Bescherung or Bescheuerung?

Reading between the lines of a freely given present

It’s Christmas morning (or Christmas Eve if you’re in continental Europe) and it’s time for Father Christmas to do his rounds. “Yo-ho-ho,” he bellows as he comes in the front door (and glances at the drinks cabinet, muttering to himself and a bottle of rum!)

In an extraordinarily apt slip of the tongue, I once described the ritual of Christmas presents to my German in-laws as a Bescheuerung, which made them all laugh. It’s a word that doesn’t exist, but sounds awfully like bescheuert, meaning daft, crazy, inane. (The word should be Bescherung, meaning exchange of gifts, although it does also happen to mean what Oliver Hardy always said to Stan Laurel: That’s a fine mess!).

So, this tidy little package is handed to you and your eyes light up with glee. You shake it to try to guess … whether it’s fragile. It’s heavy. Pretty heavy! What, oh, what could it be?! You unwrap the parcel to find it contains a finely crafted casket, and upon opening the casket you behold its contents: a six-shooter revolver, complete with six live rounds of ammunition and (thoughtful touch, this) an export permit. For me? Really? All mine? There can be no mistake about the intended recipient: there, engraved in block letters down the barrel of the firearm, is your name. It’s yours. To keep. For ever. Merry Christmas. Behind the false beard you can just discern the chortling features of the Turkish president, Recep Erdogan.

Image: the gun that was gifted to the Lithuanian president.

Now, when The Godfather’s Michael Corleone excused himself in that restaurant to go have a pee, he was mightily relieved when he discovered a gun of similar dimensions jammed between the cistern and the wall. Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird tells how he was just a boy when he was given his first gun, and he narrates how he immediately went out and killed birds with it. All except one: the mockingbird of the title. I was even once given a gun, as part of my Christmas Bescherung: it fired caps and made a dreadful smell, albeit a really cracking cracking noise. The contexts within which these three other arms were gifted are clearly defined, if not expressly, at least implicitly. But the casket containing the firearm described above was not gifted for Christmas but as a farewell present from the Republic of Turkey to the heads of state and dignitaries attending this week’s NATO summit. And the giver was indeed Mr Erdogan. So, what did he mean with it?

He could have been inviting them to appear out of the toilet, shoot two people dining in a restaurant, drop the gun and disappear to Sicily for a year. Or to take up target practice so that, one day, they can save the town from a rabid dog who’s as dangerous dead as he was alive. Or they could have chased each other around a playground, crying out, “Bang! You’re dead!” And, quite honestly, any of those three might be a rational explanation for the gift given how only irrational explanations are otherwise available.

Whatever the gifts were, they were symbolic and, being symbolic, it is not exactly fitting to ask what the meaning is, and it would be defeating the point for Erdogan to explain the symbolism. Either you understand, or you don’t. To that extent, the stunt pulled by Mr Erdogan is a shrewdly clever one, and is enrobed in a multitude of questions:

• Should NATO be arming itself?

• Is a six-shooter the level of armament that NATO should aspire to (i.e. it doesn’t need many weapons) or is that the level it now has, and should it be upping its budgets?

• Is it an invitation to join Erdogan’s gang? If so, should the willing recipients in their turn be gifting Mr Erdogan an automatic rifle to say I’m in, buddy? Or should they send him a dead fish, or a horse’s head?

Some heads of government, like Keir Starmer, left their gift back in Turkey because it would be unlawful to bring it into Britain. Starmer is first going to arrange for the weapon to be decommissioned.

I have to admit I stared in disbelief at such arrant posturing poppycock. Sir Keir has a diplomatic bag. He could carry an atom bomb in it and never be challenged by Customs & Excise. But, if he’s insistent that arms need to be decommissioned before they can be transported across borders, then I suggest that he decommissions all the arms that he’s busy exporting to other countries, like Israel, to ensure that no harm comes to anybody as a result of his blatant warmongering. We wouldn’t want them going off and harming anyone, now, would we?

What is fascinating about this leaving present from the Türkiyeish president is not in fact the gift. It’s observing how the recipients of the gift take the gift itself and how they deal with it. That is the far more interesting story. And could in the end be precisely why Erdogan gave them the guns in the first place. Personally, I think he missed a trick. He should not have given them six bullets, but one. Just to test their readiness to play Russian roulette.