Words of the month: Sippenhaft, Sippenhaftung

Word of the Month: Index

A Sippe is an extended family, a clan. Haftung means "liability" and Haft "imprisonment" or "confinement." Sippenhaft and Sippenhaftung refer to the principle that every member of a clan can be held responsible for any crime committed by another clan member. It was practiced in the Middle Ages in German-speaking countries and is also known from other cultures. It is fundamentally in conflict with the modern notion that individuals can be punished only for acts they committed themselves, which did not prevent the Nazis from reviving Sippenhaft as a means to terrorize the population. [Source]

Why do I bring up this seemingly outdated notion? It’s because I see Sippenhaft, in a vastly extended form, at work wherever I look. For example, the Boston bombers explicitly justified their actions against Americans with the claim that (other) Americans had committed crimes against Muslims. Conversely, more than one Sikh was murdered in the aftermath of 9/11 by an American who considered wearing a turban and a beard a sure sign that someone was a Muslim. In both examples, the killers were willing to ‘murder the innocent,’ and this makes this modern form of Sippenhaft so repulsive to me. In traditional societies that subscribed to Sippenhaft, the member of a clan who committed a crime or who was aware of a crime committed by a relative knew, at least, what was coming, whereas the spectators at the Boston Marathon did not.

Sippenhaft in its extended form becomes grotesque when one realizes that a person typically belongs to more than one group. Take me as an example: I’m male; I’m German; and I may be perceived as being a Christian. This may make me simultaneously the target of certain feminists; of people who suffered under the atrocities committed by Germans all over Europe during WWII; and of radical Islamists. Never mind that I oppose patriarchy in all its forms; abhor the German war crimes; and am appalled by the conduct of Western powers in the Muslim world, from the Crusades to recent times.

Learning a Foreign Language Through Poetry

Guest post by Laraine Flemming
Laraine's text is longer than my usual posts and therefore opens in a new window.

I wholeheartedly agree with her assessment of the value of memorizing poems, not only to assist in learning a foreign language, but also to make you appreciate the finer points of your own language. I believe I have an ear for the rhythm and melody that can be achieved in a text, and I think one reason is that we had to memorize poems in school and recite them aloud. That way, I started to see the expressive potential of different meters and to the present day, I 'hear' the sentences that I write down. I attribute this directly to my experience with reciting poems.

To me, the claim that one doesn't learn anything from memorizing poems is dubious, to say the least. It's just one of the many ways in which education has been dumbed down over the last decades based on spurious claims that do not hold up to scrutiny.

Word of the Month: Unglücksrabe

Word of the Month: Index

A Pechvogel was the first 'compound creature' I drew and posted on my blog. I'm finally getting around to giving him a companion in misery. Unglück is the opposite of Glück (good fortune, luck), and we encountered a Rabe (raven) already in connection with Rabeneltern. Like a Pechvogel, an Unglücksrabe is a person who has run into some misfortune—he and a Pechvogel are partners in bad luck.



The most famous Unglücksrabe in German literature is Hans Huckebein, the anti-hero of a story told in pictures by Wilhelm Busch. I have to do some more research to find out why ravens are associated with bad luck in this expression.

[Source: Wild Things in the German Language: Kindle/paperback version | iBooks version]