This shows you just how useful the Berlin Schnauze can be, and how someone can earn his money with it, drumming up as much interest in his ties as if he were running an entire department store.
Thus a language renews itself every second. All events, great and small, leave their mark on it. War and inflation as much as a Zeppelin sighting, Amanullah’s visit, or Iron Gustav.13 There are even speech fads in Berlinish. Perhaps some of you still remember the famous “to me.” For example: if a Berliner is being chatted up by someone he doesn’t want to talk to, he says, “That’s Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church to me,” which means “nave.” And, as everyone knows, a “knave” is a scoundrel. Or someone is giving an order to a young boy and says to him, “Can you manage it?” And the boy replies, “That’s abacus to me.” (You can count on me.)
By now you will have noticed that in many of these stories, there’s more to Berliners than just the big Schnauze. For instance, people can be very impertinent yet also very awkward. Berliners, however, at least the better ones, combine their impertinence with a whole lot of quick wit, spirit, and jest. “A Berliner ain’t never taken for a fool,” as they say. Take, for example, the nice story of the fellow, who’s in a great hurry and riding in a horse-drawn carriage that’s going too slow: “My God, driver, can’t you move a little faster?” “Sure thing. But I can’t just leave the horse all alone.” But a true Berliner joke is never only at the expense of others; it’s just as much at the jokester’s expense. This is what makes him so likable and free: he doesn’t spare his own dialect, and there are many wonderful stories to prove it. For example, a man, already a bit drunk, walks into a bar and says: “What ales you got?” And the barkeep replies: “I got gout and a bad back.”14
And now for the stories I promised you about children. Three boys enter a pharmacy. The first one says: “Penny o’ licorice.” The shopkeeper fetches a long ladder, climbs to the top step, fills the bag, and climbs back down. Once the boy pays, the second boy says: “I’d also like a penny o’ licorice!” Before climbing the ladder again, the shopkeeper, already annoyed, asks the third boy: “You want a penny of licorice, too?” “Nope,” he says. So the shopkeeper climbs back up the ladder, and then down again with the full bag. He now turns to the third boy: “And what do you want, lil’ man?” And he answers: “I want the licorice for a ha’penny.” Or, a man sees a young boy on the street: “Huh, smokin’ already? I’m gonna tell your teacher.” “Do what you want, you old fool, I ain’t big enough for school yet.” Or, there’s a fifth-grader at school who can’t get used to calling his teacher “sir.” The teacher’s name is Ackermann and he lets it pass for a while until finally he gets angry: “By tomorrow morning you’ll write in your notebook 100 times: ‘I shall never forget to call my teacher “sir.””‘ The next day the boy comes to school and gives his teacher the notebook, in which indeed he has written 100 times: “I shall never forget to call my teacher ‘sir.’ ” The teacher counts and, sure enough, there’s 100. And the boy says: “What’s up, Ackermann, surprised?”
We’ll hear some more Berlinish another time if you want, but there’s surely no need to wait. Just open your eyes and ears when you’re walking through Berlin and you’ll collect many more such stories than you’ve heard on the radio today.
“Berliner Dialekt,” GS, 7.1, 68–74. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.
Broadcast on Radio Berlin. The exact date of broadcast has not been determined, but it was almost certainly one of several broadcasts Benjamin gave in November and December of 1929 on subjects related to Berlin; during these months, the Berlin radio journal Funkstunde [Radio Times] advertised, without specific titles, several broadcasts by Benjamin during the Berlinstunde [Berlin Hour].
1 Berliner Schnauze, which can be loosely translated as “Berlin snout,” refers to both a way of speaking and an attitude. It connotes both the physiological (snout, schnoz, nose, muzzle, gob, or mug) and the linguistic-cultural (insolence, coarseness, lip, sass, wit, yap). It designates a style specific to Berliners, and more exclusively, to working-class Berliners. For more of Benjamin’s comments on Berlin dialect, see “Wat hier jelacht wird, det lache ick” [If anyone’s laughing here, it’s me] in GS, 4.1, 537–42 (first published in the Frankfurter Zeitung, May 5, 1929). Both in its stated emphasis on Berlin dialect as spoken, everyday language and in the rhythm and inflections of Benjamin’s own syntax (which here includes, even in its typescript form, indications for what some linguists call “filler” words or, in German, modal particles, words such as “so” and “well” and “now”), “Berlin Dialect” stands out, in focus and style, as perhaps the most “spoken” of Benjamin’s radio talks for children.
2 Fritz Reuter (1810–1874) was a writer from Mecklenburg in Northern Germany known for his contributions to Low German literature; Johann Peter Hebel (1760–1826) wrote in the German dialect of Alemannic; Jeremias Gotthelf (1797–1854) was a Swiss novelist.
3 Our English translation does not pick up the bawdy humor at play in the Berlin dialect. In addition to the comedy of the woman correcting her husband’s grammar while making grammatical mistakes of her own, the preterite of the German verb essen (to eat) is aß (ate), which in Berlin dialect sounds like Aas, or carrion, but which also has a slang meaning of “bitch” or “bugger.” Her response, in other words, amounts to both “I ate” and “I’m a bitch.”
4 The character of Nante the Loafer (Eckensteher Nante, or Nante, the man on the corner) is a figure of working-class Berlin, popularized in the work of Adolf Glassbrenner. See also in this volume “Theodor Hosemann.”
5 Max Liebermann (1847–1935) was a German-Jewish painter, printmaker, collector, lifelong Berliner, supporter of Impressionism in Germany, and first president of the Berlin Secession. He served as the president of the Prussian Academy of Art from 1920 to 1933. Walter Bondy (1880–1940) was a Jewish painter, editor, art critic and collector. Born in Prague and raised in Vienna, he studied and lived in Berlin, where he was affiliated with the Berlin Secession.
6 Heinrich Zille (1858–1929), German illustrator known for his humorous depictions of working-class life in Berlin.
7 Here Benjamin uses the word Göre, or brats, but spelled as it would be pronounced in Berlinish: Jöhre. Throughout, his quotations have reproduced the variant spelling of Berlin dialect, but here he has incorporated it into his own language.
8 Hans Meyer, Der Richtige Berliner in Wörtern und Redensarten (Berlin: H. S. Hermann, 1904).
9 This passage appears in Hans Ostwald, Der Urberliner in Witz, Humor und Anekdote (Berlin: P. Franke, 1927), 39, as well as in Adolf Glassbrenner, Berliner Volksleben, vol. 3 (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann, 1851), 248–9. In this instance, Benjamin’s typescript, rather than giving a full quotation, refers only to “Ostwald, p. 39”; it is unclear whether Benjamin read aloud from this particular passage or from another of Ostwald’s many books. As Benjamin’s typescript does not provide a full quotation, we follow the editors of the GS, who provided the passage.
10 Alfred Döblin was a speaker on the Berlin Radio Hour from 1925 through 1931, with most of his work for the radio done between 1928 and 1930. Perhaps his most famous contribution to Weimar radio was a never broadcast script, The Story of Franz Biberkopf, the radio play for his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929); scheduled to go out on September 30, 1930, it was cancelled at the last minute due to fear over Nazi reprisals. As Peter Jelavich puts it, “In the atmosphere of fear and panic in the weeks following the elections of 14 September 1930, when the Nazis emerged as the second strongest party in the Reichstag, the political oversight committee of Berlin’s station balked at airing a work by a well-known leftist Jewish author” (Berlin Alexanderplatz: Radio, Film, and the Death of Weimar Culture, 93). For Döblin’s early contributions to Weimar radio, see ibid., 75–8; and for a reference to Benjamin’s reading of the necktie-holder vendor scene from Berlin Alexanderplatz, and the political and formal issues raised by its transposition to radio, both in Benjamin’s reading and in Döblin’s radio script, see ibid., 29–30, 102–3. See also Benjamin’s discussion of Döblin’s novel — as a new form of epic narration, as well as “a monument to the Berlin dialect”—in “The Crisis of the Novel” [1930], SW, 2, 299–304 (GS, 231–6).