spoke with such a distinctive Bavarian accent, and the \u2018folksy\u2019 effect that it gave to his voice was so unexpected that it could have made me laugh if the context hadn\u2019t been so serious. Even though I had always known at least the gist of what he was saying, actually hearing<\/em> him speak for the first time was jarring; my skin prickled with goosebumps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The fledging German-speaker in me squirmed in discomfort as I watched, because I had never heard someone speak that way in German before. The vocabulary, the style, the nationalist tone \u2014 it all felt verboten<\/em> in a visceral way. I hadn\u2019t even realised how much I had subconsciously internalised the post-war boundaries of \u2018acceptable\u2019 German speech until I heard them being violated. Just watching it felt uncomfortable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since then, I\u2019ve developed an entirely new relationship with German and European history. It feels more important and personal to me. Intellectually, I can\u2019t get enough of it. Being able to peek into such a dark and complex past through an untranslated lens is incredibly stimulating. I feel driven to understand it in a way I never did before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Growing up in Canada, I had always struggled to wrap my head around the horrors of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. It was a big, horrible thing that I knew had happened, but it all felt so far removed from my peaceful experience of the world that it seemed impossible to understand or explain. All I could do was mentally rope it off as an abstract \u2018evil\u2019, and try not to get too close.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But this was intellectually unsatisfying; and also, I\u2019ve now come to believe, intellectually irresponsible. \u2018Evil\u2019 is a cop-out. It\u2019s a lazy way to avoid examining how, and why. It means not having to wonder what drove the perpetrators (or their enablers in the general population – the Mitl\u00e4ufer<\/em>) to act as they did, and not having to think too deeply or honestly about what you would have done in their place. It makes it easy to picture yourself always on the side of the \u2018good\u2019, because you know that you\u2019re not \u2018evil\u2019. If World War II and the Holocaust were planned and carried out by \u2018evil\u2019 people, then ordinary people (\u2018like you and I\u2019) are absolved of guilt, except to the extent that they were manipulated, indoctrinated or intimidated by the evil ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I\u2019ve come to appreciate about post-war Germany\u2019s spirit of Vergangenheitsbew\u00e4ltigung<\/em> \u2013 i.e., Germany\u2019s cultural reckoning with its Nazi past \u2013 is that it tends not to fall into this intellectual trap, at least not in the completely post-war generations. This is admirable, but also not surprising. The war and its immediate aftermath are still within living memory; the Holocaust was written in their language. The history still feels close, relevant, and personal. It\u2019s not an abstract evil here, but an all-too tangible collection of people and events… one that frequently includes one\u2019s own relatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Here is one more story: Less than a month after I moved to Berlin to study public policy, a fellow international student was telling me how strange it felt to live in Germany. He joked that he ought to start an art project by buying a calendar and marking off the days when he didn\u2019t read or hear something about the war. \u2018It\u2019d just be a blank calendar,\u2019 he said. When you live in Berlin \u2013 and above all, when you speak German \u2013 it\u2019s inescapable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

 <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

History feels closer when it\u2019s written in your own language. This is something that I\u2019ve come to appreciate more and more over the years that I\u2019ve lived in Germany. There\u2019s a unique intellectual and emotional closeness we feel to stories, ideas, and histories that are originally expressed in our language – the one that we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1121,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[7,19],"class_list":["post-635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","tag-german-history","tag-german-language"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/krisbest.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/krisbest.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/krisbest.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/krisbest.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/krisbest.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=635"}],"version-history":[{"count":42,"href":"https:\/\/krisbest.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1828,"href":"https:\/\/krisbest.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/635\/revisions\/1828"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/krisbest.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/krisbest.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/krisbest.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/krisbest.com\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}