How much do I love artsy German indie electro-popsters Wir Sind Helden? A LOT, that's how much. I've been seeing references to them in German magazines and feminist blogs for years, but only heard them for the first time recently. And oh my God, how did it take me so long? They are so fantastic and last night Ju Ju and I had a bit of a German dance party as we grooved around the kitchen to the sounds of Die Reklamation.

Not only do I absolutely love this song (I can't embed the video), but back in 1995 I created (and never finished) a graphic novel about an indie band who sell their souls to the devil for fame, and a few pages of it, and I am seriously not exaggerating, looked exactly, PANEL FOR PANEL, like a bit of this video. My heroine even looked like, and was dressed identically to, Wir Sind Helden's lead singer/guitarist Judith Holofernes.

I love this song, and its supercute Tintin-esque video:


And this video (and song) just makes me happy:


Because I am a sheep, give me a few "five things" list suggestions!

I was wondering why I love crazy German ice-skating soap opera Alles Was Zählt, which I've been watching avidly online since last week (every single episode is available! It's awesome!). Then it dawned on me. We've got a plucky young ice-skater from the wrong side of the tracks who is discovered at random and chosen for the ice team of a fancy gym, only to become the rival of the owner's glamorous, evil daughter, whose hunky boyfriend is kind to our heroine. Our heroine's brutish stepfather has forbidden her to skate and when he finds out she's been deceiving him, kicks her out of the house and she is forced to go and stay with the owner's family. And when the hunky boyfriend gives her the new skates she needs, they initially hurt her feet so much that when she has to take a surprise skating exam (long story), she needs her scruffy old skates - but the evil rival has stolen them from her locker! So she has to skate in the painful new skates! But she's so awesome that she dazzles all the judges!

In what other medium would we find such a tale? Why, in old-school girls' comics, of course! The whole thing is straight out of Mandy or Judy! And that, I think, is why I love it. That and the fact that every episode ends on an awesome cliffhanger.

1. The ongoing Buffy comic. Oh, so good. The last two panels made me grin from ear to ear (of course, I guessed who the off-panel speaker in the second last panel was, but I still beamed when I turned the page and was proved right). Speaking of Buffy comics, I also finally got my hands on the collected Tales of the Vampires - I got a few of the comics when they were coming out, but they kept selling out too quickly from Dublin's indie comic shop. Anyway, despite the fact that the art in the serial story about the mini-watchers is shockingly bad (seriously, could they have at least got someone who knew how to draw kids? The children looked like mutant dwarves), and I kept wishing they'd got Mike Mignola to illustrate that as well as the cover, the story itself was great, as were almost all of the single short ones. I love the way they all explore stuff that was hinted at in the programme about the vampires retaining elements not only of their personalities but of their feelings for other people - the story about the man whose father is turned into a vampire was particularly fantastic. So yeah, strongly recommended if you can find it (I suggest looking online).

2. The Laura Viers and Saltbreakers album. Excellent and not over-hyped, as I had feared. Speaking of slightly fey North American indie girls, I love this Feist video (and the song too):


3. I am listening to a lot of Pentangle recently for the first time since, well, since I was a kid and my dad used to play them all the time. But they really are great. I am very pleased at this twee folk revival thing that's been happening lately, although as ever I can't help feeling smug, in a hideously teenage "but of course I've been listening to Steeleye Span again for years!" way. I have also rediscovered the Boo Radleys' Giant Steps album. 'Lazarus' is one of my favourite songs ever, but I haven't listened to the entire album in years, and I'd forgotten how good it is. I think the shoegazing/post-shoegazing revival is already underway...

4. I've been trying to brush up on the auld Deutsch by actually looking up words I don't know in a dictionary when reading something complex, as opposed to what I have been doing for the last few years, which is to get frustrated when I can't understand something and then just giving up on the book. I've been reading Cornelia Funke's Tintenherz (published in English as Inkheart), which is a pretty good kidlit/YA fantasy. Admittedly I don't really have to look anything up in that, apart from the odd obscure word which turns out to mean "a fire-eater's flaming torch" and stuff like that, and indeed can easily read it in bed while feeling sleepy, which is a sign of how demanding it is. However, I have also been attempting to read Robert Ide's Geteilte Träume: Meine Eltern, die Wende und Ich, which is a book by a Ossi journalist born (like me) in 1975, about how the wall coming down created a generation gap between his generation, who were in their teens at the time, and their parents. It's totally fascinating, but I'm finding it quite slow going because (a) he uses very long sentences with ten zillion subclauses, which is confusing enough in English let alone in a language with German's word order and (b) there are a lot of references to specific East German brand-names, which, thanks partly to the German way of starting all nouns with capital letters, I keep thinking are ordinary nouns that I don't recognise. It's frustrating because the book is incredibly interesting and well-done. I just wish it didn't take me ten minutes to get through a page.

5. I am going to see CSS on Saturday, and watch the final five episodes of Battlestar Galactica on Sunday. Huzzah!

Und du? What cultural delights are you enjoying right now?

Because apparently I am subconsciously trying to make up for laughing at Ossi haircuts twelve years ago by reading all about people in East Germany in the late '80s and early '90s, I found this absolutely brilliant site, in which you can see and read about what various people bought with the 100 West German marks which was given to all Ossis crossing the border into the west. Don't worry if you can't read German - I linked to the image-only section (you can click on the images to read the captions). If you can read German, check out the text section. Fascinating stuff.

I went to see The Lives of Others last night, and it's the best film I've seen in a long time. I couldn't stop thinking about it afterwards, and I actually dreamed in German last night. That's how powerful it was - it made me dream in bad German! In fact, I've been immersed in all things Ossi recently - I just finished reading Anna Funder's Stasiland, which I highly recommend, and which, like the film, is very moving. It's also absolutely gripping and reminded me how much I didn't really know about that era, despite my Germanic studies. I started studying German at college in 1993, and in our first year we did a course called Landeskunde, which was basically an introduction to modern German society and history - of course, it being 1993, there was a huge emphasis on the Wende (as the period of collapse and reunification is known - it basically means turn or turning point) and the issues of reunification; but the emphasis was on the peaceful protests and the various organisations that drove them rather than the doings of the state they were protesting against.

The Lives of Others ends in the early '90s, just a couple of years before I went to Berlin for the first time. I spent the summer of 1995 in Berlin, living in a sublet apartment in the central western district of Charlottenburg, a big, airy, beautiful apartment that was incredibly cheap - less than DM100 a month, I think - because it was still being rented for pre-Wende West Berlin subsidised rates. When you go to Berlin now, you can't necessarily tell the difference between the west and the eastern districts; back then it was unmistakable, not least because a lot of the eastern areas with old buildings hadn't been restored to perfection after the war, so there were bullet holes up to adult male head level in lots of them, and even those that didn't bear literal battle scars tended to look pretty raggedy. Berlin has changed enormously since then - the difference between Unter den Linden - the pre-war central boulevard that became a rather bleak street in east Berlin and is now a bustling boulevard again - in 1995 and 2007 is almost surreal; it looks like a different city.

And I feel a hot rush of shame when I remember the way my friends and I used to joke lightheartedly that summer about Ossi style, and how you knew you were in the east when you saw lots of mullets, and afterwards I realised how shitty that was, for a bunch of 19 year old snotty hipsters to make jokes about the fashion sense of slightly shell-shocked people who had grown up in a grim country, brought it down in a peaceful revolution, and then found their world totally pulled out from under their feet and their economy in chaos. I mean, we weren't totally stupid and awful, we felt that we were on their side, we didn't mind not being able to find any work that summer because knew that we didn't deserve to get jobs when so many Ossis were out of work, we loved their side of the city with a passion, but still...we laughed at their haircuts. And they deserved better than that. In the film, Wiesler, the Stasi agent, always wears an ugly grey nylon jacket with corduroy shoulder patches, zipped right up over his shirt and tie. There was something about it, about the way he wore it, that was almost unbearably poignant, that made me want to cry. I think it was partly because it matched the character's drab, restrained, beauty-free life, and partly because something about it reminded me of those 1995 East Berliners.

Anyway. The Lives of Others is, as my fellow former-Germanist sister Busta J put it in a text, super fantastisch, whether you know anything about Berlin or not. Go and see it.

I was talking (read: ranting) the other night about my lack of trust in translations of fiction, despite the fact that (a) translating fiction is one of my dream jobs, one which will definitely remain a dream as there is pretty much no work in translating German fiction to English and (b) translations of the novels on my course got me through my first year in college when I really wasn't up to reading an entire novel auf Deutsch.

But hypocrisy aside, I really don't like reading stuff in translation when I have a choice, because I know how subjective they can be. What sparked off my ranting was my recent reading of Erich Kaestner's Emil und die Detective (I don't think I need to translate that title into its English version, do I?), the story of a bunch of small boys who band together to trap a thief who has picked the pocket of the eponymous Emil on his journey to Berlin. I vaguely remember reading it as a kid and quite liking it but not being overwhelmed. However, as a Deutsch-reading children's literature afficionado, I thought I should give it another go in its native language. And what I got was a lesson in how subjective translations are. A subsequent glance at the standard English translation revealed that in English, Emil and the Detectives is as humdrum as ever. Emil und die Detective, however, is utterly wonderful - subversive, charming and and laugh-out-loud funny. I checked the translation of some of the passages that had made me laugh so much I translated them to a bemused Patsington, and while the words had been translated correctly, the tone had not.

But the bits of the translated text that really stood out were glaring in their absence. One of the central characters in Emil und die Detective, the car-horn toting Gustav, regularly speaks Yiddish - and not just some of the many words that Yiddish shares with German. In the English Emil and the Detectives, however, the Yiddish is translated into plain English (I think meshuggene is simply translated as "daft"), which I find kind of sad and disturbing. Going slightly OT for a moment - glitzfrau told me recently that Yiddish as a first or second language rather than as slang is now almost extinct, which makes me sad. I really wanted to do the Yiddish course offered by the German department when I was in college, but it was only available to Germanic Studies students rather than those, like me, who were doing plain old Germanistik.

You don't need to be able to read another language to know how translations can differ - just read two different translations of the same text. Penguin Red Classics have commisioned new translations of all of the many non-English books they've been publishing, and in some cases they dramatically change the tone of the text. I particularly noticed this in their version of Kafka's Metamorphosis, which I've read in the original German, the old Muir translation, and now this new one. It's this change in tone that marks the subjective nature of so much translation, and it's why I'll never read any translations of German writing - it's the only language apart from English in which I can read fluently, so why I should I read a translation when I can read the original?

Of course, if I do ever get my dream job of translating German books (preferably entertaining ones like Emil, which I would seriously love to translate, even for fun), they will be absolutely perfect and practically the same as reading the original. Won't they?