The Little House in the Prairie Country

 

This old black-and-white picture - probably taken in the late 50s - is of the "Landheim" (home in the country) of the "Wandervogel" group I belonged to as a prepubescent youngster in the (c)old country.

 

This "Landheim" was just 28 kilometres from my hometown Braunschweig and I walked, hitchhiked, and cycled to it a hundred times, alone and with "Kameraden", and the times I spent there are forever edged in my memories.

 

 

The "Fahrenden Gesellen" celebrated their 100th anniversary in 2009, which they commemorated with the publication of a "Festschrift" full of old photos, stories, and documents which I promptly ordered.

 

"Es lebe der Bund!"

 

From the book "100 Jahre Fahrende Gesellen - 1909-2009", page 49:

 

"In den 1950er Jahren entdeckte Heinz Radtke 30 km nördlich von Braunschweig eine alte Spargelbude, umgeben von kleinen Wäldchen, Heidefeldern und Äckern, die nun leer stand und verfiel. Für 40 DM im Jahr wurde sie gepachtet und von den Jungen über zwei Jahre lang an jedem Wochenende ausgebaut, denn aus den Wänden des Fachwerkbaus war viel herausgefallen, ebenso schaute durch das Dach der Mond. Es wurde gesägt, gemauert, gehämmert, gebastelt, neu verputzt und das Dach gedeckt." Translate

 

 

"Endlich konnte die Einweihung gefeiert werden. Neben Gaugrafen und Bundesleiter hatte sogar die Stadt ein Ratsmitglied geschickt. Es wurde ein schönes Fest, ohne Alkohol! Man trank Kaffee, lachte, sang Lieder und kratzte sich, denn die Mücken eines nahen Sumpfes waren uneingeladen auch gekommen. Den Gästen konnte ein Raum mit drei Fenstern gezeigt werden, 5 x 3 m groß, mit Tisch, Stühlen, Schrank, alles umgebaut nach unserem Geschmack. Ein Kochherd und sogar eine Pumpe waren da. Über dem Tagesraum war der Dachboden mit Matratzen zum Schlafen eingerichtet." Translate

 

My prepubescent self, already with glasses, sitting in the corner.
That smiling chap beside me was a very good friend. I wish I could remember his name. Even more so, I wish I could still be in contact with him.

 

"Viele Jahre diente dieses Landheim den Jungen und auch manchem Altgesellen zur Erholung vom Großstadtlärm. Hier wurden auch Gau-, Mannschaftstreffen und Osterlager veranstaltet. Nach zehn Jahren lief der Pachtvertrag ab, und ab Anfang der 1970er Jahre gab es auch keine Jungengruppe mehr in Braunschweig." Translate

 

At home at "Riverbend" sixty years later

 

More than sixty years later, I still have my old "Fahrtenhemd" to remind myself of all those many wonderful memories from a wonderful time!

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

P.S. I am very impressed with GOOGLE's 'Translate' function. Not only does it find its way through long German compound words such as Fussbodenschleifmaschinenverleih - although it does give up on Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz - but it also re-arranges the twisted syntax of a long German sentence. And click on the 'loudspeaker button' for the accent-free audio.

 

Why Germans don't play Scrabble

 

 

If you think that "Fussbodenschleifmaschinenverleih" is huge, try "Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz" with not a hyphen in sight, except if the word is split across two lines. And we can't even compound the word 'meat pie'!

Perhaps there's a good reason why we don't write 'meatpie' or 'polopony', the latter looking like a misspelt 'polyphony' but simply meaning 'polo pony'. Like the ancient Romans who wrote without spaces between words in a style called scriptio continua (continuous script) to save expensive writing materials, Germans to this day write compound words without spaces or hyphens, even though today writing materials are considerably cheaper than they were in ancient Roman times.

The hyphen leads a double life: it is used not just to break words into syllables but to tie two or more words together, in the formation of compounds. Here are three compounds: school bus, bus driver, school-bus driver. This is one of the simpler uses of the hyphen turning compound nouns into adjectives. Ice cream is two words as a noun but hyphenated as an adjective in ice-cream cone. Ice cream itself remains non-hyphenated - this last word, ironically, being hyphenated.

As for word breaks, consider the word 'cashier': 'cash-ier', as a noun, seems obvious, as it means 'one that has charge of money', but 'ca-shier' is a transitive verb, meaning 'to dismiss from service'. It happens again with the word 'bumper': who doesn't know that it breaks after the 'bump'? But divided into 'bum-per', it becomes an adjective meaning 'unusually large', as in ' bumber crop'.

 

You're so lucky! There's one online at www.archive.org

 

By way of this long weekend's entertainment, I have just read Edward N. Teall's "Meet Mr. Hyphen (And Put Him in his Place). It may be the only full-length work on hyphens ever published in the English language.

As an enthusiastic reader of all of W. Somerset Maugham's novels and short stories, I keep coming across his spelling of 'to-day' with a hyphen. His writing was of a different time, and language changes as do its rules, and I am comforted by Teal's final, reassuring paragraph:

 

 

There should be a German book on the use of hyphens as well. I mean, Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz would be so much easier to read with at least three hyphens judiciously inserted, even for someone like me who served his articles with the much hyphenated Hamburg-Bremer Feuer-Versicherungs-Gesellschaft.

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Dumb and Dumber

 

 

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grand-children's time - when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness."

So wrote Carl Sagan in "The Demon-Haunted World - Science as a Candle in the Dark" in 1995, twenty-seven years ago. How prescient was that!

 

Read the book online at www.archive.org
or listen to the audiobook here

 

And he continued: "The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudo-science and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. As I write, the number-one video cassette rental in America is the movie 'Dumb and Dumber'

 

 

To which I can add only four words: Not only in America!

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

Auf der Heide blüht ein kleines Blümelein ...

 

 

ERIKA is a German marching song, mainly associated with Nazi Germany. The marching song is from the perspective of a soldier who is longing for his sweetheart back home. The theme of the song is based on Erika being both a common German female name and the Latin name (Erica) of the heather plant that grows on the heath.

 

 

The above postcard features only the first stanza of the song. The full song is written below:

 

Erika On the heath, there blooms a little flower and it’s called: Erika. Eagerly a hundred thousand little bees, swarm around … Erika. For her heart is full of sweetness, a tender scent escapes her blossom-gown. On the heath, there blooms a little flower and it’s called: Erika. Back home, there lives a blonde little maiden and she’s called … Erika. That girl is my faithful little darling and my joy, Erika! When the heather blooms in a reddish violet, I sing her this song in greeting. On the heath, there blooms a little flower and it’s called … Erika. In my room, there also blooms a little flower and it’s called … Erika. Already In the grey of dawn, as it does at dusk, It looks at me, Erika! And then it’s to me as if it’s saying aloud: “Are you thinking of your fiancée/bride?” Back at home, a maiden weeps for you and she’s called … Erika.

 

Before I could become a teenaged "Halbstarker", I had already joined the "Fahrenden Gesellen", who, on hikes and in camps, taught me my self-reliance, which has kept me in good stead throughout all my life.

 

'Yours truly' on the left

 

And, yes, we marched as we sang, and we sang as we marched, which included such old favourites as "Erika", because those were the 1950s and 1960s, a time well before the zenith of German self-flagellation.

 

 

Remember Oskar Matzerath? In Günter Grass's "Blechtrommel", on his third birthday, Oskar Matzerath, disgusted by the mundane and hypocritical adult world around him, throws himself down the cellar stairs to halt his physical development, remaining the size of a three-year-old child while his mind matures. He uses his glass-shattering vocal shrieks against anyone who tries to take away his red-and-white toy tin drum, which he constantly beats in protest against society.

Where, in today's brow-beaten Germany, are the people who are prepared to halt their personal and professional development to "beat the drum" in protest against what is happening in their country?

 

 

I am no longer a German and I no longer live there to have to witness the Untergang des Abendlandes, and no-one can stop me from singing "Auf der Heide blüht ein kleines Blümelein, und das heißt: Erika ..."

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

A permanent solution to a temporary problem

 

 

I was phoning a neighbour across the river to check how much rain their gauge had registered after last night's downpour, when she asked me, "Have you heard?" "Heard what?" I said. "Yesterday the postman found our neighbour dead. He had hanged himself!"

If this keeps going, little Nelligen will soon need its very own suicide help-line because this has been the fourth suicide since I've lived here.

The first one was a young bloke in Nelligen Place who shot himself after his girlfriend had left him. The second one was a neighbour up the lane whose wife left for Sydney to visit her daughter. Before she left, she'd told him, "When I come back, I want you gone!" So he put one end of a hose onto the exhaust pipe, started the engine, and put the other end of the hose and himself into the car. He was gone alright. The third one was a gunsmith who was professional to the end: he shot himself. And now this Indian rope trick by someone who hadn't even been an Indian!

I have never liked the word 'suicide'. Nor have those who committed it "passed on" or "gone to a better place". They killed themselves and are dead! FULL STOP! Germans used to call it "Selbstmord", literally "self-murder", but they, too, seem to have gone soft and now call it "Suizid".

Why not call it even more euphemistically 'a permanent solution to a temporary problem'? If you have a temporary problem, don't call the suicide help-line, call me! I will come over with a couple of beers and talk and talk and talk so much that you'll kill me instead of yourself!

 

Googlemap Riverbend

 

P.S. As for that offending hyphen in "Help-Line", I am right now reading "Meet Mr. Hyphen (And Put Him in His Place)", a book written entirely about the hyphen. More about that tomorrow. I know you can't wait!