Curated playlist
German words and phrases
- PrivatdozentPrivatdozent is a title that has shaped European academic life for well over two centuries, yet most people outside German-speaking universities have never heard it spoken aloud. It describes a scholar who has cleared every hurdle the…
- KleinstaatereiKleinstaaterei is a pejorative German word coined in the early nineteenth century, and it names one of the strangest political conditions in European history. Picture the summer of 1789. The young Wilhelm von Humboldt and a group of…
- Drang nach OstenDrang nach Osten, a phrase meaning "Drive to the East," began as a 19th-century German nationalist slogan and ended as a justification for some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century. Its first known appearance in writing came in…
- WirtschaftswunderThe Wirtschaftswunder, a German word meaning "economic miracle," describes one of the most dramatic reversals of fortune in modern history. West Germany and Austria lay in ruins at the end of World War II. Cities were rubble, factories…
- ÜbermenschThe Übermensch sits at the heart of Friedrich Nietzsche's 1883 book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and it has been misread, weaponized, and reclaimed ever since. Nietzsche did not invent a hero. He invented a question: what would it mean for…
- FührerFührer is a German word meaning "leader" or "guide," and for most of the world, it carries one overwhelming association: Adolf Hitler, dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945. That single association has all but erased the word's long…
- OstpolitikOstpolitik produced its most visible symbol in 1987. That year, East German leader Erich Honecker made an official visit to West Germany. It was the first time any East German head of state had crossed into the West. Two German states that…
- UntermenschUntermensch. The word itself sounds like a verdict. In German, it literally means 'underman' or 'sub-man', and when the Nazi regime printed nearly four million copies of a pamphlet bearing that title, they were not writing philosophy. They…
- KapellmeisterThe word Kapellmeister earned the soprano Aloysia Weber an unusual compliment in the 18th century. The actor and musician Joachim Daniel Preisler heard her perform at her own home in the 18th century. He wrote in his diary that Mozart, her…
- LeitmotifLeitmotif is a word that describes something listeners have felt for centuries without having a name for it: a short, recurring musical phrase tied to a person, a place, or an idea. The technique reaches back to the early seventeenth…
- NazismNazism, formally named National Socialism, began its public life as a name its own followers found embarrassing. In the 1920s, opponents in the German labour movement borrowed the Bavarian slang term for a backward peasant, a clumsy yokel,…
- BlitzkriegBlitzkrieg lit up the front pages of Western newspapers in September 1939, when journalists scrambling to describe the German assault on Poland landed on a single electrifying word: lightning war. Time magazine called it "a war of quick…
- LebensraumLebensraum, the German word for "living space", began as a dry term in a biologist's book review and ended as the ideological engine behind the worst war of annihilation in human history. On the 29th of April 1945, with the Red Army…