Born Again German

Think you’ve seen it all before? Life’s patterns getting a little too familiar? New people & places starting to have an air of ‘same shizznit, different bucket’? Instead of spending that hard-earned cash on a frontal lobotomy (or that nice suede couch from Ikea), why not try out a new character in the Game Of Life™? I reckon there’s nothing that’ll flip the Mental Reset Switch like landing smack dab in the middle of a foreign country with only a little of the local lingo. For best results, go alone, and for a fair while.

When I landed in Germany in 2003, the main thing I anticipated was adventure. I was doing a work experience stint with a multi-national Aerospace company in Bavaria, of which I knew little. Of Germany and German, I knew less. I was expecting good beer, nice sausages, lederhosen, and green countryside. It turns out that was spot-on, even about the lederhosen (but only once, in a beer hall).

What I wasn’t expecting was a striking difference in the way I ended up seeing the world and interacting with people. I now realize the combination of a new language and new culture has an amazing power to re-incarnate and rejuvenate.

I’ve always been fascinated with the relationship between language, thought, and identity. I remember someone once told me that words are the building blocks of thought, and it stopped me in my tracks. I’d never questioned what my thoughts were made of before, and it led me to the bizarre question – how would we think without words? Try it for a second. Kinda difficult to get anything except basic imaginings & rememberances, huh. Well then – what happens when you are forced to learn, and think in, a new language?

I pursued the learning of German with great enthusiasm and many post-it notes, and after a couple of months was able to converse slowly. I even made some German friends with whom I spoke mainly German.

It was with these people that I noticed a difference in my personality. My German was basic, and therefore blunt. (In fact it was so basic that when we first met they thought I was Polish). Even when we spoke English, I generally had to be blunt so that they would understand. Surprisingly, I found this liberating. I am not usually blunt (far from it, you groan), but in Germany I could be nothing else. Dealings with people became quite simple. Even as my grammar and vocab expanded, and my speaking became more fluent, I found I was still concerned primarily with being understood by getting the words right. Contrast this with our mental focus when speaking to new people in our mother tongue – we are often concerned with what subtle meanings the person we are talking to will draw from our speech, and exactly how we should phrase things in order to convey the meaning and image we want. As we speak, so do we listen – we are also tuned to look for these things in the language of others. But this is not so when you’re neck-deep in new syntax!

On top of the syntactic simplicity I’ve just described, there was an added simplicity of content in discussions, since I did not have the vocab for complex subjects. Realising this I look back and wonder what the hell we talked about – after all, “I come from Australia” will only get you through a sip or two of beer, if you’re lucky. I guess we talked about music, family, places, likes, dislikes… things like that. And when the small-talk dried up we tended to go places and do things, or just muck around.

Further to this simplicity & directness of communication with people, I was largely ignorant of, or at least unconcerned with, class & status. Scratch one more layer of nuance to worry about. Although it took a while to dawn on me, I lived in a decidedly lower-class suburb, composed of mainly migrants and workers. The apartment I stayed in was also a very small and unlovely shoebox, but for some reason I didn’t seem to realize that until near the end of my stay either.

So when you add these things up – elementary conversation, basic topics, general ignorance regarding subtlety, politics & the media – what does it start to sound like…? Childhood. And that’s exactly what it felt like. Through being stripped of advanced communication skills and social awareness, life became simple & new again. Dealing with people became refreshingly uncomplicated (if a little laboured at times), and I saw the world through an uncluttered, clear lens. I felt like I was starting again.

I became optimistic, a little fearless, and I didn’t so much ‘question’ my previously-accepted behavioural norms, as I felt they had never existed. I thought there was nothing strange or desparate about going on a solo pub-crawl – it was the end of the week, I wanted to go out on the town, and so I went. Simple! And on each occasion I did it I ended up making friends and/or having a good time. Internal barriers dissolved and the world regained the sparkle of possibility.

Thinking back now, my time in Germany evokes a sense of heady nostalgia. I have memories like making my first snowman, swimming in clear pebble-bottomed lakes, going for bike rides in the wood, swapping stories with Helmut the security guard over spaghetti in the guard-hut, and watching a thunderstorm thrash itself out against the windows of my small apartment.

When I got home to Melbourne, the feeling lasted for quite a while. I remember being so relaxed, so unconcerned with how people perceived me. My directness of communication had bled across into English too. It was a sort of confidence perhaps, but probably more a lack of insecurities.

I’d never had much luck with girls in pubs, probably due to the fact that I’d wanted to but been too afraid of rejection. Upon returning home, I was surprised to find that the confidence of the newly-returned expat worked pretty well for a while. I’d learned to be alone and happy (at least for a time), which I now realise is a universally attractive quality.

Now it’s been four years since I was briefly a Born Again German, and while I can recall that wide-eyed wonder and naivety, it of course doesn’t persist.

I still think it’s the one of the best experiences I ever had, and I guess it taught me that if the world sometimes seems boring and restrictive then it’s only because I’m seeing it that way, getting caught up in complexities and illusory barriers maybe. Since I’m cheesy, I’ll finish this with a pithy quote I heard the other day which sort of sums up for me the necessity of believing in possibility like that: “The important thing is this: to be able at any moment to sacrifice what we are for what we could become”.

A bit extreme, but you get the idea.