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German and Austrian Culture and Words ( to run away but also having fun with it before )

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"Im Namen des wiedervereinigten Deutschen Volkes erkläre ich Sie, lieber Loxuru, Graf von Kreuzigung, hiermit feierlich zum konsularischen Ehren-Preußen im Exil."
=
"On behalf of the reunified German people, I hereby solemnly declare you, dear Loxuru, Count of Crucifixion, to be a consular Honor-Prussian in exile."

:beer: flower3 ;)
 
Today, a Polish friend sent me this link to a video in German with the introduction text: "Modern Germany explained by a short example about a snow man and a snow woman" - the translation of the German spoken text follows just below:

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=125408452793070

German text translated into English:

8:00 am: I have just built a snowman.
8:10 am: A very emancipated woman on the way to her work complains why this is not a snow woman.
9:00 am: I have built a snow woman next to the snow man.
9:15 am: A passing by kindergarten teacher complains about the gently indicated breasts of the snow woman.
9:20 am: A gay man across the street complains why there aren't two snowmen and only a traditional couple in my garden.
9:25 am: A vegan neighbor complains that the carrot noses are a waste of food.
9.30 am: A man insults me as a racist because both snow - "human beings" are completely white.
9:35 am: My neighbor Fatma demands a headscarf for the snow woman.
9:40 am: The police arrives and observes the growing crowd.
9:45 am: A special German police force arrives because the broomstick could be used as a weapon.
9:50 am: ISIS claims to have inspired the snowman as a covert terrorist attack on German traditions.
9:55 am: My smartphone is confiscated and evaluated while I'm transported blindfolded in a helicopter to the German Attorney General who is investigating crimes against the German state and I am now a suspect of a membership in a terrorist movement.
10:00 am: I am asked about accomplices in building the snowman and the snow woman.
10.15 am: I am fed up and declare in an official statement that I will never again build a snowman.

P.S.: I forgot that this man had to pay a fine of 1000,- € because these snow sculptures did not wear protection masks and did not have a security distance!


If this man only had been as lazy as I am in the cold German seasons, he probably would not have had such problems because my snowmen are usually looking like this one and I create them behind my home ... because I am a very, very careful German :

Too lazy to build a standing snowman.jpg
 
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Oh, I just saw that the Austrian-German-Swiss TV satellite channel "3sat" will honor the famous journalist "Georg Stefan Troller" this evening and the whole night by broadcasting 9 documentaries by & from him with reports about his own life but also with his now almost historical documentaries about famous persons like Muhammad Ali, Isabella Rosselini, Leonard Cohen etc.:

Ashampoo_Snap_2021.12.13_20h12m51s_001_Livestream- Programm und Sendung verpasst - 3sat-Mediat...jpg

 
The older I become, the more I get the feeling that I must once have taken a turn into a parallel world which does not really reflect the true world as it was meant to be.

I was very, very surprised when I heard in 1979 that this German song from the "Eurovision Song Contest" about Genghis Khan really was also a hit in Mongolia in 1980 - 1982 ... IN GERMAN!


And today, I have heard that this 30 years old German "Shanty"-song is right now in December 2021 a No. 1 - Hit in China ... IN GERMAN !!!

www.welt.de

China: „Aloha Heja He“ von Achim Reichel – Plötzlich ist ein deutscher Song die Nummer 1 - WELT

Vor dreißig Jahren sang Achim Reichel einen Shanty über Reisen nach Singapur und Sansibar. Nun läuft das Seemannslied des Hamburger Rockers plötzlich in China rauf und runter. Wie konnte das passieren?
www.welt.de www.welt.de

(That's why you suddenly find relatively old German songs with Chinese subtitles on the Internet: )




Do I think, this is normal? No, not at all ... but why not? Internet and social media are making history by its own, by accident, by chance and by coincidence ... and maybe this is how this universe was created.
 
And some other funny examples about German-English = "Denglisch" in Germany, here in a new article about the situation the former East-German GDR (=DDR), unfortunatley most of it in German but with lots of English words, which sometimes made their way via Western computers to the Soviet Union and from "English-Russian" into "English-German":

"Can I become a Broiler?"

www.spiegel.de

Denglisch in der DDR: Can I become a Broiler?

Nur wenige beherrschten sie in der DDR fließend, und doch sickerte die Sprache des Klassenfeindes tief in den Alltag ein. »English made in GDR« wurde zum Vorboten unseres heutigen Sprachmixes – teils sogar mehr als im Westen.
www.spiegel.de www.spiegel.de

Also very nice in this article is a dialogue from a TV-drama between an East-German general and his computer expert.

(For the fight against the "Western capitalist class enemy" in 1983) ... you needed a certain knowledge of English in the East. And a permanent linguistic alert. When the Stasi (= abbreviation of "Staatssicherheitsdienst" = Secret Service of the former communist GDR) leadership illegally procured an IBM computer from the USA in the series drama "Deutschland 83" in order to decipher a stolen NATO floppy disk, perplexity raged because the system only reacts to commands in English.

A "Stasi"-employee cannot hide his enthusiasm about this IBM computer: "Das ist echt cool!" (= "That is really cool!")
"Sagen Sie nicht cool!" (="Don't say cool!") orders his general.
"OK."
"Sagen Sie auch nicht OK!" (= "Don't say okay either!")

The warning then appears on the computer screen: Syntax error!
 
Via telephone, I talked yesterday with an old friend. We both studied together some decades ago and he remembered me to a conversation we both had at those times with students from other parts of the world. My old friend told me that he wondered how right I seemed to have been in those times:
A student from Africa made the joke with us Germans that he does not and he never will really understand what is important for us Germans because we are keen on some drinks like coffee or beer and we can buy some things in our supermarkets which are almost unknown in other parts of the world. For example, he said that he is afraid when we Germans do not have any more Coffee, Beer or "Sauerkraut" in our supermarkets, we Germans might start our aircraft carriers and the next war.
I said with a sad smile: -"Germany does not have any aircraft carriers."
- "But Great Britain and France do have aircraft carriers! Germany does not have one?"
- "No! Not one single aircraft carrier! Why should we? No colonies any more. We are a state with relatively few coasts in the center of a continent. No enemies near us and France offered us several times their nuclear protection. We spend the money rather for our so-called infrastructure and the care for our older population by building a lot of hospitals - almost too many hospitals and for too much money, but for the costs of one aircraft carrier we can build almost a hundred hospitals and may be, there will be a time when we and our international neighbours could need them."
- "You Germans have become a bit crazy in this dangerous world with so much warfare, didn't you?"
- "Yes, we surely are all a bit crazy, but maybe in the future, we all need to be a bit more crazy in a different way than we were before and we will try to prepare for all kinds of dangers in the future and we have the money for a lot of preparations of all kinds."

Well, my old friend remembered this dialogue of mine and he sent me this following diagram and said: "I did not think, that we ever could need so many hospitals as you said but you were really right more than 30 years ago!"

intensive-care-beds-capacity.JPG
 
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Silent_Water said:
A student from Africa made the joke with us Germans that he does not and he never will really understand what is important for us Germans because we are keen on some drinks like coffee or beer and we can buy some things in our supermarkets which are almost unknown in other parts of the world. For example, he said that he is afraid when we Germans do not have any more Coffee, Beer or "Sauerkraut" in our supermarkets, we Germans might start our aircraft carriers and the next war.
Click to expand...
One could have pointed out to that student from Africa that, before the establishment of the Empire in 1871, German states have for centuries fought each other!
 
Loxuru said:
One could have pointed out to that student from Africa that, before the establishment of the Empire in 1871, German states have for centuries fought each other!
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Yes, sure. I could have replied so many other things and topics, but even Mark Twain is sometimes quoted with this sentence:

"Repartee is something we think of 24 hours too late!" ;)
(= in German: "Schlagfertigkeit ist etwas, worauf man erst 24 Stunden später kommt!")

I could also have replied that German tribes were used to fight each other for millennia, not only centuries, when you think of the almost "intra-familiar tribal infight" which caused the death of Arminius (= Hermann), the Cheruskian, who defeated Varus and wiped out three complete Roman legions in this famous battle somewhere in the forests around Teutoburg or somewhere else.

en.wikipedia.org

Arminius - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

Or I could have said that our German supermarkets are always so well planned in a typical German way that there most probably never will be any shortage of "Sauerkraut", "Rotkraut", Coffee and Beer!

Or I could have said that before the establishment of the German Empire in 1871, aircraft carriers as well as German supermarkets had not been invented yet.

I could have replied so many, many, many more fitting things ... :doh:

;) :popcorn:
 
Silent_Water said:
Yes, sure. I could have replied so many other things and topics, but even Mark Twain is sometimes quoted with this sentence:

"Repartee is something we think of 24 hours too late!" ;)
(= in German: "Schlagfertigkeit ist etwas, worauf man erst 24 Stunden später kommt!")
Click to expand...
'L'esprit de l'escalier' - staircase wit! (In other words, the perfect reply only comes to you as you are going down the stairs on your way out.)
 
Silent_Water said:
"Repartee is something we think of 24 hours too late!" ;)
(= in German: "Schlagfertigkeit ist etwas, worauf man erst 24 Stunden später kommt!")
Click to expand...
Migoz2 said:
'L'esprit de l'escalier' - staircase wit! (In other words, the perfect reply only comes to you as you are going down the stairs on your way out.)
Click to expand...
Always terrible when it happens after an exam!:doh:
 
OK, there is now another new Christmas Eve for me like the last one: I am still not a millionnaire yet, not famous at all, got no villa, no yacht, no girl-friend, no family but at least good music from my stereo- & video-system and this could by my most favourite song this evening according to the German saying "Humor ist wenn man trotzdem lacht!" (= Humor is when you laugh anyway!) :

I guess, the bored girls behind him could simply not hear anymore this constant whining of him for his lost great love of the last christmas.
;)
(Between this lamentation song text, the singer Matthias Reim explains that George Michael himself heard this version, liked its translation and its humour and gave the permission for this German version of this song.)


MERRY CHRISTMAS !
 
Mhm, this Christmas, I somehow got the feeling that Christmas is nowhere in this world any more as it once used to be.
Sadly, you even can no more say something similar like "Make Xmas great again!" after this video which a German friend has sent me today as a link.
As usual with the links from this friend of mine, I am swaying back and forth between shock and enthusiasm ... but finally, I decided to laugh a lot about some really funny ideas in this video:

 
Sometimes, I think, "facts, science and integrity" are not as successful as a well done satire.
Right now, there is a new German satire with the German version of Dr. Fauci, the most famous German virologist - Prof. Dr. Christian Drosten - of the most famous and almost historical German University Hospital, the "Berliner Charité".


Here, he is in an fictional annual review from about New Years Day 2023 looking back in an interview to the last year 2022. The female reporter asks him and constantly speaks & spells his name wrong:
- "Who are you and why I am talking at all with you? I mean, why did my TV channel want me to do so?"
- "Don't you really know me any more? I am the man who invented this pandemic of 2019 - 2021!"
- "Which pandemic?"
- "Pig's flu ! Oh no, sorry, I sometimes get confused with my inventions. I mean Covid-19!"
- "Oh yes, now I remember! You are this slave of the pharmaceutical mafia, controlled by extra-terrestrial lizard people, the man with psychologically questionable world domination fantasies!"
- "Nooo! I just wanted to make a financially successful podcast on the internet, but after the German government declared a general ban on vaccinations, all enemies of vaccinations said that they don't let any government tell them what to do and they all suddenly wanted to get a vaccination! So, my podcast and I fell into absolute oblivion!"

Et cetera ...

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1478414863101796354

One of the best German satires I have seen in 2022! :)

The complete satire video with the annual review on 2022 from New Years Day 2023 can be found here:

 
One of the most legendary moments from German TV of all time: Crane driver Ronny raging about his inadequately prepared workplace.

Statements from him I quote on an almost weekly basis at various occasions:
- "The people are simply disregarding their work, and that's the problem."
- "They can't even hold a measuring tape."
- "A bunch of bunglers. Real bunglers!"

And the most important of all:
- "Crane spots must be reinforced!"

And I don't even work in the construction business :D

 
Silent_Water said:
Yes, but there are some parts of German "Autobahnen" like of the "A 3" between Köln / Cologne and Frankfurt which are famous even for speed addicts in Japan. I had a rather "mad" driving instructor who told us he knew a Japanese manager who once wanted to drive a "Ferrari Testarossa" on this Autobahn up to its limit and these two madmen really did it. The Japanese manager rented the Ferrari and they changed the seats at the end of this A 3 's and drove back on the same A 3 "just for fun" at the highest possible speed of the "Ferrari Testarossa". The driving instructor told us not to do this on our own again because he himself thought later, this is a kind of madness because he drove for the first and the last time in his life really between 300 and 400 km/h on a really public street and he was sweating like never before, he said. But the Japanese manager found it "funny"! Must have been a descendant of a Japanese Samurai with a hidden longing for death, I think ...
Click to expand...

A Czech millionnaire did the same some weeks ago in a "Bugatti Chiron" and if you want to see how it looks to drive like a madman on a German "Autobahn" without speed limit, watch this!

This is not a trick and it is not from a video game. This is a real video by this millionnaire who caused a new discussion in the German parliament about the possibilities on German "Autobahnen" when driving without any speed limits on a nice Sunday morning.

In my opinion, it is really madness when you look at the speed in "Kilometers per hour" (=> a maximum of 417 km/h !!!) in the right corner down:


And a German newspaper article about the discussion caused by this millionnaire:


The newspaper also quotes experts saying that this car needs at least 500 meters to stop when driving with about 400 km/ h !
 
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Silent_Water said:
The newspaper also quotes experts saying that this car needs at least 500 meters to stop when driving with about 400 km/ h !
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Reminds me of Bernd Rosenmeyer (1909-1938). A famous German racing driver in the 1930's. He was killed when he tried to set a new speed record on an Autobahn stretch (Darmstadt-Frankfurt). On unforeseen gust of wind caused him to loose control, get airborne and crash against a bridge embankement. Aerodynamics are really unpredictable at those speeds. The record, Rosenmeyer tried to break, was 432 km/h, not so much higher than that Czech madman. And at least, Rosemeyer had the Autobahn for himself, there was no other traffic yet!
 
For non-metric Americans: 417 km/h = 259.11 mph.:eek:
According to Wikipedia, the Bugatti Chiron has an electric inhibitor that prevents it from exceeding 420 km/h(261 mph) because Bugatti does not believe that any current tires can handle a higher speed.
 
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