Scholars seek to prolong the German conversation
When Londoner Amber Tallon, 30, started learning German at the age of 12, she “took to it like a duck to water”, she said. An A-level in the language and modules in German at the University of Oxford, where she studied history, have helped her to her “dream job”, working as a Blue Badge Guide in London, where some of the large range of tours she offers are in the German language.
“[In England] we have such a bad rap for not learning languages, assuming that everyone is going to speak English. I think it’s just polite to learn even the basics of the language … it puts you on the right foot,” she said.
She volunteers a few of her favourite German compound words, to illustrate “how creative a language it is … the heart of the matter captured in a single word”.
“Schokoladenseite ”, which translates literally as chocolate side and means a person’s good side, and “Kabelsalat” (tangled cables) are two of her treasured gems. They both nod to the American humorist Mark Twain, who wrote in 1880 that acquiring the “art of German” was akin to assembling a collection of “alphabet processions”.
Caroline Wyatt, a BBC presenter whose long career as a foreign correspondent started in Berlin in the early 90s thanks to her German language skills, said learning German “really enriched my life as a human being”.
“It takes away the fear … because thanks to the language, you think: ‘I can understand this place.’”
Wyatt recalled being “perfectly happy”, after she had secured a job as a business correspondent for the BBC World Service in Berlin in 1993 when she was in her mid-20s, “to slip a suitcase in the back of a car, head to Harwich, get on a ferry and drive to Berlin before satnav. “It wasn’t that it wasn’t scary, but it just felt like the world was opening up.”
Tallon and Wyatt are a bit of a rarity these days: the number of pupils choosing to study German at A-level in 2024 was just 2,261. Entries for German have more than halved over the last decade, there is an increasing dearth of German teachers (not helped by Brexit) and some higher education institutes are considering closing down their German departments.
The decline has prompted a wider community of German scholars, with diplomats and the occasional politician, to search for creative ways to prevent German being consigned to the academic scrapheap.
Next month, the Association for German Studies in Great Britain and Ireland will meet for its 92nd annual conference, hosted by the German department at the University of Leeds, to discuss the future of studying the language.
One of its keynote speakers, the German ambassador to the UK, Miguel Berger, is behind the initiative “Making the Case for German”, together with the Goethe Institut , and the UK Department for Education’s German promotion programme – a joint effort with the British Council to re-energise language learning in state-maintained primary and secondary schools in the UK. The project was hatched under the last government, and all participants hope it will also be embraced by the new administration.
Berger said that the aim is “to make German once again a more popular choice for language learners in the UK”.