Hearing German voices

I’ve been studying German for some time now and progress is painfully slow, each tiny step forward requiring much effort and concentration. So when I watch German TV I tell myself this counts as homework. Actually it does help my comprehension, somewhat, especially when I watch documentaries about German culture or history or wildlife. It’s all educational, I tell myself as I settle down to watch yet another documentary on the Black Forest, or the building of the Kiel Canal in the late 19th century. I’ve also become secretly addicted to the sports channels and their seemingly endless diet of ski-jumping and darts.

Because I have to pay so much more attention to the commentary than if it were in English, I tend to notice much more about it. For example, nearly all the accompanying commentaries of these documentaries and sports events are by men. I listen to male voices giving me information about the various histories of German companies, telling me about rare birds to be found in the sand dunes of the Baltic Coast, or instructing me about the life of Martin Luther. Men routinely keep me up to date on winners and losers in skiing.

Sometimes I relax by watching foreign films dubbed into German. Recently I watched Leonardo DiCaprio explain junk bonds in ‘The Wolf of Wall Street’ – a quintessentially American subject in an American setting – talking in German. But Leonardo’s mouth doesn’t move in time to the spoken words, in this version someone else is inhabiting the actor on screen, like a spirit he appears possessed. This sort of dubbing transforms the German words into something inherently odd, something disconnected from the visual world. And I can’t help noticing that in dubbed films, Black actors don’t sound Black anymore; they’re being rendered silent by invisible white voices. (This issue has been picked up by German broadcaster Deutschland Funk.)

At the moment my German lessons are online, and my teacher and nearly all of the other students are women. At least I get to hear some female voices speaking German.

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One thought on “Hearing German voices

  1. I’ve lived in Germany since 1983. With the possible exception of the Netherlands, I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. But there are some things I don’t like. One is that most non-German things on television and in the cinema are dubbed. This is bad in itself, but considering that dubbing was invented in southern Italy about 90 years ago because there were illiterate people in the audience, it should be really embarrassing for das Land der Dichter und Denker.

    Another is an exaggerated federalism. I have no objection to federalism itself, but there are two problems in the way it is implemented. One is that some laws require passage by both the national government and a majority of the state governments. That might make sense in some cases, but usually such laws are some compromise produced so that they would pass, and it is not always clear who is responsible for what. The other is the question as to which things should be taken care of at the federal level and which lower down.

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