A Damn Fine Cup of Culture

Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

Here’s a puzzle for you: who has two thumbs, an English mother, but his mother tongue is German? This guy!

Okay, okay, that was not very good, even worse than the usual “two thumbs” jokes – but it’s true. My dad was German, my mother English, I was born and raised in the Swiss German-speaking part of Switzerland, and the language I learnt first was German, not from my dad (who, like most fathers of his generation, was much less present) but from my mother. She did try to teach my sister and me English, but… well. Let’s say she was partly successful: we learnt how to understand English, but when we were small we’d always answer in German. Once we did start learning English in earnest, it was admittedly easier for us, but even though I talk and write English much more than any other language these days, I would not call myself a proper native speaker. Half-native, maybe, which sounds like a weird term from 19^th century literature; Kipling, maybe, or Joseph Conrad.

I did start watching TV and films in English relatively early, thanks to the many, many Betamax tapes our uncle from the UK would send us. In some ways, I’d say that my mother started teaching us English, but Zulu, The Benny Hill Show, Only Fools and Horses and M*A*S*H and tons and tons of ads on ITV finished the job. And then came Sky TV, with Dutch-produced programmes in English and iffy pop music shows where you could win ugly t-shirts: The Great Video Race and Young, Free and Single with Gary Davies. (When my sister and I featured on those shows, which included a phone conversation with the host, we recorded our cringy TV appearances on Betamax video. The circle closes.)

Reading in English, however? That was something different. I read a lot as a kid, but what I read was in German for the longest time. I’d occasionally look at my mum’s paperback novels, mainly bestsellers like Jaws and thrillers and war stories from the ’60s and ’70s (Das Boot, Ice Station Zebra), and I remember being fascinated with a copy she had of Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape, though I don’t remember anything more than the title. I’m sure I must have read some English books – I have very faint memories of having one of the Fighting Fantasy books, or perhaps some cheapo knock-off, but again, no recollection of the actual thing.

The first honest-to-god English-language book that I remember owning and reading, not once or twice but somewhere closer to a dozen times, was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – and, fitting with my odd linguistic education, I believe that I bought the book in Germany, in a bookshop with a tiny selection of non-German books in their original languages. I think I got the Hitchhiker’s Guide just in time before we were to drive back from a stay with my dad’s family, and reading it all the way through on the three-hour return trip.

I was somewhat prepared for the strangeness of the universe I was to encounter: while I didn’t know the original radio show, they’d shown the TV adaptation of the Hitchhiker’s Guide on one of the German channels we received – dubbed into German, of course. That version of the series wasn’t necessarily the best introduction to Douglas Adams, whose humour is very dependent on the right turn of phrase, and German TV dubs were usually done quickly and with little understanding of the subtleties of the original material. In German, the Hitchhiker’s Guide – or, as it was translated, Per Anhalter durch die Galaxis – may have been mainly silly, but there was something there that intrigued me. So when I found the slim paperback volume in that German bookshop, this was obviously what I went for.

Having read and reread the book so often – and, later listened to the radio show – I don’t often feel I have to return to Douglas’ original cult hit. I may read it again eventually, but I’ve got piles of books that I’ve never read and that I want to read at least once. Nonetheless, I’d consider reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy one of my formative experiences as a reader. Only in part because of Adams’ story and his sense of humour, though I did enjoy these a lot; but what made this a considerably more intense experience for me was that I was reading in a different language from what I was used to. Thanks to TV and films (and, I guess, BBC Learning English cassette tapes), and certainly thanks to my mum’s early efforts that her thankless sprogs never really appreciated at the time, it was easy enough to understand the language – but there’s nonetheless something different about reading an entire book in a different language. TV and films don’t take place in your head to the same extent: we’d watch Michael Caine’s colonial officer shouting orders at his soldiers at Rorke’s Drift or Alan Alda’s Hawkeye musing once again that war is hell, but that was still an external thing in a way that reading isn’t. When you read, you let language into your head and create a world from the words and phrases. In some ways, I would say that my brain only became rewired to accept English as one of its main languages when I began reading in English.

And it was Douglas Adams’ satirical sci-fi that was my brain’s training data. By the next time we visited the UK, I must have read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy several times, and obviously my next purchases were The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and Life, the Universe and Everything. I then started reading in English more widely, and before long I read almost exclusively in English, including some authors I’d previously read in translation (and believe me, early Stephen King has some of the worst translations into German, with “soap operas” turning into “soap orgies” – which, to me, always sounded like Russ Meyer spoofing a Doris Day movie).

These days I read much less than I did as a kid, as a teenager, or at Uni. I’d love to read more, but having an office job and responsibilities and way too many films that need to be watched simply doesn’t leave me with enough time. I’m fine with reading in German, but English is still my go-to language when it comes to reading. And whenever I crack open a book, it’s still young teenaged me hopped up on Douglas Adams that reads along.