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PUR is an evergreen German band, and while Indianer (Native Americans) doesn’t sound like a likely title for a German song, that should make today’s German lesson all the more interesting! Learn about a part of the German mindset that probably won’t be treated in any other course or lecture. Today’s vocabulary focus will be on words that you’ll absolutely need to understand Western references, plus in the grammar section we will cover the eternal question of when to use which of the German cases.
Listen to an excerpt of today’s song at Amazon.com. Americans can also buy a legal mp3 of the full song right there; international visitors will have to go to 7digital instead.



This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 6:30 pm and is filed under Intermediate Season 1 . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

3 Responses to “Intermediate Lesson #5 - Indianer - PUR”

GermanPod101.com says:

What do you think of today’s song? And had you heard about Karl May before?

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timwilde says:

Good insight. Never heard of Karl May before this lesson.

One very good question though, does this mean I have to kind of watch what I say if this topic comes up in conversation while in Germany? I grew up and currently live in Arizona (my office is actually on Reservation land) I think the ideals spoken to in this song and actual daily life of the people are a wee bit different.

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Judith says:

As kids, most Germans believe that Native Americans are pretty much like Karl May described them. Hence there occasionally are initiatives like the one described in this song, where the kids all get Native American names (or decide to assign each other such names), maybe even organize into tribes and are from then on expected to try to conform to the ideal.

There usually is disillusionment as they get older though - seeing that the other kids with Native American names aren’t much more virtuous than the rest, maybe learning that Karl May completely invented his stories or simply thinking back about the stories at some point and realizing that nobody can be that good.

So adult Germans don’t have that over-the-top image of Native Americans anymore… but there’s nothing to replace it. For example, you’ll never hear about alcoholism and gambling problems unless you go to the states. You may well shock people by telling them about that. To hear that some people live half an hour’s drive from a reservation and never mingled, nor do they intend to, is also shocking and incomprehensible, because the fascination remains.

I wouldn’t ask you to withhold anything you’d want to say - just keep in mind you are likely to shock people, gently disabuse them of their dreams.

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