The Lego kit language

Wladimir Kaminer, photo M. Fleitmann, www.europaeische-kulturtage.de

I’m often invited to schools to read to the students. Afterwards they ask me questions. They’re not interested in discovering more about the content of my stories – all they want to know is how much a year I earn from writing and what I spend the money on. A few of them ask whether I dream in German. And other inquisitive readers try to create a link between me and the German language as well. “Why do you write in German?” they ask at readings and in their letters. “Did you learn German at school in Moscow? Do your children speak German? What do you really like about the German language?” I vehemently defend myself. “No, I didn’t learn German at school, but here – out of sheer necessity,” I explain.

As a writer and journalist I was interested in reaching a broad public, but I was always sceptical about the translators. And in Germany, despite the masses of immigrants, German is still by far the only language that most people understand and read. I was never a fine artist as far as language is concerned. To me language is simply a tool, a hammer that helps to forge bridges of understanding with other people. People can apply language in different ways. Just like musicians torture their guitars in very different ways – one of them plays with twelve fingers and his nose, the other beats the hell out of the strings with his fist. But when he really has something to say, he can play two chords and the audience is in raptures. Then even the most vicious music critics shake their heads saying: even though these two chords are utterly hackneyed and insignificant, the way the guy hammers those strings is definitely amazing – a great musician. So I hammer my German, that’s by no means perfect, but it’s good enough to formulate my thoughts about life and put them down on paper.
My first encounter with German was at Soviet School No. 701. In the fifth grade we were allowed to choose which foreign language we wanted to learn. The choice was either German or English – all of the kids chose English. German was scorned as the Nazi language. But somebody just had to do German – after all, we were living in a planned economy – so all the lousy scholars and the hooligans were sentenced to German lessons. At the end of the long lunch break the two language teachers came into the school canteen – the English teacher was a young bleached blonde with long fingernails. Apart from that she had a deep erotic voice: “Ladies and gentlemen,” she called. “Come on please – to the classroom!”

That sounded real cool to us at the time. That was the language of our prophets, the language of Ozzy Osbourne, Manfred Man and KiSS. The German teacher was an elderly lady with horn-rimmed glasses and grey hair done up in a bun; she wore a home-made grey blouse and looked like a huge old crow. “Kommt zu mir, Kinder! In das Klassenzimmer!” she cawed. KLASSENZIMMER – Classroom: when we heard that word, we all got goose bumps.

It wasn’t just the students; classic Russian writers had a critical attitude toward German as well. Leo Tolstoy compared it with never-ending railway tracks – going on and on as far as the horizon. Nabokov went even further and reckoned that the German language sounds like someone hammering nails into planks. I wasn’t a particularly good scholar, but I wasn’t bad enough to have German lessons. So I spent my youth in the classroom: “Molly was a dealer in the marketplace/Desmond was a singer in the band...”

By this time my knowledge of English had evaporated quite naturally from my mind. Who was Desmond again, and what was Molly’s job? So in Berlin I started learning a new language from scratch – on the streets, in the pubs. Later on I went to a language course at the Humboldt University where I quickly grasped the system. Unlike my native tongue, in German you can combine of all kinds of words with one another, nouns with adjectives or vice versa, you can even derive verbs from nouns – entirely new phrases emerge in the process, but they’re understood by everyone immediately.

 At the beginning I experimented a lot on the underground trains. My first guinea pigs were the ticket inspectors who were always more than willing to get involved in a complicated verbal exchange. For instance, they said, “Your short stretch tariff expires after twenty minutes.” “I couldn’t find the long stretch tariff and just wanted to stretch the short one a bit, but unfortunately I somehow missed the stop,” I retorted. “We can arrange that for you,” was the reply. “Please get out with us.” Out or with? With or out? I was enthralled by the flexibility and sensitivity of this language. Later, when I started to write, I used these wonderful fit-me-together words that continually produced new colours in the language as titles for my stories, and even for books.

In Russian, for instance, “Russendisko” would turn into a pretty boring “Russkaja Diskotheka.” And “Militärmusik” – is equally unsayable in Russian. My acquaintance with German is now thirteen years old. And I now know that English, the language once so much in demand and the language of our prophets Ozzy Osbourne etc., is nothing more than an accidental by-product of Low German. My native tongue, Russian, is very visual and expressive, and you can find dozens of words to fit everything you can think of, but nobody understands them here in the West. Then again, in German you can make all the endings rhyme – if you want to.

This language has nothing to do with the railway tracks going on and on to the horizon, it’s more like a Lego construction kit where all the pieces fit together. It’s up to each individual to make what they want out of it. This morning, for instance, my mother-in-law, who can’t speak German, showed our seven-year-old daughter a photo of me with the caption “Schriftsteller Kaminer” and asked what it said. Now “Schriftsteller” means writer and is made up of “Schrift” and “steller.” But Nicole, reading it differently, said to her Granny, “That’s easy, Schrifts-teller, – it’s a plate with writing.” My motherin-law looked at the photo again more closely, but she couldn’t find a plate anywhere. German is, and remains, full of mystery.