I'm not myself in German
What I lose (and gain) in my non-native language.
DRESDEN, Germany — At a party before the holidays, I was talking to a Russian friend. She’s lived in Germany far longer than I have, but we often bond over our shared Ausländer (foreigner) experiences.
She told me a joke, which I think she mentioned having heard in a stand-up routine. I haven’t been able to find it online, so you’ll have to forgive my subpar retelling of it.
The joke was about the “American guy” at a party and how all the second-language English speakers there tacitly agree to take turns entertaining him. Looking around the room full of Germans, I knew right away that I was that “American guy,” and it was her turn to entertain me.
Of course, she didn’t mean any offense by it, and I try never to take offense at that kind of thing. (It’s my strong belief that Americans living abroad bear a responsibility to take jokes at their expense in stride. It’s just good cultural diplomacy.)
That night, she also mentioned a quote from a Russian writer living in the U.S. I assumed the writer was Vladimir Nabokov, though I haven’t been able to find such a quote attributed to him. So again, forgive my paraphrasing.
It was something along the lines of losing most of your true self when you speak a foreign language.
I often find myself repeating this refrain to my German-speaking friends: Ich bin nicht ich selbst auf Deutsch. I’m not even really sure that’s the right way to say it, but it gets the point across. I’m not myself in German.
In conversations in German at parties, or even around the dinner table with my roommates, I tend to hang back. By the time I process what’s being said and formulate a response, the moment has passed, and I have to start all over.
When I first moved to Germany, I was reading Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner. It’s based on the author’s year as a Fulbright grantee studying poetry in Spain. I often think of how Lerner describes American expats in Madrid — “surrounded by Spaniards, reticent compared to the rest of the company” — when I find myself sitting quietly, listening to my German friends and feigning total understanding.
Not only am I more reserved when I speak German, but I also don’t feel particularly smart or funny or charming. I suspect the most entertaining parts of a conversation with me are my juvenile mistakes and my awkward turns of phrase.
Was ist ein Kühlschrank, aber kälter? I asked one of my roommates as I was putting my groceries away the other day. (What’s a refrigerator, but colder?) I was, of course, trying to refer to the freezer — der Gefrierschrank, as I learned it’s called in German.
In another recent conversation in my WG, I tried to recount the plot of a movie I’d just seen. But we got lost in the weeds as I attempted to describe a last will and testament. Es ist ein Dokument das sagt, wann ich sterbe, mein Sohn so viel Geld bekommt und meine Tochter so viel Geld bekommt. Or something like that.
Conversations with my roommates are often punctuated by these roundabout descriptions of words I don’t know or can’t remember. I find myself relying heavily on the German word das Ding (the thing) to fill in the gaps. That and the ever-useful question — Ach, wie sagt man das auf Deutsch? (How do you say that in German?)
I’m used to being able to express myself clearly and effectively in English. So it’s hard to feel like every time I open my mouth to speak German, at best, I struggle to get my point across, and at worst, I sound stupid. I can’t shake the feeling that when I speak German, people are secretly laughing at my earnest attempts to express myself.
So even as my German improves, I’m still most comfortable in English. I’m the most complete version of myself when I speak English — that’s what (maybe) Nabokov was getting at.
But of course, the flip side is that every time I ask a non-native English speaker to speak English, I’m asking them to become a less complete version of themselves. And that almost feels like a manifestation of American hegemony — like I’m imposing soft power on the conversation. It feels like I’m unfairly taking an upper hand.
I can’t help but feel guilty expecting someone to speak my native language, when I’m the one living in their native land. When two people don’t share a mother tongue, whose comfort and completeness takes precedence?
Sometimes I worry that by only speaking German with my roommates, they’ll never truly know me. But if we only spoke English, they’d probably feel like I was never able to really get to know them.
Shortly before I moved into the WG, I went to a party that Luisa, Martin and Alex were hosting at the apartment. They were the only people I knew there. And because I was trying to establish a relationship with them where we only spoke German, I planned to do the same with everyone else at the party.
I got along fine for a while. A few times, when discussing more complex subjects, I lapsed into English. During one of these lapses, I overheard a girl ask her friends (not without a bit of contempt), Wer ist die Englische? Still, for the most part I could manage.
But as the night wore on, it became harder to stay afloat. It felt like I was understanding less and less, and by the end of the night, I found myself in a group conversation that I was catching absolutely none of. I realized after few minutes that I’d totally checked out and had just been letting the German words wash over me.
At first, I was embarrassed. Surely everyone was waiting for me to chime in and found my silence incredibly rude. And surely, I thought, I was the only person just standing there, not contributing at all to the conversation.
But as I looked around, I noticed several people (all of whom I presumed to be native German speakers) standing silently by, sipping their drinks. I’d forgotten that some people just don’t talk that much at parties.
Still, it feels strange to be that person. I’ve spent 22 years thinking of myself as someone who talks a lot. I’d never describe myself as shy, or even quiet. As a kid, my teachers would chastise me for talking when I shouldn’t, and as an adult, I find myself in a profession that requires me to talk all the time, often to strange and unfamiliar people. But it turns out that part of my personality doesn’t always translate.
Still, as a native English speaker living in Western Europe, I’m incredibly lucky. So much less of me gets lost in translation than it would if my native language were Romanian or Korean or Swahili. When I want to be a more complete and true version of myself in my native language, most people here can understand me.
Being a native English speaker gives me a huge day-to-day advantage. It means I often need no conduit to communicate with the world around me. I can speak my native language and be understood by nearly a fifth of the world’s population and more than half of Germans.
To be able to operate effortlessly in the language that has defined so much of our modern global culture is something millions of people work tirelessly to achieve (and something I did nothing to earn). But, at the risk of sounding ungrateful, it sometimes feels like a disadvantage too.
Speaking the modern lingua franca makes us Anglophones lazy.
It entitles us to delay our half-hearted attempts at learning Spanish or French until seventh grade. In Germany, everyone learns English starting around 5 or 6 years old. And many start learning another foreign language around 13.
A few months ago, I was talking to German girl who had just finished her master’s in international relations. She told me (in English) that she wanted to live abroad but was having a hard time finding a job because she didn’t speak any foreign languages. When I pointed out that we were, in fact, speaking a foreign language at that very moment, she told me English doesn’t count.
When I studied abroad in Paris, I took six hours of French a week for a semester. By the end of my four months there, though, my French was still limited to ordering food, asking for a table at a restaurant and excusing myself for the litany of offenses I committed knowingly and unknowingly every day.
In Paris, I could get by speaking almost entirely in English. But maybe if my native language weren’t one that made my life so easy, I would have taken my French lessons more seriously.
Still, it doesn’t do me much good to wonder how much better I’d be at German or French or any other language if I’d grown up elsewhere. We don’t choose where we’re born, and we don’t choose what language we grow up speaking.
All I can do is try to improve my German day by day. That means, even though I could get by in English, I have to force myself not to just rely on that crutch.
And if every day speaking German gets imperceptibly easier for me, then that’s something. It means — I hope — that every day, the gulf I sometimes feel between myself and others here is narrowing.
Every bit of progress I make in German allows me to engage with life here more directly, rather than through the filter of translation. And maybe one day, I won’t be the awkward “American guy” at parties with my German friends anymore.
But for now, struggling through in German is just one of the many daily exercises in humility expat life offers.
I keep the phrase Ich wusste das nicht — “I didn’t know that” — handy in all situations. Yesterday I used it to tell one of my roommates that I didn’t know buying Bodenhaltung eggs was bad because I didn’t know what Bodenhaltung meant. (It’s basically the opposite of cage-free.)
Some days, even the most mundane things feel like swimming upstream when I’m speaking German.
The other day, I went to a bakery to buy a pastry on my way to the university, and I wanted to know if that particular bakery also served coffee (not all bakeries here do). As I walked there, I rehearsed in my head what I’d say to find out.
Bieten Sie hier Kaffee an? I repeated over and over.
But when I walked in, the words began to catch in my throat. Bieten Sie an Kaffee hier? I stammered to the woman behind the counter. She looked at me quizzically, gesturing to the espresso machine behind her.
Damn it, I thought. Next time, I guess. ▣