Auf de liebe!: Why MCDonald’s is the only thing germans confess their love to
When I was young––maybe about five years old––and first learned about the concept of love, I remember asking my mother: “But mama––who do you love more? Papa or us?” (Us being, of course, my siblings and I.) And she replied: “Oh, that’s not the same. It is impossible to compare that. I just love you in different ways.” I did not understand. This one word, Liebe, did not imply “different ways”. Liebe was Liebe, and I was confused enough by this conversation to remember it even now, years later.
It took me some time until I learned that, in fact, there are different kinds of words for love. Just not in German. In the bible, the terms eros for sensual love and agape as love for God are used. Quoted in the Dictionary of the Untranslatables, Ulrich von Wiliamowitz-Moellendorff comments on this: “Although the German language is so poor that it has to use the single term ‘love’ [Liebe] in both cases, the two ideas [eros and agape] nonetheless have nothing in common” (599). If one looks more closely at Old Greek, one can make out even more kinds of love than those mentioned in the bible, from Philia to Storge to Xenia and Philautia––love for friends, love for family and guests, love for the self. And indeed, all of sudden, the German Liebe, containing all these meanings in one and at the same time none, does appear very poor.
Of course, we have the seemingly untranslatable Minne, a word from the Middle Ages used to describe the courtly love of a knight to a lady, but even this romantic phrase has been used solemnly as a literary and legal historical term since the 19th century. Tormented by my school’s Literature lessons, the little devil in my brain that looks suspiciously like my German teacher cries out: “But without German writers, Romanticism would never have been what it was!” That is true. There was a time, when, broken over lost love, Goethe wrote his famous novel “The Sufferings of Young Werther”, inspiring hundreds of unhappy German lovers to follow the protagonist into suicide for Leidenschaft, for true passion. In the end, the novel had to be banned from several European cities. In this time period, great poems about love have been written, airy songs devoted to women prettier than nightingales as well as heart shattering elegies of rejection. But those sentiments vanished soon. Most literature written after 1945 is in some way political, at first as a response to the Second World War, then to the East-West conflict and then to climate change, neo-nazis and other gruesome threats. Don’t get me wrong, these topics remain highly important and should definitely be written about. I am just hoping to find next to them at least a little bit of Leidenschaft. But it seems I am hoping in vain––The fire of German love has died out long ago already.
Language is the outgrowth of the collective consciousness of our society. Every language consists only of phrases that are useful in some way, that are needed to point to something existing in that society. There is a reason why in Inuit languages, there are way more words to describe snow and ice than in German and English. It is simply knowledge important to that culture, knowledge others might not need. So, if Germans don’t already have a large variety of words for love, who knows if they truly desire more than one?
After all, we are known for our cold and direct speech, for showing less emotions and more efficiency, for caring more about simple statements than flowery love confessions. Of course one could argue that languages like English and French, too, who are seen as more passionate, have to deal with a small repertoire of love words. But even among these languages, German is the outsider. In French, one can often hear exclamations such as j’adore ça!, applying an “I love it“ to something as simple as ice cream, or a cute house, although adorer can also be used to describe one's love to God. In English, as I have realized during my studies here in Bennington, one confesses their love to literally everyone. Even acquaintances I talk to once or twice a week throw a love ya after me as if it means nothing. And maybe it doesn’t in American culture. “In Modern Languages, “to Love” Means Everything” (595), exclaims one of the subheadings in the Dictionary of Untranslatables.
In Germany however, using phrases like this is almost unthinkable. The brave soul venturing closest to an open “I love you“ is McDonald’s, with its slogan Ich liebe es––I love it––but then again, even that is a phrase shaped by an American brand, adapted from the English I'm lovin’ it. A true German company wouldn’t dare something as outrageous as this. Thus, conforming to the more free-spirited Americans, the catchphrase for the German gummies Haribo has been transformed to include the word love in English language advertisements. In German, their jingle goes: Haribo macht Kinder froh und Erwachsene eben so!––Haribo makes children happy and grown-ups as well. In America, one can instead find kid’s and grown-ups love it so, the happy world of Haribo! written on the golden packaging. Once again, Germans deem themselves as too uptight for an open display of love, even when it concerns their favorite type of candy. And yet, even with a language that seems to be made for screaming, that allows such a small scope for Liebe, I feel that there is a deep need to express one’s love, even though that might not be possible in the most direct and easy way.
I miss my home dearly. My home, and especially my family. Even when I am having a good time here at Bennington, immersed in a nice book or laughing with my friends, in the background, this hole in my chest continues to throb, this hole that can only be filled by my mother’s pasta, my sister’s fairly uninteresting gossip. And yet, at the end of each call with my family, staring at the beloved––but pixelated––faces from so many miles away, I am unable to speak of all these feelings choking me. Instead, I will say goodbye to them with a simple Hab dich lieb!––a softer form of “I love you“, something that can barely be translated into English.
We still use the verb lieben, of course, but we somehow manage to take off its edge, its meaning, by adding the auxiliary verb haben. This is the formula used by most families, parents and children alike, to express their love––or rather, their fondness, as love is a word way too big for everyday conversation––for each other. When I look up translations of common phrases with jemanden lieb haben online, most offer “to like someone, to love someone, to hold someone dear, to be fond of someone“ as an English alternative. But neither of these really seem to fit. And why should they find a synonym to this weird, German phrase? After all, the English language is hardly ever confronted with a similar problem. When American parents want to express their love to their children, they don’t have to soften their words the way we Germans do. They, bluntly, almost simply, say “I love you“.
And I can hardly be the only one envying this directness, if one observes German Instagram. Scrolling down my friends' posts, quite a couple of love confessions can be found––in English. “Love you”, they comment under an especially good looking picture, followed by “Gorgeous!” And “Omg how can you be so beautiful ?!”. As it seems, love––for me as well as for most of my peers––is some sort of therapeutic borrowing––a term defined in my linguistics class––from the English, lines too heavy to speak in our own language. Even je t’aime seems so much more graceful, so much easier to pronounce, next to our German ich liebe dich.
So, do Germans love McDonald’s more than their family and friends? After all, this is the only time they use the word lieben unguarded by auxiliary verbs or synonyms from other languages or any other form of softening. I don’t think so. Rather, people love differently in every language, and who knows if the more open, American way of expressing love is truly more efficient. Even after seven months in America, a friend might throw a rash “Oh my gosh Anne, I love you!“ at me, and I will freeze, not knowing how to respond. And that is not just because of my inherent German modesty.
Using only one word to express one’s love to romantic partners, friends, family, a country, a home is just as confusing to me now as it was to my five year old self. Let us, once more, consult the Dictionary of Untranslatables on love in modern languages: “Depending on the context, the period, or the author, the meaning moves, in each language, now towards one extreme, now towards the other” (595). Surely, I cannot be the only one who’s head is spinning from the impossible task to define love, to put this ever-transforming concept into the shackles of language(s). If I had the power to do so, I would take a hammer, and I would break Liebe into thousands of fragments, I would revive words like Minne and make up new ones, write an entire dictionary on love––everything so that we Germans, despite our shyness, might be able to express our true feelings more freely, so that parents don’t have to rely on auxiliary verbs to show their children how much they care, and so that McDonald’s Ich liebe es can finally be put into relation.
Bibliography
Cassin, Barbara. Dictionary of Untranslatables: a philosophical lexicon. Tr. by Rendall, Hubert, Mehlman, Stein, Syrotinski. Princeton University Press. New Jersey, 2014.
“Ich hab’ dich lieb”. linguee.de. 2023. Web. Apr. 04.
Artist Statement— I wrote this piece for my translation class, where we talked about the untranslatability of certain words and phrases. Inspired by a statement on Germans and the word „love“ I found in the „Dictionary of Untranslatables“, I decided to write this essay on the many and often confusing meanings of this often times (at least for me) so confusing word.
Anne — a Freshman from Germany studying Literature, Creative Writing and Translation at Bennington College. Confronted with the cultural differences between America and her home country, she wrote the following essay on the different perceptions on love, as well as the untranslatability of such a seemingly simple word.