Visit theallusionist.org/eastwest to hear this episode and read more about it.
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, tuck language into a box lined with straw and keep it cosy til springtime.
On 9 November 1989, the demolition of the Berlin Wall began. Within a year, Germany was unified. East Germany, the DDR, dissolved and was incorporated into the Federal Republic of Germany, took on its currency and its rules - and its lexicon. Both West and East Germany had already been speaking German, of course; but there were differences, from the years of very concerted separation, the attempts at isolating East Germany from what was considered Western culture and capitalism, and the specifically East German concepts that had their own vocabulary. I was curious about what happened to East German language.
On with the show.
ÉTIENNE ROEDER: There are some words that still exist. There are some expressions you could still tell that these people that the people come from the East or the West. For example, in the Western part, they say ‘Plastik’, and in the Eastern part, I would say they say ‘Plaste’ because there was a company in the East - there was actually just one company in the East that produced plastics and that was called Plaste und Elaste, and because of that, all the people would call plastics ‘Plaste’. And you you could still tell today if someone says ‘Plaste’ and instead of ‘Plastik’ that this person is probably from the Eastern part.
ESTHER-MIRIAM WAGNER: ‘Plastetüte’ - plastic bag. I mean I remember going to school with a plastic bag and being sent home because it was a West German bag. This was a very precious item - you would keep a ‘Plastetüte’ for months and you would reuse it and reuse it and reuse it until it was just tatters. That was a precious object.
MATTHIAS EINHOFF: My son, when he tries to identify if someone is coming from a West German or East German family, he asks them how they call the thing that you put your bathroom things in: East Germans say ‘Waschtasche’ and West Germans say ‘Kulturbeutel’. And that’s the ultimate identifier whether you come from a East or West German family. Wonder what it’s like when you’re from a mixed family.
ÉTIENNE ROEDER: I would use both. I can't really say where it comes from. I grew up with Waschtasche. Probably that's from the east then, but today I say Kulturbeutel. No, I say, Waschtasche, sorry, I say Waschtasche. Yeah. It’s true. But, you know, I I so much understand all of these words that I can't really sometimes tell what I used first.
My name is Étienne Roeder. I was born in East Berlin in 1983, so six years before the wall came down and seven years before German reunification. So I was seven before Germany became one country.
I did gymnastics. And for me, that was the opportunity to travel a little bit, to get to know other parts of the country, other parts of Europe. So I remember in the early 1990s, maybe 94, 95, we went to a training camp to the western part of Germany, a part that my family didn't know at all. But, we realized immediately that there were some words, some expressions, some phrases we used - we, I say, like people from East Berlin, people from other parts of the country didn't use. And it was not by dialects or by regional tones of the language, or by the way, how people would pronounce things. But it was specific political words. And I really realized that these words exist. And there was a time in the 90s when I realized that these differences disappeared, that, slowly, they faded away. People would not use these words anymore, like me either, because no one would understand.
ESTHER-MIRIAM WAGNER: Well, there were definitely a few words that were differently used in East and West Germany.
HZ: Esther-Miriam Wagner is a linguist and executive director of the Woolf Institute at Cambridge University. She grew up in the city of Jena, which was in the southwest corner of East Germany.
ESTHER-MIRIAM WAGNER: You had different terms for foods for example because also the foods were very different in East Germany, the availability of foods was very different.
ÉTIENNE ROEDER: There was a word in German, in Eastern Germany, that was called ‘muckefuck’. You probably heard of that. It's a coffee. Coffee substitute. Muckefuck.
HZ: Muckefuck. Couple of etymological explanations knocking around - that it’s a corruption of ‘mocha faux’, false mocha, because the drink was made of non-coffee things, such as grains or vegetables or acorns. Alternatively, it meant ‘rotten wood’.
ESTHER-MIRIAM WAGNER: Yes, there are certain things that you still only say in the East, like for example for grilled chicken we say ‘broiler’ in the East and in the West they say ‘grillhänchen’.
ÉTIENNE ROEDER: Yeah, you could tell by some words if, for example, if a person says temple instead of tissue, then you could probably bet that this is the person from the West, because in the language, people from the West, I would say by tendency would use more the brand name of a product than the name of the product itself. You know what I mean? In West Germany, they would use like the brand Tempo, which was a brand of tissues, instead of saying ‘tissue’. “Can you hand me over tissue?” That would be like the East German form. And "Can you hand me over a Tempo?" would be like the Western German way of saying it. But. And that works with a lot of things.
HZ: Interestingly, the West Germans that I've mentioned this to have all been like, "Oh, I didn't think there were any differences."
ULRIKE MEINHOF: Well, there were, but they have virtually almost completely disappeared again, because it's very easy for language which undergoes a different political change, there's different institutions in different social and economic and professional practices, to adopt a whole new vocabulary so that these new practices can be described. So classically, you'd get lots of lots of words in the DDR, which had ‘party’ or ‘worker’, or ‘state-owned’, or whatever, the stuff like this in front of it, as against West Germany, which has lots of ‘federal’ things in front of thing. So there were lots and lots of new words. But of course, these words were describing institutions that are no longer there. So they kind of disappeared again
HZ: Ulrike Hanna Meinhof grew up in the town of Tiefengrün, in what she describes as the last house in West Germany. She is now a professor at the University of Southampton, and one of her areas of expertise is European borders, including the one that used to divide Germany.
ULRIKE MEINHOF: And then there were these euphemisms, you know, like the wall was called the Antikapitalistischer Schutzwall, the anti-capitalist protection wall, Schutzwall, because the GDR said that was what protected them. But nobody in the DDR actually said that, they all said ‘The Wall’. So there was a lot of state euphemism about things.
ELKE SCHÖNHARDT translated by MARTA MEDVEŠEK: Antifaschistischer Schutzwall, that’s how we called the wall. You were never allowed to say ‘Mauer’ [The Wall], to say ‘Mauer’ is derogatory, you don’t say that. That’s how it was described, that we were protected from the capitalism. Ultimately it was of course the other way around. And it was of course used to prevent the emigration of the GDR citizens to the West, that’s what it was actually protecting. But it was of course presented the other way around.
HZ: But despite state efforts, East Germans were not completely isolated from media and culture from West Germany or beyond.
ULRIKE MEINHOF: All East Germans were watching West German television. That in itself was a way to stop the language from drifting further apart because West German television was absolutely standard. People had TVs and they had little things in the back where they ocould switch it around and initially the East Germans tried to blur it but it was impossible to do because this country is not that big you know and of course the West Germans used to do that also as a way of propaganda; it was good free world propaganda.
ESTHER-MIRIAM WAGNER: But you know that the media - there was actually a difference, also there was a sort of a line across East Germany because there were parts of the very East that could not receive West German television. That's the area around the east of Saxony and they could actually only watch East German television, whereas we in the western part, we could actually watch Western television and I mean there must be some influence surely that we could actually watch sort of standard German programs, And those in the east could not or had a much harder time because I mean of course you are influenced by mass communication. But those poor people I mean we call them the sort of the ‘’Valley of the clueless’’ - "das Tal der Ahnungslosen" in German. I don't know how they did it.
HZ: Interestingly, a regional dialect that was regarded negatively came to be the language of power.
ESTHER-MIRIAM WAGNER: a lot of the political elite in East Germany came from Halle - they came from Saxony-Anhalt. And that's actually a dialect area which has a very peculiar and very pejoratively viewed dialect. And a lot of these political leaders were speaking in this particular dialect and because they became the political elite, a lot of other East Germans would then also just start talking in this particular register because it was seen as the official state register. So basically these southern dialects, even though they're only a part and by no means the majority of the population, because it was a dialect spoken by the political elite, it became then really associated with the East German state. And I remember that, for example, in my school, you would have teachers who would speak absolutely normal German - I mean, they would speak high standard German, but as soon as there was some sort of official East German event and they would have to give a speech, they would actually change register and start talking in this sort of Saxony-Anhalt dialect just because it was seen as something that you had to do, because this was the way that these politicians would speak on TV.
ÉTIENNE ROEDER: The language was kind of like a sociolect, I imagine - that you really quickly could tell where someone comes from and what you could talk about or not, because anything I remember back in the days was political. I remember growing up in a time where where they existed, these two languages. It was like an official language we received through the media. I remember these episodes when every night we would sit together with my grandparents, my mother and my aunt and my cousins, and watch the ‘Tagesschau’, which is the news program at 8:00 at night. And back in the days before the wall fell, it was the ‘AK’, ‘the Aktuelle Kamera’, that was like the other news show for the Eastern part. So I remember that when we switched from one news show to the other one because the old one didn't exist anymore, we would continue this habit to sit together and watch the news at 8:00 at night. My grandparents and my mother and my aunt, they would just constantly translate or comment on on the news that were presented in TV. It always seemed to me that my family had to reframe what what we saw in TV.
ESTHER-MIRIAM WAGNER: But I think people from West Germany - I remember people being surprised, when meeting northern East Germans that they didn't sound different to them. They had this idea of every East German speaks in this hilarious way which sounds really daft but then actually they were quite astonished to meet people who who spoke just like them. And also to see that these people from - who speak these very maligned accents - that actually they could say intelligent things. Because often - I think what people were exposed to in West Germany was basically recordings, television or radio, that were made by the official state media in East Germany and of course this was all very heavily edited and it was all sort of party line East German paroles and slogans, which weren't terribly clever. So of course people had this particular idea of what linguistic ability was like in East Germany. People were surprised - I was in a church in East Germany, which was quite unusual itself because very few East Germans were actually religious. I remember being taunted in school. You know "she's so stupid. She believes in God" and things like that. So I remember going to Erlangen with the church group to perform a play. And so we went into the equivalent of the church there, so there were other churchgoing people. And one of the children was sort of crying out and saying, "Wow, they speak German. I thought they spoke Russian!” We were taken aback by this, but there were just these ideas of I guess in the same way that we sort of have certain ideas and you know nowadays about certain countries based on what the media show you. So I think a lot of West Germans had this idea of what life... social life, ‘linguistic life, everything was like in East Germany. And it really wasn't.
ULRIKE MEINHOF: Well, yes, Russian was one of the languages you learned in school. If you went to sort of higher level schooling, you learned Russian, and there were words that influence GDR German which came from Russian - not directly, I mean, there were a few like ‘sputnik’ and stuff like that, you know, which we all used. But most of the words that got into the GDR German which were taken from Russian, were sort of translations from Russian concepts, so ‘Kulturhaus’, you know, House of Culture and ‘Planwirtschaft’ - planned economy, or ‘Fünfjahresplan’, five year plan - and all these kind of words, these are all Soviet terms to describe the economic structure and they were all directly translated into German. So you get these these sort of loan translations.
ESTHER-MIRIAM WAGNER: Basically there was no religious literacy because people didn't read the Bible or didn't in any way learn about Christian rites or Islamic or Jewish... I mean about any sort of religion because there was such a strict sort of secular line in East Germany.
HZ: How did they talk about concepts that there weren't supposed to be in East German.
ESTHER-MIRIAM WAGNER: I don't know. I mean if you don't have the vocabulary…
HZ: How do you say ‘God’?
ESTHER-MIRIAM WAGNER: Well, there was a word for God - “There is no God,” “God is dead.” Not not having these sort of specific linguistic register to talk about religion makes it actually easier just to sort of completely denounce it and say we're not going to talk about this. “There is no God, there is no religion.” But a lot of the linguistics in East Germany was sort of marked by use of particular socialist rhetorics and phrases, so when you wanted to talk about anything pertaining to the state or to the social life in a socialist republic you had to speak in a particular linguistic register which had a lot of nouns. It's typical this sort of when you have people talking in an official register, often you find that they use the language of distance. That they basically shy away from language of immediacy so you actually don't connect to the person who listens to you, but you use a lot of nouns and you use this very very abstract language. And that's what people did. Often you just could not understand what they were talking about. This was a very very artificial artificial register they would use.
HZ: But why do you think they felt the need to do that? Could they not really handle yet directly thinking about this stuff, so they have to create these linguistic fences?
ESTHER-MIRIAM WAGNER: Well when you create linguistic fences you sort of keep yourself safe, you're not in danger of saying something that may be viewed as critical. All right. So you can actually... With a certain linguistic register, it's very easy to hide yourself and just sort of repeat phrases that you've heard before. I still have that now when I talk to Americans: I'm always absolutely astonished at the breadth of their vocabulary; how wonderfully they actually manage to describe their own emotions, or express what they really want to say. East Germany, you wouldn't talk in a very open way about yourself, because opening up yourself was always also a dangerous thing.
HZ: Politically?
ESTHER-MIRIAM WAGNER: Politically, yeah, politically. And I think that's one of the reasons I actually really had to learn to express myself, in the years after the change.
HZ: What kind of risks were you running if you were revealing too much of yourself before?
ESTHER-MIRIAM WAGNER: I don't know. I think it's just... I think in certain in societies, in socialist societies, you don't want to stress your individuality too much, I think. So when you start talking about yourself a little bit too much, I think that's always viewed as suspicious by the state. You don't want to be too individual; you don't want to reveal yourself as thinking too much about yourself or about your situation. But it's astonishing isn't it. If you don't have the word you actually can't understand yourself. You don't have the vocabulary that you don't understand your own feelings about a certain thing. It's astonishing isn't the whole language really sort of shapes the way you can think about a problem. I mean there are these these sort of Sapir-Whorf theories that have long been sort of criticized. They had this idea that your vocabulary allows you to sort of see the world in a certain way, which people don't agree with now. But I think there’s still a way in which the way you think about yourself and about the world is shaped by the availability of words to describe it. Right? You can have a sort of an intuitive feeling, but I think unless you can actually describe it in words it's very very difficult.
HZ: So after the reunification of Germany, the former East Germans gained language as they lost some.
ESTHER-MIRIAM WAGNER: The more population movement you have the more you will have standard sort of language standards being imposed or being introduced. I think a very mobile society is usually one where you lose your dialects. I guess this also - this sort of contributed to the specifics of East German linguistics, because there was hardly anywhere anyone moved anywhere. I mean you were born somewhere, you stayed there. Once people start moving around, then the regional differences get lost. This caused a lot of grief, I think, also among East Germans how sort of the cultural and linguistic heritage of East Germany was completely extinguished in the early 90s. Some of it resurfaced later again. But I think not being taken seriously linguistically also contributed to a lot of resentment that people still have, especially my generation, a bit older than my generation, I guess, like people in their 50s and 60s.
ÉTIENNE ROEDER: Then there were other people would call like the time of the GDR ‘the peace time’, ‘Friedenszeiten’. So they would always refer to the old state in the colloquial language as ‘the peace time’ or as ‘the other country’, ‘the other reality’.
ULRIKE MEINHOF: Well, you know, this sort of what we call ‘Ostalgia’ - not nostalgia, ‘Ostalgia’, ‘Ostalgie’.
HZ: Portmanteau alert - Ostalgia.
ULRIKE MEINHOF: That you are kind of longing back to some times when life seems easier, because, you know, it was much more protected and rents were low and everybody had work, and there were nice provisions for women in creches, these sorts of things. So, both for good or for bad reasons, there is that; because there is youth unemployment more in the East than there is in the West. I think the most important thing to remember is that any group that feels marginalized as a result of social change will always hark back a little bit to the good old times.
HZ: You heard from Étienne Roeder, Matthias Einhoff, Elke Schönhardt with translation from Marta Medvešek, Ulrike Hanna Meinhof and Esther-Miriam Wagner, who in today’s Minillusionist talks about her dialect from the region where she grew up, about 100km southwest of Leipzig - she says it is regarded quite perjoratively as German dialects go.
MINILLUSIONIST
ESTHER-MIRIAM WAGNER: So it really is interesting for me that on the one hand, I'm very happy to talk in English and I'm quite myself in English and I'm very happy to talk in dialectal German and that myself in dialectal German, but when I'm asked to speak High German I just can't do it. It's because suddenly I lose my identity; I don't feel like myself anymore. There are these socio linguistic studies by a couple of sociolinguists called Milroy, and they found that people who speak a dialect that is viewed very pejoratively by the majority of other people will still continue speaking in a certain dialect because it gives them such grounding and such you know such a large amount of identity that they can't - they just can't stop talking in it. And I feel this is exactly the same with me. I can speak German, I have to speak in my local dialect even though my husband hates it. You know he makes fun of me when I speak my local accent.
HZ: Where's he from?
ESTHER-MIRIAM WAGNER: He's from the same area! He pretends that he he doesn't speak it, but whenever he's on the phone immediately and he talks to his friends, he immediately starts talking in dialect, he immediately changes language. But he doesn't realize that so whenever I do that I talk to my friends and I go a bit more to the dialect he makes fun of me.
What really struck me - I watched a movie which was called As We Were Dreaming. And it's based on a book that takes place in Leipzig in the 90s. It's called Als Wir Träumten, it's about basically young people just after the change stealing cars going to techno parties you know living crazy lives. And I really like the visual sort of I think the visuality of the movie was fantastic and the casting was also nice. But then I was so appalled that they all spoke in Standard German. It just didn't work and I know that if I watched a comparable thing, like The Wire would never have the young ghetto kids speaking RP or Standard American. You would never have people here like if you watch shows like Misfits or Skins - people don't speak RP, people speak their region’s dialects. But you had this movie which took place in the the deepest linguistic heart of East Germany. They cast some local actors who then actually spoke the local dialect, but all these kids spoke you know standard German and - this is not working. This really isn't working.
And for the first time I really realized how perhaps it's part of the dubbing culture in Germany, because we dub all movies, so people are used to you know all sorts of characters speaking Standard German. But somehow it's accepted in Germany that you will not take account of people's regional accents, which is very interesting because you really rob movies and TV shows of authenticity. It always feels like you're in a theater play. It doesn't feel real; it's like a very badly scripted theatre play, though, because people speak these very awkward dialect and don't speak dialect or speak just really awkward standard language. In Leipzig, I don't think you would have had any sort of teenager who would have spoken standard pronunciation at that time. When I was a teenager, people who spoke like this were considered slightly awkward and precocious. I mean these were certain people you knew but you didn't really get warm with them because they had this really awkward way of talking.
HZ: Did you feel like they were kind of pretentious?
ESTHER-MIRIAM WAGNER: Of course, very pretentious! Why would you speak like this to us? This is how you can speak if you speak to your grandparents perhaps or something. But if we talk among each other, we talk in a certain socialect, dialect. It just has to be. Otherwise you can't really connect to one another.
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This episode was produced by Marta Medvešek and Helen Zaltzman, with help from Martin Austwick who also makes the music you hear on the show.
Thanks to Rachele De Felice, Lynne Murphy and Eleanor McDowall, and Adele, Thomas and Lutz. This episode is dedicated to Suzy Freake.
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