Sphinx

The ending of Ulrich Ritzel’s most recent novel, Nadjas Katze, is quietly lovely. I’m planning to blog on the book more extensively in the near future, so won’t go into the full details of the plot here; the key point is that Berndorf, the detective, has uncovered the possibility that Nadja his client may actually be his half-sister (this depends less on utterly improbable coincidence than it might at first appear). He’s back home in Berlin; the phone rings, and it’s Nadja, whom he last saw storming off in fury. “Well,” she says – or something like that; the book is also in Berlin, and I’m not. “I guess you’ve heard that the test results are in.”

Leaving us hanging? Not in German, because Nadja uses the familiar Du form, having up to this point stuck grimly to Sie in addressing Berndorf; there can be no doubt that the DNA results are positive. In English, one would have to do something like adding “Well, big brother”; in German, it’s so much more subtle – but also a vastly bigger thing, with the choice of form signalling a complete transformation of the relationship. I immediately thought of a poem I’d recently read by the German-based Japanese author Yoko Tawada, ‘Die zweite Person Ich’, from her collection Abenteuer der deutschen Grammatik (Adventures of German Grammar). Pretty sure this isn’t going to work in English at all, but here goes…

The Second First Person / The Second Person I

When I still addressed you formally

I said I and by that meant

me.

Since yesterday I call you ‘Du’,

but still don’t know

how I should rename me.

I am now the person who duzes dich, not siezes Sie, we are both now different people to one another, and that’s a massive thing – and yet the pronoun stays the same.

One reason I like this practice is that it offers a subtle manner of maintaining an appropriate degree of distance without being rude or excessively formal. As I think I’ve discussed on here before, I find it an issue with students that either we must be very formal (I address them as Mr or Ms, they have to use “Professor Morley” whether they like it or not), or we are all on first name terms but actually of course there is an implicit hierarchy and we are not actually friends and shouldn’t be friends, or we make the hierarchy very explicit so that I refer to them by first name while they have to be formal. Using the first name but with the Sie form seems to me, at least in theory, to strike a reasonable balance.

Whether it works in practice is another question; I find it tricky enough navigating the transition between Sie and Du with academic colleagues, where it ought to be relatively straightforward – but of course I’m a foreigner and less familiar with judging exactly when the transition becomes appropriate, and in any case we are dealing with academics and their known proficiency in social interaction… I’ve been surprised – shocked, even – by one colleague who wanted to embark on Du from only our second meeting; I continue to struggle with the fact that another whom I’ve known for years continues to reply to all my messages in English, apparently just to avoid having to make a commitment to one conception of the relationship rather than another, where I’ve been ostentatiously addressing him as Sie in the hope either of getting confirmation when he writes back to me as Sie, or prompting him (as the more senior party) into initiating the transition.

Of course it may be a problem if people think I am older and more senior than I really am, so they think it’s my job to take the initiative in proposing a more familiar form of addess…