The Umlaut

For some reason, my umlauts won't stay put. The umlaut is the two dots over the 'a' -- well, that should be there. By convention, when the umlaut is not possible, an 'e' is added after the vowel. So, 'kräht' becomes 'kraeht.' Lots of people with Germanic last names have their umlauts preserved with an 'e' in the "American" spelling. I think that's cool.

During World War II in Austria, the resistance used 'O5' as a label. The German word for Austria is österreich (with a capital O), or Oesterreich. Hitler thought it best to strip the name after Anschluß (or Anschluss -- but that's another orthography lesson) in order to help Austrians not think of themselves as Austrians.

Anyway, the resistance took their label from the name of their homeland -- 'O' plus 5 -- 5 being the fifth letter of the alphabet, which is 'e'. Thus, 'oe' or the first letter of their country. A roughly carved 'O5' is still visible in the stone of Stephansdom (St. Stephen's Cathedral) in Vienna, Austria -- or at least was in 1991 when I lived there with a wonderful old man named Arthur Preuss who lost his father and his own youth to the SS just before Anschluss. Arthur was captured by and then escaped from "the best dentists in Europe!" (because they remove all of your teeth) to spend the remainder of the war in the forest surrounding Vienna fighting with the resistance. His apartment almost 50 years later was covered in various stuffed and mounted wildlife. Arthur said he had become a good hunter during the war. He learned to sit in a tree for hours and could tell "from smell and sound what was a deer, what was a man, and what was a Nazi."

Arthur survived the war and was reunited with his love Brigitte. The two of them supplemented their income by having female American students live with them. They always chose women "to keep Brigitte company."

Arthur was an actor (his father had been a famous opera singer) and a drunk. He would come home late and go into the living room -- which was next to my room -- and put opera records on an ancient turntable and sing along. More than a few times, I ventured out of my room -- abondoning my German homework -- to sit in the tiny kitchen and wait for Arthur to finish his most recent aria. He would join me and we would eat ice cream and drink beer and talk. He would call me Bambi (he said my eyes were too big for a person) and we would talk. Sometimes he would tell me stories about the war or about the son who hadn't spoken to him in years. He would tell me about his father. He would become poetic when talking about his love for Brigitte. Most times he would get too drunk and too emotional. He would slip into German or Czech (his father's language) and sometimes get very angry or very sad.

Come to think of it, Arthur showed me a lot and taught me a lot. I haven't thought about him in a long time -- and to think this came up because of a stubborn umlaut...