A Language Beyond My Reach: Longing, Learning German, and a Life Imagined
- Lavavoth
- 5 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 5 days ago
Originally published on January 18, 2017. Updated with additional writing, new links, videos, and edits.
My desire to learn German began in 2007 after a friend recommended that I watch The BRD Trilogy by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In truth, Germany itself, that is, its war history, politics, culture, and aesthetics, had already begun taking hold of me around that time, alongside my growing interest in paranormal documentaries focused on apparitional phenomena. In hindsight, I understand this convergence as part of the process of acclimating to Hans’s official and inevitable arrival in August 2010.
Back then, I interpreted the obsession psychologically, artistically, and historically rather than spiritually connected to Hans. Germany became intertwined with my creative ambitions. I wanted to apply for a Fulbright through University of Pennsylvania and travel to Germany. Once there, I hoped to interview surviving German women from World War II, or their children, about losing their husbands during the war and navigating the harsh realities of postwar Germany. I wanted to immerse myself in Berlin, to experience the city while creating a series of large-scale drawings inspired by the interviews, with the hope of eventually exhibiting the work in a gallery there.
Sadly, the project ultimately went nowhere. I struggled to get responses from the galleries I contacted regarding the proposal. More importantly, I needed at least a basic conversational knowledge of German before attempting something like this. I was also in my early thirties, too entrenched in my life in Vermont to realistically extricate myself from it for an entire year.
But I kept thinking about my friend Ryan Widger, who became both a close friend and a kind of guardian angel to me while we were at Penn. He was a brilliant photographer, a fellow student whom I appropriately met one day in the darkroom of the Charles Addams Fine Arts building. We were instantly drawn to one another. As I was completing my graduate studies, he was finishing his undergraduate degree. He had been accepted into the Yale MFA program, but turned it down to attend Cranbrook Academy of Art instead.
I believe it was before attending Cranbrook that Ryan applied for a Fulbright through University of Pennsylvania to study in Sweden. While there, he created a series of beautiful black-and-white photographs using a Hasselblad camera. His decision to apply inspired me as well.
German is one of the more difficult languages to learn, aside from languages that require learning entirely different writing systems or scripts, such as Arabic, Russian (Cyrillic), Chinese characters (Hanzi), or Japanese writing systems (Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana). The reason for this is that German grammar relies heavily on gendered nouns, case systems, sentence restructuring, and compound words that can dramatically alter meaning depending on context and word order. Even when individual words are familiar to English speakers, the underlying grammatical structure often functions very differently.
For example, the sentence “I have never seen the man” becomes “Ich habe den Mann noch nie gesehen,” where the verb is split apart, with habe appearing earlier in the sentence while gesehen is pushed to the end. Literally translated it reads: I have the man never seen.
German frequently restructures sentences in ways that can be unintuitive to native English speakers, particularly as sentences become longer and more grammatically complex.
As I write this now, I think that my inability to speak German, coupled with thoughts of my deceased friend and my own journey with cancer, has forced me to confront the reality that time is finite. Certain desires and unfinished longings grow more pronounced when mortality stops existing as an abstraction and instead becomes something tangible, scheduled, and clinical.
For years, German represented something just beyond my reach, another life, another version of myself that perhaps would have been more fearless, disciplined, and capable of stepping fully into the unknown. Maybe that is why I kept returning to it despite repeatedly failing. The language became attached to Hans, to history, to my abandoned Fulbright idea, to Ryan, to my fascination with Germany itself, and to a larger desire to step outside the confines of the life I had constructed in rural Vermont.
This leads me to my bucket list, which now includes traveling to Norway, Switzerland, and New Zealand; returning to Germany to take dirt from Hans’s grave, which he already gave me permission to do, and hike through the Black Forest and the Hürtgenwald (where my school adviser, professor, and friend Stephen Julich, agreed to spread my ashes. The nearby town of Jülich, Germany was named after his ancestral family lineage); publishing my dissertation/book; obtaining my PhD; carving hiking trails into my property; renovating my kitchen and bathrooms; and finally finding some way to quiet the restlessness that has followed me for most of my life.
At some point, I realized that learning German had become psychologically entangled with all of these desires. Every failed attempt at learning the language became symbolic of something larger, such as time passing, opportunities narrowing, aging, fear, unfinished ambitions, and the growing awareness that certain versions of myself will never fully materialize. Yet I still return to it. I still browse my books, revisit the films, reopen the language apps, and imagine myself walking through Berlin again, hearing the language around me and finally understanding it. Perhaps that persistent return matters more than fluency itself.
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