Over recent months, this subway ad has tittilated many a Munich gentleman—and not a few ladies, for that matter. Immune to feminine charm as I am, one might think this fine display would hold scant interest. Nothing could be further from the truth. It wasn't the breasts that caught my attention. Don't get me wrong, I like breasts well enough, for a piece of anatomy. The breast ranks between the earlobe and the frenulum as an interesting bodily quirk. What's more, you can pierce any of those three for added entertainment value. No, the fascination lies in the language. A scant two words of copy—five if you count their component parts—ply some remarkable English. Pecta super protrudo First, let's not count the word super as English. You bookish types know that super is Latin for above. Likely it came into English through Norman French, and into German through French French. Super makes itself equally at home in both languages. And a good thing, too. It's easy to invent new words to say how awful things can get—in German, these expressions contain the word scheiß as a grammatical requirement. But to find a new word to say something good...well, our languages have to work at it. According to LEO, that fast source for all things deutschsprachig, most of the synonyms for super have to do with being on top or sticking out. For example, spitze (peak), prima, or the futzy hervoraggend (literally, protrude forth). Other expressions refer, disquietingly, to annihilation; todschick... Continue reading

Where is he gay today? The French Riviera Nice Vence Grasse Grasse Vence Saint-Tropez Vence Continue reading

My landlord, Romulus, loves the good life. Since he takes charge of the bottle recycling at our place, he can't help notice that we do, too. That led us to chat, in English, about beer. Nowadays, I told him, I could scarcely manage three Weißbier at a time. That amounts to about 1500 ml, which isn't even two of those giant Krug you see at Oktoberfest. A mere sip for a true Bavarian. "That's because Weißbier isn't covered by the Reinheitsgebot," he began. The Bavarian beer purity law—the 1516 Reinheitsgebot, or Cleanliness Order—forbade local beer to contain anything more than water, malt, barley and hops. Weißbier, made with unmalted wheat, doesn't actually qualify as beer. Brewers can put a modest number of chemicals inside. "It has many conservatives," Romulus continued, "Like with California wine, the next day the conservatives make my head explode." Scholars call this linguistic interference. In German, a preservative is Konservierungsstoff—literally, "conserving stuff". No biggie. "Yes, last week we went out to dinner, and the wine was full of preservatives," I replied. "We felt very sore the next day." Perhaps I should have considered this sentence more closely. In German, most people use the borrowed word Kondom, for a condom. But that's slang. The ever-wise Papa Scott tells us that his teenage son learned the high-falutin' term Präservativ in his sixth-grade sex-education class. (One wonders what they teach in a German ninth-grade sex-education class. Oral technique?) Romulus looked at me quizzically. Then he smiled. "You gay guys... Continue reading

After Thursday's angeljacking, yet more post-Papal sentimentality. This flyer tells us that a mere €10 will secure a souvenir coin, commemorating one of "the most important stations in the life of our German Pope." That is, the day he quit. But hurry! The limited edition of a mere 20,000 means your devout grandmother might end up with an empty sideboard. The celebration feels a bit subdued, when you compare it to the heady days of 2005. People still remember the front page of Das Bild, which loudly declared We Are Pope! The faithful here in Bavaria view the former Archbishop of Munich through rose-coloured glasses. Many will admit that their favourite son had a troubled Papacy; few will call him a failed Pope. Note how the blurbers use the word "station". Does it suggest Ratzinger is being crucified by unbelievers? Previous popes faced financial fiddles, conspicuously gay priests, and the systemic abuse of children. None of these problems appeared overnight. But what was Benedict's response? Insiders tell us that the Pope was as shocked and appalled by much priestly behaviour as any reasonable man. A sympathetic BBC Op-Ed reminds us how then-Cardinal Ratzinger led a Good Friday service in which he called out the "filth" afoot, and how it could sink the Church. As he assumed power, he choked. He went back to what he understood best—theology—and doubled down on it. Stricter adherence to doctrine would cleanse the church. And, indeed, it would. If it mattered. No clerical criminal resorted... Continue reading

The Angel of Peace. Her golden wings have flapped ineffectively since 1899, when the Munich city fathers screwed her to a column in the überspiessig suburb of Bogenhausen. That makes the Angel of Peace—in German, der Friedensengel—a neighbour of ours. Her day job doesn't tax her very much. She reminds us of a warless quarter-century after the Franco-Prussian war. German kingdoms fought shoulder-to-shoulder, and repelled the armies of Napoleon III in a spat over who would be the King of Spain. The creation of a strong, united Germany out of many disparate monarchies changed the political landscape forever. A strong, united Germany would ensure peace for generations. Wouldn't it? In truth, the now-beloved Angel was a bit of PR window dressing. Coming together as a nation put Bavarian troops under Prussian orders for the first time. This humiliated the Bavarians, and reminded them that their king, the notorious Ludwig II, was unfit to command. The Angel told Müncheners that they should view this new state of affairs as just peachy. Nowadays, we've forgotten all that. Müncheners love the Angel for her beauty, and who can argue with the message? "Her angel wings seem to reflect the golden light of an early morning sunrise. Poised in grace and tranquility, [the Angel] can serve as a reminder to seek peace and calm." So says Horst Kohl in his authoritative Bismarck and the Creation of the Second Reich the blurb for the Angel of Peace Barbie® . The good burghers of Munich, after... Continue reading

Living in Munich, we enjoy high levels of peace, safety and public order. Which is why it's so surprising to witness the Silvester, or New Year's Eve, in action. There's an awful lot of recklessness with fireworks, and many drunken revellers toss firecrackers around simply to cause mischief. A fave trick, it seems, is to toss a string of crackers at someone's feet and tell them to dance. On Monday night, I witnessed someone throw a string of crackers under the wheel of my neighbour's Porsche; luckily, it only smoked up the upholstery. (Was this a political statement, like the rash of car burnings in northern cities?) The ever watchful Papa Scott assures us that the injury toll in his northern city of Hamburg has declined in recent years, but I suspect this may be more luck than management. Our place is near the Friedensengel in Munich, where police close off the street to give tipsy pyromaniacs a free rein. Even today, we can smell the cordite in the air. I posted the photo above on New Year's day in 2008, and it gives a hint of how we face down the dangers of a festive occasion. The überlin blog gives you a filmic taste of what it's like to be in the middle of a German public Silvester celebration. Drunken assholes love to toss firecrackers into post-boxes. It's such a common problem, apparently, that the post office has worked out a procedure. The deliverable mail is dried out after... Continue reading

The social media was unanimous. They recommended we drink the Mersault on Heiligabend. So we did. Twitter and Facebook had excellent taste. Now the 1st Weinachtstag dilemma. Which shiraz to have with the duck? The choice is a bit more complex. One from the Barossa Valley, the capital of Shiraz. And two from McLaren Vale, the grape's spiritual home. Let's start with the McLaren Vale shiraz. D'Arenberg wine is dear to my heart, from the days when my pals and I would skive off lectures at the nearby University of Adelaide to go wine drinking tasting. There's an art to university drinking. The undergrad imbiber must calculate, usually on the run, how to squeeze maximum merriment from minimum dough. In most parts of the world the math is easy—beer wins. Especially so 'round these parts; beer is the Poland Spring of Bavaria. Those poor students in England must resort to cider when skint, and I pity them. In the South Australia of my youth—home to about 60% of Australia's viticulture—the most cost-efficient booze was wine. When wineries finished their run of bottling proper wine, they would often find some left over. They decanted the leftovers into three-litre bottles, known as flagons or 'goons for short, and sold it cheap to the likes of us. Depending on the luck of the draw, one's palate could become quite spoiled. Our 'goons of choice came form D'Arenberg, and to boot, their tasting room showed great tolerance of freeloaders. D'Arrys curls up in a... Continue reading

Time for a bit of crowdsourced Christmas cheer. Your advice, please. One of the curses of adulthood is patience. Grown-ups know how to defer gratification. It usually works out for the best, but from time to time, you have to loosen the corset, open the poppers, and live a little. I've collected wine, in a modest way, since university days. A few dozen nice reds actually got schlepped across oceans and equators. Since arriving in Munich, Master Right and I began to hunt for bargains at wine auctions—the Munich Wine Company in Diesenhofen offers some real gems if you look carefully. In a wine-auction house, most of the stock is nicely long-in-the-tooth. Much comes from estate sales; previous owners stockpiled wine in the cellar, waiting for it to age, and never quite made it to their last tipple. It occurred to us that some of our wine is so old, that it may no longer improve with age. And that if we drink the stuff at our current modest rate, it could end up with a new owner, yet again. So Master Right and I have declared 2012 the Christmas of Drinking Half-Decent Wine for a Change. We're having a quiet Christmas at home, but you can celebrate with us. Tell us which bottle to open with tonight's traditional baked ham. The choice is between two chardonnays, and a pinot bianco. The bottle in the centre is a classic 2001 White Burgundy from the Mersault appellation near Beaune—a find from... Continue reading

Christmas season is almost upon us. In Munich, that means Oktoberfest season is finally off our backs. Oktoberfest brings the same cheese-level as Christmas, but with a different subject matter. Bavarian cheer becomes almost as unavoidable as Christmas cheer. Everybody dons lederhosen, sings corny songs, eats wild game until he grows antlers, and drinks super-proof beer brewed to make you extra gemütlich. The local dialect gets laid on thick, too—it calls itself Boarisch, though standard German would call it Bayerisch. You hear Yaw instead of Ja. Nayn instead of nein. Hod instead of hat. And a simple d' instead of the more precise der, die or das. I still have trouble with the last of those, even after all these years, so the season is a godsend. Stadtsparkasse (city savings banks) around Bavaria allowed you to conduct your ATM transaction in Boarisch, as you can see from the screen above. I tried it, and liked it. Boarisch grammar is much more devil-may-care than standard German, which sounds a bit prissy by comparison. The producers of the summer-comedy Ted even released a special version of the movie to coincide with Oktoberfest. (For those of you who don't know, it's a movie about a boy's teddy bear which gains the gift of speech. As his owner grows, the two pick up some bad-boy habits, until true love puts a stop to it.) The movie would be released with the bear speaking Bavarian, instead of Hochdeutsch. Here's a scene of the stars bloking... Continue reading

Lago di Garda, May 2011 Continue reading