Who the Hell is Bill Knospy?

Spotted on a trash bin in a field near Baumberg:

No idea what it means, but it was a refreshingly urban thing to see in the middle of German cornfields.

The Life-Changing, Unmissable ‘Rhine-Swing’

A curious thing about Google Maps — At the very northern tip of Düsseldorf, right next to the Rhine, is a “tourist attraction” (as shown by the camera icon)  called Rheinschaukel, or Rhine-swing.

There is no further description of the “Rhine-swing” on Google, or for that matter anywhere in the Internet. There is, bizarrely, one review, which just gives it three stars but leaves no comment. What is it? A restaurant? A carousel? Some sort of park?

After wondering about this for years, I said to myself: Self, why don’t I get on my bike and go visit it? Of course, I didn’t just go for the Rhine-swing, the banks of the Düsseldorf in summer are a pageant of lush green, and the scent of linden trees in bloom hangs everywhere in the air. There are also some great old-fashioned Rhine markers along the way:

But I was there to find the swing, and so I did. It took a lot of hiking and riding among the banks of the Rhine, but I found it. Ladies and gentlemen, behold the Rhine-swing:

There has to be a story for why this limp, moist length of rope has become a Google™-endorsed Tourist Attraction™. Does anyone know it?

German Word of the Week: Bekenntnisschrein

This GWOW is special, because it’s new.

It occurs in a short piece by Christoph Seils in the German politics mag Cicero about the hapless German Social Democratic Party, which has been circling the drain along with every other Western European center-left party. The title, appropriately, is Warten auf den Untergang — ‘Waiting for the Collapse’.

As I read along, I came across this sentence: “Das Bemühen das Thema soziale Gerechtigkeit aus dem Bekenntnisschrein zu holen und für die unterschiedlichen Zielgruppen der Partei konkret herunterzubrechen, wirkte ideenlos.”

“Efforts to take the subject of social justice out of the shrine of beliefs and to break it down for the party’s various target groups made the party seem out of ideas.”

Bekenntnis is the German word for a profession of belief or an article of faith; lip service is called Lippenbekenntnisse. Schrein is a shrine, obvs. “Shrine of beliefs” is just my clumsy way of translating Bekennnisschrein. And why did I have to resort to a clumsy approximation?

Because the word Bekenntnisschrein does not exist. Check out this Google search:

He made it up!

Seils, you magnificent bastard, you made it up! You used German’s endless, Lego™-like flexibility to create a brand-new word that never existed before, at least according to Google. And if Google don’t know it, it ain’t worth knowing.

It conjures up a great image, too. I imagine the Bekenntnisschrein to be a sterile, vacuum-sealed chamber, let’s call it the Brandt Chamber, where the temperature is kept just above absolute zero. Whenever elections time rolls around, a senior operative of the SPD party dons a clean suit and enters the Brandt Chamber:

Here, the Sacred Core Principles of Social Democracy (SCPSD) are arranged, in careful alphabetical order, in glass cubes. Each sentence is composed of glowing, ethereal script composed of pure Bebelium. Upon contact with ordinary oxygen and party infighting, the principle slowly deteriorates, but the original, inside the Brandt Chamber, regenerates using a mystical source of energy: the Simple Faith of the Common Man.

But lately, the SCPSDs grow dimmer and dimmer. The Simple Faith is depleting with each passing year. One day, the glowing sentences will eventually flicker out and die forever. And, joined my millions of doughty dockworkers and contumacious costermongers, I will shed a silent tear.

And then return to absolutely slaying it on Grand Theft Auto IX.

‘Cold-Blooded’ Horses

Taking a spin around the Urdenbacher Kämpe today, I came across a group of three handsome horses happily consuming huge quantities of fresh grass:

These are Rhenish-German draft horses, which were once the main source of local transportation in this part of Germany. After the advent of the automobile, the breed went into decline, but a local horse-breeding family, the Reuters, continue breeding them (g), and make a living by offering wagon and carriage rides.

The German name for this general variety of draft horses is Kaltblutpferde — ‘cold-blooded horses’. As the Wikipedia entry po-facedly explains (g), this does not mean that these horses are reptiles: “they are warm-blooded mammals which have an average body temperature of 38°”. They’re called cold-blooded because they are mild-mannered, unflappable, and don’t mind being harnessed for man’s purposes.

They are pretty friendly: one came up to me and stuck his head at me over the fence. He just stood there, chewing a big ball of grass, and examined me with mild curiosity.

Fün with Dändy-Döts

I have never stopped loving the perky pairs of pronunciation-permutators, and the great Berlin Typography blog now has an entire post dedicated all the different ways German graphic designers have had fun with these dandy dots over the ages:

If German mandarins ever decide to try to eliminate Umlauts in the name of anti-discrimination or ease of learning German as a second language or what-have-you, I will go underground and begin a campaign of direct action to save the dots. Non-violent, of course. At least at first.