DACH

A lexicographical discovery

Because the BL's collections are so rich and wonderful, it’s easy to get a bit blasé about precious and unusual items. It's not that we take our treasures – or any of our collections – for granted, but I tend not to be hugely surprised when, for example, I’m checking an antiquarian dealer's catalogue and see that we have two copies of the book marked "extremely rare", or when I discover that one of our early German books has beautifully hand-coloured plates or an interesting ownership inscription.

However, every now and then I come across something that does stop me in my tracks, and this happened the other day when I was following up an enquiry letter from Germany. The enquirer worked for an institution called the Daniel Sanders Haus , which commemorates the German lexicographer of that name.  Like many English speakers who have studied German, I had actually heard of Sanders without realising it: together with one Eduard Muret, he compiled a German-English dictionary, first published in 1869, and the modern successor to that dictionary, published by the Langenscheidt Verlag, is still known as "Muret-Sanders".

Anyway, according to the letter I'd received, Sanders sold the working notes for the two-volume German dictionary which he compiled single-handedly and published between 1860 and 1865 to the then British Museum Library. I must admit I was initially inclined either to doubt the story or pass the enquiry on to a manuscripts specialist, but the enquirer had done his research thoroughly and provided two BL printed book shelfmarks, LR.276.a.2 and LR.276.a.3. When I ordered these I was amazed to discover that in each of these two copies, the two volumes of the dictionary were indeed swollen to five and six volumes respectively by the interleaved sheets of Sanders’ notes.

And what notes! Not just handwritten notes on the interleaved sheet, but additional slips pasted in, cuttings from newspapers and magazines with particular words and phrases highlighted and annotated, and in at least one place a whole little pamphlet of additional notes attached to the interleaved sheet.  
Altogether a fascinating view of the lexicographer at work: it was one of those moments which made me want to spend the rest of the day (week, month…) examining the volumes, and I was amazed that I’d never heard of them in my 18 years at the BL.

So I wrote back to the enquirer explaining that he was indeed right about Sanders' notes. I hope that he or one of his colleagues is able to come and study the dictionaries in the detail they deserve, though it could potentially be a lifetime's work given the volume of material and the difficulty – even by 19th-century German standards – of Sanders' cramped handwriting. Meanwhile I'm very grateful to the enquirer for setting me on to the volumes; enquiries have often led me to interesting corners of the collection, but there are few which I have found so intriguing as this.

SR

More about German America...

There is a persistent myth out there in cyberspace and elsewhere that shortly after independence the United States came within one vote of making German its official language. 

This, of course, is untrue: the U.S. actually has no official language, despite all its government documents being printed in English, and in the 1790s people of German descent were far too sparsely represented for their language to present much competition for the dominant one. Nevertheless, perhaps in part because of the close relationship between the Hanoverian/British government and several small German states, Germans and German speakers were among the earliest migrants to the British colonies in North America. Some were British residents, successful enough before they came, but seeking further opportunities. Others fled wars, or the oppression of radical Protestants by the Holy Roman Empire, and established their new towns and colonies in such places as Ephrata and Bethlehem, both in Pennsylvania.

A while ago, I wrote a blog entry on German towns – both original and born-again! – in Washington and Oregon. But the state that springs most readily to mind when I think of Germans in the U.S. is undoubtedly Pennsylvania. There I have heard people speak the distinctive Pennsylvania Dutch, derived from the language once spoken in the Palatinate, from where their ancestors originally came. They also run the celebrated Pennsylvania Dutch restaurants, serving huge portions of hearty Germanic-influenced food to long tables of tourists flung convivially together from all parts of the nation and world. (If you want to investigate further, the Library has cookery books at 7939.o.8, LB.31.b.9553 and 7947.aa.33, for example, as well as works on all other aspects of that culture, in English and German – though not it seems, in Pennsylvania Dutch itself!)

Despite this immediate association, there are other states which have as many Germans in them as Pennsylvania does. The mid-West received many of the second wave of German immigrants, poor farmers who came in the nineteenth century as economic migrants in search of a better life. Simultaneously, Yiddish-speaking Jews from Germany, Austria, Poland and Russia arrived mainly on the eastern seaboard, seeking refuge from the increasingly extreme racial and religious policies of their homelands. Another set of victims of such policies were the lesser-know Russian Germans, Protestants who left their homes on the Black Sea and in the Volga basin as a result of Tsar Alexander III's harsh Russification policies, which aimed to stamp out their language and questioned their loyalty to the nationalist Tsar. The BL has a good selection of books on these 'Volga Germans', in Russian, German and English, including ones specifically devoted to their life in the U.S. (e.g. 77/20765). They settled in Nebraska, Kansas and North Dakota, but when the land proved inhospitable some moved west. The migration continued into the 1960s, when the Boeing-based success of Seattle and its environs, allied to a temperate climate, drew mid-westerners away from the car plants of Detroit to new opportunities in booming industry.

Most recently, either Nazis or Communists drove many ethnic Germans – including such prominent names as Bertolt Brecht and Fritz Lang – to seek new homes in the United States. (Ironically, Brecht later attracted the attention of the un-American Activities Committee, and returned to Europe.)

Outside specific parts of Pennsylvania or Dakota, however, the Germans are now largely assimilated into mainstream English-speaking culture, and some of the best-known German Americans would be unrecognisable to us under their original names. This is perhaps overwhelmingly a consequence of World War One and of forced assimilation; the Library has a (German-language) study of the treatment of German Americans during those years at YA.2002.a.22389.

Nevertheless, up to 15% of the current U.S. population claims mainly German descent, and their influence is obvious in every sphere from everyday words (Kindergarten) to brewing and fast food.

Janet Ashton (West European Cataloguing Team Manager)

Ephrata Pennsylvania (Photo: Janet Ashton)

 

The joys of German cataloguing, or, Why didn’t I learn Spanish?

I catalogue foreign language books at the British Library, it's Monday morning and I have a pile of German books on my desk waiting to be catalogued. The German books present us with the most problems because of the breadth of subject matter. This is a risky statement because our Hispanic collections are a complete mystery to me but I've never heard any of the Spanish or Portuguese cataloguers complaining of difficult technical stuff. And let's face it, German is not as straightforward as the Romance languages anyway. As Mark Twain said, "The Germans take part of a verb and put it down here, like a stake, and they take the other part of it and put it away over yonder like another stake, and between these two limits they just shovel in German".

I need to get through five or six of these books by lunchtime to maintain the required cataloguing rate. I notice one of them is conference proceedings. Anxiety levels rise noticeably. That will mean a decision about conference main entry which can be difficult. Hard thinking or coin? The former obviously, but one is sometimes tempted.

Even the beautifully illustrated Die Bayernfenster des Kölner Domes 1844-1848 (The Bayern windows of Cologne Cathedral 1844-1848), which I take up first, is potentially a problem because of the troublesome looking subtitle Kirchenausstattung zwischen Kunst, Theologie und Politik (the art, theology and politics of church décor). It's going to need looking at quite closely. We are sometimes helped by existing records created by other libraries and I'm using one for this book where a German cataloguer has detailed 140 illustrations, 42 of which are colour. Obviously someone with too much time on their hands.  

I glance at another book in the pile. Waldburg-Capustigall: ein ostpreußisches Schloß im Schnittpunkt von Gutsherrschaft und europäischer Geschichte (Waldburg-Capustigall: an East Prussian castle: the squire, his family and European history). One of my duties is to propose new subject headings to the Library of Congress in the United States and this is the kind of work which may require them. Once approved by the Library of Congress the new subjects will appear on the British Library's catalogue. So, more extra work with this one.

Meanwhile, the French, Spanish and Italian cataloguers are having the time of their life.  Knock a few books off sharpish – no problem! – and then down to the canteen for coffee. I do French myself so I know this for a fact.

We also have to catalogue a series called Fortschritt-Berichte VDI, which unlike most of the foreign language books require a Dewey Decimal Classification number. Even a German would find these a challenge. Their subjects range from fuel injection systems in cars to mathematical models for biological treatment in sewage purification. When you're struggling to keep up your cataloguing rate, you don't want to meet one of these.

My desk is next to our "Urgents" trolley. German books always outnumber other languages here. The hated Fortschritt-Berichte VDI are placed here, too. Because of this geography, reader requested books are sometimes plonked straight on my desk rather than being more democratically placed on the trolley itself. They have to be catalogued asap, and definitely no time for cherry picking. The readers are waiting for their German books.

German is a wonderful language and a good knowledge of it opens the door to a wealth of great literature. I have also learned so much about German history, culture and arts while cataloguing German books. But I certainly found it more of a challenge to learn than French for example, and cataloguing it is generally more demanding than French, too. Which brings me to the point about Spanish. I have heard it said that Spanish is the easiest foreign language for a British person to learn. I don't have any evidence to back this up except for the less stressed faces of my colleagues. So maybe if I'd opted for that in my education rather than German my life would be a little easier now. In spite of all this though, German is not my major problem.That honour goes to Finnish with its fifteen cases and painfully difficult vocabulary. I wonder what Mark Twain would have made of that.

Trevor Willimott

 

‘To the Lighthouse’ revisited

I have just finished reading a German translation by Karin Kersten of Virginia Woolf's 1927 novel To the Lighthouse – Zum Leuchtturm (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1993).

For those who don’t know the novel, it focuses on two days ten years apart, with a reflective period in between. The two days, in 1910 and 1920, show the Ramsay family holidaying on the Isle of Skye. On the first day a journey to a nearby lighthouse is anticipated, and tensions affecting the family and friends staying with them are explored. The middle section gives a sense of time passing and lets us know what has happened to some of the characters. The second day, ten years later, sees the long-awaited journey to the lighthouse finally completed by surviving members of the original party.

A literary translation must retain the essence of the original and work on the same levels, yet be a unique manifestation. This makes translating a literary classic a laborious and difficult task and it would be impossible to emulate in German the genius of Virginia Woolf’s writing in what many consider to be her finest novel. Such a translation can only be a substitute then, something which approximates to the original in a way that satisfies the target language reader.

Nevertheless, I was interested to see how the German language coped with the stream of consciousness narrative mode. I don’t think this technique has been as much practised in German literature as in English or American works, but writers who did use it in German include Hermann Broch – the trilogy Die Schlafwandler (The Sleepwalkers, 1931-32) and Der Tod des Vergil (The Death of Virgil, 1945); Alfred Döblin – Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929); and Robert Musil  – Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities, 1930-42).

A full critique of the work is beyond the purview of this blog but I use Mrs Ramsay, the most important character, to illustrate a few points. Beautiful and caring, mother to eight children, she is admired, even loved, by friends who spend the holiday with her family – 'sie legte einen Zauber über sie alle' ('She cast a spell over them all'), and to Charles Tansley, philosopher friend of Mr Ramsay and dubious about the qualities of women, 'sie war die schönste Frau, die er je gesehen hatte' ('She was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen'). It is through her that we learn so much of the other characters.

Woolf’s extended sentences, sometimes ten or even more lines long, used to describe Mrs Ramsay’s thoughts, are ideal constructions for the generally less rigid word order of German and for the use of several parenthetical clauses within a sentence which is so common in German literature. However, certain literary devices are unavoidably sacrificed, for example where assonance is employed to bring a poetic sound to a phrase or sentence. 'The monotonous fall of waves on the beach, which … beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts' becomes 'das monotone Anbranden der Wellen an der Strand, die … einen gemessenen und beschwichtigenden Trommelwirbel für ihre Gedanken schlugen', and the melody of the language is completely lost. Similarly alliteration, which can bring a poetic rhythm to prose, suffers in this translation. In describing Mrs Ramsay’s effect on William Bankes, the phrase, 'as if the ship had turned and the sun had struck its sails again', which gains power from its repetitive consonants, becomes in German the rather less forceful, 'als ob das Schiff umgekehrt und die Sonne wieder auf seine Segel gefallen wäre'. Onomatopoeia sometimes still works because of a similarity between English and German words – 'this sound … suddenly thundered hollow in her ears' / 'dies Geräusch... dröhnte ihr auf einmal hohl in den Ohren', but the subtlest skills of the translator are often frustrated by the limitations of the target language. Because Woolf's writing depends so much on the lyrical nature of her prose when describing the thoughts and feelings of her characters, these failings are a telling disappointment in the translation.

The life of the mind is always much more interesting than the 'real' world. That's where we live; we just move around in the physical world. Therein lies the appeal of stream of consciousness writing for me. While this was not an easy read, close attention to differences in the two languages has helped towards a deeper understanding of the novel, and in spite of some shortcomings in certain nuances of language, the interior monologue is closely paralleled in the translation, allowing the reader into Mrs Ramsay's mind as completely, if not as lyrically, as the original.

Trevor Willimott (West European Cataloguing Team)

Words nice and nasty

A few years ago the Deutscher Sprachrat, which promotes the German language at home and abroad, ran a poll to find “the most beautiful German word”.  Musing on the results would easily fill a whole post, but I mention it here because, having occasionally worked as a freelance translator, I’ve got a little list of unfavourite German words, which – perhaps perversely – reminds me of this campaign. Unlike the words in the poll, however, my unfavourites are defined not by sound or meaning, but by downright difficulty to translate.

Of course German, like every language, has its classic “untranslatables”, words considered to have a powerful symbolic or emotional weight impossible to convey exactly in another language. One of the poll winners is a fine example.  Look up a dictionary definition of “Habseligkeit” and then read the winning justification and you’ll appreciate the gap. Luckily I don’t usually encounter such poetic problems as I mainly translate promotional material for academic publishers. Instead it’s the language of German academia which causes me grief.

For example, the verb “erschließen” tends to make my heart sink;  it basically means to open something up or make it accessible, but used to describe the function of a library catalogue – “Der Katalog erschließt zum erstenmal die Manuskripte der Bibliothek” – it can make for awkward English unless you change the focus slightly: “The catalogue offers the first full description of the Library’s manuscripts”. Provided that is the case and the catalogue is fully descriptive rather than a finding aid. “Systematisch” is an other particular unfavourite, “Ansatz” can be a headache, and even “Wissenschaft” itself can be tricky.

Another problem occurs where German uses both a “Latin” and a “Germanic” word for the same thing. Of course you can often pull off the same trick in English, but sometimes the two German words only have one obvious English synonym: I recently found an author’s  “Selbstbiographie” described in the same sentence as an important “autobiographisches Zeugnis”, but “His autobiography is an important autobiographical document” sounds distinctly odd in English.

Out of context, or to a formally qualified translator, this probably sounds like small beer. But I do find that it’s the superfically straightforward words, rather than the famous untranslatables or false friends, which set traps for the unwary. It fills me with admiration for translators who work on literary texts and have to (re-)create a work or art and reflect an individual voice as well as conveying a coherent meaning. My colleague Patricia Tiney has successfully done just that in her newly published  translation of a story by Theodor Fontane, Under the Pear Tree,  the first full English version of this work.

Finally, despite my rogues gallery of unfavourite German words, I have my own favourites too. Like the Sprachrat’s poll respondents, I love these for their sound as much as anything. And top of my personal poll? For many years that has been “Ewigkeit” (Eternity) – a lovely, spacious word for a lovely, spacious concept.

[SR]

Document Supply Centre Requests – revisited

Back in August I wrote a post titled Document Supply Centre requests and the ‘r-word’. Now that this year’s budget for German-speaking Switzerland is used up, I have time to revisit the volume of requests for inter-library loans. Due to the number of requests, and to the need to consider whether a requested item provides “value for money”, I have been rejecting more “borderline” items (i.e. items which do not 100% fit our German Collections Development Policy).

As an example, an item costing 80 Euros or more, in a subject area we don’t normally cover, and with a very narrow or specific focus is not necessarily good value for money because, apart from the actual price of the book, we need to consider the overheads of ordering, processing, cataloguing and long-term storage. In the case of DSC requests, as the book is to be sent out on loan, there is also the extra potential for damage or loss.

But back to the statistics. Statistics can of course, give a skewed idea of what’s happening; for example: when did the academic year start, or when was Christmas or Easter. These external changes at institutes’ “working times” influence how many requests we get. Also, the number of German departments in the UK will affect it. However, looking back at the spreadsheets for the last year, two non-numerical observations are clear:

1. the number of diverse institutions asking for German language publications was much higher then, compared to now.
2. Recently we have received more requests which are out-of-scope, and these are also areas which English-speaking academia should cover well.

In one view I can show you some statistics graphically:

The horizontal lines 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 represent the financial years 2005-2006, up to 2009-2010. So the most obvious observation one can make with regard to my previous post is: for this financial year’s April, May and June the number of requests was extraordinarily high. And even though October is – surprisingly– a time when we get loads of requests, October 2009 was maybe slightly down from October 2008, but still higher than the other three years. December 2009 and January 2010 were not extremely busy, but it is worthwhile bearing in mind that libraries and institutions nationwide have probably started to feel the crunch now, and that interlibrary loan requests are not enjoying the same level of budgets any more as in these institutions last academic year.

However, all this is a bit more complex. I only see the requests for items we do not hold, and therefore there might well be many more requests for German Collections items (those which we already have). So I’d like to conclude with: it’s too early to monitor the recession on the basis of DSC requests at the British Library’s German Collections.
[CG]

Anyone for dubbing?

Over Easter I saw a television advert for Swiss chocolate featuring a small girl whose voice had been (rather badly) dubbed into English, presumably from a German-language original. Watching it reminded me that adverts are about the only place where we now experience the dubbing of foreign voices on British television. 

That wasn’t always the case. Most people of my age remember with mixed affection and bemusement the dubbed children’s drama serials which were shown year after year on school holiday mornings. Oddly, many came from Eastern Europe, then firmly behind the Iron Curtain. Even the most famous German import fell into this category: Das singende, klingende Bäumchen (The Singing, Ringing Tree) was an East German production, although the other best-remembered dubbed German children’s serial, Silas was West German. That was shown in the early 1980s and must have been among the last dubbed live-action series shown on British television.

By then children were either more sophisticated or less tolerant, and even adults who had grown up with dodgy dubbing were unenthralled by Channel 4 dubbing the medical drama Die Schwarzwaldklinik (Black Forest Clinic) in the mid-1980s. Dubbing eventually disappeared, and has never really come back in the UK, although it’s still common in many European countries, including DACH. As well as many academic studies on the topic, there’s even a German reference book devoted to the art, Lexikon der Film- und Fernsehsynchronisation (BL: YA.2003.a.16376), which lists the German voice casts of dubbed films – who’d have guessed that Klaus Kinski voiced the character played by Sabu in Black Narcissus! – and includes brief biographies of famous dubbing artists.  

When I lived in Germany I got used to dubbing again, and the only time it really jarred was when I started watching the British film Mona Lisa on television. I found it impossible to carry on because to me it felt so wrong to hear the very different and distinctive accents of Robbie Coltrane and Bob Hoskins both dubbed into more or less standard German (by Joachim Kerzel and Wolfgang Kuehne respectively, the Lexikon informs me). But conversely, having first seen the film Rain Man dubbed into German, I found the English original jarring, again because of a very distinctive speech pattern, this time the monotonous phrases repeated by the autistic savant character. And a couple of years ago we had a German intern who was disappointed when he first watched The Simpsons un-dubbed because ‘the voices sounded all wrong’.  

In a way it’s a bit sad that we’re too sophisticated now for dubbing. While as an adult I’d rather watch a foreign film or TV series with subtitles, I wouldn’t necessarily have wanted to do so as a child. Those old foreign children’s serials are remembered as a bit of a joke now, but laughing at a bit of bad dubbing wasn’t their only appeal back in the day. They offered a window – however bizarre or fantastic at times – into a culture other than that of the English-speaking world, which today’s children, for all our global media, don’t seem to get through TV and films.

[SR]

Discoveries 4

Sometimes the way I discovered an item is more interesting than the item itself. In this case it is at least worth mentioning briefly. I have been asked to catalogue items of the so-called Collins Collection (books primarily selected by the book dealer John Collins for their bindings; there's more information in the newsletter of the Friends of the British Library, Issue 56 Spring 2007, p. 5). Some of the bindings look to me – as a layperson – extremely boring or standard, for other books even I can see that the binding is extraordinary, or at least “something special”.

One item for which this is true, is:

Muret. Muret-Sanders Encyclopaedic English-German and German-English Dictionary : giving the pronunciation according to the phonetic system employed in the method of Toussaint-Langenscheidt / [smaller edition for Home and School.]
(Berlin : Langenscheidtsche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1905.)
Wq6/9979
Collins 831 [not yet fully processed and orderable]

As you can see it is a reference work of 1905, but there are at least two features I should mention here. First the cover has this interesting depiction of a friendly world where England, France and Germany would help and support each other (in case you can’t see it from the scan to the right: the three hands shaking have each a kind of shirt sleeve which features each countries’ name!).

The other notable feature is the explanation of signs within the introduction. Whereas some similar, helpful advice re usage of words is common, I have so far not seen a dictionary which advised that a word

• is a Masonic terminology (symbolised by a rectangle)
• was part of the “lang. of the criminal classes” (symbolised by a small gallows)
or even
• was part of the “language of the uneducated people” (the letter “P” is used)

I won’t comment on these, of course, but will simply give you the visual proof that I’m not making this up:

[CG]

Discoveries 3

Oh, you think, we are back to these Discoveries entries, and the next thing he is going to say is that he found this book by accident whilst looking for something else, and it will be a book to do with the dark past of the country he was born in. Okay, this one is actually different:

1. It’s about a Brit who moved to Switzerland, giving us insights about living there.
2. I did actually search for “England” and “Schweiz” (Switzerland) to find publications in our collection on the theme of “England seen through the eyes of others”, and after Switzerland, I might actually search for examples from Austria and Germany, but we’ll see.

The title of this post’s discovery is:

Langford, Reginald Augustus. England-Schweiz unentschieden. Wie ein Brite die Eidgenossen kennenlernte. Vignetten von Hans Fischer. (Zürich, [1957].) 10196.g.30.

Before I get carried away about the slightly humorous drawings by Hans Fischer (1909-1958), I should probably briefly translate the title of this book: England versus Switzerland, A Draw.

RA Langford’s book touches, of course, on topics which are specifically Swiss, but there is a nice little story in this book, which is supposedly part of the Swiss male’s characteristic. Now all worries about stereotypes aside, I could well imagine a German or an English man behaving in this way too; it is relatively amusing. Langford describes the scene for this story and recalls the dialogue below: imagine a young, female English teacher, and her new male pupil who wants to have conversation classes.

Teacher (in an encouraging and inviting way): Would you like to tell me about your work?
Student (not very keen): My work isn’t very interesting – every day it’s the same...
Teacher: That doesn’t matter, just tell me something about it.
Student: Well, actually there isn’t much to tell you.
Teacher: Yes, but what are you doing for a living? Business correspondence? Or accounting?
Student: Actually a bit of everything.
Teacher (trying not to lose her friendly and encouraging demeanour): What are your hobbies?
Student: Actually not many. [note: this doesn’t make direct sense in German either]
Teacher: Are you a member of a local club or an association?
Student: No.
Teacher: Do you ski?
Student: No. […]
Ten minutes later, following a similar pattern…
Teacher: Are you interested in books? Student: Not really. No time to read.
Teacher: Maybe we should read something together now?
Student: Alright, if you wish. But actually I came to make conversation.
(@ BL 10196.g.30, pp. 69-70)

[CG]

Apart from chocolate, cheese and minaret debates

When I learned that the BL’s underground area houses more than 600km of bookshelves (almost twice the length of my native country Switzerland), I was amazed. What is more, when Clemens brought me the Wörterbuch des Flumser Dialekts (BL shelfmark X.909/82299), the Dictionary of the dialect of my native village Flums, I was speechless.

I actually thought that I knew my father’s dialect inside out. Anyway, examining the book, I came across words I’ve never heard before. Like vertschienggä [fær't∫ıє:ŋgæ]: It’s a verb which describes the process of wearing out your shoes by “walking in an unorderly manner”.

A long chapter is dedicated to agriculture. I now know that the farmers have different calls for cows, pigs, goats and sheep to draw them back to the stables. Inspired by this newly acquired knowledge, I want to share something about Switzerland with you that not everybody knows.

The Alpabfahrt is the highlight for a lot of herdswomen and herdsmen who spent the whole summer in the mountains with their cattle for summer pasture. Living in the alp huts (Alphütten) is only possible during a few months, mainly July and August, as it is too cold there, apart from midsummer time. Although sounding rather idyllic, it is a busy time up there: during their stay in the mountains, in addition to looking after the cattle, the Sennerinen and Senner (the German name for people who are doing both herding and producing diary products) are producing cheese, milk and butter and are maintaining the pastures. There was a time when women were not welcome in the Alphütten because their presence there was thought to bring misfortune with it. That was also the time when many myths came into being. The most famous one is the Sennentuntschi myth (which could be translated as “the myth of the alp hut dolly”) of which exist countless variations in different regions in Switzerland.

Nowadays, quite a few women decide to spend the summer as Sennerinnen, and even people who are technically not farmers will work as dairy people during summertime to escape from every day life for a short time.

The Alpabfahrt marks the end of the summer pasture, when the cattle are brought down to the valleys again. It’s never clear when exactly this event is taking place because the homecoming depends on the long range-weather. Several hundred animals will then make their way down to the valley in small groups, each under the care of two or three Sennerinnen and Sennen. Before they set off for their way home, on average about 20 km (12 miles) away from the alp, the best cows (the ones that give the most milk) are adorned with a conical head dress of flowers and carry large bells on ornate straps around their neck, called Tschäppel .The women and men are wearing traditional clothes of the region. Back home, they are welcomed by the crowds and at various market stalls, the alpine dairy products are sold.

You can certainly imagine that during the Alpabfahrt, the herdspeople will have to cry “se se se” pretty often to keep the cows under control, and that afterwards the shoes are definitely vertschienggät.
[Asha Riederer, Intern November to December 2009]