Just down the street, on the way to the pub, an executive with two young boys has rented a house with a long front garden. There is no discreet back garden since the S-Bahn runs directly behind the house. So, in the summer life is lived in public view. We see the lady of the house arguing with the au-pair girl; we see one boy hit another and pretend that he didn’t; we see toys scattered over the grass, wooden trains and plastic bricks and lifeless Action Men like some miniature disaster. In the winter, the garden furniture is covered and the au-pair girl back in Australia, but the wooden train catastrophe is still there and so are the boys. I peeked in through the gate briefly the other day and one of the boys spotted me and came running down the path, shouting “Opa, Opa!” Until then it had been a perfectly agreeable day; there had been a cheque in the post and the receptionist from the doctor’s in the downstairs flat had smiled nicely. Put crudely, you do not, in your upper-mid 50s, want to be mistaken for anyone’s grandfather. The boy stopped when he realised his error. I ushered him closer and hissed into his ear: “Tell your mother that you urgently need a pair of very thick glasses.” Then, satisfied that I had made a 4-year-old cry, I continued my path to Floh where almost everybody is older than me.

            But these wintery moments continued all week. On Tuesday I found that I was the only person in a roomful of colleagues who knew that Leonid Brezhnev was once leader of the Soviet Union. I am stuffed, it seems, with perishable knowledge, like a deepfreeze that is full of forgotten out-of-date pizzas and half-eaten Haagen Dazs. Then, on Wednesday, I strolled (on the other side of the road from the myopic grand child) to the bakers, bought coffee and Schrippen, and found myself addressed as “Junger Mann”. There was a time, when I first started to live in Berlin, when I would have been flattered. Foreigners with a basic command of Hochdeutsch often find the crudity of Berlinisch to be the single biggest obstacle to liking Berliners. I don’t mean the chaotic grammar, the missing genitive, the mangled Akkudativ, the passive-aggressive “wa”. We can all sympathise with that. It’s a tricky language. No, it’s the sheer proletarisation of language, the attempt to drag the world down into a basic vocabulary of 350 words. Berlinisch favours the third person – “Na, weeß er denn jetzt, wat er will?“ – and in doing so mirrors the language of bureaucracy. It removes the possibility of poetry, of grace. If you have ever been to a Bavarian wedding feast and heard the sing-song on the Polterabend, you will know it is possible to be both witty and linguistically creative and musical. The problem with Berlinisch is not that it’s dialect but that it forms part of the defensive wall of the insecure Berliner.

            So, “Junger Mann” is, of course, not flattery but irony. What is meant, in fact is: old man. I’m not usually this sensitive. In fact, I am rather contemptuous of the American feminists who complain about being called girls. The US writer Miriam Kotzin was moaning in her blog last week about how she (a woman in her sixties) was addressed as “young lady” by her doctor (who is in his early 40s). “I find an implied hierarchy in the phrase,” she says, “with the person wielding it assuming the power.” Well, maybe she is correct in her analysis. A doctor does have power over a patient. In Britain nurses often call their patients “dear” or “love” or “sweetheart” even though the people lying in the hospital bed might be professors of archaeology or bankers with a heart bypass. In these cases, the terms of endearment hide a kind of embarrassment, a temporary reversal of the social order. It is strange but is not intended to annoy or insult.

            But the use of “Junger Mann” in Berlin is an attempt at Proto-revolutionary egalitarianism. It’s a way of saying: I’m a baker, you’re a journalist; I don’t much like serving you because behind the apron, we’re all the same, flesh and blood. In fact, she says to herself, I’m better placed: you’re old, I’m young. I mused about this on my walk home, a complicated trip because a. I forgot the Schrippen, b. I had to avoid the Opa, Opa house and c. it was raining hard. Back at the office I rang up the one man who is older than me in the office, a Germany expert on the brink of retirement.

            “Lighten up,” he told me. “You’ve been in Germany too long. The Berliners say Junger Mann and Frollein because they forget people’s names. It’s the Amnesia-capital of Europe. Anyway why are you complaining about rudeness? You’re the rudest man I know.” And wo er Recht hat, hat er Recht. Berlinisch is as crude as it is rude but it is the ideal idiom for fatalists. Remember the old Zille joke. He’s sitting at a Stammtisch and his friend reads out from a paper:

            “Hier steht, det bei jeden Atemzuch, den ick mache, een Mensch stirbt.“

Zille thinks deeply for a while.

And replies: “Warum nimmste denn keen Mundwasser?”

Dieser Artikel wurde am Dienstag, 01. Dezember 2009 um 11:24 veröffentlicht und ist abgelegt unter Typisch deutsch. Du kannst die Antworten zu diesem Artikel mit Hilfe des RSS 2.0 Feeds verfolgen. Du kannst eine Antwort hinterlassen oder einen Trackback von deiner Seite aus senden.