Fall 2023 Course Review: GERMAN 103, Elementary German¶

The third Aufsatz is a group project, intended to be played out on stage. I knew immediately what I wanted.

In the book »Oh wie schön«, on their way to Panama, the bear and the tiger meet a fox, who "wanted to celebrate his birthday with a goose". (Janosch 18) Innocent as this sounds, an illustration shows the goose lying in the fox's lap, next to a pot and silverware. The popular belief is that the goose is the fox's dinner. (Myllynen 26)

I refuse to believe it, so in my headcanon the fox is not going to eat the goose. Instead he and the goose are a married couple, having an argument. They verbally abuse each other in front of the tiger and bear, triggering a dispute between the latter two (who, in my headcanon, are a gay couple).

I pitched my idea to my groupmates, and we went with it. The problem was I had no way to end it, but Ava suggested we could give life to the Tigerente (tiger-duck, which the tiger carries with him all the time like a baby but doesn't talk) and let him settle the argument.

Now, with a beginning and an end, all we need to do is find a trivial dispute that could tear not one but two relationships apart. There is zero description of the fox and goose's life, but there was a lot about the tiger and bear. The bear goes fishing, and the tiger picks mushrooms. At the end of the day the bear for both of them. The trivial dispute is then:

• Tiger is sick of eating fish and mushrooms every day
• Bear is the one who cooks

Extrapolate this a bit, and we came up with

• Goose is sick of eating lettuce and potatoes every day
• Fox is the one who cooks

I believe this is very — almost too realistic. I'm sure food related breakups happen routinely. What makes this even better is the fact that it was the fox's birthday, which makes eating the same kind of food more ridiculous.

However, we put a fundamental difference between the two duos as well:

• Bear and tiger are traveling to Panama
• Fox and goose have stayed home for 20 years, despite fox's promise on their wedding to travel around the world

Which ends in the latter pair joining bear and tiger on their way to Panama.

Now that we have the plot, we churned out a script. We made sure to sprinkle in two types of humor:

• Situational, such as the goose saying "I have no hands, I have wings" when asked why she never cooks";
• Profanity.

Yes, vulgarity is how you want the audience to engage. The most famous German profanity — or perhaps word in general — is Scheiße (shit), but we didn't end up using it. (This was, however, the first word Laura heard as she entered the room we were rehearsing in, the moment I knocked over a soap dispenser.)

The profanity we used were "Wichser" (wanker) and "Hundesohn" (son of a bitch, or dog literally, which is anatomically not off base because foxes are somewhat dog-like).

One day on the lecture I asked Laura if it was OK to use these two words. You should see her face as I threw this question. She went through a phase of "seriously?" and then affirmed that yes, she's OK with it.

Later, as she wrote feedback for our first draft, she commented on our use of the two words again. She thinks we should reconsider these words, not because they're naughty, but because she has better alternatives.

She argues that Wichser is mostly used among teenage boys, and Hundesohn is kind of outdated, and used rarely in Germany. In addition, she left us a paper that discusses animal insults. Like a whole 13 page paper. I have a theory that, she downloaded this paper long ago and waited for this day.

She recommends the insult "dumme Gans" (dumb goose), but unfortunately the insult was actually directed toward the fox, and to call an animal a "dumb $animal" is like calling a human "dumb human", and weaken the insult.

We ended up keeping Wichser and Hundesohn, because incidentally bear and tiger are somewhat teenagers, and the fox is "old" according to the book. Also, these are pretty famous insults too. This seems to convince Laura.

We also learned that the best team (or two) would be nominated into a competition with the other German classes, and the winning team would receive $200 in reward. That said, I believe we had a pretty good chance.

Once we had the final script, we went on to do our first rehearsal. Thomas caught covid and had to join us over Zoom.

At the same time, I was working on the props. My inner child/engineer hybrid made this masterpiece:

We had one more session of rehearsal before our class performance. We couldn't afford full costumes, so we just improvised as best as we could:

• Ava (goose) brought a feather scarf or something
• Thomas (bear) wore a brown jacket
• I (tiger) wore a yellow T-shirt

Ryan also brought a butter knife. The guidelines forbid weapons, so it was plastic. We did our final rehearsal outside of the library.

On performance day, I brought my Tigerente. Realizing I don't have a string to pull him with, I used my USB microphone with a clip on one end.

The performance went smoothly. The other three groups also did a spectacular job. Their roleplays were:

• Rotkäppchen-artig (the little red riding hood with a twist)
• Geistjäger (ghostbusters)
• Fortnite (featuring lines such as „Ach! Ich bin gestorben!“ and a sheet of paper that just said "GUN")

Personally I enjoyed Rotkäppchen-artig the most but somehow Geistjäger was nominated. Oh yeah our play was nominated too.

The competition was set two days later. That day I learned that the Geistjäger cast couldn't make it, so Rotkäppchen would be competing with us after all. The other two competitors were from 102, bringing »der Froschprinz« (the frog prince, which featured a talking piece of bread) and »der Urlaub« (the vacation, set in Switzerland, that somehow ended in a guy suffering diarrhea).

Right after our performance, I handed my Tigerente to Hartmut (the German department professor, who starred all the grammar videos) for his autograph. He agreed.

After all four groups have performed, we and the professors were asked to vote. We won, and Rotkäppchen came second. Tied third are the other two groups.

Absolutely wonderful.