Unter dem Titel Nachbarschaft beschwerte ich mich vor zwei Jahren, dass ein Konzert des Jungen Klangforums Mitte Europa in  Terezín ausgerechnet auf Englisch beworben wurde, obwohl doch die beteiligten jungen Musiker aus Polen, Böhmen und Deutschland stammen. Zumal am Ort des Konzertes, im Konzentrationslager Theresienstadt, kam mir das widersinnig vor. Mein Einwand eine Nebensache? Nicht ganz.

Gestern war ich daraufhin eingeladen, vor den Musikern kluge Gedanken über den Vorzug der Muttersprache zu verkünden, aber bitte auf Englisch, denn in dieser Sprache verständigen sich die jungen Leute, proben gemeinsam, schließen Freundschaft. Eine kitzlige Aufgabe, als Vorstand des Vereins Deutsche Sprache, auf Englisch die deutsche Muttersprache vor Polen und Tschechen zu bewerben. Ort des ganzen war Krzyżowa, die Begegnungsstätte der Stiftung Kreisau, seinerzeit Sitz der Moltkes und Treffpunkt von vorausschauenden Menschen im Widerstand gegen Hitler. Anlass waren die Proben für das Konzert am 11. März 2007 im Konzerthaus am Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin, für die Auferstehungssinfonie von Gustav Mahler.

Das Junge Klangforum … möchte durch die einzigartige Sprache der Musik dazu beitragen, die Gemeinsamkeit Deutschlands mit Polen und der Tschechischen Republik zu stärken., so heißt es auf der Startseite.

Dank übersetzungsfreudiger Bekannter und Freunde gelangen auch die kurzen, polnischen und tschechischen Textabschnitte in der mehrsprachigen Ansprache mit dem Titel Skipping the mother tongues und der Unterzeile Which language serves best to strengthen the central European identity of Poles, Czechs and Germans?, über deren unerwartetes Echo ich mich im Anschluss auslasse:

Panie i Panowie,

Wybaczcie mi, gdyż nie potrafię w waszym języku przedstawić owej subtelnej różnicy pomiędzy krajem ojczystym a ojczystym językiem. Proszę zatem o chwilę cierpliwości dla mojej próby wyjaśnienia tego zagadnienia w języku angielskim.

Dámí a pánové,

promiňte, že vám nemohu češtině vysvětlit ten jemný rozdíl mezi pojmem vlast a mateřština. Dovolte mi, abych se o to pokusil v angličtine.

Meine Damen und Herren,

sehen Sie mir nach, dass ich den feinen Unterschied zwischen Vaterland und Muttersprache hier nicht auf Deutsch erörtere, sondern auf Englisch.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I cannot discuss the subtle difference between fatherland and mother tongue in all our languages here today. Let me try it in English.

Going to Terezín for your Dvořák concerto two years ago, I had braced myself: Here I was going to stand, a German about to face what been done in the name of Germans by Germans. Obviously I am not guilty myself, but I did and I do feel responsible. I want to respond. I want to face history as a German first, then as a European. What’s the point of being German if I denied any one facet of my people’s history?

But how did I experience Terezín? All your signposting, all your announcements, the speeches – everything was in English! It was odd, there was no German. Incidentally there was no Polish, either …

I felt cheated, I felt out of place.

And why English of all languages? Surely one of the many beautiful languages in Europe, but it is the mother tongue of the nation least inclined towards a European identity.

On the other hand, your medium is English, for making friends, for rehearsing together. Steffen Kepper tells me, it is for him a joyful experience to converse with people he would otherwise not understand. Lovely!

So – what’s the point of arguing the use of English?

English is your lingua franca. It is however, an awkward compliment to call a language the lingua franca. English actually suffers from being the world’s lingua franca. It spawns many regional variations of English – Hinglish, Singlish, Japlish, Denglish, Carribean English (not to mention American English, which George Bernhard Shaw regarded as particularly awful).

And there is a tendency of the lingua franca to be turning into a kind of strong Pidgin. For an educated Englishman the world’s commercial language is almost a foreign language, one might as well call it Globish – so as not to confuse it with proper English.

Allow me to mention five points on this issue. Don’t worry, I’ll make it short.

First. As you know, the European Union has three official working languages, French, German and English. So, in a meeting whatever is being said in one language, will be made available in the other two.

Once, in a meeting the former Czech prime minister, now EU commissar, Vladimir Špidla, as he was speaking German, was interrupted: „Why don’t you speak English, like everybody else in this room?“

Mr Špidla said: „There are thoughts that can only be voiced in German.“

May I add: There are thoughts that can only be voiced in Czech, in Polish, in English, by Milan Kundera, by Tadeusz Borowski, by William Shakespeare. Shakespeare, incidentally, has just been removed from school curricula in the United Kingdom.

Back to Mr Špidla: why would he take a stand against the zeitgeist, why would a Czech prefer the German language? Why is this significant? We’ll come back to this.

My second point: The Amazon river basin acts, as we know, as the lungs of this Earth. If the Amazon rain forests get chopped down, there won’t be enough oxygen to breathe for the world population. There is no substitute for the Amazon rain forest.

That includes all plants, as they interact with each other and all the animal life as it interacts with plant life. And it includes the people living there. They know about insects and birds and snakes and about the plants, their fruit and their roots –“ they know all that is absolutely essential for their little portion of the rain forest to survive.

We here in Europe have no idea what we do not know.

No Western or Eastern scientist is anywhere near the knowledge that lives in the languages of hundreds of little Amazon tribes. Some of them consist of just a few families, and while we sit here rehearsing for Berlin, another tribe will have left the Earth forever and they have taken their language with them and they have taken their knowledge of survival with them.

Each language bears facets of culture that are unique to the language, they may be similar in other languages, but they are not the same.

For our survival, the science of bionics will become essential. Bionics is where we learn from nature how to solve modern technical problems. Think of shark skin, that we now emulate in aerodynamics. If we don’t care for languages, soon we won’t know how to copy nature.

Third point: Imagine, for a moment, we did not have music. Imagine, we had to express words with movements of our body, with our arms and legs, without speaking! Think of a tree! Would tree look the same as Baum, would drzewo look the same as strom? In speech-eurythmy these four words look like this:

((Eurythmist performing the English word, the German word, the Polish word, the Czech word))

Four different pictures for the same plant! That would indicate, there are four entirely different perspectives of one simple matter. Imagine, how much more diverse the views will be on more complicated phenomena!

Point Number Four: Let me quote to you what Walter Krämer, professor for economic and social statistics has to say about scientists in Germany. You may not be aware of it, but German scientists are currently abandoning their mother tongue for the sake of English as the sole language of science:

„The German mother tongue“ he says  „is the medium of scientists born and bred here, in which they think, they ponder, they let ideas unfold, they formulate hypotheses, they think laterally to connect with other thoughts, they spark fresh creative thinking. The mother tongue is not just their tool, it is the midwife of theories and ideas.“

You see, when we think, we give birth to new synapses in our brain all the time. Of course, this works in any language, but it works best and most fruitfully in our mother tongue. If I keep dabbling in a foreign language, I can only think at a lower level, I create less of these fresh brain cell connections.

And we are not discussing just words. There is the concept and there is the word. There are probably four times more concepts in our minds than words in our languages, but we need words to take hold of the concept, explain it, work on it – and maybe create other new words.

Last Point: Let me give you a really awful example of the lack of concept: The Chief Executive Officer of a German multinational company addressed the Annual General Meeting of shareholders. The board was about to fire several hundred employees and this is how the CEO announced it to the shareholders. He spoke English, not his mother tongue. This is what he said:

„It is better to cut off our hands and feets than our arms and legs.“

I think we get the message. But I bet my hat, if this man had used the language his mother taught him, for one thing he would have found the correct plural of foot, but more importantly, he would have bitten his lips rather than announce a chainsaw massacre amongst the workers.

Lets wrap up what we have said: A common language is nice for communicating. But communication is just the most primitive function of language. If we reduce language, any language, to its function as a tool, we abandon all historic and cultural substance.

And we dry out our source of poetry. There is more to language:

Following Vladimir Špidla: Language and thinking require each other, there is wisdom in every language.

Following the Amazon Indians: Languages carry knowledge that is unique to each language.

Following our picture of the tree: People of different languages see things in their own way, even basic things are not the same in languages. You know that from music.

Following the statistics professor: Language can enhance or disable creative processes.

And not following the Chief Executive Officer: Language is more than „Pass me the butter, please!“ Language is to be respected as an expression of our culture, otherwise before we know it, language will have turned into a chainsaw.

The language we learnt from our mothers – the mother tongue – is among all languages the one closest to our hearts, and it is the basis from where we learn … each other’s languages.

The mother tongue is a piece of luggage that is weightless. Let us not allow ourselves to think it is worthless – we might lose it and not even notice the loss until it is too late.

Before I make one last additional point, my answer to the question is obvious: Which language serves best to strengthen the central European identity of Poles, Czechs and Germans? It is the mother tongue to begin with, followed by the neighbours‘ languages.

English can hardly be the answer.

Here is one last point. Let us consider love. Not the love for a hamburger, but our respect for another person’s soul. Let me quote from the work you are rehearsing, from the Alto voice in the last movement:

Uwielbiam ton twojego głosu kiedy mówisz …

O uwierz moje serce! O uwierz:
Nic nie jest stracone!
Twoje jest, tak twoje, to za czym tęskniłeś
Twoje, co kochałeś, twoje o co walczyłeś!
—-

Miluji tón tvého hlasu, kdy říkáš …

Ó, ver, srdce mé! Ó, ver:
Nic neztratís!
Tvé je, ano Tvé, po cem touzís,
Tvé, co milujes a co sis vybojoval!
—-

I love your tone of voice when you say …

Oh believe, my heart! Oh believe:
You shall loose nothing!
It is yours, yes yours, what you desired,
Yours, what you loved, for what you fought!
—-

And now in my mother tongue:

Ich liebe den Ton Deiner Stimme, wenn Du sagst …

O glaube, mein Herz! O glaube:
Es geht dir nichts verloren!
Dein ist, ja Dein, was Du gesehnt,
Dein, was Du geliebt, was Du gestritten!

Das Echo dieser Ansprache? Es war so, dass ich am liebsten nur noch vor Musikern sprechen möchte. Sie verstehen es zuzuhören. Außerdem hatten wir eine feine Aussprache hinterher, bei der mir Jennifer, meine Frau und vorführende Eurythmistin, die Schau stahl. So bald nehme ich sie nicht mehr mit …