German 4 Dummies: "Ehrenamt"

In the land of compound nouns, Ehrenamt is especially dear to us because it is steeped in the culture Germany.

Ehrenamt consists of the nouns Ehre (honor) and Amt (office, official function). Join the two with the appropriate grammatical glue and you get an honorary appointment or and honorary office.

Or....?

Well, look at the translations offered for Ehrenamt on the free dict.cc site, and you can begin to understand why we picked this term for a posting.

While the meaning of honorary appointment and the like does hold true, the vast majority of use cases matches our plain and simple "volunteer", or "volunteer job".
By joining as a volunteer firefighter, for instance, or joining the Red Cross, or training the local soccer team, you get an Ehrenamt.

No big official appointment ceremony, no band playing at your new unpaid gig. Aside from possibly a little bit of ritual fun with the fire engine water pump, you go, sign up and show up.

When the German speaking media report on the latest project of a charity or the firefighters, you will see the adjective ehrenamtlich(e) everywhere in the report.
The same holds true for speeches in which officials praise volunteers and their effort, their contribution to society.

The point we are trying to make is that the combination of honor and office, in the mind of the blogster, echos a bygone era with a strong notion of sometimes misdirected duty, honor, and authority while, at the same time, describing an objective set of jobs performed for no compensation, or at least very little.

Of course, you can disagree with this, but then the blogster would invite you to see if there are other words in German for volunteer and volunteering.

Plenty, right here: the main one being freiwillig - recognize free and will here? The best example we have found thus far for the intricacies of the concept of volunteering in German is the volunteer fire brigade.

The official German name for that is Freiwillige Feuerwehr, volunteer fire brigade. If you are a member you hold an Ehrenamt. In other words, the term Ehrenamt seems to encapsulate the notion of civic duty in addition to doing this as a volunteer.

So, whether you as a foreigner find the term Ehrenamt slightly creepy or wonderfully traditional and civic minded is very much up to you.

Ehrenamt does seem to imply a long term proposition, too, as opposed to the blogster's more utilitarian American concept. There is a disaster, you volunteer, you go help. Or there is a cool Craigslist volunteer call, you do the training, and you have fun - hey I still have a bright pink t-shirt somewhere with MARSHAL on it.

In the world of the Ehrenamt, things are a little less spontaneous and flexible, it would seem.