You can't mention German without a perfunctory [en] nazi reference. You can't think of German without remembering a language that symbolized foreign dominion over peoples under the Austro-Hungarian Empire, an official language of Switzerland pushed down the throats of its students of non-German-speaking regions as mandatory with dumb school textbooks, and massacred in its various Swiss German dialects. Or unerotic sex, be it in the form of Germany's many legal brothels, their only-recently-banned zoophilia, or weird porn scenes (free word of the day: Stromkasten [de], electric box), or even their Erotik-Märkten [de].

Yet, dig deeper. Forget all that, ignore the jealousy of vulgar latin languages, unlearn the crap, and start anew. You have to go beyond all that, and discover a beautiful, subtle, rich and intuitive language.

The language of philosophy, the language of new composite words, the language that gave us such beautiful concepts as:

  • Dasein [de] (pobyt [cs]) your local and temporal existence...
  • Umwelt [de] ... in your given subjective environment...
  • Weltanschauung [de] ... from which you draw your world view...
  • Zeitgeist [de] ... influenced of course by the intellectual atmosphere of your time.

Of course, try not to live under either of these...

  • Zwangswirtschaft [de] economic system based on coercion.
  • Zwangsgesellschaft [de] a society based on coercion.
  • Zwangsheirat [de] forced marriage.

A language that has different good-byes depending on the means of communication:

  • auf Wiedersehen [de] (au revoir [fr], arrivederci [it], hasta la vista [es])
  • auf Wiederhören [de] (hasta la oída [es], a risentirci [it])
  • auf Wiederschreiben [de] (arrileggerci [it])
  • you can even push the idea further, and if you happen to have some German trombamica [it], and need to despedirse [es], what more appropriate than an auf Wiederficken [de]?

And frankly, wouldn't the world be a better place if we adopted both the word Autobahn [de] and its lack of legal speed limitation? Let's not pretend that a "highway" limited to 65 mph is the same concept as an Autobahn with no speed limit.