Denglish in the GDR: Can I become a Broiler?

The good old

for fried chicken

The most famous GDR word with an American immigrant background

Photo:

Michael Winkler / PantherMedia / IMAGO

When part of the people raged against the German Democratic Republic in autumn 1989, it was an English word that set the tone. Certainly it was also about “dissidents” or “oppositionists”, “enemies of the republic” or “rioters”. But when hundreds of thousands roamed the streets of Leipzig, they shouted something else out of their throats: "We're not hooligans!"

In retrospect, one is all too easily inclined to believe that prior to 1989 a good command of English was only allowed and widespread in eastern Germany among state security spies. As in the case of Rainer Rupp, who was smuggled into NATO headquarters in Brussels under the code name "Topas" in 1983 to listen to phone calls, log conversations, evaluate secret papers - all in English. Incidentally, Topas was the model for the role of GDR border officer Martin Rauch in the series »Germany 83-86-89«.

For a long time, English was not only the lingua franca among allies of the USA, international trade, the United Nations and the peace movement. It had also developed into the "lingua franca" between individual states in the Warsaw Pact. At the same time, there was growing unease about the creeping "Americanization", the cultural influence of the USA. In the whole of Germany one oscillated between enthusiasm for America and America skepticism.

How close the two were, I also experienced in my childhood in the West: what we were proud of everything that came from the USA -

At the same time, the grandparents claimed that Elvis Presley died of excessive consumption of

and

. It was criticism of the toxic

In the meantime, the West German student body chanted, just as it happened at events of the SED and FDJ in the east:

- instead of in plain English

The English language was never the cause, but it was always the clearest expression for

- with "z", because the British "s" was not American, the British attach great importance to that.

Paul McCartney told of the attitude towards this in his parents' house.

When he in Liverpool in 1963 with John Lennon "She loves you (yeah, yeah, yeah)"

Father James McCartney is said to have said:

The Beatles also met with a great response in the GDR in the early 1960s and became powerful idols of

and

, as they were called all over Germany at the time (a German fantasy term: "Twens" are

or

in English

. It was also discussed at the highest political level. When SED concrete heads vehemently took action against Beat and Rock'n'Roll in 1965, State Council Chairman Walter Ulbricht explained, as heard here in the interview:

As much as father McCartney in Liverpool, Ulbricht in East Berlin or my grandparents in Aachen

rejected

, the younger generation in the West and East wanted to hear it: a battle cry for individual and political freedom, closely related to the English language connected.

One wished for more

more

generally more

in life.

And slowly the longing that a young GDR citizen felt grew: at the time, she resolved to "travel to the USA as a pensioner at the age of 60", not realizing that at 57 she would be the first German Chancellor to receive the US Chancellor's Medal of Freedom. Presidents should get.

Interflug knew stewards, the Lufthansa flight attendant

The books and essays by the East German linguists Helmut Langner and Martin Lehnert leave no doubt as to how much English people enjoyed in everyday life in the GDR. Just like in the West, people in the 1980s talked about the

and the

, the

and the

the

or the

. You had

as well as

, had a

like

or

loved

wore

used

or

.

In the summer

and

taken out, people went

,

or, as in the West, »hitchhiking« - which means

in English

.

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Littger, Peter

'Hello in the round!': The trouble with our English and how to shoot it

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Number of pages: 256

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There was also

talk

of

and

, because English language imports were increasingly of an economic nature: from trade, transport and, above all, technology. Ships operated

as in the rest of the world

. Some GDR companies had names such as

. And in the Interflug planes, male and female

consciously employed

instead of - like Lufthansa in the West - just "passenger attendant". In 1990, Martin Lehnert emphasized in his book "Anglo-American Things in the Linguistic Usage of the GDR" that an international standardization of the language was seen as a relief and an enrichment.

With the help of GDR companies, of all things, English words and phrases experienced a

- a word that is also common.

While the East German »Duden« had 347 Anglicisms in 1956, there were more than 5000 in 1986. At the same time, German spellings such as »Kola« for Cola, »Kautsch« for couch or »Kockpit« for cockpit disappeared.

Only jeans remained on sale as "rivet pants" until the end of the GDR, for example as the Eastern brand "Shanty".

"Don't say cool!" - "Okay."

The GDR power apparatus resisted the development of English with desperation.

In retrospect, we know that the Cold War was waged to great lengths on the level of meaning.

Famous are the words of US President Ronald Reagan, who branded the Soviet Union and its satellite states in 1983 as "evil empire", the "empire of evil".

For this fight you needed a certain knowledge of English in the East.

And a permanent linguistic alert.

When the Stasi leadership illegally

procured

an

from the USA

in the series drama "Deutschland 83" in

order

to decipher

a stolen

NATO

, perplexity raged because the system only reacts to commands in English.

An employee cannot hide his enthusiasm:

“That's really cool.”

“Don't say cool!” Orders a general.

"Okay."

"Don't say okay either!"

The warning then appears on the screen:

The same general speaks his own English when, for example, one night he meets a CIA agent and says "It's middle-night" for "It's midnight".

Did Angela Merkel already know at that time that

would be right?

Your mother Herlinde Kasner must have known: she was an English teacher.

Cindy and Mandy, Ronny and Maik

Most people in the GDR rarely had the opportunity to speak English with others. This was not changed by state television, which from 1966 broadcast its own school series "English for you" filmed in London. Even so, few citizens spoke English fluently, and they were certainly privileged.

Access to the English language increased from year to year, not by speaking it, but by using it to create new ideas about a different, better life. People liked

and

or both: "cocktail parties". They went to

, continued to listen to

and

"checked" the

and invented the "pensioner disco" as a tea dance for the older generation. English was an event!

The fact that young parents wanted at least a passive connection to the English-speaking part of the world is made clear by the first names they increasingly gave their children: Cindy, Peggy and Mandy, Elvis, Ronny and Kevin.

Or Maik as a Germanization of Mike.

100% made in GDR

There was a denglisches gibberish that we knew in the West: They drank

and ate

- instead of

.

One liked the

and the

, both of which were untranslatable.

And like in the German West, »Cutter« sat in the radio stations: a term that no one on the BBC has heard in 100 years.

Some terms were 100%

such as

or

.

Martin Lehnert has explained that some English terms came into the GDR vocabulary through the Russian language, for example:

• Meeting

  - which evidently created a meeting culture much earlier in the east than in the west

• Toast

  - a diplomatic reception

• Festival

  - even for political events that are true to the line

The

was also imported via Russian.

He coordinates the technical process in public transport companies, and since 1990 in many western cities too.

World-class: the broiler

Among all the examples, the

the most famous GDR word imported from the USA.

Everyone knew it and still knows it today, the Eastern European counter-breed to the golden brown "roast chicken" in the West.

And like the

, the

an example of everyday English terms that were more common in the East than in the West.

"Hooliganism"?

Monday demonstration in Leipzig on October 9, 1989

Photo: Lehtikuva Oy / dpa

The already mentioned

made an inglorious, highly official career

. With Paragraph 215, "hooliganism" found its way into the GDR Criminal Code in 1968 and served the Potsdam District Court in January 1989 to sentence a man to 16 months' imprisonment for posting two sentences: "We want to leave. We are not allowed to. "

The fact that the leadership of the GDR had an English term for their critics seems like a compliment to a counterculture for which freedom always had an English sound.

So "We're not hooligans!" Became an impressive swan song.

Half German, half English.

The last chapter

, as it was usually

called

on export products with the missing

.

Then our common German-English speaking present began.