What is really important? What touches us today – and will not go away tomorrow? It’s the things that have moved us since human existence: happiness, love, family, partnership, time, stress, loneliness, farewell, grief.
BILD columnist Louis Hagen*, coming from a German-Jewish family, sought answers to the eternal questions of mankind from poets, thinkers and researchers. And found a few answers that are amazingly simple – and yet can enrich our lives.
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How proud I was when I was first addressed. I had pimples, a squeaky voice. I was 14 and I wasn’t you yet. My counterpart, a lovely lady in a bakery, must have been short-sighted. If she had asked me how old I was, I would have lowered my voice and said, “Almost 15!”
You or you – just small words, but two worlds. We call each other significantly less than we used to. The triumph of the du began in the late 1960s. Until then, even students used to address each other.
“Duzen is on the rise in German-speaking countries,” says linguist Horst Simon in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung (FAS). This is due to the influence of the American lifestyle.
► But in Germany, too, advertising shows us when to use the first name – namely when speaking to young people. A Swedish furniture store doesn’t even know you. Nor would a computer company with an apple as its trademark. In English there is only “You”, which stands for Du and She. (With our neighbor France, on the other hand, you are a common form of politeness.)
In the junk show “Bares for Rares” (ZDF), the moderator of the lights always asks very friendly at first: “I’m Horst. May I say you?” He can always.
BILD columnist Louis Hagen
My young colleague Hannah studied in Washington State. She says: “It’s so comfortable in the USA that you don’t have to worry about the salutation. Nothing is embarrassing because you can’t go wrong like with us.”
She means the situation that everyone is probably familiar with: Do I use the addressee’s address or do I use the first form? My answer: If I want a bank loan, I don’t want to be called first names. If I buy a new tennis racket in a specialist shop, then yes. “If the Du is used more and more frequently, then at some point it will become a sure-fire success,” says scientist Simon.
I think it would be a pity if this small but fine feature of our beautiful language were to be lost. When you used to tell your parents that you “met someone there,” the first question was, “So, are you on the first name?”
Before that came about, there was a long, sometimes difficult process: the transition from you to you. He was always associated with palpitations and hot cheeks. And often the salutation was followed by what makes people of all languages happy – the moment when you fall in love.
* Louis Hagen (76) was a member of the BILD editor-in-chief for 13 years and is now a consultant at the communications agency WMP. His texts have also been published as a book and under koehler-mittler-shop.de available.