When talking about childhood with Germans, one of the differences one discovers is that they all grew up reading Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck comic books, and we didn’t. We Americans outgrew Mickey and Donald by the time we were 6, but the Germans… they kept reading, even into adulthood, and even now ask for the English word for Entenhausen, the town where Donald and Co. live. (What, it has a name?) My wife still talks today about smuggling Mickey Mouse comics to her cousins in East Berlin.
Apparently, a big reason for the German fans was the German translator Erika Fuchs, who lent the mouse and the duck a literary tongue not found in the original and who helped invent a grammatical form named after her, the Erikativ, using a verb to express an action in a comic, as in sigh, a precursor of emoticons used today in chat and SMS.
Erika Fuchs died this week aged 98. I’m too old to start reading comic books, so I guess I’ll never catch on. (via beissholz and swr)
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I am thinking of buying some Carl Barks, but then again, they would have to be the ‘real ones’ = the Erika Fuchs ones.
And I am sorry for you that you never experienced the wonders of ächz stöhn and fnf
))
This explains a lot. I’ve been asked by coworkers on two occasions what Entenhausen is called in English. And both times each of us had gone away scratching our heads.
Duckburg. They all live in Duckburg.
I remember when I came first to Germany in 1970 and saw the original “Last of the Mohigans,” and Bonanza, and High Chapparel and heard about Karl May. I don’t think that the 60 million Americans of German descent have anything to do with culture, but it must have something to do with the mystique of the American “Wild West” experience. Its a shame that Europeans do not have the creativity to express their thousands of years of wars and culture and discoveries to the world as we do. Maybe its politics, or maybe its just American contempt or disinterst in anything foreign that it is not a two way street.
My son will be heartbroken. Seuf!
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