Image: authentic Germans, by AI.
In his Little History of Photography essay (1931), Walter Benjamin describes the mysterious “aura” that the earliest portrait photographs had to them. For instance, he discusses David Octavius Hill’s 1840s picture of a Newhaven fishwife, in whose downcast gaze there “remains something … that fills you with an unruly desire to know what her name was, the woman who was alive there, who even now is still real”. In this, “the most precise technology” shows itself as being able to “give its products a magical value”. These are photos that catch us by surprise.
This, Benjamin thinks, is lacking in later photographs. The reason for this, he claims, is in part because the subjects of the earliest photographs sat “with their innocence intact”; as yet unaware of how they “ought” to present themselves in a photo. In later portrait photographs, Benjamin says, children were posed in elaborate costumes, or negatives were retouched by the photographer—to allow the sitter to present themselves however they might have wished to be seen.
(From an article in The Guardian by Tom Whyman.)
My introduction to German as a foreign language was at the age of 14 and, in two years, I had been educated up to a grade B in O-level, whereas my five years of French educated me to a grade A. I would go on to study A-level French (for which I likewise got an A) and even win the school French Prize in my leavers’ year.
In my first year of LL.B., I took an optional course of “French for LL.B.” and passed, albeit without any merit. Then I started filling my university holidays with work as a travel courier. So, the French and the German came in handy, and to them were added Italian and smatterings of Czech, Polish, Hungarian and, then, Dutch. I always liked to be able to say the basics in the local language. My basic Japanese—not that I needed any—came from observing an entire busload of tourists from that country greet their tour guide in a hotel lobby in Paris. Never forget: repetition is a crucial element of learning …
My German was to get a jump-start again in 1989. Someone had suggested I apply for a grant to study in West Germany and I was invited to interview in London. They wrote to me afterwards saying they would be glad to accept me onto the course, but, unfortunately, my German was rubbish. They had a solution, however: “How about a two-month intensive, residential language course in Schwäbisch Hall; we’ll pay?” I couldn’t say, “Where do I sign?” quickly enough. I was competent enough by the end of the intensive course to co-author a newspaper article in the Schwäbisch Hall local rag, in which we spectacularly misjudged how things would go in East Germany.
Image: my first published article. I’m still hooked up with John and Mark on LinkedIn. We reckoned East Germany was a fixture. A few weeks later, the Berlin Wall fell. But why our friend had not appeared the second time was never quite explained.
The university lectures, once the real course got going in Tübingen, pretty much started with me simply noting down the words I didn’t understand. My self-appointed homework was to look them up. The first day, there must’ve been 100. But this total gradually reduced: it’s astonishing how often people say the same old words, time and time again. By the end of the course, I was still occasionally noting down words, but it was no more than ten a day.
It’s one thing to know what a word means, however. It’s quite another to actually use it, so I would engineer phrases and sentences in my chit-chat that deployed my newly acquired knowledge, and this garnered some admiration from those with whom I spoke. Not every day that one hears Abstraktionsprinzip and Wegfall der Geschäftsgrundlage down the pub. Whilst this may have had the effect of establishing my intellectual credentials in the world of German academia, the boys down my local bar confided in me that I did have a manner of speaking that was redolent of … shall we say—the Civil Code?
When I acquired a German partner, who would later become my partner in marriage, I found myself at an interesting linguistic juncture: for he spoke no English and therefore German was from the outset our lingua franca. As it would also be with his family, who likewise spoke little or no English. And the German that they spoke was neither the German of Tübingen University nor the German of the Musk gay bar in Düsseldorf (where I once had the honour to meet Mr Jimmy Somerville). It was a quite different German: the German of every day.
I’d long since come to a realisation that, beyond school age, one can never learn a foreign language from another non-native speaker of the target language: whatever they say that you don’t know you’ll always be tempted to write off as rubbish, until you have it attested to by someone who really does know. But a native-speaker who speaks nothing of your own language can be relied upon to always speak true vernacular, without bending or compromising what they say to your own state of knowledge, be it of either his language, or your own.
The British in Belgium adopt Frenchicisms with gusto. They’ll relish talking about la commune, refer to trains as a tay-jay-vay and reproduce French names with assiduous accuracy, to the point of incomprehensibility: Yp, Broock-scèle, Louvainlaneuve and look at me with condescension if I talk of local authorities and councils, Yp-re, Brussels, Louvan-la-Neuv and the high speed train (many don’t even know what TGV means). Getting an ex-pat Brit employed by the European institutions to speak authentic English is as good as impossible. Learn English from them, and you’ll cope admirably at Berlaymont, but don’t try it down Dennistoun way in the east end of Glasgow.
What impressed me and helped me to learn anew the German tongue as spoken by my partner and his family was the fact that it was German tout nu, devoid of affectation or compromise. It was German as spoken by the Germans in Germany and thereby retained something that Walter Benjamin had alluded to in relation to early photographs: “its innocence intact.” Nobody is posing in the Newhaven Fisherwife photos. And no one was posing in Oldenburg in 2003.
It is arguable that the greatest enemy of idyllic holiday resorts is the travel writers who sing the praises of idyllic holiday resorts. The secret, hidden coves become flooded with day-trippers who leave their plastic wrappers, and pollute Spain’s nudist retreats with embarrassing comments and designer bathing costumes. Eventually, the lager louts spoil everyone’s fun, and the authenticity of an island retreat is reduced to post-card pastiche and cliché.
Authenticity is that which is portrayed by, and encapsulated in, that which knows no other. It is by not knowing any other that the authentic remains true to itself, without bending or compromising itself to the viewer, the listener, the holiday-maker or, indeed, the foreign-language speaker.
An authentic hide-away retreat is one where none has gone before; an authentic photograph is one that reveals the inside, not the outside pose, of the subject; and authentic language is that which is spoken from the inner feelings of the speaker, and takes no account of the outer appearance or inner feeling of the listener.
Ironically enough, just as knowledge of a holiday destination will ruin the holiday destination, and knowledge of the framed appearance of a printed photograph will place a veneer over the subject, so knowledge of how communication will be received corrupts how communication is then given. For, communication compromises communication.