Germans Love David Hasselhoff! Or Is That Just a Rumor? German people - Thank you just for being German, and of course, for designing Alex's car. Die Deutschen: Sie versuchen zu erobern! Zunächst nur, indem sie ihre Automobile hierher importieren. Dann aber sickern sie langsam aber sicher in unser schönes Land - und mit ihnen ihr Techno und Rammstein. Haben sie keine Angst, geneigte Mofos, da ich deren Sprache und geisteskranke, fremde Zivilisationen steuern wollende Pläne verstehe! DISCLAIMER: I have been asked about this page just TOO many times, so I guess I should explain. I am not German. I can read basic German and pronounce, oh, say, seventeen German words properly. This whole thing started as something of a mutual fascination between Rachel and I. If you want to know why, read on. If you don't want to know, then don't ask me. Seriously Strange... Obscure Facts and Trivia: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Germans But Was Afraid To Ask.... Visit My German Links Page! Life In Germany: The official name (in English) of Germany is the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG). History/Historical Facts: During the early 1920s, at the height of inflation in the German Weimar Republic, one American dollar was equal to 4 trillion German marks. (Reichsmark - Not Deutsche Mark) English scientist Isaac Newton and German mathematician Gottfried W. Leibniz, working independently, both discovered CALCULUS, the branch of mathematics that studies continuously changing quantities. Henry Ford didn't invent automobiles. They were invented by several 19th-century engineers, chiefly two Germans: Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz. What Ford accomplished was mass-production and affordable service. PEZ Candy was first marketed as a compressed peppermint candy over 70 years ago in Vienna, Austria. "PEZ" was derived from the German word for peppermint...PfeffErminZ. Today, more than 3 billion PEZ candies are consumed annually in the U.S. alone. Sauerkraut is not German, it's Chinese. It was eaten in China at least 200 years before Christ. Britain's present royals were originally named Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. This was changed in 1917, during WW1 because of German connotations. "Windsor" was suggested by one of the staff. Concurrently, the Battenbergs, their cousins, changed their name to Mountbatten. Johannes Gutenberg, a German, invented the printing press. Countries or principalities that have German as an official language: Deutschland (Germany), Österreich (Austria), Schweiz (Switzerland), Luxemburg and Fürstentum Liechtenstein. Wilhelm II was the last "Kaiser" of Germany. 7 European countries include German as a national language; a total population of nearly 120 million people. Passau, Germany, is home to the largest organ in the world. (This cathedral also houses the largest bronze bell in Bavaria.) The United States, Rußland (Russia), England, and Frankreich (France) all occupied Germany after WWII. Konrad Adenauer was the 1st chancellor after World War II. The Berlin Wall crumbled on November 9, 1989. The original Oktoberfest was held in München (Munich). During the late 1800's, the prime minister of Prussia, Otto von Bismarck united Germany through three brief wars. Here are some churches In Germany: There is much AWESOME architecture in Germany. Goethe: In my (humble) opinion, the best poetic use of German. Entertainment, Sports & Music: The most popular sport in Germany is soccer. There are 11 players are there on a soccer team. The German word for soccer is Fußball. German tennis players Steffi Graf, Boris Becker, and Michael Stich (ooohhh, Germans who don't play soccer!) all have won Wimbledon. In the German version of the film Die Hard (1988) starring Bruce Willis, the terrorists are not from Germany but from an unnamed country in Europe. The "Brothers Grimm" collected and published fairy tales during the 19th century in Germany. The famous fairy tale "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" take place along the German river Weser. All of the following composers were German-speaking: Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Johann Sebastian Bach. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was also German-speaking, though not born in Germany like the others. "Die fantastischen Vier" are German rappers; that is the weirdest thing I have ever heard.

Left: For future reference (hehe) German people do not LOVE cows. Pigs (schwein) are considered to be good luck. Whatever dude. Also part of the architecture of Germany are castles... there are many still left there that you can visit.

Randomness! The present chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany is Gerhard Schröder. (Not the Peanuts character.) Germany is going to switch off their own nuclear plants. But simultaneously they will 'subsidize' Russian nuclear plants. 14% of all East Germans (Ossis) want the "wall" to be rebuilt. 30% think people from east and west are still strange to each other. Every fifth says the reunification is the reason for his unemployment and over 60% of the Ossis are disappointed by democracy. At the same time 14 % of adult germans have a "right wing extremism potential" 13 % in the west, 17 % in the east. Every tenth - in the east every sixth - is willing to vote for a party of right wing extremists. 83 % of all secondary modern school (roughly the same as "Hauptschule"!?) students over 14 years of age don't know what the word "Holocaust" means; and 43 % of all high-school graduates have no idea either. The German "Autobahn" has NO SPEED LIMIT! AWESOME! An Amerikaner is a cookie. (And all this time I thought it was a viscious slang term!) Average number of days a West German goes without washing his underwear: 7. Germany has one of the fastest growing economies in the world. German is the language of business in Europe. German phone booths are grey and pink (they say "magenta", in other words: PINK!). I find this to be fruity and if I were German I wouldn't stand for such an atrocity. German is a very important academic language. One out of ten books published is in German. The name of the German postal system. Die Bundespost. That sounds really funny. "Liberty Cabbage" was the name given to Sauerkraut during WWII. Too bad it isn't even German; it's CHINESE! Pigs (Schwein) are known to be good luck in Germany. Hmmm... maybe Coca-Cola drinking pigs would be. Sigmund Freud, known as the father of psychoanalysis, was an Austrian physician- German-speaking! Santa's reindeer Donder means "thunder" (Donner) when translated into English. Santa's reindeer Blitzen has the name which means "lightning" (Blitz) when translated into English. The German word Gymnasium refers to schule (school). In one university, Weihenstephan, you can study brewery! In the United States, a septillion is represented by the number 1 followed by 24 zeroes; in Germany, it is the number 1 followed by 42 zeroes. Many high-end cars are German; Porsche, Mercedes-Benz and BMW to name a few. The famous Porsche sports car is manufactured in Zuffenhausen, Germany. BMW stands for Bayerische Motoren Werke (Bavarian Motor Works). Lederhosen is the German word for the traditional leather shorts that boys and men often wear in the alpine areas of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Leather shorts now that is just plain weird. The international auto ID for Switzerland is CH, which stands for Confoederatio Helvetica. Switzerland: it ain't Germany, but it's still good.... Wilhelm Tell was the legendary figure who shot an apple from atop his son's head and is considered one of the founders of the (German-speaking) Swiss state. Bern is the capital of Schweiz (Switzerland). In northwestern Austria, the Austrian-German border is comprised of several limestone ranges that are collectively referred to as the Bavarian Alps. These include Zugspitze (9,718 ft.), the highest mountain in Germany, located a short distance northwest of Innsbruck, Austria. Due south, along the Austrian-Italian border, the Ötztal Alps include several 3,000 meter peaks, the highest of which is Wildspitze (3,772 m / 12,375 ft.), Austria's second highest peak. The highest peak in Austria, Grossglockner (12,461 ft.), and the third highest Grossvenediger (12,054 ft.), rise east of the Ötztal Alps in the Höhe Tauern, whose name is German for "high towers". The Höhe Tauern is a long crescent ridge with a spectacular outline, rising north of the border. It is now contained within the Höhe Tauern National Park.

Everyday Stuff: German currency called is called Deutsch-Marks. The capital of Germany is Berlin. The German flag is black , red and yellow. A German subway is called a U-bahn. There are 5 new German states- 16 all together; Bavaria (Bayern) is the largest. Bavaria, the largest of the sixteen German states. Germans - separate their waste with respect to several categories: waste paper, sheet metal (tins, aluminIum foil, etc.), bio-waste, the "yellow bag" (for things made of plastic), glass (when you bring your old bottles to a refuse container at a collecting point the separation hasn't ended yet. There are containers for brown, white and green glass...), hazardous waste like batteries, electronics, oil-bins ( You have to retuen these to a gas station), old medication, building rubble... There is a place for everything! Some examples with two products of daily use: What is the right procedure throwing away a cigarette packet? The plastic around the packet has to be assorted into the "yellow bag". The packet itself must be separated: The bigger part of it is of course waste paper. The encasement of the cigarettes which is located between the packet and "the units that have their destination in being smoked" combination: It's paper coated with another substance. This is a case for normal trash. What about a bottle of beer? (Incredibly important to Germans!) Well, first of all there is a distinction of cases: 1. The bottle is a returnable bottle: In this case you return the bottle to the retailer - after all you've paid a deposit on it. The closure of this very bottle evidently disposed of as a sheet metal container. 2. Your beer bottle is a non-returnable bottle: Now you have to bring your bottle to a refuse container (But take care of the color of the bottle!!! You have to assign the color of the bottle to the appropriate refuse container; then and only then you are supposed to deposit your waste glass into this identified and located container.) "All clarities are eliminated!" (German proverb: "Alle Klarheiten sind beseitigt!") Germans are not allowed to wash his/her car on his/her own property.  Oil (and perhaps other substances never heard of) could soak to the ground water. Germans must wash his/her car at a public place that is "prepared and appropriate" for such a task. The "fingers circle" gesture is widely accepted as the American "okay" or "I'm in agreement" sign, but it means something quite different in other countries. In Germany, the gesture is considered vulgar or obscene. (In fact it means "@$$hole"!! hehehe) German schoolchildren start learning a foreign language in the 5. Klasse. Unlike Americans, Germans (like most of the world) use the metric system. There are 100 centimeters in a meter: approxiamately 39 inches. A liter is less than an American gallon. (About ¼th of a gallon.)

More Castles.... Left to right: Castle Wurzburg, Castle Neuschwanstein (my personal favorite), Castle Hohenschwangau.

"Many prominent German Americans have strengthened our society through the years. Publisher Johann Peter Zenger championed freedom of the press in the early 18th century, and Thomas Nast's powerful cartoons increased public awareness of corruption within Tammany Hall in 19th-century New York. During the American Revolution, Baron de Kalb and Friedrich von Steuben fought valiantly for our freedom, just as Dwight Eisenhower and Chester Nimitz did in World War II. German Americans who have enriched America's cultural, scientific, and economic life include writers John Steinbeck and Erich Maria Remarque; physicists Albert Einstein and Maria Goeppert-Mayer; philosophers Hannah Arendt and Paul Tillich; and industrialists and business leaders John D. Rockefeller and John Wanamaker." William J. Clinton, Oct. 5, 2000.

History/Historical Facts: More Americans (19.6 percent) report German ancestry than any other. In second place is Irish ancestry (13.1 percent) and in third place English (11 percent). In an historic meeting in the USA, in the eighteenth century the senators of the then existent states of America gathered to vote on whether English or German be the national language of the country. The resolution to go for English was carried by one vote. A fourth of the population in metropolitan Detroit claims German heritage, a million people in Michigan as a whole. October 6 is German-American Day. Just as Irish-Americans celebrate St. Patrick's Day and invite everybody to participate in the celebration, on German-American Day Americans of German descent invite everyone to celebrate with them. (That means GET DRUNK with them- if it's really anything like St. Patrick's Day.) In 1983, for the German-American Tricentennial of this first group immigration, President Reagan proclaimed October 6 as German-American Day, honoring the contributions of German immigrants to the life and culture of the United States. Public Law 100-104 designated October 6, 1987, as "German- American Day" and a proclamation was issued by the President October 2, 1987; and such day was proclaimed by the President every year since 1987 to be German-American Day in honor of the contributions made by German immigrants to the life and culture of the United States. The designation "German" is used in a cultural, not in a political sense, thus including the German-speaking Swiss, Alsatians, Austrians, Germans from Eastern Europe, and German Jews. The first German settlers came to America 1683. (Individual German settlers are documented already in Jamestown, Virginia (1608), the "birthplace" of America. However, it was on October 6, 1683, when a group of Mennonites from Krefeld disembarked from the "Concord" (the German Mayflower) in Philadelphia, constituting the first group immigration of Germans to America. Over 7 million would follow them over the next 300 years making German-Americans the largest ethnic group in the United States. In the 1990 Census 1 out of 4 Americans reported German ancestry.) In 1863 a group of 13 families from founded Germantown, now a part of Philadelphia. After the United States entered WWI against Germany in 1917, anti-German hysteria swept through the country. Many states passed legislation banning German in schools, religious services, newspapers and associations. Even in regions predominantly settled by German-speaking immigrants, cultural tolerance turned to Germanophobia, followed by abrupt abandonment of German-language programs in schools and colleges, churches, and associations. The "Pennsylvania Dutch" are not Dutch at all- they are German. The word for German- "Deutsch" was mistaken for "Dutch"; thus they were incorrectly named the "Pennsylvania DUTCH" and should be called the "Pennsylvania Germans"! John F. Kennedy when famously and publicly addressing a large crowd of Germans in Berlin close to the infamous wall, closed his speech with the statement "Ich bin ein Berliner". Unfortunately, rather than associating himself with the locals, his obvious intention, he told everyone that he was a doughnut! Henry Kissinger was the first German-born American to become Secretary of State in 1973. In 1869, Carl Schurz became the first German-born citizen elected to the U.S. Senate, and was Secretary of the Interior under President Rutherford B. Hayes. John Jacob Astor, a German immigrant from near Heidelberg established the first monopoly in the United States and became its richest man by 1835. Astor's American Fur Company, which made him the wealthiest person in the United States and allowed him to found the Astor Library, one of the cornerstones of the New York Public Library.

Entertainment,Sports & Music: George Herman Ehrhardt was better known in the early twentieth century as Babe Ruth. Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg formed a company in the ninteenth century in New York which is to this day famous for manufacturing the Flügel (Piano). Stars such as Clark Gable (Goebel), Elvis (yes, Elvis) Presley and Marlene Dietrich were/are German or of German descent. Marlene Dietrich rejected lucrative film offers from Nazi Germany and fled instead to Hollywood. Her first great success in German film was "The Blue Angel". Arnold Schoenberg, teacher of music at conservatories in both Boston and Los Angeles- and a major influence on modern classical music, was born in Vienna, Austria. (A-Ha! A German/German speaking country!) Fred Astaire was the stage name of Alfred Austerlitz, a son of Austrian immigrants and star of many American musicals including "Singin' in the Rain" and "Top Hat". Some movies like Saving Private Ryan, Die Hard, U571, and Seven Years in Tibet include scenes where German is spoken. "The Katzenjammer Kids", which made its first appearance in the New York Journal in 1897;created by German-born Rudolph Dirkis, was one of the earliest comic strips. Inspired by German "picture books", the Katzenjammer Kids are based on "Max und Moritz," similarly mischievous young boys created by artist Wilhelm Busch in Germany. Max und Moritz had been popular in their homeland for more than 30 years before the Americanized version first appeared in William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal Sunday supplement.

Randomness! The famous Bavarian castle Neuschwanstein was used by Walt Disney as a model for his fairy tale castle logo, and served as inspiration for "Cinderella Castle" in Disneyland. (Neuschwanstein means "new swan rock" and it was built by the "mad" King Ludwig II between 1869 and 1886). American presidents such as Nixon and Eisenhower are of German descent. "Die Philadelphische Zeitung" was the first German language newspaper published in 1732 in America. John Roebling, a German-born architect, designed the world-famous Brooklyn Bridge. In 1893 at the World's Colombian Exposition in Chicago, F.W Rueckenheim developed a new recipe of popcorn, peanuts, and molasses. The name of his concoction is Cracker Jacks! German-born artist Emanuel Leutze created the famous painting "Washington Crossing the Delaware". In 1804 a group of separatists from Württemburg led by Johann Georg Rapp, founded Harmony, Pennsylvania. Bausch and Lomb were two German immigrants that set up an optical lab in New York, and their company is now a major manufacturer of eyewear and eye care products. Thomas Nast, an American of German descent was the father of the political cartoon and the first to depict a donkey and an elephant as mascots of the Democratic and Republican parties. Germans are brilliant physicists: J. Robert Oppenheimer, a physicist of German-Jewish descent headed the Manhattan Project. Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Wurttemberg, Germany. The most well known of his works is the theory of relativity. He worked on at Princeton until the end of his life on an attempt to unify the laws of physics.

Neuschwanstein Inspiration For Cinderella Castle

Everyday Stuff: Levi Strauss, the man who gave the world blue jeans, was born in 1829 in Bavaria. He made the first pair of jeans while traveling to California during the Gold Rush. "A new pair free if they rip" was the slogan for his jeans. The time difference between New York and Germany is normally 6 hours. Both German and English spring from the same language. They share either the same or very similar words, for instance: Book and Buch, Nose and Nase, Finger and Finger, Door and Tuer. Leo Hirschfield brought the recipe for candy (named after his little daughter) from his native Austria. He made the candies, called "Tootsie Rolls" in his own small store. German immigrant Henry John Heinz's company is today the best-known maker of catsup (ketchup). The speed at which Heinz catsup travels as it leaves the bottle is a blistering 25 miles per year. Just thought I'd add that!

Fairy Tales and Their German Counterparts: Little Red Riding Hood is Rotkäppchen. The Pied Piper is der Rattenfänger. The Frog King is der Froschkönig. Snow White is Schneewittchen. Sleeping Beauty is Dornröschen.

Words of Possible Interest: Maybe of interest to those of German descent (and Irish, too)-- the word describing the shape of the bubbles in beer foam: "orthotetrachidecahedrons". The German word for housewife is "hausfrau". I would rather die than be either one of those, ick! The German word "Gesundheit" for "good health" is often said when someone sneezes. Say Guten Appetit before eating. In northern Germany people say "moin moin", "Moin" meaning "Good Morning", and "Moin Moin" being an emphasis, - ie: "A Very Good Morning". In Germany, a pick-up line is called "Aufreißspruch".

Much crazy German Info was provided by Dieter the crazy German =)...  thanks for linking Rachel and I, and thanks for all this random info!

To find out more about Germans and German-Americans, visit my page of German links!!!