Now that Easter is just around the corner, large displays of Easter candy are popping up. Haribo, our favorite manufacturer of gummi-candy products, sells Goldbären ("Gold Bears") all year long -- now, for Easter, we have Goldhäschen -- gold bunnies!
Down the street from Colón Language Center, where Shelby takes her German class, there's a store selling remaindered books and CDs. This looks like a promising way for us to inexpensively stock up on German-language reading materials. I dropped in to browse earlier this week, and made our first two purchases:
My Small Dog Mister and The Cat in the House and My Small Dog Mister in the Night
I thought about buying a translation of Carter Beats the Devil -- I was doing surprisingly well, comprehension-wise, on the section I read in the store -- but decided to start with some warmup books first. I can always use more work on my colloquialisms, and anything I read has at least a few verbs I've never seen before (or can't remember ever meeting ...)
And on Thursday night, while Shelby was out with her classmates, I stopped at our neighborhood Thalia Bücher to look around, and found this:
. . . a translation of Love That Dog, by Sharon Creech. It's highly recommended in our household (even though it gets sad at the end); it's about a boy who, with some guidance from his teacher, discovers a love for poetry while trying to tell the story of his dog, Sky. Appropriately for a book about poetry, it's written entirely in free verse. It must have been a bear to translate, but (as far as I can tell) the translator did a good job -- to me, it "feels" the same way in German that it does in English.
My happiness at finding Der beste Hund der Welt was tempered somewhat when, on my way out, I saw the book that was prominently displayed at the entrance to the store: Schwarzbuch USA (Black Book USA), by Eric Frey. I tend to let most examples of anti-Americanism in German bookstores go in one ear and out the other -- for example, yes, there are prominent piles of Michael Moore books in almost every German bookstore I've seen, but he's a homegrown loudmouth, and it's America's own darn fault for making him popular enough to export to foreign countries. This one, however, stopped me in my tracks. Basically, it's a five-hundred-page compendium of everything that America's ever done wrong ("Das komplette Sündenregister der USA" -- "the complete register of America's sins") from 1776 to the present day.
One might think that an author coming from a culture that could compile a pretty hefty Schwarzbuch of its own might hesitate before damning the USA so completely, but it turns out that's America's fault, too! You see, it was the manipulations of American capitalists during the 1920s that caused the depression, which provided fertile soil for Nazism! And if the Allies had made the decision to bomb the gas chambers at Auschwitz, the Holocaust would have been over so much earlier . . .
I'll add the usual American-in-Germany disclaimer: individual Germans have been nothing but friendly and gracious to us since we got here; I've always felt completely comfortable in Germany. But somebody has to be lapping this stuff up and believing in it fervently, otherwise it wouldn't keep ending up on the bestseller lists ...
Posted by Kevin at March 20, 2004 09:12 AM