Category Archives: Germany

ShoutOutForGerman / Some German words

Posted on by
Reply

Shout Out For German is an initiative of the German Embassy, Goethe Institut and DAAD:

It’s time to celebrate the German language in the UK! The German Embassy, together with the Goethe-Institut UK and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), invites you to take part in our social media campaign #ShoutOutForGerman – your chance to share your language learning highlights with the world.

 

Whether you’re a student, a teacher, or just a fan of the German language, from 19 to 24 January 2026, show your enthusiasm for Deutsch on social media. Use the hashtag #ShoutOutForGerman and tag the German Embassy London to showcase your school’s activities, your favourite German words, travel memories, a clip of you dancing to a viral German song – anything goes!

Continue reading →

Der Zauberberg, Thomas Mann

Posted on by
Reply

I’m re-reading Der Zauberberg. It’s been a good fifty years since the last ‘read’, and I now know to take it slowly and with enjoyment.

The novel was published over 100 years ago, in November 2024. And two new translations are about to appear, one by Susan Bernofsky in the USA (translation only just finished), with W.W. Norton, and one by Simon Pare in the UK, Oxford World’s Classics, appearing on March 12th 2026. The Pare translation has an introduction by Ritchie Robertson, and detailed notes explaining the many cultural and historical references in the text. Sounds excellent, and I am looking forward to seeing what the reviewers say about the novel.

Continue reading →

Frankfurter Küche/Frankfurt kitchen

Posted on by
Reply

The Frankfurt Kitchen, the original fitted kitchen, was designed in 1926 by Margarete Schütte-Lihotsky. 10,000 of them were installed in Frankfurt am Main. I knew the V & A had one, but when I went to see it a few years ago, of the three people I asked, only one had heard of it and none of them knew where it was. Now the V & A Storehouse in Stratford can display it.

The V & A kitchen is not identical to the one in the diagram: it has solid fuel and electric stoves, not gas, and it has a chair rather than a swivel stool. It was designed to minimize the steps taken by the housewife. On the right-hand side there are drawers for various dry goods such as lentils, sugar, flour. The names are printed on them. They are called Schütten in German – I’ve seen it translated as dispensers. I actually have a couple made of toughened glass which a friend gave me.

Goodbye to Palandt

Posted on by
1

Bye-bye, Palandt! – post at the Dispute Resolution Germany blog, on July 27th:

C.H. Beck, Germany’s leading legal publisher, today announced that several of its publications will finally be renamed in light of the Nazi past of the jurists whose names they currently bear. All of these publications are household names for law students and practitioners alike.

The campaign for these names to be changed was pretty much a niche thing for many years and gained traction and public visibility only fairly recently.

I didn’t realize that Palandt was a member of the Nazi party. According to German Wikipedia, Beck Verlag chose him as the editor (of the BGB commentary) at short notice in 1938. Palandt (1877-1951) wrote the foreword and introduction until the tenth edition in 1952. In 1945 he removed the pro-Nazi bits. He was allegedly not responsible for the overall editing.

I haven’t got a Palandt at the moment, but I have sometimes bought reduced-price older editions in Germany and found them very useful, but not predictably frequently. Probably there are ways of consulting it online – it was never very easy as a full-time freelance translator to go to a library to consult it, as time was scarce.

After much criticism, Beck Verlag has eventually decided to change the name from Palandt to Grüneberg. The same fate befalls Maunz, Schönfelder (killed in Italy in 1944) and Blümich (I don’t think I’ve encountered Blümich).

40% German blog (and podcast)

Posted on by
4

I’m just logging in to make a gesture towards posting in 2021, post Brexit and mid-Covid.

I have only just discovered Nic Houghton’s blog 40% German, subtitled Pretzels, Beer and Confusion.

Nic is a Geordie who has been living in Germany since 2011 and writes about that. Topics include:

Annoying the Germans: Small Talk
The Eye of the Beer Holder
The Two Sides of Germany’s Cutting Edge
Germany’s Class System
How Healthy is Germany?
Königreich of Kebabs

and all those other topics I have wondered about over the years.

The first thing that caught my attention was a post on integration, Integrating the Germans. A recent discussion with local Bavarian villagers about immigrants to their village not really joining in turned out to be referring to people from Nuremberg who wanted to enjoy the village social life without contributing to it themselves.


This put in stark relief, in my mind at least, the problem of integration. How can anyone in Germany expect peoples from vastly different cultures to integrate into German life, if we still have problems integrating Germans into German life. It also made a mockery of the expectations that some people seem to have that immigrants from all over the world will suddenly become their particular brand of “German”. I’m not sure it can boiled down into some checklist. Politicians in the past have tried, making bold statements about the need for a Leitkultur or a Guiding culture that defines for immigrants the way they should behave, but which culture? Is it the one from the North or the South, the East or the West?

He also has a podcast, Decades from Home, together with Simon Maddox, which I’m listening to now.

Decades from Home is a podcast that looks at the weird and wonderful of German life from the perspective of two non-Germans.

With over two decades of living in Deutschland between them your hosts, Nic and Simon, find news articles and tell stories that show the many different sides to German life.