Last year I taught a class called “German for Reading Knowledge”; a curious class, really, which trains (primarily) graduate students to read academic German with the aid of a dictionary, even if they’ve never heard or spoken a word of German in their lives. It is a requirement in many graduate programs that you demonstrate reading competency in one or two languages beyond English and whatever your primary language may be. Art historians and musicologists are explicitly required to take German, mostly, I suspect, because a great many of the foundational texts of those disciplines were written in Germany in the nineteenth century. It seems slightly absurd if, like one of my students, you’re studying contemporary African art (in which case French or Swahili would probably be more relevant), but those are the rules.

To supplement the textbook, I would often give my students headlines or captions from gossip magazines to translate (“you have five minutes to tell me what this is about”), and sometimes, as a special treat, I would hit them with something completely untranslatable. Some people may feel that giving students in a translation class something untranslatable to translate may be of dubious pedagogical worth, but I beg to differ: one misconception about translating that I was at pains to dispel is the view that translation is a form of code-breaking, and that as long as you know the code, then all you have to do is decipher the text to reveal the “real” meaning. This is how machine translation works (or at least did until Google translate come along), but it is also a view commonly held by people, especially, in my experience, native English speakers, who don’t speak any other languages. This passage from Dan Brown’s Digital Fortress is a good example.

And so it was that one day, I presented my students with this little gem:

(Unfortunately, I haven’t got the “official” translation of this passage to hand—it’s in Notes to Literature, you can go and look it up if you like—but it doesn’t get it quite right. I might post it as an addendum once I’m back in New York next week).

A little bit of background is in order here. Two things: first of all, I initially came across this passage in the context of my friend Tim’s perennial search for sausage-related quotes by German philosophers and cultural critics. It’s all for a hypothetical book he’d like to write on the role and status of Wurst in German culture and society: suffice to say that this is a vast topic, and one which will have to wait for another blog post. The tentative title for this opus is, of course, Wurst Case Scenario.

Image via WikipediaThe second thing you should know, is that this quote comes from an article Theodor Adorno wrote as a follow-up to an open letter he had written in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (I think) concerning the republication of Heinrich Mann’s novel Professor Unrat as Der Blaue Engel (The Blue Angel), the title of the famous film starring Marlene Dietrich, which was based on Mann’s book. It was, in other words, an early instance of the now-common film tie-in edition (“Now a Major Motion Picture” etc.). Adorno felt that this was unconscionable and served only to illustrate the absolute dominance of the Culture Industry and the erosion and degradation of Western Civilisation. Now, it appears that in the wake of this initial complaint, several senior editors at the publishing house (whichever one it was; Fischer, probably) announced that they had been against changing the title of the book, and that it was therefore not their responsibility, and if they’d had their way, the title never would have been changed. Except, of course, that everyone he spoke to said the same thing: it wasn’t my idea, it’s not my responsibility. So who, Adorno wanted to know, had made this abominable decision which all the senior editors at the publishing house had been against? The passage quoted above, which I gave to my students to translate, is the last paragraph of an article entitled “Unrat und Engel”, which in and of itself is difficult to translate, since on the surface it simply alludes to the two titles of this work, but can also be read as “Rubbish and Angels” (the plural of Engel being Engel).

Here’s my attempt at a translation:

“Das Unheil ward total”, with its sudden temporal shift, and the archaic past-tense form of “werden” (today you would say “wurde”), catapults us into quasi-Biblical territory. This is the End of the World we’re talking about here, clearly. I mean, steady on Theo! All they did was change the title of a book! But that, of course, is just as barbaric as writing a poem in 1952. The people writing scripts for the culture industry are the same as the people who were overseeing the prisoners at Auschwitz less than a decade before (and, in some cases, they might even have been not just equivalent but actually identical). This is the total calamity which has befallen us. There is no difference between writing a poem and filling a mass grave. At least it seemed that way to Adorno, and to a lot of people in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the Second World War.

But what do we do with the Würstchen? As you no doubt noticed, I didn’t translate that sentence, mainly because I don’t know how, exactly. And this is precisely why I gave this passage to my students. Short sentences with relatively simple syntax, and yet so hard to translate into anything resembling English. I’m not even particularly happy with “I didn’t want this” or “it’s not what I wanted” for “Ich habe es nicht gewollt”; it would probably be more idiomatic to say “my hands were tied”, but that doesn’t fit the broader context of Adorno’s wholesale indictment of post-War German society and ultimately of all of Western civilization. If your hands were tied, it implies that you were forced, by powers or circumstances beyond your control, to perform some action. Whereas “ich habe es nicht gewollt” also applies to the editors at Fischer, who were against changing the title of the book, but watched as it happened anyway. The difference is perhaps subtle, but those editors wouldn’t have said “our hands were tied”, because that would imply that they actually did this. But that’s not what they’re saying: “we didn’t want this” and if it had been up to us, we would have put a stop to it. It this disavowal not only of personal responsibility but also of personal agency and authority which feeds into the problem sentence.

So let’s start at the beginning: “Würstchen” is the diminutive of “Wurst”, so it’s a small sausage, a hot-dog, or, if you will, a Wiener. To call someone a “Würstchen” means they’re a wimp, a loser, someone who can’t or won’t stand up for themselves. If sentence were “jeder ist ein Würstchen” it would mean “Everyone is a Wiener”. But the deceptively simple reflexive pronoun “sich” means that it’s actually closer to “everyone is a Wiener to him- or herself”. But what does that mean?

Now, this sentence echoes the proverb “Jeder ist sich selbst der Nächste”, which literally means “Every man is his own neighbour”, a somewhat cynical inversion of the Christian dictum of loving thy neighbour as thyself (Liebe deinen Nächsten wie dich selbst), and thus corresponds roughly to the English saying “charity begins at home”: i.e., when it comes down to it, we’ve all got to look out for number one first. But now instead of being your own neighbour, you’re your own Wiener. Or rather, you are a Wiener in relation to yourself. In other words, you don’t have to guts to stand up for yourself in the face of your own cowardice and selfishness and take responsibility for your actions and the actions of others. This, essentially, is what led to the Holocaust.

But how do you condense all of that into one English sentence involving sausage? I have no idea.