[Update 5/2015] N-word debate in Germany

Change eBook specifications to incorporate a family filter. This way, we don't have to debate that again in a dew decades.


Having barely recovered from the debate about the American N-word in Mark Twain, we now get clobbered by an N-word debate in Germany.

According to an article in Die Zeit online of 19 Jan, Germans are split right down the middle in opinion polls about removing "Neger" (negro) and "Zigeuner" (gypsy) from such children's classics as Pippi Longstocking.

Let's take a step back and look at Huck Finn.

English-German dictionaries have the translation "nigger" for the English word "nigger", so the same word, no translation at all.

We found a German translation using the American N-word, for example, "Miß Watsons Nigger Jim saß an der Thüre," which we interpret as more proof that the American N-word remains the same word in German.

MLK, in his I have a Dream speech, uses the term negro.

Just how negative then, is the word "Neger" in German? You could argue that there is the complication of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Niggers as Zehn kleine Negerlein in German.

We do not follow this latter argument from a linguistic point of view. We do understand unease and upset by pejorative use of the German "Neger" and are happy to see that the chocolate covered big marshmallow treats (search in earlier posts) were suitably renamed.

The ever helpful Wikipedia lists usage of Negro and "translations" for many countries and says that, in German, "Neger" went from neutral to derogatory or racist since about the late 1970s.

What you get to see in the Wikipedia article is, that "negro"  is fine in one language, with "black" being pejorative, where in another "colored" is cool and "negro" is bad.

We were against the re-naming effort until we saw that, in German polls, the more educated folks prefer to leave word usage in Pippi Longstocking and elsewhere unchanged while less educated were more in favor of change.

To us, this indicates a failure of the education system as purveyor of historical perspective.

The question arising from this was "who suffers from a change"?

Our answer: nobody.

The folks whom the schools fail will feel better if their children read without these words.

The educated folks can work on overcoming their nostalgia.

The K-landnews team will always find a digital copy of a classic, and - using a crude global search and replace - we can return it to the state of word usage that reflects the original, should we deem it desirable.

[Update 5/20/2015] A roofer named Neger and the company logo.
Some time during the last year there was bit of a stir in the German media when the logo of a roofing company in the south western city of Mainz made the rounds.
The screenshot below shows why some people were upset: "Big ear rings" and a "skirt" are a clear ethnic stereotype.
Given the logo, it does not help much that the German surname Neger has nothing to do with the term Neger that designates a black person.