Joe Fitzsimons

Germany Is Going Away I've been going back to Germany often over the last three years. One thing stands out every time: nobody speaks fluent German anymore. I kept count on a trip earlier this year. I interacted with ~20 people -- baristas, taxi drivers, store clerks, etc. and I'd involve them in conversation long enough to get a feel for their fluency. ~15 of them just wouldn't pass what I'd consider a reasonable language test. Broken grammar, poor diction. All my interactions were friendly and polite, but these people just don't speak the language. In the most egregious cases, they default to English instead. I found it just baffling to talk to people in positions of relative importance -- airport staff, for example -- and hear them fuck up Der/Die/Das. Let me explain. I lived in Germany from 1997 through 2002, Kindergarten through 3rd grade. Nearly all my childhood memories involve only natively fluent speakers. Some of them had immigration backgrounds, but the level of integration, i.e. language fluency was very high. It would've been unthinkable to run into people several times a day who just struggle to communicate. This is the type of thing that's probably hard to notice if you live there: the proverbial frog in boiling water. But I notice it very clearly because I go back so rarely, sometimes years apart. Every time it hits like a ton of bricks: "that's not how I remember it!" And the changes over the ~2 decades that I've been gone are very, very clear. A generation of workers has aged out, i.e. been replaced by a new generation, and so the demographics have shifted. Nowhere is it clearer than in the ability of people in public life to communicate in the German language. What I cannot stress enough is how weird this feels. For the vast majority of my readers: you have never experienced anything like this. You probably never will. It is an exceedingly strange and alienating feeling to return to a familiar place -- home at one point in your life -- and to find that people there can't speak the language anymore. They literally can't. The culture you grew up with is no more, and you may look around for someone else who understands, but you are all alone.