Germany Local Custom Tips by Nemorino

Do you want to go with me?

This one is projected onto the wall of an underground S-Bahn (suburban train) station. It asks "Do you want to go with me?" and gives a choice of three possible answers:

-- Yes with a green condom

-- Maybe with a yellow condom

-- No with no condom

Website: http://www.machsmit.de

Little rubber bear

To get the point of this one, you have to know two things.

The first is that most Germans have the disgusting habit of eating a sort of gelatine candy called "Gummibärchen" or little rubber bears. Aside from gelatine they contain masses of artificial color and flavoring, and have the most wretched consistency you can possibly imagine. Sometimes I have the suspicion that they must put in some other secret ingredient to make people addicted to them, but this is just a suspicion of mine, I don't want to start any rumors.

Actually it's not only the Germans who succumb to this strange craving. Here on VT there are no fewer than three tips saying how great these Gummibärchen are, and two of these tips are by Americans, namely lenoreva and AcornMan. But the third is by a German, World-travel, who writes: "Everyone likes Gummi bears..."

Everyone? Well, not quite. In an obscure Frankfurt neighborhood there is still one tiny pocket of resistance...

Anyway, the second thing you have to know is that Bärchen or little bear is a nickname that lovers sometimes call each other, so the phrase "Gummi, Bärchen" with the comma could be taken to mean "Rubber, darling" or "Don't forget the rubber, darling."

Website: http://www.machsmit.de/

"Ich komme lieber mit."

This one just says: "I'd rather come along."

But, as VT member globerover has pointed out:

"Ich komme lieber mit" might be translated as "I'd rather come along", as you stated, but in this connection it has a different meaning. The German word "kommen" is used in the "sexual language" in the very same way as "to come" in English. So the slogan in fact means "I prefer to come (ejaculate) with" (with condom, of course).

Thanks, Leo, for this explanation!

Website: http://www.machsmit.de

Spring feelings

If the text of one of these ads is in German and you don't understand it, take a deep breath and very politely ask some nice-looking person that you were looking for an excuse to speak to anyway. If that person doesn't tell you to bugger off (or slap your face or call the police) maybe she will give you a charming explanation of what the text of the ad means.

Second and third photos: "For dreamers, realists and braggers"

Website: http://www.machsmit.de/

Give a present with love

Poster in the Frankfurt am Main train station, track 11.

Second photo: This "Schäferstündchen" is sort of a play on words in German. It could be taken to mean The Shepherd's Little Hour or The Little Sleeping Hour.

Website: http://www.machsmit.de/

Colorful Evenings

Here's an illuminated poster called "Colorful Evenings" in a Munich subway station.

Second photo: Go for Gold! I took this photo of a postcard propped up against a beer glass in the BordBistro of a late night ICE-train on the way home from the opera in Mannheim, just to try out the macro function of my new camera.

Third photo: My pop star.

Website: http://www.machsmit.de/

My stamp collection

This one is entitled "My stamp collection."

It is no doubt a reference to that timeless question: "Would you like to come up and see my stamp collection?"

Update: Thanks to VT member JLBG for pointing out that in France this question would be "would you like to come up and see my Japanese engravings" or "let me show my etchings".

Which reminds me of an old James Thurber cartoon (originally published in The New Yorker, later included in his book Men, Women and Dogs) in which a very wimpy-looking man says to a woman in a hotel lobby: "You wait here and I'll bring the etchings down."

Website: http://www.machsmit.de/

Quickie.

When you travel around Germany, be on the lookout for the clever condom ads that are posted in stations and on billboards all over the country.

What all these ads have in common are the two slogans:

Mach's mit meaning take part or join in. *

Gib AIDS keine Chance meaning Don't give AIDS a chance.

And they all list the website www.machsmit.de, which is a very informative, friendly and non-moralizing website intended to promote safer sex among young people. (All in German, of course.)

Do other countries have ads like this, too, or is Germany the only one?

Second photo: Here's a newer one, from the summer of 2006, with the condom on a carrot. The headline is "Against Short-Sightedness", meaning not only that carrots are good for your eyes, but also that it would be short-sighted to have sex without a condom.

Third photo: Another vegetable one from 2006. It reads: "Fits any cucumber! A condom is so elastic that it almost always fits perfectly. And in case the standard rubber doesn't fit properly, there suitable types even for unusual sizes. That makes sex secure and relaxed for everyone. Including you!"

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* Thanks to VT member globerover for pointing out that the slogan "mach's mit" also stands for "mach es mit", meaning "make (do) it with" the "with-thing" is the "condom" of course. So, the slogan in fact means "do it with (condom)".

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Website: http://www.machsmit.de

Litfaßsäule

This typical cylindrical advertising column, which you can see in cities and towns all over Germany, is called a Litfaßsäule ("Litfaß-pillar" or poster pillar) after its inventor, the 19th century German printer, publisher, poet, event manager and all-round entrepreneur Ernst Litfaß (1816-1874).

Litfaß installed his first one hundred poster pillars in Berlin in 1855, which makes 2005 the 150th anniversary of his invention.

The poster pillar shown in the photo is advertising neither kiwis nor bananas, it is advertising itself. The slogan is:

Plakate machen aufmerksam -- 150 Jahre Litfaßsäule.

Which means roughly:

"Posters grab your attention -- 150 years of the Litfaß pillar".

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Thanks to VT member JLBG for pointing out that "the Litfaßsäule were the ancestors of the famous Paris "Colonnes Morris" (1868) that have recently spread to other French cities".

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What's so bad about it?

A glance at a map of Germany will reveal that there are hundreds of place names that start with the word "Bad", and you have probably guessed that this does not mean all these places are bad in the sense of awful or terrible.

The German word Bad means bath, so these places are all spas. They all have naturally occurring mineral springs which are alleged to have medicinal or curative properties of some sort, so these are places where people come to "take the waters".

In the good old days before the German economy started going to hell in a hand basket, any self-respecting German above the age of, say, 32 would try to develop some vague illness which would allow him or her to go off on a three or four week Kur at the expense of their health insurance. That's why lots of German towns attempted to get the word Bad in their names, so they could get a chunk of this lucrative business.

Bad Orb for instance was only called "Orb" until 1909, when they finally got state permission to use the word Bad in their name. And Bad Hersfeld was only called "Hersfeld" until 1949.

I once asked my doctor in Frankfurt if he would prescribe a Kur for me, but he only laughed and said I was too healthy. I was somewhat miffed about this at the time, but have since decided that it wouldn't have been my scene in any case. And being healthy is something really fine, even the Germans are starting to get healthier now that their health insurance has stopped paying for everything.

If for some reason you would like to read about life on the Kur, there is a short book by Hermann Hesse called Kurgast, published in 1923.