The other day I was talking a little bit about Christmas parcels. Whereupon a reader wrote that I should spare people such “absurd, whiny stories about wonderful western clothes and fragrant western parcels for the starving GDR citizens”. I checked it again and found nothing of the kind. In addition to the anecdotal about West Packages, it was also about South Packages (from Thuringia to Berlin) and East Packages (from East to West).
Apparently at times more parcels per capita were sent from the east to the west than the other way round. By 1960 there were almost 18.6 million packages. Later, things like books, calendars, handicrafts like nutcrackers and candle arches, crocheted blankets and baked stollen were sent from east to west, as the historian Konstanze Soch found out.
Mine tunnel or wrapped baby Jesus
I recently mentioned that as a student at the Leipzig post office I saw how many elongated parcels were sent “over there”. There were hundreds of Dresden stollen. One man stood at the bottom of the pallet, one on top of the truck that was supposed to be transporting them. And the stollen packages were cheerfully tossed to one another. It went bouncy and fluiiii and flop.
Then it occurs to me – and now it’s getting linguistically again – that as a real old Berliner you don’t say “der Stollen”, which comes from the Old High German word “stollo” and is supposed to mean “support” or “post”. The mine tunnels were once supported with these. With a lot of imagination you can see a mountain in the loaf of a tunnel, and if you prick it with your finger, you have a small mine tunnel for ants. Sometimes ear pince-nez also nestle there, which I once experienced many years ago in an overaged, dried-out tunnel. For other people, the shape of the pastry is reminiscent of the wrapped baby Jesus. Today we speak of “swaddling” when swaddling a baby very tightly.
In Berlin they say: “Want a piece of Stolle?”
So the Berliner doesn’t say “the gallery”, but “the gallery” – although that sometimes triggers a cultural dispute. Because, as with many words, there is a clear distinction between north and south. However: The nubes on the soles of football boots are also called studs. And football is probably more important to many Herthaers and Unioners than any mine and the baby Jesus.
“Want a piece of Stolle?” Is the motto in Berlin at Christmas. The word slips much better across the Berlin tongue, which is also used to the “Stulle” – a very different kind of dough. Some words end in “ulle”, such as “Lulle”, “Pulle” and “Schulle”. And quite a few also on “olle”. Starting with “meene Olle”, followed by the “kessen Bolle”, which sometimes “ooch amesiert like Bolle”, to the “Molle” (beer), the wild “Tolle” or the thick “Knolle”. You have it on your face or elsewhere.
And by the way, to counteract the family quarrel with the relatives who have traveled: You can say both: “the tunnel” and “the tunnel”.
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