GERMAN WORD OF THE DAY
Do all your best-laid plans go out the window when you hear that little internal voice telling you you’re too tired/lazy/bored to do them? If so, our German phrase of the day is just what you need.
Published: 29 March 2022 10:16 CEST
Updated: 3 March 2023 16:51 CET
There’s a famous Cherokee fable called the Two Wolves that describes a conversation between an elderly man and his grandson.
The grandfather tells the young boy that he has two wolves fighting inside of him. One encapsulates all the negative traits that plague people, from arrogance to self-pity, and the other encapsulates all the good, from empathy and kindness to generosity and faith.
This internal battle is raging inside everyone, he says. “Which wolf will win?”, the boy asks. The man replies: “The one you feed.”
In German, you might well hear this evil wolf described as “der innere Schweinehund” – literally your inner pig-dog, but more accurately your “inner temptation”, “inner bastard” or “inner swine”.
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More specifically, the German phrase describes the weak-willed part of ourselves that we sometimes have to fight with on a daily basis in order to get things done or steer clear of our worst vices and habits.
The word “Schweinehund” can be traced back to hunting practices in the Middle Ages, when specially trained dogs were used to charge at, stalk and subsequently trap wild boar.
By the 19th century, the word had moved into colloquial use to describe nasty, unpleasant people, and by the time of the Second World War, athletes were talking about “der innere Schweinehund” as a personification of the lazy part of themselves that wanted to do anything but train.
Most famously, the incisive use of the phrase by a German Social Democrat in 1932 prompted a call to order in the German Reichstag.
Kurt Schumacher (SPD) had claimed that National Socialism had succeeded “for the first time in German politics in the complete mobilisation of human stupidity.” He said the Nazis were specifically appealing to the worst of human nature – the population’s “inner swine”.
These days, you might hear German speakers bandy around the phrase in much more of an everyday context.
It’s your inner swine that might have encouraged you to stay in the pub just a little too long on a weeknight, or scroll on social media for another hour when you were meant to be working on an urgent report.
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The good news is that, as with the two wolves, psychologists think it’s actually quite useful to envision an evil alter-ago trying to talk us into doing these silly things. So next time that inner bastard is trying to convince you to waste time or indulge a bad habit, you can tell it in German: “Not today, pig-dog!” (“Heute nicht, Schweinehund!”)
Alternatively, you can work together with your inner swine to achieve some amazing things.
As the Germans, Austrians and Cherokees know, there’s no getting rid of the inner swine, but it can be counterbalanced against its opposites: compassion, determination and willpower.
Will the bastard win out in the end? That all depends on how much you feed it.
Examples:
Why is it so difficult to overcome the weaker self?
Why is it so difficult to overcome your inner temptations?
Today I’m fighting my inner weaker self.
I’m fighting against my inner bastard today.