German Job in Montgomery, AL

There is a dire need for a German teacher in Montgomery, AL.

E-mail me with your contact info ASAP if you feel you would be a good fit for this position in the Montgomery area – or call.

Birmingham Art

In local Bham news, if you are interested in more paintings like the one above by Ralph Holzman, comment on this blog post. He might sell some for the Christmas season. No, they’re not all about Holocaust survivors – only two are (but I thought that went with the “dire need” theme of this post). Anyway, don’t miss the chance to share that job with someone who really needs a German job in Montgomery, AL – they really need someone immediately.

This video is mostly just a history of the evolution of Oktoberfest (which you Americans spell Octoberfest).

Das waren die guten alten Zeiten...damals...

As a side note, the turnout of y’all’s mailing in your Oktoberfest 2011 photos was iffy xaksullivan@gmail.com. Your mailing them to me means you grant me permission to post them on the site, citing you as the source (thanks to ___your name here___).

On the plus side, my level of German translation, tutoring, teaching, and conversational work has about tripled of late (dreimal so viel oder so), so I’m sending out a very special herzlichen Dank (hearty thanks) to those who have helped refer me via the site, Facebook, Twitter, and word of mouth. I really appreciate you. Danke sehr, gnädiger Herr!

Also, I’ve been very pleased in recent times of the level of comment activity going on on the site here and in the FB community. Keep it coming! I want to hear from you! Bleiben Sie alle in Verbindung, ja?

Strangely, yet appropriately, Hitler & Halloween (a holiday for human sacrifices) have been trending on Twitter of late. I suppose the Holocaust might be next. I wish to share this fascinating video relevant to Germany & the Holocaust and the future.

Ted Pearce, a Messianic Jewish musical artist from Texas, recently played in Birmingham, AL and I had an opportunity to meet him and speak with him, played at a congregation in Germany where most of the congregants were sons and daughters of Nazis. How weird is that? Weirder still, Ted Pearce was their favorite American musical artist or so.

As you will note, Ted Pearce does not believe in replacement theology (along with the idea that God divorced the Jews and no longer honors his covenants with them), but rather that God is still working with the Jewish people in Germany, Israel, and all over the world and will continue to in accordance with the prophecy in the Bible.

It’s official – Oktoberfest 2011 is here! If you have photos from the Oktoberfest and would like them to appear on this blog, simply e-mail them to me at xaksullivan@gmail.com – I would love to post some nice ones!

So I’m @OHenry’s and surprised to learn what Fanfaronade means – die Prahlerei – bragging – bravado, bluster, according to Dictionary.com. Very strange indeed. Äußerst merkwürdig.

I’m not bragging about remembering this word. It seems very hard to word into a conversation. Prahlerei, the German word for bragging (from “prahlen“), would be easier to work in – even in an English conversation.

If you can’t remember this word, perhaps you need to drink some Memoryade (or O’Henry’s coffee).

Volkswagen cars are great.

“We love our cars more than our wives” (“Wir lieben unsere Autos mehr als unsere Frauen”), states German pop-song “Deutschland” by the band Die Prinzen. That is certainly not the case with me, but it’s a (tragi-)comical thought about materialism, German pride in their Autos, and the difficulties with women – because the next line is, “denn deutschen Autos können wir vertrauen” – because we can trust German cars. The syntax there is also super German.

"Goodbye, old life, hello new one."

I always wanted a Volkswagen. Maybe they will hire me and include one of their finely crafted German automobiles in the deal.

Psalm 23 - Shalom!

Anyway, the ’99 Mitsubishi Eclipse will help me get to my German and ESL Lessons in the Birmingham area.

Bis zum nächsten Mal!

Ted Pearce sings Psalm 23:

Check out Ted Pearce’s discography on his official website.

Why do Germans love David Hasselhoff so much? Perhaps it’s because he’s been looking for freedom (though he says it can’t be found) and in (the heighth of 80s) style! Strangely, the Berlin Wall did fall in 1989 – the same year he sang this song! Many people do not believe in coincidences. Draw your own conclusions.

I’ve selected this 1989 David Hasselhoff video from atop the Berliner Mauer (Berlin Wall) wearing his 80stastic battery-powered leather jacket [Lederjacke], which, as David Hasselhoff quipped in his NPR interview, is now more famous than David Hasselhoff is. David Hasselhoff himself says the event is one of the most magical in his life and on the same level as the birth of his children (his wife was also pregnant at the time and was hoisted by a crane onto the wall, which concerned him greatly).

Why am I posting this today of all days? Because today, yes today, yet 50 years ago, yes, 50 years ago, the Berlin Wall was built and ironically dubbed “an anti-Faschist protection wall” (antifaschistischer Schutzwall) – whatever that means. Watch for the “Raketenangriff” (rocket attack) that narrowly misses David Hasselhoff in the video. People always be tryin’ to hassle the Hoff…

Note: You can see the famous Berlin landmark, the Brandenburger Tor (the Brandenburg Gate) there in the background to David’s left.

For a more newsy education of the history behind the German wall in Hochdeutsch, see the Tagesschau’s media on the matter. Oh, and by the way, ,,der Flüchtlingsstrom” refers to the stream of refugees always trying to get away from Ostdeutschland in der DDR.

Tagesschau.de about the 1961 Mauerbau
Berliner Mauer Quiz!!!

See also (siehe auch):
How David Hasselhoff Brought Down The Wall
NPR Story on The Night David Hasselhoff Rocked The Berlin Wall (with Audio)

Did you know that it is the year 5771? In fact, in September 2011 it’ll be 5772. It is in the Jewish calendar anyway. I never thought I would live to see the day. Shows how much I know. As Einstein showed, time is relative. This is something we can also see in different rhythmic structures in music (for example 3/4 time and 4/4 time) and in various other calendars which keep time – the Gregorian calendar (which we use), the Jewish calendar, and the Chinese calendar, to name a few. I guess the moral of this relativity might be that we should have the wisdom of humility and admit we do not know everything so that we may further our learning and see how we can benefit from understanding other rhythms and even applying them in our own lives.

The 9th of Av happens to be on the 9th of August this year, which happens to sound strikingly similar. However, the Jewish calendar is based on floating dates based on a lunar calendar where each day begins at sundown (so Monday begins at sundown on Sunday, etc), until you get to the 7th day, the Sabbath, known as Yom Shabbat, in Hebrew (Day of Rest). The 9th of Av is called Tisha B’Av in Hebrew (or der neunte Aw in German) – or even #TishaBAv among the Twitterati.

The Star of David in Birmingham

Important Events on the Ninth of Av
The 9th of Av is an important date in history for Jewish-German studies as so many terrible things happened on the 9th of Av such as the Destruction of the 1st temple, Destruction of the 2nd temple, the declaration of the First Crusade against the Jews in 1095, expulsion of all Jews from England (18th of July, 1290), the expulsion of all Jews from Spain (2nd of August, 1492, the year Columbus sailed the ocean blue), the declaration of World War I on the ninth of Av, the 1st of August, 1914, just to name a few.

On the 10th of July 1492, Germans began systematically deporting and exterminating the Jewish people (on the 9th of Av). This was their plan for the Final Solution to the Jewish Question [die Judenfrage].

As I learned at the Beth Hallel service on the 9th of Av, 2011, the odds of having so many significant events occur to one ethnic group like this is mindgooglingly astronomical – about 1 chance in 15,318,685,820,000,000,000,000,000,000.

A common belief is that around the 9th of Av, 40 days of spiritual testing may occur. Jesus and Moses (Yeshua and Moshe) were both tested for 40 days and 40 nights. Check out more about the significance of the number 40 in the Bible.

For more info about the 9th of Av, see:

TheFoundationStone.org – the 9th of Av
Intimacy in Flames – TheYeshiva.net

And so destiny brings us to the topic of Yiddish today. Oy! I noticed about half the people on YouTube clicked dislike on this YouTube video, so I ask you dear readers, what did they dislike? Perhaps it was the versus word in its title – German vs Yiddish sounds very controversial given the well-known cultural issues surrounding this ethno-political topic. But Yiddish must be fun to speak because Yiddish is just fun to say and just typing Yiddish makes me a yiddle bit happier. Klezmer music also makes me happier – but that’s another story.

In German, it’s (das) Jiddisch. You already know some Yiddish, I’m sure – oy weh, for example yarmulke yarmulke (Yiddish – yarmlke), which is the Yiddish word for kippah (Hebrew – kippah – plural: kippot). Thanks to Chris at Beth Hallel in Birmingham, AL for clarifying that one. Beth Hallel is the fastest-growing Messianic Jewish congregation in America, or so I have heard.

At Beth Hallel people may attend a Hebrew class, which is fascinating, but again – a bit tangential to the main topic of this post. The main thing that you need to know here is that the Torah (first 5 books of the Bible – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), are in Hebrew – not Yiddish. Hebrew is more of the written language for the Jewish people – the People of the Book – and Yiddish is more of the spoken, colloquial language. The simple version is Hebrew is more formal and Yiddish is less formal.

Yiddish is a bit of a spoken mish-mash of languages of Hebrew, slavic language like Russian, and German, much as the English language evolved from Germanic tribes interacting with French peoples, English peoples, and Celtic peoples, etc. Later English would also incorporate Yiddish, and nowadays in the Age of the iPhone there is no telling how quickly languages evolve since you don’t even have to physically be relocated to other places to cause new trends, etc.

It is pretty impossible to talk about Yiddish meaningfully without any talk of the significance of the Jewish people. However, there is so much to say about all things Judaica that I must constrain myself in this late-night inspired blog post to the language Yiddish and in particular to this one YouTube video I found right before I was about to go to sleep. Ich bin schläfrig is how you say I am sleepy in German.

OK, so it’s late – almost 2 a.m. now – so just watch the video and enjoy. Perhaps I’ll do another post on Yiddish or Hebrew in the future. In fact, that will almost indubitably occur, Lord willing.

Now it is time to dream, so an untranslated Yiddish lullabye is in order:

Das Radio-Koeln App for www.radio-koeln.de is available at the app store for free. It should work for iPhone, iPad, iPod, Touch, Android, and Blackberry (with Wi-Fi of course).

The Radio Koeln app is a good resource for American German learners who want to get an aural experience of how it feels to be in Germany – in reality, it’s a mix of English and German. Almost all of the songs are in English. There is German spoken in between. Many American-German-learners complain a lot (as Americans are wont to do) about how Germans respond in English when they try to speak German because the Germans want to use their English and their English is often better than the attempting German speaker’s German. I too experienced this on my last trip to Germany and my solution was to keep talking in German even if they tried to come at me in English. So what happened was dual-language conversations for a while until their mind switched back to German. If you keep speaking German when they’re speaking English persistently enough and confidently enough, the conversation will revert back to German. However, it takes lots of steeping yourself in German words and culture to have the necessary persistence and confidence for the language.

That is a tangent. Back to the Radio Koeln app.

With the Radio Koeln app, you can also peruse the Radio Koeln website itself, check the weather, though you might not care that it is 22-28 C and “leicht bewoeklt” (lightly cloudy). If you click on the Radio Koeln button at the bottom of the app, you can check Nchrichten (news stories) for Koeln, NRW und Welt Nachrichten, Sport, Horoskope, Studiomail, Wecker, and yes, even Verkehr (traffic, in this context)!

If you click “Playlist” you can see what’s coming up on ze radio – New Radicals – You Get What You Give – Cassandra Steen – Stadt, Sunrise Avenue, Hollywood Hills, Toto – Africa, Rihanna – California King Bed, Bloodhound Gang – The Bad Touch, U2, Where The Streets Have No Name, Pink – Sober. The songs are listed in descending order (so the first one listed is the one currently playing). I like this feature because then you know what you’re hearing, when a lot of times they don’t tell you on the radio anymore.

Anyway, check out the Radio Koeln app – it’s a good simulation of listening / studying in German while you are doing your German homework. Yes, when you are doing your German homework – now go do your German homework and listen to the Radio Koeln app. Just try. Im Ernst. Geh Radio Koeln hoeren. Jetzt. Sofort.