In the summer of my 21st year, I found myself gallivanting around Europe with three friends. We were there under the pretense of playing music, which occupied a very small portion of each day. The rest of time we were free to absorb as much culture as we could possibly retain. Of all the places we visited, Germany really sits atop the culture pile. For example, in Bonn, the birthplace of Beethoven, I was able to get a soft pretzel the size of my head called “Der Amerikaner.” I did not see the place where Beethoven was born, but I did see the bakery where Der Amerikaners were made.
Germany also has a thriving night life. You know the scenes in all those action movies where the protagonist is looking for someone in an impossibly loud, crowded, and futuristically neon club?[1] Those places exist all over Germany; during the day they are tech schools. At night people gather at these clubs to share ideas, substances, and bodily fluids. They are culture central.
When an expansive warehouse full of Tesla Coils can’t be found, the Germans show their resilience and tenacity. They will stuff a DJ and a soundsystem anywhere. The particular anywhere I found myself was the basement of a concert hall somewhere in Berlin. Lest no space go without techno music, a glorified wine cellar had been outfitted to be its own tiny club. Of my three friends, two were in tow, in addition to the German who had been tasked with carting us around all over Europe.
One of my friends, J, is somewhat of a renaissance man. He liked to learn as much as he could about every country we went to. He would always try to learn a bit of the language as well. When in Italy, he learned how to say “how much.” Now, “quanto questo” means how much is that item; fruit, car, etc. “Quanto questi” means how much is that person, to have sex with? He learned the latter version, and proceeded to hang half his body out of the window of our van and shout it at everyone we drove by, waving his hand emphatically with his fingertips pursed with his thumb; true italanio.
While in this German sub-club he wasted no time extracting some serious knowledge from the locals. A group of female twenty somethings taught him how to say “Ich haber ein schtender” (sic). Roughly translated this means “I have a telephone pole”, which roughly translated means “I have a boner.” The delight on J’s face upon mastering this phrase would outshine that of any child on Christmas morning. I don’t care if Santa came down the chimney on a hoverboard with a thousand ponies made of cupcakes in his bag, children know not the joy of learning how to say “I have a boner” in a foreign language.[2]
Saying it to the delight of the German girls who taught it to him was one thing. Once we got outside, they would realize that teaching him to say “Ich haber ein schtender” was like running electricity through Frankenstein’s monster. He burst into the Berlin night letting everyone within a really healthy earshot know that he had a boner.
He kept this up while we walked to the train, on the platform for the train, and then on the train itself. Now, this was somewhere around 2:00 or 3:00am, at the earliest. As he sat on the train shouting out that he had a schtender, there was a couple by the door who were going about their business as if a schetender was very much involved. But, J’s declarations of boner-having were so loud, so convincing, and so frequent that I bet any Berliner polled would have picked him over the dry-humping couple when asked to select the most offensive and inappropriate thing happening on the train.
Imagine riding whatever public transportation you usually ride and having some German dude shouting “I haff das boe-nahhh! I haff DAS BOE-NAHHHHH!” again and again, while a group of Americans fail at trying to silence him. This is what would happen if one was to Americanize the situation.
Now, whenever I see or hear someone parody the Kennedy “Ich bein ein Berliner” thing, I always laugh to myself. Not because parodying the “Ich bein ein Berliner” thing is funny, it is probably the opposite of funny, but because I immediately hear “Ich habe ein schtender” in my head. And in my heart. And probably in J’s pants somewhere.
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