October 9, 2009 – What We Understand in German

I am not surprised when i don’t quite understand everything when someone speaks to me in German. After all, I don’t always understand when i am spoken to in English or Hebrew. Something blanks out. But in German it is more problematic because my own replies are spoken in shy whispers and aimed usually at the floor. When I raise my head and/or speak up, I’m usually understood. After all I speak Yiddish and have been watching American WWII films with German accents for years… But that’s it, my understanding of Berlin is colored by the same things that color my difficulty with carrying on a conversation in German – I’m coming at it from a very specific direction.
Today, for instance, in the most banal of activities, shopping in a department store, I found myself imposing my Yiddish accent, my Israeli values and my American sense of commerce on everything we picked up. I hope you can imagine the details – it embarasses me to make too much fun of myself.
So I picked up a copy of “A Woman in Berlin,” a book about what it was like to live here after the war, and hope that – with a healthy dose of Marlene Dietrich’s “Black Market,” will put me on a more even keel.