A Purpose, It's That Little Flame

On Friday, I was leading a discussion with a small group of sixth formers (16-year-olds) about social problems, and making a difference in the world. Suddenly, one of the students, who had been super-engaged and participatory throughout the discussion, turned to me and said, "I feel like it sounds so awful when I talk. Like beschissenes German English." It was a problem that I know well.

I Yell Because I Care, Part 2: Lines in the Sand

"I guess it's like my mama says, I yell because I care." - Ariana Waynes

This is the second part of a three-part reflection on the subject of foreigners, and being a foreigner, in Austria. In Part 1, I discussed my own positionality regarding this issue, and whether I am qualified to speak up on this subject. Part 2 describes the current situation with immigrant incorporation in Austria, using examples from my personal experience. In Part 3, I turn once again to my own position, questioning how I can best show solidarity with other Ausländer in Austria and, in some small way, contribute to a solution. 

I had always known, on some level, that discrimination against people with "migration backgrounds"* was a problem in Austria. But I had always considered it to be something that happens "out there" -- in villages, among older people. Not in the city I love, and coming from my friends and colleagues, from people who have been nothing but hospitable towards me. Not in my school, my ostensibly progressive, weltoffene (cosmopolitan) school, "wo Vielfalt Schule macht." 

Learning German: Daham

I've been in Vienna for just short of three months now, and I've reached a point in my adjustment where I can say that nowhere in the world feels as much like home right now as this city does.

German differentiates between "die Heimat" ("home," as in the place where you're from) and "daheim" / "daham" ("home," as in where you live). I will always have a special connection to Pittsburgh -- in my complete admiration for working-class culture, in the way a turn-of-the-century brick factory brings tears to my eyes, in the way I value grit more than anything, in my complete and utter belief thats unions are the way to a better life. (Speaking of which, check this out!) Pittsburgh is and will always be a part of who I am.

But, at least for now, I'm a Wienerin, too. I have built a life for myself here.

"Check" it!

English is cool here. This means that advertisements* -- although ostensibly in German -- will consist of as much as 80% English words ("Laser shows! Gratis drinks! Die Night wird awesome!"). Rappers will try to sound tough by spitting lines like "Kein Gangster auf der Street ist so beliebt bei den Kids." And pretty much everyone drops English words into their everyday speech.

When I first arrived in Austria, I was very paranoid about this. Is this person just saying "Beste Party Ever" or "That's it" because I'm around, and I'm missing out on some Ur-Austrian expression that they would normally say?

Slowly, though, I've been realizing that that's just the way German works. In fact, I'm often the one who looks silly for using German words, when everyone just uses the English one. When I wanted to know what to pack for my work at Uni Wien last summer, I looked in my favorite online dictionary / Austrian lifeline for the best translation of "dress code," and proudly wrote in my email to my boss, "Gibt's Kleiderregelungen?" "Nein, es gibt keinen Dress-Code" was her response.

Sometimes, though, German uses words that, at first glance, look like English -- but will confuse the living daylights out of you if you are actually a native speaker of English (or, as German speakers would say, "eine Native Speaker"-- even though everyone is a native speaker of something!). Here are some examples, for your (Schaden)freude:

Schüler Say the Darndest Things

In general, I've been really impressed by the English levels of my students. I am, of course, getting a bit of a biased sample, because only the ones who feel comfortable enough to speak in English tend to participate in class. And I'm not surprised that some of them prefer to not speak, because the kids can be quite brutal to each other. On Wednesday, for example, I had one of my sixth-form classes do small group discussions about various issues in the American election. One of the groups was talking about Afghanistan, and so one of the boys said, "Yes, war is bad. It costs much death of soldiers." Whereupon his partner gave him a dirty look and said, "Much death of soldiers? Seriously?"

Because young people in Austria watch so much American television*, they have a really good idea of what correct English sounds like -- even if they can't quite speak it themselves. Stefan, a friend of mine from my dorm, for example, speaks absolutely awful English. (He once asked me how to translate "Studenten" when he was trying to have a conversation with one of the people in the dorm who speaks no German.) But another time, we got to talking about TV shows, and he quotes me an entire scene of Family Guy, in perfect English (punctuated, of course, by German phrases like "Und dann schaut er durchs Fenster und sagt...").

I try to be supportive of my students even when they make mistakes, so that they'll continue to want to speak. Sometimes, though, I find it hard not to laugh along with their classmates at some of the things they say. And so, in the spirit of Schadenfreude, here are some of my favorite exchanges with students in the past three weeks:

German Movies That are Not About Nazis (or the Stasi!)

When people in the US ask me whether they should learn German, I respond with another question: "How much do you want to learn about World War II?" Because my German-learning experience felt in many respects like a six-year seminar on the Holocaust (with some Wiedervereinigung thrown in).

I'm not sure of the reasons for that--maybe they want to make sure that we never forget how sucky Germans were/are, and continue to be loyal to America--but I know that it's not the case in other countries. At the Goethe-Institut in Schwäbisch Hall, for example, one of the classes mentioned the various Nazification laws in the 1930s. Of couse, my American friend in the class, having taken five years of German class in the States, was ready to roll: she began ticking off dates, laws, and penalties as the French, Japanese, and Romanian students in the class, who had been taking German just as long, looked on in bewilderment. 

And some people really enjoy that. They study German because they're interested in the Holocaust, or in music, or in nineteenth-century philosophers, or in Romantic literature. But I'm not one of those people. I'm still not quite sure why I love studying German so much, or why I am so enthralled with Austria, but it has nothing to do with music, mountains, or Nazis. I enjoy experiencing the ways more global cultural elements take on a German / Austrian spin: for example, I read a feminist blog auf Deutsch, and I love German hip-hop.

I also love watching German movies. Unfortunately, the German movies that are well-known in America always seem to discuss the same themes. (Even the most famous "Austrian" movie of all time is half-cheerful frolic through the mountains, half-"Oh shit, the Nazis!") Some of these films are even great. But there's a lot more to German-speaking cinema than Downfall, Goodbye Lenin, and Das Leben der Anderen. Here are some of my favorites.

Guess I Got My Swagger Back

Although I tried to maintain a positive outlook, my first few days in Austria did not go well. The problems started in the airport, when a lady asked me where the Gleis was for the S-Bahn, and I could barely get out the words for "down the steps there." When I went to pick up my roomkey from Martin's colleague, I was up to full phrases -- but only one at a time. When I tried to put together a two-phrase sentence, I ended up just trailing off halfway through. And then a girl around my age offered to help me with my baggage, but I just stared blankly at her because it took me like 30 seconds to figure out what she was saying.

Ok, I thought, I'll chalk that up to the fact that I haven't slept for 20 hours and am feeling the first stirrings of a horrific cold. But even after sleeping for ten hours, my attempt to introduce myself to my roommate auf Deutsch did not go as well as planned. Shit, I thought, have I forgotten how to speak this language? That could make things interesting.

But in the past few days, things have definitely been looking up. Finally able to get out of bed after a week-long Erkältung (cold), I've begun interacting with people, and I've found that my Deutsch skills are not as degraded as I had feared. In fact, I think I'm getting my Vienna swagger back:

First (Third?) Impressions

Like every child of the 1990s, I love Harry Potter. But several things about the books have always bothered me: (1) If Europe's Christians decided to make witches and wizards their bitter enemies for several hundred years, why does the (witchcraft and) wizarding world still celebrate Christmas? (2) Are Muggle-born children really ready to give up their entire culture at age 11 and never look back? (3) Dumbledore's explanation aside, isn't it immoral to not share the "technological" advances of wizards with the rest of the world? It's this last one that irks me the most, though. Not because 100 million people died from the Spanish flu, which a quick spell could have healed, but because every time I travel, I think to myself, "Damn, I really wish I could apparate."

Why I Broke my Promise

I recently spoke with an American who decided to attend the Uni Wien for his undergraduate studies. We had known each other cursorily last semester, having a few mutual friends and having one class together, and when I saw him again, I asked him how he had been doing. In English. Which surprised him.

Mother's Milk

Pretty much every post on this blog mentions Dialekt in some way. I’m fascinated by it – the way in which an entire country can speak counterhegemonically. This isn’t the German you learn in German class, or on TV or in films. It exists solely in the mouths and media of the people who speak it, who aren’t exactly well-known the world over. Had I not come to Austria, I probably wouldn’t even know that Austrian dialect exists. And Schwiizerdüütsch – the dialect spoken in Switzerland – still remains the stuff of legend for me. I’ve heard Austrians attempt to mimic it, which is where my knowledge of the word “Schwiizerdüütsch” (Hochdeutsch would be Schweizerdeutsch) comes from, but I’ve never heard it spoken by an actual Schweizer. (I did, however, hear a guest lecture by a Swiss person attempting to speak Hochdeutsch last week, and that was enough to convince me that Schweizerdeutsch is indeed an entirely different animal.)

Yes, Dialekt is something special, and it’s something that, as the expression goes, really needs to be passed on with the mother’s milk for perfect mastery. But there’s one group of Austrians that doesn’t speak Dialekt with the same fluency as everyone else. And oddly enough, they’re the ones for whom the sacred rite of Dialekt-through-breastfeeding occurred in the not-so-distant past. I’m talking about toddlers.

Genau!

I was searching Google for an explanation of why Austrians put corn on their pizza when I found this simply hilarious blog about living as an American in the German-speaking world. Although I've found that Austrians actually eat slower than Americans, I still found the following post about sharing meals with German speakers to really hit the nail on the head.

Bist du ein Native Speaker?

There was a Dutch psychologist visiting our Institut last week, which gave me a chance to experience another aspect of European work culture, namely its largely international flavor. Europe is really pouring its heart into the whole European Union thing, by and large, and I'm constantly amazed by the large diversity of Europe-wide initiatives. ERASMUS, the student exchange program and general network of European universities, is an excellent example of this, and meeting students from all over the continent during an ERASMUS semester is quickly becoming a rite of passage for European students (it even has its own cult film!)

Yours, Formally

German, like many other languages around the world but unlike English, has two ways of saying you: "du" (informal) and "Sie" (formal).* In your first-level language class, you complain about having to learn the extra conjugation, but this is only a minor annoyance, you think, in a language with many major ones. Then you start living in the German-speaking world, and you realize that even though you can conjugate both forms, you don't have the foggiest idea of how to use them.

I Do, Indeed, Finally Fit In

In the middle of November, I wrote a blog post which unfortunately was lost to the depths of the Web when my Internet connection went dead. In it, I remember opining that I would probably first feel totally at home in Austria at my goodbye party, when I would realize that I actually was a valued member of Haus Salzburg for the short time I was there. I'm not quite ready to take my leave yet, but it is true that I both feel totally at home here and finally feel like the Austrians I know see me as someone who belongs here. A few vignettes from the weekend will show you what I mean.

Re-Evaluation of My Goals for the Semester

Because I will be unable to attend the final discussion for the required Central College Abroad course next week (I have a final for another class), I was asked to write a response paper re-evaluating the goals I had made at the beginning of the semester and reflecting upon my experience in Wien overall. Again, I'll try to post a translation when I have time.

The Shadow of Fluency

Since I've been home, several people have asked me whether I'm fluent in German now. The answer: I don't know. There's no border to cross, no test to take, no magic moment in which you get your German-speaker membership card and all the Austrians welcome you as a member of the tribe.

mi è piaciuta la italia

It's no secret to anyone who's talked to me in the past few months that I am seriously in love with Austria and with my life here. I'm living like a normal student, which was my goal for the semester from the beginning. But that also means I need to remind myself that there's a lot that's special about this semester as well, and that I should take advantage of the extraordinary opportunities as much as the ordinary ones.

"But Your German is So Good!"

Because I'm not taking a German language class here, my learning feels more haphazard. I hear many of the mistakes I make (mostly in terms of gendered articles and their corresponding adjective endings), but I'm sure there are plenty of others that pass by unnoticed. I'm taking more risks linguistically, in terms of guessing the noun forms of verbs I know, for example, which is good, but without instruction, I have no way of making my guesses more educated.

And then, of course, there's my accent. I've gotten everything from Northern Germany, to Sweden, to Switzerland, to France. (Maybe so few people guess it correctly because, even though everyone knows what Americans sound like, it's so rare to hear an American speaking German.) And when I'm tired, I fall into English sound patterns. Sometimes I even end up saying English words instead of German ones, like the night I tried to go out with my floor after three hours of sleep, and ended up talking about "Östria" -- a blend of Österreich (German) and Austria (English).

I know all of this. My grammar mistakes grate at my ears, so I'm sure they bother my Austrian conversation partners even more. But sometimes, I wonder whether this isn't the Harvard perfectionism creeping in again. Language isn't a formula to apply; it's a communication apparatus. Mine might be a little less stable than most, but if it works, that's the most important thing. But is that just laziness and a lack of ambition talking?

Every time I meet someone new, this dilemma crystallizes itself. If the person already knows I'm an American, they'll say, "Oh, you speak such good German!"* But if they don't know I'm a foreigner, immediately after I speak they ask me, "Where are you from?" or "You're not from Austrian, are you?" Should I take the complement and run? Or strive to not be immediately pegged as a foreigner?

*I also don't know to what extent I should believe the complements I receive. I know that Americans are much more free-wheeling with complements than most other countries, but I also feel like the Austrians are judging me from a different standard of "good German" -- basically, I don't need to speak English with you -- than I would like to judge myself. The one complement I actually believed, though, happened when I was in class with the WU students. Part of our small group work was to read a two-sided explanation of the American mindset behind a specific situation. When my Austrian reading partner flipped the page over, I said, "Whoa, dude, I'm only on the first column. I read really slow." And he said, "Oh, I'm sorry, your German was so good, I forgot that you might take longer." He didn't expect me to be incompetent! Of course, I actually was, which proves yet again that I have a lot of work to do.

Frauentreff, or in English, Meeting Women

Central College Abroad gives us the opportunity to complete an internship during our time in Vienna. Brie, another girl with the program, and I are both working at Frauentreff, a non-profit organization for foreign-born women in an immigrant neighborhood. Frauentreff has German language coruses, beginning literary courses, and advising for women in multiple languages (Turkish, Spanish, and three West African languages -- Ewe, Twi, and Hausa -- I had never heard of before). This is mostly advice and help with everyday life (How do I register my daughter for school? Could you translate this form and help me fill it out?) and small bureaucratic matters that present minor annoyances to cultural insiders but major roadblocks / sources of confusion for immigrants with little knowledge of the system and weak language skills. It's a bit ad-hoc, but nonetheless important. Unfortunately, there's not really much for us to do, so I don't know how long this internship is going to last, but I've enjoyed simply watching the work of the center so far.

Today, Brie and I went to a beginning literacy course. Because all of the women were from small villages in Turkey, they had never had the opportunity to go to school, and since studies show that it's easier for a person to learn to read in their native language, the class was conducted in Turkish. The women were working off of a paper with a bunch of very simple, "What is your name?" questions, and then various answers. First, the women attempted to read the paper through. A phonics lesson then followed, as the women had to attempt to figure out how to write each of the names of the people on the paper. Finally, the women had to attempt to write their own name using phonics. It was fascinating, because even though Brie and I could read the words on the paper, we didn't know what they meant -- the exact opposite of the women in the class, who understood the words but couldn't read them. By the end, though, both groups understood that "ismin ne?" means "What is your name?"

At the end of the lesson, the teacher told Brie and me that we could gladly stay and drink tea with the women. We accepted, and suddenly, the women were pulling out huge containers of food and pouring heaping amounts of a dish that looked and tasted like Italian wedding soup without the soup on plates for us. A large, circular piece of flatbread (very similar to naan) formed the basis of the meal, and then there were various topping options, from joghurt (Greek style, but don't tell Turkish people that) to thick cherry filling to cucumbers and parsley.

Brie and I didn't have a language in common with these women, because even though they've been in Austria for two to five years, they spoke very little German. They understood us when we said "Bitte" (please), "Danke" (thank you), "Entschuldigung" (excuse me), and "Auf Wiedersehen" (goodbye") -- what you can learn in any tourist book -- but when I tried to ask them "Wie heißt das auf Türkisch?" (What is that called in Turkish?), I got a mix of blank looks, "Türkisch, ja" (meaning that Turkish was the only word they understood), and "nicht verstehen" (don't understood). But that didn't really matter, because if you want to be my friend, all you have to do is feed me. The women were incredibly nice, and told the director of Frauentreff, a Turkish-born woman who has lived in Germany and Austria for 20 years, that they wished we could talk to one another better. I think they don't have a lot of opportunities to interact with Austrian / non-Turkish people. The director says that because they can find everything they need in their neighborhood (just like back in their villages in Turkey), they rarely venture out.

By the end of the meal (and with some help from the director), we had learned the Turkish words for sugar, bread, tea, thank you, spoon, and bowl. One of the women even asked us how to say goodbye in English. There was only one lingering question: Was that supposed to be lunch, or does "drinking tee" really mean "drink tea and eat until you burst?" I'll have to Google Translate that question and ask the women at "tea time" next Friday.

Vokabelheft

I’ve been keeping a running list of vocabulary words -- German words that I heard for the first time, but was able to figure out through context clues; German words I read or heard without any comprehension whatsoever (thankfully, this is rarer than the first type); and English words, whose German equivalents I desperately sought during conversation, only to come up empty, leading me to either gesticulate frantically or describe around it using other words. (Dropping in English is always an option, but one I try to avoid when I’m not with other Americans. It seems kind of rude to me. But maybe that’s just a projection of some internalized “you should speak my language” Americanness, and Europeans don’t actually feel that way.)

My Vokabelheft (vocabulary-notebook), as I call it, reads like a running commentary of my time here. When I’m diligent about writing down new words, I don’t need a proper journal.