Monday, January 11, 2021

Starting the year with a DNF...and some German vocabulary

 So, starting the year with a DNF isn't maybe the strongest start to 2021. Or...maybe it says "I value my reading energy in 2021, be gone things that don't make me super excited!"

The thing is, I was very pumped for this book : "A Demon-Haunted Land: Witches, Wonder Doctors, and the Ghosts of the Past in Post-WWII Germany." Right up my alley, right? The bummer of the book is that it's really more about 2 faith healing hucksters operating in a super vulnerable time in post-WWII Germany. There's a lot of interesting information out there about how people deal mentally in countries after wars and uprisings but this book doesn't really touch on that and that was one of the ways that I was kinda let down.

But you know where this book didn't let me down?  Ridiculous German words. They are long and ridiculous and all of them look like untreatable venereal diseases. I found some fun ones in this book. 

-Schicksalsgemeinschaft - term to describe a community supposedly bound together by a shared experience of fate.

-Paragraphenschwierigkeiten - red tape! (Or, literally, paragraph problems)

- Teufelsaustreibungen - devil expulsions. (This book says that devil expulsions are what Protestants say and Catholics say exorcisms which...I don't know if that's true)

(This one wasn't in the book but Garrett and I have talked about this one. Also if that is spelled wrong please direct your corrections to him).

- Vergangenheitsbeweiltigung - This is when you have guilt about the Holocaust even if you were born after it happened and had nothing to do with it.


I hope that some of you had "learn some obscure German words" as a new year's resolution.



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