Category Archives: Germany

Problems of moving from one country to another

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The heading of this blog should now say ‘no longer in Fürth’, unfortunately. But I will get round to that one day, I hope.

Curious factoids:

1. In the UK you can order postage stamps online from various places, but only Royal Mail can send you 88p stamps – the standard for the EU. Another service refers to these stamps as ‘weird and wonderful’ denominations.

In Upminster, you can definitely buy one 78p plus two 5p. This is in the main (sub-) post office.

2. It costs only about 25 euros to have post sent on by Deutsche Post for a year, but Deutsche Post does not recognize postcodes that are longer than 5 digits. Thus the first half of the UK postcode is isolated and identified by them as ‘Länderkürzel’. The county appears straight after my name, the house number after the street. This would all be OK if only the postcode were there. However, after a phone call they have ‘fudged it’ by putting the postcode after the town name – which of course is where it should be anyway.

No wonder the service is so cheap – it is self-annihilating.

Buses and state courts

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Can you commit a breach of copyright by watching streaming pornography? The Cologne Landgericht (officially translated into English as the Cologne Regional Court) has apparently admitted that it may have been unjustified in requiring the names of customers to be revealed, following which letters before action were sent out, requiring recipients to pay 250 euros (text corrected – see first comment).

In the Guardian and elsewhere, the Landgericht has become the Cologne state court.

Did they get the story from an American press report? The Independent uses it too. But even there, state court is a misleading term. We’re not talking about a dual system of federal and local law here.

Some US sites intelligently write of a Cologne court. That seems enough information in this context.

I’m not sure whether the German site The Local purports to write US or British English:

Cologne lawyer Johannes von Rüden represents hundreds of what he says is at least 10,000 people who were sent the legal letters and ‘fines’ from Bavarian law firm Urmann and Colleagues (U+C). …It is thought the Cologne state court only ordered internet providers like Deutsche Telekom to hand over names and addresses of customers because it misunderstood what Redtube.com was.

Yes, Abmahnung is difficult to translate.

The Local also reports that ‘buses’ are Germany’s new favourite transport.

But it does condescend to refer to coaches later in the article.

Goeuro.de, which released the online search figures, says it expects around a million passengers to travel by coach around the festive period.

St. Jude’s Day Storm/Orkantief “Christian”

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It’s strange coming back a day after the storm that hit the UK and hearing on the German news how the same storm is described here.

In the UK the reference to wind speeds seemed more common, but on German TV I heard about 12 on the Beaufort scale. In the UK the storm, originally ‘probably the worst storm since the 1987 storm’, became ‘the St. Jude’s Day storm’, whereas in Germany it was ‘Orkantief Christian’.

The Daily Telegraph remarks that in the UK we don’t name storms:

Laura Young of the Met Office said it wasn’t them. “We don’t actually know where it has come from,” she said. “We don’t name storms in the UK. It could have been Americans who named it and it was reported. Or it could be someone here saw that it was St Jude’s day and decided to name it that.” Traditionally, our storms only merit a name once we have seen the damage they have caused, not before.

LATER NOTE: I forgot the most important thing: the German reports kept showing people whose houses and cars had been damaged by falling trees and saying whether they were insured and exactly how many thousand euros’ damage had been caused. In fact, practically every report on a road traffic accident in Germany is accompanied by an immediate and precise account of the financial loss. How do they know that? I’ve never heard it in the UK.

Haribo

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I’ve complained about the fake consistency of Haribo (Hans Riegel, Bonn) liquorice before (this has been followed by the reshaping of one kind of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk in diarrhoea-like blobs – see pictures in the Daily Mail here).

It may seem churlish to repeat it after the death of Hans Riegel, the founder of Haribo, this week.

But immediately I saw the heading in the Guardian online: ‘Haribo: an addict’s story‘, I knew there must be a German behind it. And of course, it is Philip Oltermann, apparently now living in Berlin. I’ve written about Oltermann’s book here before too. I think it is all very well for him to write about Germany for the Guardian, but should he be praising a firm that has taken over some confectionery it doesn’t understand? I don’t mind the gummy bears (although it seems Haribo actually has the temerity to produce jelly babies).

The story does have a legal aspect, though, since the yellow gummy bear is called the Goldbär and Lindt tried to enforce this name for their gold-foil bear.

The German confectionery giant has managed to engrain itself in Britain’s sweetshop psyche in a remarkable way.

Unfortunately.

I wouldn’t have minded eating the jelly Holy Family, though.

Plums, damsons, Zwetschgen and peaches

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I know fruit and vegetable terminology is really confusing. We have a Polyglot Vegetarian, but where is the polyglot fruitarian?

For years I have known that Zwetschge is difficult to translate into English. The standard exemplar is sweet and can be eaten raw. It is commonly translated as damson because of its small size. But a damson is small and sour, and makes good jam. I suppose the best English translation is zwetsche (the G got lost, but it just indicates a diminutive). One also encounters damson plum, but I don’t know if that helps. And some people even throw the term prune into the mix.

But it seems I failed to define Zwetschge properly. I was thinking of taking some back to England for the neighbours, but I gradually realized that what I was seeing in the market as Zwetschgen were what I would call plums.

Yesterday at the market, at an organic veg stall with two types of Zwetschge, I was told that in everyday German, Pflaumen are round and Zwetschgen are oval!

Now I know that Californian plums are round, but Victoria plums are longish. But this is rubbish.

So no Zwetschgen for my neighbours in England. They would wonder why I was bringing plums all that way.

To be fair, I was told there are masses of different Zwetschgen.

Curiously, the Wikipedia entry for Pflaume does not link to plum, but to Prunus domestica. Perhaps that’s why Frau Albrecht was selling both Zwetschgen and Hauszwetschgen.

P. domestica ssp. domestica – common plums, zwetschge (including ssp. oeconomica)
P. domestica ssp. insititia – damsons and bullaces, krieche, kroosjes, perdrigon and other European varieties
P. domestica ssp. intermedia – egg plums (including Victoria plum)
P. domestica ssp. italica – gages (greengages, round plums etc.; including sspp. claudiana and rotunda)
P. domestica ssp. pomariorum – spilling
P. domestica ssp. prisca – zibarte
P. domestica ssp. syriaca – mirabelle plums

Zwetschge (Prunus domestica subsp. domestica)
Kriechen-Pflaume oder Hafer-Pflaume (Prunus domestica subsp. insititia)
Halbzwetsche (Prunus domestica subsp. intermedia)
Edel-Pflaume (Prunus domestica subsp. italica)
Spilling (Prunus domestica subsp. pomariorum)
Ziparte (Prunus domestica subsp. prisca)
Mirabelle (Prunus domestica subsp. syriaca)

In other news, I encountered the Roter Weinbergpfirsich.

It was sold as a Blutpfirsich.

Up to then I thought Weinbergpfirsich (vineyard peach) just referred to those flat peaches that have become so fashionable (Plattpfirsiche). But I was told that was not so – the term properly (if such a thing exists in fruit terminology) refers to old garden peaches that have furry skins and don’t keep well. I got some yellow ones too, but I have now eaten them, and I’ve converted the red ones into compote.

Leading decision/Grundsatzentscheidung

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It’s been widely reported today that Haribo (which markets a sweet called Goldbär – gold bear) won in a case against Lindt Sprüngli, which has been introducing a gold-foil-wrapped bear for Christmas. The court in Cologne held that people would refer to the Lindt product as ‘gold bear’, thus diluting the mark into which Haribo has pumped huge amounts of money in advertising. (No, commenters, the court did not say that people could not tell the difference between a ‘gummy bear’ and a chocolate bear). Die Welt (German):

Denn die meisten Verbraucher werden laut Gericht den “Lindt Teddy” naheliegenderweise und ungezwungen als “Goldbären” bezeichnen – und eben nicht als Teddy”, “goldene Bärenfigur”, “goldfoliierten Bär” oder als “goldfarbenen Schokoladenteddybär”.

Haribo konnte auf die Umfrage eines unabhängigen Meinungsforschungsinstituts verweisen: 95 Prozent der Verbraucher würden die traditionsreiche Wort-Bildmarke “Goldbär” kennen.

The Local (English):

But the judges said that shoppers were likely to refer to the Lindt product as a “Gold Bear” because of its appearance and thus dilute the Haribo brand.

“Most consumers would not use descriptions such as ‘golden bear figure’, ‘gold foil-wrapped bear’ or ‘gold-coloured chocolate teddy bear’… but rather the closest description, particularly considering how well-known the other brand is: Gold Bear,” it said in a statement.

The decision isn’t final – Lindt will be appealing. It was commented that this particular point of law – whether a word mark can be diluted by the appearance of another mark – has not been decided by the highest courts (höchstrichterlich), or that there has not been a fundamental decision (Grundsatzentscheidung).

Die Welt:

Eine höchstrichterliche Rechtssprechung gebe es zu einer solchen Kollision nämlich noch nicht, erklärte das Kölner Landgericht.

The Local:

“What is special about the case is that there has been no high court ruling on the issue of a collision between a brand name and a three-dimensional product design,” it said.

That is very American. It’s common in the USA to refer to the Supreme Court as the ‘high court’.

I’m not sure if the highest court here would be the Bundesgerichtshof or the Bundespatentgericht. At all events, to call such a decision a ‘landmark decision’ would not be correct. What is meant is a binding decision – not that Germany has an official system of precedent, but in practice it seems like that. A landmark decision is one that makes the news in a big way.

LATER NOTE: Guardian article – with mug shots of the two bears.