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Tuesday, April 04, 2006

WORLD CUP UPDATE

It’s fair to say that Deutsche Welle, a Germany company that provides news and analysis from Germany and other parts of Europe in 30 languages, is in the communications business. Having worked in the communications business for a number of years, I have noticed time and time again that people in the communications business often have not mastered the business of communication. Now, here we have Deutsche Welle sponsoring a sweeps to the World Cup, something I am absolutely burning to win, unabashed soccer mom that I am, and, most unfortunately, they can’t seem to communicate basic sweeps details, like when a sweeps closes or who’s eligible and who’s not. I realize the U.S. has more stringent advertising laws than the rest of the world, ones that require sweeps sponsors to publish detailed contest rules with references to obscure legal concepts such as force majeure, but still. The bare minimum would be nice.

So, I got an email this morning from Deutsche Welle, in response to an email I’d sent two weeks ago, informing me that the sweeps I entered and blogged about here on March 22 is closed. Yes, closed. It was the one that asked for a 250-word essay. I submitted a 325-word essay. (I write shorts long, as my editors know.) However, bless their little poor-communicator hearts, Deutsche Welle is sponsoring another World Cup sweeps. To enter, email your impressions of Germany to
english@dw-world.de. Be sure to put RADIO CONTEST ENTRY in the subject line, and give your full address, including country, in the body of the email. Besides that, all you have to do is send along your impressions of Germany. For details, all two of them, click here.

I’m going to send them an edited version of my essay. It is not what I would call polished. And I left out an anecdote that turns on tourist stereotypes. Here it is:

On a trip up U.S. 1 along the California coast, my friend and I kept running into busloads of German tourists at the various lookout points along the way. I do not know if their exuberance was a response to the exhilarating scenery or a after effects of beer at breakfast. Whatever the reasons, they were loud.
On my next trip, to Costa Rica, my friend and I pulled up to the lodge where we would be staying at for a stretch. There was a tour bus outside. “Oh God, I hope that’s not a busload of Germans,” I said, half to myself.

"What wrong with Germans?" my friend wanted to know.
I told her how loud they’d been in California, tall and tan and loud.
Luckily for us, it wasn't a busload of Germans. They were Quakers.

MY IMPRESSIONS OF GERMANY (MY ENTRY)

I traveled through Germany once, en route to Denmark from France. We stopped in Cologne. The cathedral was majestic, the people at turns warm and brusque. I was traveling with a French family. That might explain this ambivalent reception. It was a short stop, so I do not remember anything beyond that. I don’t recall if we ate there. We definitely did not have any beer. (I probably could have used one.)

Back home, in the States, my earliest impressions of Germany were classical musical, the great composers, and then, when I went to collge, cinematic. Fassbinder, Herzog. I must admit that I didn’t warm to their movies as much as I did to French or Italian cinema, but they were moving, like powerful dreams.

I later developed an appreciation for the great influence German immigrants had on American cooking. Meta Given, a leading food editor in the 1940s and 1950s, was influenced by her family’s German heritage. She’d grown up on a farm in the Ozarks. When I bake a recipe from one of her cookbooks, I think, “Ah, the German influence.”

As for contemporary Germany, my window there was my father, who passed away one year ago. He’d studied German in college, and picked it up again when he was in his seventies. When I visited, he used to love to ask me if I knew what a German word, like die fleidermaus, meant. And so many more. And I rarely knew the answer, except when I got lucky with a deductive guess. He also liked to show me articles from Der Spiegel and Der Stern. He liked that sometimes they showed topless women on the covers.

It’s a shame he never got to Germany.


(FWIW: I learned of this sweeps in an email response from the Deutsche Welle folks.)

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Keep up the good work »

10:03 PM  

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