March 26 - Lois comes to join us.

Another sunny morning! But the overnight low was around 32 and snow mixed with rain was forecast for later in the day, so I continued to think of it as Still Winter. Mentally, however, both the Germans and the wildlife were treating this as spring. Back in the U.S. when we have rain mixed with snow and temperatures in the 30s, the birds seem to stay in their nests, at least in Virginia they do. In exactly that kind of weather in Germany I saw birds out frolicking and doing their typical spring things of making nests, chasing mates or competitors, and loudly chirping just outside my window at the crack of dawn. I suppose they felt like this was “As Good As It Gets” (a good Jack Nicholson movie, by the way), and they might as well make the best of it.

People were also starting to plant annuals despite the discouraging weather. Annuals were appearing on sale at supermarkets, hardware stores, and the like. Of course, these were the frost resistant and shade tolerant annuals like pansies (Stiefmutterchen) and primroses (Primulen) because the average date of the expected last frost was about May 14 or 15, according to a quiz show we saw. We occasionally watch the German version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” and a competing show simply called “The Quiz Show” where the limit is 300,000, the contestants are cooperating pairs, and they have four “vetoes” where they can change each other’s answers. The vetoes are the functional substitutes for the three lifelines or “jokers” as they are called in the German version of Millionaire, but the show really has a different flavor, in part due to the very different personality of the moderator. The moderator of the Quiz Show tried to help the contestants, occasionally even resorting to pantomime, whereas on the Millionaire show the moderator tried to confuse the contestants.

Shows on TV and songs on the radio illustrated the two different ways that American culture could become part of German culture. First is just to directly import the American version. On TV, examples were the old U.S. movies or series like “Murder, She Wrote” or game shows like Millionaire. But you also have converted shows like a Hamburg Polizei (Police) show that seemed closely based on Hill Street Blues. I was also sometimes mystified by what had been imported and what had not. They had converted the old U.S. series “Love Boat”, for example, to be on a beautiful cruise sailing ship and changed the name to something like “Under White Sails”, but things that I might have thought were better quality comedy had not been imported.

On the radio station we listened to (oldies), about 50% of the songs were the original English versions or Germans singing the English versions. But more rarely I also heard complete German translations of English songs. For example, GerInga Schultz sang a completely German version of Peter, Paul, and Mary’s “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” and I was surprised to find it had exactly the same emotional punch in German. I had to wonder how many of the American folk songs have been similarly translated into German versions, or how many German folk songs are translated into English, for that matter. The humorous German songs I heard on the radio kept taking me by surprise, since humor is not, perhaps, a frequently mentioned aspect of the typical German personality. This humor is richly represented in German folk songs I know. Songs like “Die Hamburger Viermaster” (The Hamburger Four-mast ship) and “Ein Man der sich Kolumbus nannt” (A Man who called himself Columbus), “Lauf, Jaeger, Lauf” (Run, Hunter, Run), and “Die Schwabische Eisenbahn” (The Swabish Train) are hilarious. But the tradition was also represented songs broadcast on commercial radio like “At 66 Life is Just Beginning!” and “Ich bin Klempner, bei Beruf” (I’m a plumber by trade) were just funny as the dickens. In the latter song, the plumber recounts his different misadventures on the job in each verse. In one verse he floods out the house he is working on plus the neighbors, and in another he makes some mistake with the gas line and the house blows up, if I understood it right. I just wished I could have made a good translation and showed it to Bill and Phyllis—I think they would have enjoyed it since Bill is an ex pipe fitter. There are some funny songs like this in the American tradition, for example “Oh My Darling Clementine” about mining and “When I first came to this Land” about farming. But I haven’t ever heard a funny one about plumbing (altho I once heard a funny English song about drains!), so I was very happy. I thought I would like to find the printed lyrics for songs like these, translate them, and sing them just for fun. The “Hole in the Bucket” song that I had always thought was American, turned out to have an identical German version that we saw on a German musical special, so I wouldn’t have to translate that one, In fact, I concluded that probably the German version was the original, but I wasn’t sure. Does any music historian track the migration of folk songs across cultures, languages and continents?

Anyway, we dedicated the morning to visiting and caring for the graves of Aunt Size and Uncle Hans-Henning. We were, after all, living in their house and I was even using Uncle Hans-Henning’s old bicycle, so it was appopriate. The cemetery was about a kilometer away in the middle of Reinbek, and it took us a while to found the gravesite. We decided to prune back some of the overhanging growth of the evergreens so let in a bit more sunlight, and at the same time add some pansies to each of the graves since they were a favorite of Aunt Size. It seemed to be a tradition in all German cemeteries that the current owners can plant and landscape them as they see fit, and we thought some flowers would brighten it up a bit. We bought the flowers and a pruning shear at Mini Mall and then found an old ice chopper in the basement back at the house that I used as a very crude spade to dig the holes for the pansies. Monika planted and watered them as I trimmed back some of the overhang, and we were both happy at how it looked when we were finished.

Then it was back to the house for a leisurely lunch before it was time to head to airport to pick up Lois. We used the bus-train network to get to the airport while Heinke and Gustl drove over from Barmbek. We all met up at the exit gate where Lois appeared a couple of minutes later, so we squeezed into their car for the ride back out to Reinbek, carrying on a dual English-German conversation all the way out. We settled Lois into the one other bedroom on the second floor of Aunt Size’s house, had Kaffeetrinken and a light evening meal (Abendbrot), and even enjoyed a fire while watching the ice dancing competition. Lois’s biorhythms caught up with her shortly after the 8 p.m. newscast, and she collapsed into bed. I kept reading “Welcome to Higby”, an unusual book about rural Mississippi life that was humorous but at the same time curiously gripping. It seemed to me that the book had no dominant central character but rather was constructed as a loosely woven tapestry of the lives of about 10 very different (and somewhat eccentric) people over the period of just a few days. The book was well written and the characters were quite sympathetic, decent people for the most part, so I found myself rooting for them all to have a happy ending. Monika finally gave up on the ice dancing and we turned in around 10.