A Big Surprise... and Another," and there were seven words in it, to be exact. In contrast, the _Saturday Evening Post_ of January 23, 1943, which included nine articles about Hitler's Germany, contained only thirty words that were in some way "German." All the rest of the articles were written in English.
**A C HART OF WAR**
On March 14, 1943, two months before U.S. soldiers began disembarking in Italy, the _Hartford Courant_ ran an article in which the only five words of German quoted were from Hitler's "New World Order" speech of February 22, 1942: _"Meine Herren!"_ ("My gentlemen!").
On July 11, 1943, two weeks after the defeat of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel at El Alamein in Egypt, the _Courier-Gazette_ of Burlington, North Carolina, contained just two German words in an article entitled "Rommel's Gone But His Ghost Reigns": _"Verkommen"_ ("appeared") and _"geflogen"_ ("flew").
CHAPTER 9
**The Good Germans**
_Our hearts are big enough to go whole hog_
_on any good thing we find._
—Anonymous
**N** owhere in the New World could Americans encounter such high concentrations of Germans? The answer is Berlin and New York.
Berlin was _the_ magnet for all international Americans. Between 1933 and 1945, no other city received as many international students, visitors, and expatriates, whether permanent residents or tourists, as Berlin. By 1933, two years before Hitler came to power, there were 4,000 international students at German universities; in the 1930s the number rose to over 30,000. Visitors included hundreds of prominent scholars and writers, such as Arnold Toynbee, a delegate to the Peace Conference of 1919, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, and George Bernard Shaw, and thousands of journalists, novelists, and poets from Germany, France, England, Italy, Poland, Russia, Czechoslovakia, and the United States. Berlin was like a dream come true for international students because so many of the universities offered language instruction, at a moment when the world was becoming increasingly polyglot.
This was especially true for two of the leading languages of international communication: English and German. At the time, the United States had the highest illiteracy rate of any industrialized country, so American students needed German. At first glance, English might seem to be the simpler language—or it was, until the twentieth century's great surge of German. At that time, no language was as alluring as German for learning abroad. A simple grammar of German could be learned in two weeks; the best of Shakespeare's plays could be comprehended in five minutes. And yet there were few English teachers in the United States, so international students of English—who had to take their basic lessons from a single teacher—had no trouble acquiring it.
In addition, English lacked a simple, understandable grammar. French, by contrast, had the worst grammar in the world, according to the linguist Sir Charles Raven. It needed a rule book three pages long.
It was not so easy for foreign visitors to learn German, especially with the Nazis doing their best to keep it an unfamiliar and therefore exotic tongue. According to British novelist and scholar Rebecca West, who had only a few words of German when she first came to Germany in 1924, within a month "an extraordinary feat had been performed by my German. . . . I spoke easily. . . . My speech was broken and sometimes incoherent, but it was a pure German." She went on to give an eloquent description of the effect that "pure" German had on her, a woman whose previous experiences had been limited to England, France, Spain, and France, and who had found French the most "conversable" of languages: "The words had not the same shape, but had not to make sense. . . . I got into a state in which my face grew large and my voice husky and my tongue was swollen with the German sounds." She had, in effect, been reborn.
In fact, during the first few months in any foreign country, a German speaker can acquire a great deal of the language just from listening to conversations, because German is a highly fluid tongue. It starts with only fourteen consonants, which are pronounced much like their English counterparts: _b_ as in "bat," _d_ as in "did," _f_ as in "fit," _g_ as in "get," _h_ as in "hat," _k_ as in "kit," _p_ as in "pet," _t_ as in "tap," _v_ as in "vet," _w_ as in "week," _y_ as in "yet," _zh_ as in "hizzy." As children, we learn the sounds of _u_ , _ü_ , _w_ , _w_ ', and _y_ as in English, but the rest is new territory. The only vowel that requires learning is _e_ , which sounds as in "pen" and as in _bed_. But we can start speaking German by using the consonants only: _Ablöse! Gute Reise!_ ("Appraise! Good journey!") We could communicate with foreigners without having to learn the entire language.
Of course, the language has changed since the 1920s. German is no longer as fluid. In addition, German has a grammatical complication that French does not have, that English does not have, and that French grammar is closer to English than German is: the verb _wollen_ ("to want"), which we have all used to form the question "Shall we go?" uses a form of the verb that we learned in grade school and use today in other contexts, but with a new meaning. _Wollen_ is an auxiliary verb, so it cannot stand by itself. What does it add to the sentence: "Go to the store"? We would say, _"Ich will Kaffee"_ ("I want coffee"). Here, _wollen_ is actually being used to denote the desire to do something that involves physical movement. The verb _werden_ ("to become") or a combination of verbs will also convey the idea of movement: _"Ich werde nervös"_ ("I will get nervous"). The Germans had tried to make the verbs more precise, but this led to a "chicken-and-egg" situation: we need an auxiliary verb, but we don't have any, so we use the same verbs over and over. Even the German grammar book has a complicated diagram that has a man in a coat chasing a hat into a tree, which the grammar book says is a verb. Other languages have other systems of expressing motion, from the Chinese ideograms to the Indo-European-based Romance languages to English, with its subject, verb, and object.
To add to the confusion, German words are very similar in spelling to other German words. If a German teacher gives you the verb _tragen_ ("to carry"), you won't have to waste much time guessing what it means. But if he says the verb _tragen_ has a form similar to _geben_ ("to give"), you'll have to ask him for help. Or he might not know it. In fact, many German words sound like English words: _Fernsehen_ ("television"); _Falsches Alibi_ ("false alibi"). Even though Germans spell them in the German way, these words tend to sound like familiar English words, and the Germans speak in a kind of English that is not easy to learn. The grammar of German can be easy to learn, but the pronunciation is hard.
However, in Berlin, there were also many foreigners who had German ancestry, which gave them an advantage in conversing with the Germans. Because Germans so often use a suffix attached to a word that indicates its gender, the native German speakers could tell right away if a word was masculine or feminine. But foreign-born Germans usually didn't use the suffixes, so foreign-born Germans had a slight advantage. This was the case with my second language, Turkish. I, like all foreigners in Berlin, would know my words had the suffixes _-im_ and _-u_ attached, and therefore I had an advantage over Germans in Berlin in conversing with them.
As a guest, I was not the only one who could use this method of communication; foreign students could also benefit from it. According to a 1933 article in the _San Francisco News_ , the _Fräulein_ is Germany's most popular native speaker of German. She knows what the Germans want to hear and is much prized by them. Even young Americans who don't learn the language can have their needs met by young Germans, because they're so popular.
The German man or woman with the greatest knowledge of Americans is also of course Hitler himself. One might expect that Hitler would have been quite fluent in English by 1933. But according to an anonymous American correspondent of a New York newspaper, no more than a half-dozen Americans in the entire Third Reich understood Hitler's spoken German, and they were probably "the most extreme Nazi sympathizers."
If the Germans weren't so friendly, my language might have been a problem, but in Berlin I could usually rely on someone who spoke my language to befriend me, a young actor at the Max Rein
