New York Week
Jurek Becker
Translated by xia23
Day three [1]
At breakfast a show on TV in which they pray three times: once for George Foreman, an extinct boxer; once for a handicapped girl, who is polished, sitting in a wheelchair in front of the camera; once for all of America. I turn it off and on again, I want to see it to the end. Sarcastic judgements go through my head. That in Central Europe, I think, and then to be a critic. Then the question: but haven’t they calculated everything yet? Don’t they need a certain standard, to keep the price of the advertisement moment high? In the end it has been clear for a long time that this is the true show, but hasn’t it been reaching to us yet?
I notice that how often I suddenly think of EUROPA, a word, that has hardly ever occurred to me before. Up to now I always gave myself much more detailed names: I was Berliner, I was Köpenicker [2]. GDR citizen. A German – that seemed to me already exotic. And all of sudden I am a European, not less.
Above all, going around. When I want to go shopping and need lots of time with my English, people are patient with me. It is not an embarrassment here for not speaking English well. For example, in the travel agency a stone-aged man and his wife who want to go to Las Vegas. The English of both is unrefined, even I can hear it, even worse than mine. There is no doubt, that they are Americans, you could tell from their jackets. I wonder why the agent doesn’t think I’m also an American…
[1]. p. 379. New York Woche. Stationen. Ein Kursbuch für die Mittelstufe. 3rd Edition. Prisca Augustyn & Nikolaus Euba. Cengage Learning. USA. 2015
[2]. Köpenicker. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%B6penick
Köpenick is a historic town and locality in Berlin, situated at the confluence of the rivers Dahme and Spree in the south-east of the German capital. It was formerly known as Copanic and then Cöpenick, only officially adopting the current spelling in 1931.
