German Essays

For me, the one subject at school that made me most miserable was German.

Basically, my self-assessment in German was not so bad. After all, my orthography was – in my opinion – a lot better than that of many classmates. And I also found that I could express what I wanted no worse than the average students in the class.

Except that, far too often, my ideas were the “wrong ideas”.

😉 At least that is what my German teachers thought.

The main problem was the German essay. Even the way our teachers set our tasks and the given titles were strange. Incidentally, I found it strange if a young and creative person was forced to write something under a special title. Isn’t that outrageous? I would have preferred to write my opinion on some topic or other and then creatively find a title that fits with what I wrote.

But no. Teachers asked 24 students to artificially generate essays on the same and often questionable and very unrealistic title, before marking them. Once in a while, we also had to write interpretations about texts that looked very alien to us – both by famous and less famous authors. However, we were not allowed to write down what moved us personally about a text or what we might have found disgusting. Instead, we had to write what the current doctrine said. Of course, that was not really what I felt most enthusiastic about.

In my opinion, the stories told by the great narrators were sometimes abominations. I can remember masterpieces by Kleist I really found sick. But at school, the great master was beyond all reproach in German lessons. And whenever I criticized about his writings what, to me, looked rather grotesque and stagy language, all I got in return was lack of understanding – with the consequence of being graded poorly.

It got even worse when the topic of a German essay had something to do with values, moral, ethics or the like. How often I realized that the German teacher had a value system that was totally different from my own! Differentiated, abstract terms had totally other meanings for the teacher (him) than for the student (me). When it came to judging what was “good” or “evil”, “right” or “wrong”, miles lay between our opinions.

And when finally the German essay was graded, the time had come for the concept of the teacher’s and the student’s world to clash. Sometimes it happened consciously – the teacher could not or was not willing to understand what he had read. Often, the rejection was subconscious, because the student’s ideas were so incompatible with the teacher’s concept of the world. If I was lucky, the teacher would shake his head in incomprehension when reading my work – before, from his point of view, tempering justice with mercy. All of this was not very beneficial for my grades in German.

Consequently, German became the one subject for me which is most suitable for outlining all the old-fashioned and outdated things about our school and learning processes. All we ever do is make students learn things without being convinced of them and then again forget them.  You have to adapt to the teachers‘ prejudices and be prepared to make pre-fabricated opinions your own. But woe to him who shows civil courage or creativity, or – this is the worst case – both. As a general rule, this will be your downfall. And your grades in German will deteriorate. It is certainly a lot better to just keep quiet.

And here is another cheekiness: our German essays remained the property of the teacher or the school! At one time, I wanted to publish one of my essays in the school magazine. We are talking one of the essays that had been graded poorly. I got in real trouble for it.

Neither was I allowed to keep my masterpiece: the graduation essay in German. At the time, the best you could hope for was that you took legal action, which might have given you the right to see the corrected essay. A huge bureaucratic effort was necessary – and in the end it made not the slightest difference to the fact that my “intellectual property” had been confiscated by the Free State of Bavaria. And not just temporarily, either!

Well, so much on intellectual property.

RMD

(Translated by EG)