German that is used outside Germany
— English is called an ‘international
language’, and it is spoken in many different places of the world
other than England, as a consequence of colonisation, but it seems German
is not like that. Did Germany colonise any countries and impose the
use of German?
Well, Imperial Germany did colonise countries in Africa and the Pacific.
I have a picture of my great-grandmother in Namibia where her husband
had a job with the colonial government. There are still some German
traces in South Africa, such as street names, names of places, family
names and so on. In Brazil there are German communities, where German
people settled after World War II.
In the United States, there are ‘Pennsylvania Germans’
whose ancestors came from Germany. They speak an 'old-fashioned' kind
of German, different from the German today, because it has developed
separately in the States.
In the 19th century, many settlers came to the States
from different parts of Europe: Italians, Dutch, French, British, Irish,
Polish and German. At some stage around the turn of the century there
was even some discussion about German as the official language of the
United States, because the number of those who spoke German was very
large at that time.
If you look at the names or credits in Hollywood movies
you will notice many family names are German, often of Jewish origin.
Henry Kissinger is perhaps a well-known example of a US citizen with
a German name.
— How about the Nazis? Did they colonise and force
people to speak German?
They did, they invaded and occupied neighbouring countries, such
as Poland, Czecheslovakia, some parts of Russia. In Austria, which was
annexed, the language is German too. After the Second World War, those
annexed territories were returned, and Germany even lost a large chunk
of its former eastern territory, including my father’s birthplace
which is now in Poland.
Our
desires presage the capacities within us; they are harbingers of
what we shall be able to accomplish. What we can do and want to
do is projected in our imagination, quite outside ourselves, and
into the future. We are attracted to what is already ours in secret.
Thus passionate anticipation transforms what is indeed possible
into dreamt-for reality.
Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1775)
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After the war, some German language use which had been
used for Nazi propaganda was prohibited. The first stanza of the German
anthem was cut out, because the phrases are very nationalistic and indicate
an expansionist idea. But we still sing the remaining stanzas of the
anthem. …They [Nazi members] were clever in some ways. They juggled
with words very well to manipulate people so people believed it was
a good thing, like advertising or TV commercials nowadays. They did
very effective propaganda.
—Are there any countries where German is spoken
today?
Switzerland is one. There are French-, Italian-, Romansh- and German-speaking
regions in the country, spoken in different places separately. Their
German is somewhat different from the one spoken in Germany. So is the
Austrian German. These are the two countries where German is spoken
as a native language outside Germany. Parts of Luxemburg, Liechtenstein
and Belgium also have German speakers. There are also German speaking
minorities still in Poland, Romania and the former Soviet Union.
