Love, or liebe, conquers all, when you find yourself with a “recovering German” in your house, and an umlaut in your name.
By Sam Wilson-Späth*
I am chockers with quirky character traits – some fun, some not so fun, some downright annoying. As is everyone. Including my husband, Andreas.
When I first met Andreas at university, he didn’t seem very German. I knew he had a surname no one could pronounce, but he had worked hard on losing his accent and didn’t speak that much anyway.
To this day, he considers himself ‘a recovering German’. He emigrated to South Africa with his family in his teens and sees himself as a South African, with German heritage in the background.
That’s what he believes. But do you ever shed your heritage? Even if you want to?
The fact that Andreas is German to his core has dawned on me slowly and pretty happily over the last 25 years. The first time I heard him speak his German dialect Schwäbisch on the phone to his parents, I found his faintly unusual English cadence in perfect harmony. (At the same time, I realised that I have a small Fish Called Wanda issue with Schwäbisch. Cool.)
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I found his mother weirdly invasive, until I rounded a corner at a family gathering and noticed a bunch of relatives all standing uncomfortably close together while chatting… clearly German personal space is smaller than that of my South African English heritage, and ‘getting all up in my face’ was a very literal thing in this home. Aah! Suddenly, that fell into place too.
And if I thought having a classy meal under a beautiful tree, covered in real candles, on Weinacht/Christmas Eve was weird (doesn’t everyone do a sweaty bunfight of a Christmas Day lunch?), parenting with a ‘no-I’m-not’ German is also interesting.
‘What is that creepy rhyme?’ he said to me, as I dandled our firstborn on my knee, and sang Incey Wincey Spider. ‘Is this why your whole family is terrified of spiders? Why would you sing such a thing, while TICKLING the poor kid? That’s just horrific!’
This from the man who brought Struwwelpeter into the house, a book of German children’s stories so frightening, I had to hide it in a cupboard. From myself.
But how many of Andreas’s so-called ‘quirks’ are because he is German, and how many are because he is Andreas?
For example, he doesn’t think I am very funny. I believe myself to be extremely, hilarously funny… so obviously this is a problem on his side. Either because he is German or because he is wrong: either way.
He is obsessively on time. He is ridiculously tidy. He is single-minded to the point where he will unknowingly repeat the same sentence over and over rather than get sidetracked into a different conversation. He reads the end notes in books. I fear his board game hobby may be an addiction, given that it is daily and supplemented by 6 different podcasts.
I, on the other hand, like to skip from topic to topic and am messy to the point of once having my house mistaken for a crime scene. (True story. For another time though.) I don’t have hobbies; they take commitment to something inanimate and I am not big on that. And the way I read can only be described as flippity-flip.
Are you also getting the feeling this may be more about personalities than heritage?
‘Are you so into drinking because you come from English stock?’ he asked me recently, as I tapped my watch at 6pm precisely.
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‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I replied. ‘Go and find the good tonic to go with this beautiful gin. But before you go… can you say Gewürtztraminer again? Please?’
Whatever it is, it works.
- Sam Wilson lives in Cape Town with her husband Andreas, and teenage sons, Josef and Benjamin. She works in content and social media, but spent over a decade writing parenting columns about her sons growing up, for a living. Now that they can read, they are less than amused.
- This article first appeared on the Change Exchange, an online platform by BrightRock, provider of the first-ever life insurance that changes as your life changes. The opinions expressed in this piece are the writer’s own and don’t necessarily reflect the views of BrightRock.
