If you asked most Germans about the Reinhard Döhl (1934-2004) or Helmut Heißenbüttel (1921-1996), they’d likely reply with a moderately annoyed “hungh?” The work of experimental poets rarely enters the mainstream, even if it is playful or silly or otherwise seemingly accessible. This kind of work often counts as especially difficult. Which is understandable. Confronting lots of this work at one time can be admittedly overwhelming if you don’t have anyone to guide you through it. Though honestly, often times that guidance doesn’t amount to much more than permission to go slowly and rely on your own impulses.

In other words, you don’t really need to read tons of Heidegger or some shit to get a kick out of most of this stuff. Take Reinhard Döhl’s apple. If you want to go on about Geworfenheit or scream ILNYAPASDESHORSTEXTMOTHERFUCKERS at the top of your lungs or whatever, you certainly can. But I feel like all of that should be some kind of garnish. He wrote apple out a bunch of times in the shape of an apple, though there is a worm in there if you look closely. It’s kind of funny.

Show it to your kids (there’s a better version here). Maybe they’ll get a kick out of it and if they do, you’ll have convinced them to read carefully enough to find the worm. Which, hey, it’s something. You might also have taught them a couple of words of a foreign language and introduced them to a new author. They might also teach you something about the importance of our spontaneous responses to literature and the centrality of play as a discursive mode. Döhl was, in fact, distressed that people didn’t place the apple in a broader philological context. But that should say something about the basic impulse that motivates most people who read this kind of thing. Finally, it’s about play.

Or at least I think it should be. At some point, maybe I’ll read through Schiller’s Briefe über die Ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen here, but the TL;DR for now– you can’t really know shit without an aesthetic sense and you can’t have an aesthetic sense without a drive to play. Otherwise, you wind up sitting on a golden toilet, posting about being fascist for the lulz.

We tend to think about difficult literary or cultural works as being fundamentally similar– as though the difficulty of reading Jandl was the same as the difficulty of reading Kant was the same as the difficulty of reading Joyce. But this is very far from the case. The difficulty of reading Jandl, Döhl, or Heißenbüttel can generally be found less in complex sentence structure or difficult allusions and more on this insistence on silliness.

It’s the kind of difficulty, in other words, that comes as easily to children as breathing– if you can get them to pay attention for long enough to realize there’s a form of play on offer here.

Admittedly, that isn’t always a trivial task and I’ve come across enough guides to Jandl intended for classroom teachers in the course of my research to know that commitment to play is often absent from pedagogical approaches to this kind of material. In related news, some teachers suck. And some teachers especially suck at remembering that learning is best when it’s fun. Parents, of course, are often not all that much better.

A lot of kids, I think, only know curious, intellectually engaged adults from TV. Which sucks about the world! But can be awesome about TV! And is especially awesome in Die Sendung mit der Maus, which is essentially responsible for turning Ernst Jandl into a children’s book author….

A surprising thing about Ernst Jandl: he was apparently not a very funny person. Or, rather, his humor was often overwhelmed by an abiding melancholy, which colored his comedy and gave it shape. Jandl was, as Ulrich Weinzerl once put it, a Depressionshumorist, a “spielerische Ernstmacher” (“playful serious-maker”). Or rather, I should say that I find this surprising. I always find the sadness of very funny people shocking, even though the historical record and personal experience really should have combined by now to confirm the cliche: humor often “masks” some kind of underlying problem.

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Or rather, one of the things that Jandl helps us to see, I think, is that humor doesn’t simply serve to obscure some sadness that constitutes the true reality of the sufferer– we suffer because we get caught in patterns that compel us to suffer. If we suffer enough, those patterns of worry and guilt and anger can start to seem like the very core of who we are.

A lot of Jandl’s work can be understood as something like an attempt to subvert the hold that these kinds of patterns have over us– his poems serve as a kind of magical spell that reworks the very structures of our fears and our joys. Take his other famous children’s book, Fünfter Sein, which, like Ottos Mops, started out as simply a poem:

fünfter sein

tür auf
einer raus-einer rein 
vierter sein

tür auf einer
raus einer- einer rein 
dritter sein

tür auf
einer raus -einer rein 
zweiter sein

tür auf
einer raus einer-rein 
nächster sein

tür auf
einer raus selber rein 
tagherrdoktor

My quick and dirty translation

up fifth

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

door opens
one in - one out
fourth

door opens
one in - one out 
third

door opens 
one in- one out
second

door opens
one in - one out
my turn 
hiyadoc

It’s easy to recognize something both childlike and bordering on mad in the poem’s fixation on counting, in its need to ascertain the obvious. The German also rolls off your tongue. It’s the kind of thing you start to read too fast because it’s fun to say. The kind of thing kids like to repeat over and over and over again until the connection between madness and repetition is clear to every parent.

The iconic version of the children book was done by Norman Junge, who was also responsible for Ottos Mops. While there’s something undeniably charming about his bandaged stuffed animals– the cover image for this newsletter– I almost prefer this 1988 illustration by Bernd Henning. It was published in Ottos Mops Hopst, an anthology of Jandl’s work intended for children. It draws to mind an important historical context for Jandl’s work–

Henning’s illustration has the virtue of reminding us, as Anne Uhrmacher has argued, that waiting often contains an element of the unexpected, an element of dread. The counting might keep the childish impatience for something to finally happen at bay, but it might also help to ward off fears of a bad diagnosis or a doctor with bad intentions.

Returning to the political scandal once occasioned by Jandl’s silliness, it seems important to think about this connection between patterns, childishness, melancholy, and humor.

But before I get to that, I want to look a little at the people and institutions that turned Jandl from a grumpy, VERY SERIOUS POET to a children’s book author. There will be TELEVISION!!

If you subscribe to my newsletter, I will tell you about all of the pretentious, retro European TV shows. You can turn YouTube into a babysitter and be a pretentious asshole at the same time.

As a break from our regularly scheduled programming, here are some images of political propaganda I have enjoyed over the past few years that seemed relevant to the current German elections. I’ll be back to writing about children’s books, humor, and politican theory next week.

Children’s literature is an interesting kind of leveler. You can be a lot of different kinds of person and still be a person who loves Goodnight Moon. This is less true when you grow up. Loving Jane Austen, or Hermann Melville, or Thomas Pynchon says something about you. That’s part of becoming an adult and it seems to me like a very large portion of our freedom is dependent on our ability to choose the books, art, and music that make us who we are guided firmly by our own taste.

Still, there’s something about the way children’s books create unexpected constellations that I find incredibly rewarding. This is as true for writers and artists as it is for readers. Of course, unexpected connections are generally a benefit of paying close attention to a specific topic. One of the reasons that reactionary politics find people like Ernst Jandl so threatening, I think, is that the kind of overwhelming discipline a mind needs to play at that level exposes so much machismo and brutality for what it is.

In other words, I found a lot of cool shit while I was writing this week that didn’t quite make the cut (at least so far), so here’s a bunch of it in digest form.

Han Sen– Ein Chinese mit dem Kontrabass.

This book comes up a lot when you read up on “Drei Chinesen mit dem Kontrabass.” Sen was born in Berlin in 1925 and fled to China after Hitler took power. The experiences of under-represent ethnic groups during the Third Reich are very interesting to me, largely because of how little I know about it– I was kind of floored by Theodor Wonja Michaels obituary a few years back. So I ordered this book right away. I’ll probably spend at least a couple hours with this book at some point next week. Let me know if you’re interested in hearing more!

Creme de la Creme– Drei Chinesen mit einer Tüte Gras

Somehow this track makes me feel nostalgic and a little bit conflicted about a misspent youth that isn’t even my own. Doesn’t really have anything to do with the language game that interests me and also produces weird “is this racist?” feelings at moments. Isn’t really great hip-hop. Kind of trying to come to terms with my enjoyment of it this week.

Yoko Tawada–Surface Translation

Is a Japanese-German translator and writer whose work I look forward to getting to know soon. She is also very interested in Jandl’s concept of Oberflächenübersetzung (Surface Translation). I may pick up her volume of literary essays soon.

Floh de Cologne/Norman Junge

Speaking of nostalgia for other people’s youths, I hadn’t listened to Floh de Cologne in a very long time and never seriously. I think at some point they fell into the general category of “Hippie shit that makes me roll my eyes.” But now unrelentingly didactic leftism delivered with a combination of mania and precision is basically the only thing I want. That’s why kids like me.

The kids and I FaceTimed my mom after a trip to the bakery a while back. “These things are called ‘Windbags’ in German,” I told her as she watched the girls eat “the pastries, not my daughters,” I added hastily. I don’t know why so many excellent German desserts sound like insults or threats if you translate them literally into English, but it’s rather remarkable.

“Excuse me waiter, what kinds of cakes do you have?”

“We have a lovely cold dog this evening, Madame, then there’s the bee sting, or you could have some grenade shrapnel.”

I just now learned that there was once a movement to change the name of the Granatsplitter because of its martial overtones but it failed, which seems remarkable because this was in the 1950s. It isn’t as though the only memories people had of Granatsplitter at the time involved a pile of pastry scraps covered in chocolate. Admittedly, the suggestion to rename the confection ‘Bear Shits,’ [Bärenhäufen] may not have helped.

Of course, all of this brings to mind some of the truly terrible names Germans have given to desserts, and other food items, in the past. I’ll take one Paprikaschnitzel and a Schokokuss, you mouldy potatoes. One of the reasons Jandl is important to me is that I think his work can help us navigate some of the specific issues that come with raising kids in a world where we care about this kind of question.

There’s no excuse for arguments about keeping the racist names of foodstuffs, except that it reveals that the only fond memory some people have of their childhood is the ability to hate openly. But there are other issues that strike me as more complicated and more interesting and I’m afraid that they’re ignored all too often when we try to educate our children to be tolerant and interesting people.

It’s easy (and generally right) to teach our children not to make fun of the way others speak. But for all of my sympathy with the desire to ensure that our use of language reflects our respect for difference, there’s something uncomfortable about just ignoring linguistic differences altogether. Accents contain information. There are speakers who use languages beautifully not despite but because of the fact that they have idiosyncratic grammars and limited vocabularies.

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We should be able to acknowledge that without devolving to caricature. There’s nothing kind in ignoring the struggle of people who are trying to make themselves understood in a foreign language. And it should be OK if that’s funny sometimes.

Older German kids sometimes read Jandl’s “Surface Translation” in school

oberflächenübersetzung

mai hart lieb zapfen eibe hold
er renn bohr in sees kai
so was sieht wenn mai läuft begehen
so es sieht nahe emma mähen
so biet wenn ärschel grollt
ohr leck mit ei!
seht steil dies fader rosse mähen
in teig kurt wisch mai desto bier
baum deutsche deutsch bajonett schur alp eiertier

(surface translation – after william wordsworth)

my heart leaps up when i behold a rainbow in the sky
so was it when my life began
so is it now i am am a man
so be it when i shall grow old
or let me die!
the child is father of the man
and i could wish my days to be bound each to each by natural piety

There’s some humor in the attempt to parse something like meaning from Jandl’s attempts to match the sounds of the English words to words in German in his translation of Wordsworth, but if you’ve ever asked a machine to read you something in a foreign language, you’ll get the joke here. Monolinguism is rendered into a kind of mania that insists in absolute terms on German’s logic of pronounciation and its ways of making meaning, even in the face of a monument of the English poetic tradition.

In some sense, it seems to me that Jandl is reducing a basically reactionary impulse to absurdity here– what better shorthand could there be for a reactionary understanding of culture than the refusal to see another language as capable of bearing meaning? Perhaps it is then no surprise that Jandl’s more hopeful political works are often written in the kind of mishmash that emerges in lives that take place in multiple languages. We’re at our best together when we use the best words we can find at the moment and mix our languages promiscously, like Jandl’s Denglish in this poem, with a helpful glossary provided by Edward Mackinnon:

the flag

a fleck
on the flag
let’s putzen

a riss
in the flag
let’s nähen
where’s the nadel

now
that’s getan
let’s throw it
werfen

into a dreck

that’s
a zweck

_____________

fleck = stain
putzen = clean
riss = tear
nähen = sew
nadel = needle
getan = done
werfen= throw
dreck = dirt
zweck = purpose

I’m going to come back to Ernst Jandl in a later post, but first I want to establish the premise of my approach to children’s literature here. If you’re skeptical about this newsletter because you don’t care all that much about children’s books, here’s my pitch. If we look at the ways in which literary seriousness specifically and intellectual seriousness more generally have helped to destabilize past fascistic regimes, it seems to me that the cultural products that have most often succeeded in irritating fascists historically have very frequently been sustained by a radical commitment to playfulness. That commitment to playfulness is often best embodied in works for children. Furthermore, children’s books (and songs) often sit closer to the heart of a culture than the kinds of Avant Garde works where these forms of resistance are generally analyzed. I think that’s a real loss– this kind of irritation is often most interesting when it’s closest to the ground.

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Jandl is a good starting place because he effectively bridges this gap– he’s a well-established member of the SERIOUS LITERARY ELITE, but he’s also the author of several beloved children’s books. He’s also interesting because his humor derives largely from a commitment to following more-or-less arbitrary rules. There’s often an almost algorithmic quality to his writing, but while the algorithms that rule our world often serve to provide the impression of meaning without any intentionality, the kinds of algorithms that Jandl– and children– deploy often serve to make meaningful statements absurd. And there are a surprising number of childhood algorithms! Even if I would never have thought of them as that until recently. My daughters, for example, have been fascinated recently by a rhyme that goes like this:

1: Haumich und flaumich saßen auf einem Baum. Flaumich fiel runter. Wer saß noch auf dem Baum?

2: Haumich.

The equivalent from my childhood was,

1: Pete and Repeat sat on a log. Pete fell off. Who was left?

2. Repeat.

The German version is more violent and has even less claim to coherence than the American rhyme– at least “Pete” is the name of a person who might plausibly sit on a log. On balance, however, I think the German version might be slightly less obnoxious. The slap is usually not hard and there’s at least some chance that the whole thing might come to a quick end. It’s easy, though, to see why children are attracted to this kind of game. We notice when children test boundaries by ignoring rules we establish or that were established by the world, but children also test boundaries in the opposite direction– by creating rules and seeing whether they can be enforced. Childhood, so far as I can tell, is largely an ongoing game of Calvinball

It’s easiest to see the delight in this kind of play at a linguistic level– we learn grammatical rules more easily than many others and my kids have always delighted in their mastery of these systems. Children grasp the precise kind of chaos encoded in songs like the North American standard, “Apples and Bananas” immediately. Unsurprisingly, there are a number of similar songs or games in other languages, but what most of them seem to have in common is a disinterest in meaning beyond the language play at their heart. Could any statement be more anodyne than, “I like to eat apples and bananas?” The Spanish, “La mar estaba serena,” operates on similar lines– it’s hard to start a fight by noting that the sea is calm. The German song, “Drei Chinesen mit dem Kontrabass” doesn’t quite manage to establish the same commitment to meaninglessness:

Drei Chinesen mit dem Kontrabass

saßen auf der Straße und erzählten sich was.

Da kam die Polizei, fragt, was ist denn das?

Drei Chinesen mit dem Kontrabass.

Three Chinese with a double-bass

Sat on the street talking

Along came the police and said, what’s that?

Three Chinese with a double-bass

I had a difficult argument with my mother-in-law about this song. It’s not easy to say what, precisely, is racist about the idea of three Chinese people with a double-bass. Why should the police not express their interest? Though if you look at many of the videos illustrating the song, it’s not hard to have the feeling that one’s worst suspicions have been confirmed. Fortunately, many children now learn alternative versions like, “Drei Giraffen mit dem Kontrabass” or “Drei Papageien mit dem Kontrabass.” Unfortunately, mine were not among them.

It seems worth alluding to the murky origins of the song before we move on– though it’s commonly referred to as a folk song, there’s apparently little record of it before the 20^th-century and there are a number of different versions of the text. I will leave commentary on the Hebrew equivalent– which apparently translates to, “Two Chinese with a Big Violin” to more qualified commentators, but it’s worth noting that there’s one version of the song’s history that claims it emerged from the pratice of exhibiting colonized people at fairs and carnivals in early 20th-century Germany. Proponents of this theory point to early versions of the song that describe the police approaching three Chinese people, “Ohne Reisepass”– without a passport– rather than being concerned with a group of itinerant musicians.

I’ll be back soon to look at Jandl’s version of algorithmic silliness more precisely.

Ottos Mops

I’m not sure anything has ever made my daughters laugh harder than Ottos Mops, Ernst Jandl’s short, absurd poem describing a man’s frustration with his pug. Really, though, the poem describes the German language much more than it describes a man or a pug or a house or a series of frustrations. That sounds like an enormously pretentious thing to say, but kids immediately get the humor behind exaggarated sounds and patterns repeated to the point of absurdity and the constant “Os” and plosives that make up the text have an obvious appeal:

ottos mops trotzt
otto: fort mops fort
ottos mops hopst fort
otto: soso

There’s a really wonderful series of attempts to translate the poem that came out of a contest commissioned by the now defunct Sign and Sight in 2005. With all deference to the really great translators who tried their hand at the poem, I still don’t think anything really comes close to the original and I’m guessing, you can get a lot of kids who don’t speak German to laugh with this brief cartoon by the sculptor and illustrator Norman Junge, whose images also accompany our copy of Ottos Mops:

It might be even better to read it to your kids yourself, though– you’ll find a copy of the text at LyrikLine. There’s also a recording of Jandl reading it aloud, which is a lot of fun to listen to, but I wouldn’t recommend trying to emulate it to closely. In his later career, Jandl– paramour of Viennese literary titan Friederike Mayröcker– devoted much of his later career to working on what he called, “heruntergekommene Sprache,” which you might translate as something like, “down-and-out language,” and he was particularly interested in the ways in which non-native speakers of German were capable of reworking the rules of the language and he often emulated foreign accents and speech defects in his poetry– not to mock, but as a way of breaking down the kinds of pathos and self-seriousness that could otherwise infect poetic writing.

English speakers might be familiar with similar kind of linguistic experimentation from Jabberwocky, as well as from texts like Luis d'Antin van Rooten’s Mots d'Heures: Gousses, Rames: The d'Antin Manuscript, or Spike Milligan’s On the Ning Nang Nong, but Jandl’s language play was especially rigorous. It was also especially controversial– when Jandl first published his “Lautgedichte” (“sound poems”) in 1958, they led to outraged attempts to have Jandl fired from his job teaching high school German and Jandl was effectively barred from publication until the mid-sixties, when his work found favor among a new literary generation.

I think kids have an intuitive sense that there can be something dangerous about the ways language sound– at some level, the impulse that informs Jandl seems related to the impulse behind things like singing “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” until your parents go insane. Amazingly, it seems to have worked.

The idea of this newsletter was originally to have a place to collect ephemera I came across while working on a book about German humor. In the broadest sense, that’s still true. But the first book I want to read here isn’t funny at all– or at least I don’t expect it will be. Very long histories are rarely funny, and I don’t think it really improves my odds that this particular very long history was 1.) written between 1933 and 1945 2.) in Germany and 3.) mostly covers medieval German social history. So admittedly, the connection to the topic at hand here is a bit tenuous. But that was always a central part of the point of this newsletter. I’m interested in German humor as a mode, not a topic. So I don’t just want to look at instances where we know humor was important in the past. I want to see if we can start to understand history by looking at the ways people laugh, just like we’ve understood it by looking at the ways people govern, fight, make love, and work. There aren’t a lot of people who’ve looked at German history that way. Ricarda Huch just might be one of them.

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Who the Huch is that, anyway?

Well, I should be circumspect in saying that. I’ve not yet read anywhere near enough of her work to know what Huch really believed. In fact, I’d never even heard of her until a couple of weeks ago, which now feels really shameful to me. I mean, she was a female historian at a time when there weren’t many of them. She was a very popular novelist and poet. She openly opposed the Nazis, but had enough status to stay in Germany thoughout the war. She was famous enough to have an asteroid named after her, but I’ve never even heard of her!

Perhaps that makes it appropriate that I came across her while I was looking for a copy of a book called Briefe der Dunkelmänner, aka the Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum or the Letters from Obscure Men, a series of satirical letters written between 1515 and 1519 to address an ongoing debate in German religious life. At stake was the question of whether Jewish books should be burned, a position that the Dunkelmännerbriefe apparently mock compellingly.

I can’t say for sure. I still haven’t read them. They scare me! I mean, I could certainly slog my way through them and collect a few salient points to include in a diligent chapter called, “The Roots of German Satire” or something like that. But I don’t want to write that chapter and I don’t think anyone really wants to read it. I want to understand why people found the Dunkelmännerbriefe funny and how they laughed at the jokes.

Past experience has taught me that jokes this old are rarely easy to follow, unless they’re about, like, boobs or poop or something. Which, to be fair, they often are! There are a number of contenders for the title of ‘Adam Sandler of the German Early Modern.’ Still, somehow, I don’t think the authors of Epistolæ Obscurorum Virorum are among them.

I knew I would need help. And I knew I would have the best chance of reading the book well enough to laugh at it, at least a little, if I got some of that help before I started. So when I came across a book called Das Zeitalter der Glaubensspaltung listed in the search results for the Dunkelmännerbriefe, I was intrigued enough to Google its author. And found Huch and now here we are. She seems to take up the question of antisemitism a lot in this period, and I’ll be looking at some of her satirical novels next. But I wanted to dive into this history first. This kind of digressive work often presents more manageable challenges.

If you’re interested in following along as I try to understand Huch and figure out what she can tell us about German humor, please follow along both here and on Instagram or TikTok, where I’ll be posting videos breaking down individual sentences in German, both to try to help people practice their language skills by reading real German literature and to try to bring more attention to this important author. If that sounds interesting to you, I’d appreciate follows on all the channels.

I’ll most likely be writing a lot about German humor, so the first thing that came to mind was “Slovenly Peter,” the most common translation of Heinrich Hoffmann’s 1845 children’s classic Der Struwwelpeter. I feel for the eponymous Peter– my childhood, too, was filled with recriminations for messy hair and mediocre hygiene. But there are some problems with the name. It’s a little too on the nose, for one thing. And for another, do we really want to lead with Struwwelpeter? I mean, Struwwelpeter!

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To be fair, it is supposed to be a comedy, or at least the subtitle "lustige Geschichten und drollige Bilder für Kinder von 3-6" would seem to imply as much. What's more, it's intended for very young children! Love you, Germany! Even I have an incredibly difficult time thinking of this as somehow funny. I mean, I have substantial sympathy for the idea that paying too much heed to people’s perceived sensitivities around language and representation can inhibit some of the functions of humor. Still, there has to be a line somewhere, and it seems like “chopping off a child’s thumbs as a form of punishment” must be thoroughly on the “Jesus fucking Christ, why are you laughing, you monster” side of the divide. 

The monster who laughs at the mutilation of children for petty misbehavior, it’s easy to think, is a stepping stone away from the monster who dreams up the gas chambers. A long tradition both inside and outside of Germany ties Struwwelpeter and the kind of schwarze Pädagogik it is often taken to represent to the crimes of the Nazis, as observers both domestic and foreign have long pointed out. Take 1941’s Struwwelhitler, a parody by Robert and Phillip Spence that was published as a fundraiser for the Daily Sketch war relief fund. Or F.K. Waechter’s Anti-Struwwelpeter, whichbecame a classic of the German left’s anti-authoritarian Kindererziehung.  

But there’s something that doesn’t sit quite right with accounts of Struwwelpeter that reduce it to its brutality and assume anyone taught to laugh at this kind of pedagogical violence must have a casual relationship to violence. For one thing, the book was wildly popular outside of Germany– translations and adaptions proliferated almost immediately after it was published, and it remained a widely-read classic in Britain, especially where it was frequently marketed as a comic work well into the twentieth century. Admittedly, one might easily take that as evidence of its desultory effects on the moral constitution of its readers. Still, even if that were the case, it wouldn’t be some particularly German phenomenon. Everyone who has ever seen a Warner Brother’s cartoon should know that Germans aren’t the only ones who understand Schadenfreude. 

I’ll write more about Hoffman’s politics and his work as a psychiatrist and the ways in which they inform his pedagogy and his humor, at some point, maybe. But for now, well, this isn’t a post about that. This is a post about how this website got its name, and the answer is this: In addition to being a doctor and a radical democrat, Hoffmann seems to have been a loving father– he’s said to have written Der Struwwelpeter as a Christmas gift for his three-year-old son after he was dissatisfied with the selection of children's books at his local stores– he would have killed on Instagram. The book was only published after he read excerpts to his literary society, an influential group that had been founded a few years earlier by Hoffmann's friend Friedrich Hecker, a revolutionary democrat who gave his name to the Hecker Uprising that kicked off 1848’s Badisch Revolution. Hecker’s explicit aim with the society was to create a cultural space open to all, where cultural and political works could be presented to a diverse audience– rich and poor, aristocrats and commoners, Jews and gentiles. Like any good German, Hecker seems to have been fascinated by Italy, and so he chose an Italian name for his new society: “Tutti Frutti.”

Now, the phrase “Tutti Frutti” has a bit of an odd history in the German language. Hecker wasn’t the first person to put it to literary use– Fürst Hermann von Pückler-Muskau published his memoirs under the title in 1834. But the two more common usages are as a slightly foreignizing synonym for “mixed fruits,” which is sometimes even used as a kind of metonym for Italian ice cream more generally. “Sweeter than beating Italy at soccer,” promises the “Tutti Frutti Eiscafe” in Oyten, a small town in Niedersachsen.  

That, I knew. What I didn’t know until recently is that “tutti frutti” is sometimes also used to describe a striptease, most notably when German television producers decided to copy an Italian gameshow called “Colpo Grosso.” The German version was broadcast between four 1990 and 1993. It involved competing teams of models, regular couples, skeezy hosts, and, well– I don't know. I've not actually been able to bring myself to watch it; though we might have to organize a public viewing at some point.

Still, whatever the show actually entails, the linguistic trajectory of "Tutti Frutti" in German captures a lot of what I find so fascinating about German humor– where else can you find the highbrow sitting next to the trashy; noble pedagogical intentions mixed with casual sadism; radical commitment to democratic principles morphing into tawdry sexuality? I'm convinced that German humor combines all of these things in ways that can reconfigure our understanding of politics, violence, sexuality, and pedagogy. Or maybe not, but at least we'll get to cringe, guffaw, gape, gasp, ogle, and groan along the way.

Meine Damen und Herren, Welcome to the Tutti Frutti Society.

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