Mr. Franzen, what kind of result would you achieve if you took a German test today?
Against what kind of competition? I certainly wouldn’t like to take responsibility for formulating a nuclear arms agreement, but when it comes to talking about myself or literature, I can get by well enough. The German language is structured in such a wonderfully modular way. You can reduce inflected verbs to their basic form. You can ignore the short words you don’t understand or divine their meaning from the context, while the long ones can be split into their component parts.
Can you swear in German?
Little things like “Verdammt noch mal”. And of course I can bellow “Arschloch”. But I have my problems with slang. My German comes from books. As I explain in The Discomfort Zone, I spent almost all of my first German year in Munich speaking English – to American girls I was chasing. I was shy and didn’t make friends with a single German. It’s only in the last two or three years, since I began coming to Germany regularly, that I’ve found a few German friends.
Didn’t you have any luck with German girls while you were a student in Berlin?
I was already engaged then and was not really supposed to have a German girlfriend. I took that obligation pretty seriously. When the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) organized a Thanksgiving party, I was talking to an incredibly attractive young woman and our accursed DAAD tutor came up to us and she deliberately asked: “Jonathan, how’s your fiancée?”
Mark Twain wrote a damning critique in his essay on “The Awful German Language”. Some of it is wrong, but he got it right when he describes the passion Germans have for monster compound nouns like “Generalstaatsverordnetenversammlungen”. What do you find most awful about the language?
The annoying question of gender. Why is a bird masculine (“der Vogel”) and not neuter (“das Vogel”)? It still intimidates me so much that I sometimes have to stop in mid-sentence and don’t have the courage to make a mistake. Irregular plural forms also sometimes cause problems. Additionally, I occasionally find the German language sententious. The way it objectifies everything results in a tendency towards a certain recklessness and slickness. But perhaps I’ve only gained that impression from some of its speakers.
Are there situations in which you talk German to yourself?
When I write, I often translate my sentences into German to see how they sound. I try to find out whether a sentence keeps its irony and humour, whether it’s transparent enough.
Heidegger described language as the “house of the truth of being”. How does the German house differ from the American English house?
The image of the German language that springs into my mind resembles one of those enormous Chinese factories that provide everything for their workers: a cinema, a volleyball court, dormitories – a complete corporate city in which everything is rationally laid out. The vacuum cleaner is used less frequently in English houses – at least, that’s how it seems to me. The windows are not cleaned as often and there’s dirt hanging in the corners. Contemporary American in particular seems to me very much like a large untidy student dorm.
English has a large number of loan words from German – from weltschmerz to kindergarten. There are also French borrowings, but why so few from Spanish?
We export so many products that have created their own new language: films, music, and computers. If the French had developed Microsoft Windows or the mobile telephone, we would now perhaps have everything in French. Old English was put under enormous pressure when the Normans invaded England in 1066 and brought tons of French with them. With hindsight, that was very good for English as a literary language. It gave us Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare. People don’t like to see beautiful things change. But ultimately it is true for every language that it must either change or die!//
The interview was conducted by Gregor Dotzauer and translated into English.
Interview: Der Tagesspiegel, Berlin
