Monday, January 4, 2016

You Won't Believe What This Hedgehog Did Next!

That night’s good night story came from a stack of German books from my wife’s childhood.
Die Hase und der Igel.I read the title aloud as I opened the book to read to my kids. The Hare and the Hedgehog.

“That’s cute,” I thought, “The Germans replaced the tortoise in ‘The Tortoise and the Hare’ with a hedgehog.” I imagined an adorable, spiky hedgehog facing off in a running race against the boisterous hare. At that moment it made perfect sense.



The story began as it always did: The hedgehog minding his own business when suddenly an annoying, intrusive hare appears out of nowhere and begins hassling the poor rodent. Usually you’d figure a guy like that’s a Mormon. Or a Republican. But he’s not, he’s just a big rabbit.

The teasing escalates until the hedgehog and the hare agree to a race the hare wanted all along. And then the German version gets weird: Rather than tooling around a forest path, the duo agree to face off in a simple sprint from one end of the hedgehog’s field to the other.

“Fair enough,” I thought. “The story’s over quicker that way.” Hoping for a fast end to my parenting duties, I began contemplating whether to end the day with wine, beer or camembert.

Then, the hedgehog did a very strange thing, something that isn’t in that Aesop fable we all know: The hedgehog calls for his wife and tells her to dress just like him.

“Wow,” I thought, thinking the Germans had not only introduced a new animal into the ancient tale, they’d also included a bit of cross-dressing. “Those liberal Germans!” 



Then comes the hedgehog’s strategy: He and his wife will just stand at each end of the field and every time the hare arrives, he’ll think he’s already been beat by a hedgehog that hasn’t even broken a sweat.

What? What happened to slow and steady wins the race? What happened to perseverance? What happened to doing the right thing despite miserable odds? Where’s the morality play?
The hedgehog is going to CHEAT? I was so incensed I even thought in all caps. Liberal Germans indeed!   

The hare and the hedgehog progresses just as the wily hedgehog predicts: After the first race, the rabbit thinks his spiky competitor is beating him and continues to propose a rematch in the hopes he will finally emerge victorious. The hare can’t, of course, and, depending on the version, either admits defeat, goes insane or – yes – dies of exhaustion. What a kids story!

For years I thought this poetic license with the original Aesop Fable stood for all that was wrong with Germany. Now I think it’s why German kids seem better prepared for life: They already know that assholes are best countered with fraud, deceit and gender bending.

I’ve also learned that the Tortoise and the Hare and the Hase und Igel are two different stories, one by Aesop and one stolen from Aesop by Germany’s own Shakespeares: The Brothers Grimm.


Once again the Germans are doing it right: Slow and steady wins the race is a garbage axiom. Anyone over 10 knows it’s untrue and as someone who’s run the Berlin Marathon twice I can tell you it doesn’t win the race at all: Slow and steady gets you 32,001th place, or 4,291th place in your age/sex group. 

Next time I'll dress like my wife.

Monday, December 28, 2015

Germany's True Fifth Season

In Germany, the official fifth season is anything to do with Karneval, a few days of drunken spring debauchery that used to have religious undertones and a smattering of royal bashing. These days it’s just drunken debauchery. I’m not being glib because we have a similar party in the U.S.: It’s called college. But Germans love the fifth season because it’s when the rules allow them to be silly and unrestrained. Note the irony in being silly and unrestrained only when the rules allow. Germans don’t see that irony. They love Karneval.



But it’s not the real fifth season in Germany. Not in a real season sense. The real fifth season occurs in that no-man’s-land between Christmas and New Year’s. You’ve always quietly felt that the year ends shortly after all the Christmas presents are open and the new year doesn’t get going until that first feeling of dread back at your desk. The Germans have always known that it’s actually a different season and they’ve even given it a name: Zwischen den Jahren. Between the years. It’s one of my favorite sayings because it’s so perfectly right, in a German precision kind of way (but without faking the emission tests). It’s not this year and it’s not next year: It’s between the years.

Perfect.

Unfortunately my second least favorite German phrase always rears its head between the years, refusing to leave, like a subterranean worm in Tremors. “Guten Rutsch!”, or have a good slide! We all assume a good slide into next year but without a direct object in that sentence it’s hard to know. Germans love it as a parting phrase between the years – on the phone, at the counter and, with a wink of the eye, while putting you under for a colonoscopy. There’s an apocryphal story that it comes from Yiddish which, like the definition of apocryphal, may or may not be true.

I’d love to end on an upbeat comment about Zwischen den Jahren but the only remaining footnote is a negative: Karneval follows just a few weeks after Zwischen den Jahren.



Things I Found Magical About Germany: Wagenstandsanzeiger

In these days of Skype-fueled long-distance relationships and low-cost airlines, the Wagenstandsanzeiger, or train car location sign (I know, German, right?) may not seem like such a magical beast but when I was a teenager it seemed as foreign as a bank that doesn’t need to be bailed out. It’s a sign on every German train platform that knows your train intimately and will tell you exactly where on your platform the train will stop – restrooms and all.


I came from a country where train delays weren’t measured in minutes or even hours but rather days. In my childhood, American passenger trains were never delayed by things like inclement weather or suicidal twenty-somethings. They seemed to suffer from depression, only getting up the nerve to traverse the country after a couple of stiff whiskeys and a stern talking to by the Minister of Transportation.

“Mother,” my mother would tell her mother through a plastic, yellow phone with a rotary dial, “The train was supposed to leave Tuesday but they say now it may be Thursday. We’re hoping to get there before we have to start back.” My grandmother never believed my mother. But after we arrived days late, my grandmother would complain about how late the train always was.

“I told you,” my mother would say. She never got along with her mother and, just to keep up the family tradition, I never got along with my mother either. My mother wasn’t blessed with any daughters so they drafted me for the role.

It was amidst this climate that I moved to Germany and found the wondrous unicorn known as the Wagenstandsanzeiger. “You mean, they not only know which trains are going to show up at what time, but they even know which car will be where?” I thought my guest mother had become a wizard. How could they know?

My guest mother was just as surprised at my surprise: “Of course there’s a Wagenstandsanzeiger and of course it’s right!” She looked at me as though my skin had turned purple and I’d grown antlers. And from that day forward I never rode another train without first checking the Wagenstandsanzeiger. It’s a tradition I want to pass to my children. Because I’m not their mother so they can’t not get along with me.

Things I Found Magical About Germany: VW Golf Combi

This only makes sense in the context of my childhood.

The VW Golf was introduced into the U.S. in 1975 as the Rabbit. It looked like the rejected offspring of a stalwart Volvo and a dull Honda. Read: Small and boxy. It was a fuel-efficient, compact car for people who didn’t want to go Japanese. These people were the auto-buying version of punks. Or at least vegans. The Rabbit was supposedly a success but the only people who drove it in pre-cable TV Littleton, Colorado were college professors and … college professors. After cable TV, Depeche Mode and Robin Leach, yuppies who couldn’t afford BMWs also started driving the convertible version – at least it was German.


But no one in the U.S. ever dreamed of a Rabbit station wagon. Why would you? College professors never drove station wagons and if you needed that much room you’d opt for a real one anyway – one that could hold everything needed for a week-long trip to grandma’s or possibly house a small New Guinean tribe. Besides, about then Lee Iacocca invented the mini-van, saving Chrysler and making station wagons pointless.

Then I went to Germany as an exchange student and discovered someone had taken a compact car and made it into a station wagon. They’d taken a car with not very much room and added not very much room more. You could maybe fit a medium-sized wiener dog in the back or go to the bowling alley with your wife and actually take both balls (jokes on me, Germans don’t bowl). The VW Rabbit station wagon – or Golf Combi, as the Krauts say – seemed like a car that never needed to be invented and yet there it was. In fact, in Wegberg, Germany, there a lot of them were. Magic.



The Golf Combi had such a hold on me that it was one of the first things I looked for on the VW Internet site, way back in like 1994. Maybe ’95. And I even almost bought one after the birth of my first child in 2003 – I wanted us to be surrounded by magic. But I went for its mother instead – a 1996 Volvo 850. The Volvo’s rotting in a field now. Probably home to several generations of rabbit.