Bild Zeitung

After reading "Bild Zeitung Rules Germany" I got a little interested. What makes this paper so interesting/controversial. I went onto Bild Zeitung's website and I was rather impressed by what I found. There is a large amount of news from around the world, weather, technology columns, sports, forums, and of course the erotic section. Navigating the website I watched a german account of a house fire in Virginia, found out German's top 10 singles for the week, and discovered the facts and fictions behind myths involving chocolate. Bild Zeitung has a large variety of news, lifestyle, and entertainment articles and videos that could trap one on their website for hours.

http://www.bild.de/

Triumph des Willens

Für dem AMD 6 habe ich Triumph des Willens gesehen. Es ist ein Deutsche Film, dass im Jahre 1935 gemacht ist. Den Propagandafilm habe Leni Riefenstahl gelenkt [=directed]. Ich habe nicht viel versteht, weil die Leuten haben viel über Politik und National Sozialismus gesprochen. Der Film war interessant, weil ihn alt und in Schwarz und Weiß war.

Basically the film was meant to convey the power and attractiveness of the Third Reich by showing its acceptance in Germany. The film aimed to show how National Socialism had revived Germany after the depression immediately following WWI. The styles used in the filming, including aerial photography, distorted perspective, and the use of music and cinematography were revolutionary and won Riefenstahl awards from all across Germany as well as the united states and other european countries. To a modern audience a film with no plot and very little dialogue can be very unappealing, aber Triumph des Willens war fantastisch! While the german can be difficult, one can learn important historical contexts through these types of films. There are many more interesting, historical German movies out there, and I would like to continue to find them and learn from them.

German rudeness

I have noticed from a variety of sources that Germans tend to be rude. Reading the Kultur 5 article on rudeness in Germany was very interesting because of what the article constituted as rude behavior. The article stated that rarely ever does one say "Entschuldigung" when bumping into you in the street. Americans and the British do find it quite rude when someone bumps into them without saying "excuse me," but this article says that many Germans have just come to terms with the day-to-day physical contact. The article also states that Germans are not intrinsically rude, so I was wondering what makes them seem rude. One answer I found had to do with language and how what one says can be misconstrued. An example of this would be if one were to ask a German, "can you tell me the time," the German might answer, "yes." As we all know, Germans are about efficiency and logic. If you ask an illogical question, or say something that may be interpreted to mean something other than the intended meaning, it is possible and likely that a German will give a snark, logical response. While I do agree that this way of interacting may be logical, I believe that manners and politeness are necessary in keeping society happy. I know that when I go to Germany I will be polite, and I will not take the Germans' seeming rudeness to heart.

German Indie music

One thing I am really good at is listening to music. Whenever I do homework, I listen to music. Whenever I walk to class, I listen to music. So for this AMD I thought I would look into the German music scene. I really like to listen to electronic music and I found a list of good German indie bands on wikipedia so I listened to a few of them. One of my favorites that I found was a band called Klee. My favorite song is called "Ich vermiss dich" which was all about relationships so the vocal we learned for Kapital fünf was very useful. With other songs like "für immer" and "die Stadt" it is easy to pick up a bunch of different sections of the song, but it is still difficult to understand as a whole. One section of "die Stadt"goes like:

Du brauchst mich um zu bleiben

Ich brauch dich um zu gehen

Du brauchst meine Augen

Um Dich selber zu sehen

Which is completely translatable with our knowledge. This translates to:

You need me to stay

I need you to go

You need my eyes

For you to see yourself

This band Klee was started in 2002 in Cologne and has a name that means "Clover"

Yet another band that I found worth listening to is called Wir sind Helden. They were started in 2000 in Hamburg and got very big in German with the introduction of their song "Guten Tag" which I am listening to while writing this and actually find kind of obnoxious. Other songs like "Denkmal" and "Darf ich das behalten" are much better. What I learned while searching for German bands was that it wasn't until around 2000 that many German-speaking bands became popular in the reunified Germany. I believe that this implies that many Germans listened to American music until then. Either way, many German bands that exist today I find really quite good and worth listening to frequently (Definitely not Rammstein!)

German in American cinema

Struggling on what to write about for this AMD I resorted to that which I do best, watching movies. In this case I got to watch one of my favorite movies around. I find the film Inglorious Basterds to be an extremely well made film which makes the viewer feel as though he or she is in the middle of Nazi occupied France. This movie takes the setting as realistically as possible, having Germans speak german, French speak french, and the Americans speak english. This movie gives viewers the opportunity to indulge themselves with the German language without getting overwhelmed by that which they don't understand. Having an education in German only up to this point in 101, I was able to understand the gist of nearly every german conversation throughout the movie. Luckily for me, much of the german throughout the movie was spoken very clearly and formally so that I was able to understand. Examples of some of these dialogues in the film are:

When Adolf Hitler expresses is dismay at the knowledge that the Basterds are ravaging the ranks of German soldiers.

When the fictitious war hero Fredrick Zoller convinces Josef Goebbels to use a different movie theater for the premiere of Goebbels' new film. This dialogue was especially fun to listen to since they described how many people fit in the movie theater, who works at the theater, and why they should use that theater. Since we have learned many different descriptive words in German it was easy to understand the entirety of this dialogue.

When the Basterds describe their plans to kill Hitler at the movie premiere. This scene is 20 minutes of mostly understandable german. I watched the scene twice through. Once without subtitles and again with them. What I understood from the time without subtitles was actually rather close to the actual meaning of the scene.

It is really entertaining and enjoyable to listen to german and understand it. It makes me realize how much we have actually learned in this class, and it makes me more excited to eventually reach fluency. I find that watching movies in german helps one realize how much german they actually know.

Nudity in Germany

Reading through the assigned articles for Kultur 4 were interesting, but what caught my attention the most was the article on nudism in Germany. I knew that Europeans were more open to public nudity, but I had no idea how open Germany is to it. This definitely makes sense based on other German stereotypes, mainly that Germans are highly logical. Their, sometimes notorious, adhesion to the logical would likely make them realize that clothes are really not all that necessary. Reading this in the articles made me love German culture that much more. Further research into the movement of nudism and naturalism, I found that the naturalist movement actually began in Germany in the early 1900s. The movement sprung from the health and fitness philosophies of the Lebensreform movement and the idea that some major diseases could be treated by exposure to sunlight. Now many German public parks and beaches have nudist sections. Also, many swimming pools and saunas allow their tenants to enjoy their times in the nude. I now know what I am going to do when I visit Germany!

Kultur 3

After reading all of the articles for Kultur 3 what interested me was the German's aptness to negativity. The article listed a few contributors to German pessimism including Nietzsche and Goethe, but I wondered what or who else may have contributed to the German state of mind as we see it today.

The works of the prominent German poet and natural philosopher Goethe may have been a contributor to the German obsession with natural foods. Goethe wrote many works in the field of natural philosophy which celebrated the beauty and serenity of nature as it is. Goethe's obsession with nature, and especially with plants, possibly could have influenced the German mind set on the matter today. One of the articles for kultur 3 mentioned that 70% of Germans say that they would never eat genetically modified foods. It is possible that their respect for what is natural stops them from eating what they deem unnatural and synthetic. Goethe's interest in close examination and classification of the world around him shaped much of German science as it is today. I know that when I think of Germany, I think of a place where much great science is performed every day. There seems to even be a stereotype that German scientists are some of the best! This belief (actually more of a trend) has been adopted because of Germany's many great scientists through history.

Gottfried Leibniz was yet another large father figure in the German philosophy. His support of rationalist ideals led him to be considered as one of the three fathers of the rationalist movement. Now, Germans today are considered to be highly logical and rational beings. Leibniz's philosophies along with Friedrich Nietzsche's nihilism has led Germans to be deep thinkers, prone to being pessimistic. This possibly also stems from a sometimes not-so-glamorous history.

Germans have had to come to terms with their involvement in the Holocaust with time. Such a traumatic event in German history has left many Germans with a strong sense of civic duty and has allowed many Germans to think critically about other things in life. It is clear that German's rich history has shaped how Germans think and act today. German stereotypes and idiosyncrasies seem to stem from how Germany was in the past.