German Grammar Police Facing Backlash

Will Germany’s leading newspaper succeed in stopping Big Brother from imposing a confusing language reform on the common people?

Will Germans lose respect for the precision and nuance of the written word if official documents spell Schifffahrt--the word for “shipping”--with two Fs instead of three?

Will Gerhard and Gisela ever learn proper grammar if the literary lights of Germany insist on writing “bicycling” as one word, radfahren, when teachers are compelled to write Rad fahren, with the noun capitalized and the word separated into two?

These and other trivia questions are burning in media headlines these days as Germans renew a debate over guidelines for spelling, punctuation and grammar that have been in force for a year but are making little progress in winning hearts and minds among the masses.

Opposition to the new Rechtschreibung has been loud and clear since its approval four years ago by a committee of cultural authorities from six countries with German-speaking populations. But the debate gained momentum this week when the influential daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) pointedly abandoned the reform in favor of tradition.

“This is not a matter for the government to be involved in,” says FAZ political editor Guenther Nonnenmacher, one of many critics of the new language rules that are obligatory for schools and state publications. “The culture ministers made a mistake when they went ahead with this so-called reform over the objections of the country’s leading writers and intellectuals.”

Authors such as Gunter Grass and Martin Walser have forbidden their writings to be edited in conformance with the new guidelines. Private publishing houses often use their own customized systems for ensuring consistency in writing style, and linguistic sentinels calculate that there are now 23 versions in use.

“No one can or even wants to dictate how a private company handles its writing,” says Karin Eichhoff-Cyrus, director of the German Society for Language in Wiesbaden. “There’s no way to force someone to capitalize certain words or write them in conformance with the approved system.”

But like other guardians of grammar, she says she regrets that writers are providing examples of language use inconsistent with what impressionable youngsters are being taught in school.

“It’s very confusing for students and gives our teaching a credibility problem, because what appears in books and newspapers is written differently,” complains Josef Kraus, president of the German Teachers Assn. “Language is something living and will always be changing. But this can’t be done through bureaucratic edicts.”

The push for reform of the German language has its roots in the 1960s, when student radicals demanded an end to ostentatious traditions such as capitalizing all nouns and applying genders to words without any discernible logic. The inscrutable system for determining whether something is he, she or it once prompted Mark Twain to lament in “The Awful German Language” that there is something wrong with a culture in which a young girl has no sex but a turnip does. “Young girl” in German is “Maedchen,” a neuter word, while “turnip”--”Ruebe”--is feminine.

FAZ’s rebellion has refreshed long-standing criticism of the reforms by politicians and educators, whose objections range from the changes being too few and to the manner in which the Rechtschreibung was hammered out--by regional cltural figures without input from the public--being too undemocratic.

“The reform should be revoked, and I think it will be, step by step, under pressure from public and private resistance like the decision of the FAZ,” says Dietrich Austermann, a legislator from Schleswig-Holstein, the only one of Germany’s 16 states to refuse to abide by the new rules.

The arbiters of accuracy note that the sudden change in summer media themes from vicious dogs and neo-Nazis to grammatical minutiae is hardly a cause for worry. But some see the issue as an artificially stimulated public debate designed to fill media pages and air time when affairs of state wind down to a virtual standstill during summer vacations.

“Rechtschreibung has become like the Loch Ness monster. It turns up every year in late July or early August,” says Gerhard Stickel, head of the Institute for German Language in Mannheim. “I don’t exclude the possibility that the FAZ is playing a commercial card here. But in any case, this furor will die down by September.”