Don't we all wish we had a doppelgänger sometimes, someone who could take care of all the onerous chores like cleaning the fridge or clearing that pile of documents from our desk? Interestingly, the spelling of Doppelgänger (double, alter ego, dead ringer) wasn't changed when it was adopted by the English-speaking world (although it is sometimes spelled without the two dots on the a, making it look distinctly less German.)

The image is from fantasticfiction.co.uk.

This week, another one of my Russian favorites: Schlagbaum (boom barrier) became шлагбаум in Russian, keeping both its meaning and the original German pronunciation (albeit with a Russian tinge), except that the stress is on the second rather than the first syllable in Russian. 

From my colleague Ramona Binder I learned that the Romanians also use this term - in the form of schlagbaumi.

The image is from www.parktime-pro.ru.

This week's Word of the Week, Putsch (coup d'état, putsch, overthrow - isn't it interesting to see that there are two foreign words here in English?) has its origins in the Swiss dialect of German. It is used in French, English, Polish (pucz), Romanian (puci), Hungarian (puccs), Czech (puč), Italian (putsch) and perhaps even more languages that I am not aware of yet.

The picture is from www.charles-de-gaulle.org.

Bruderschaft/Brüderschaft trinken was originally a drinking ritual that marked the passing from the formal "Sie" form of address to the informal "Du". Nowadays, there are a variety of other meanings that derive from the original one (such as "to fraternize", for example - indeed, not all of them are positive, as witnessed by this example from Poland.) In Russia and Bulgaria, пить на/пиенето на брудершафт (bruderšaft) is a well-known ritual, too. 

My thanks go to my colleague Peter Reichstein for pointing out the Polish version to me.

The image is from www.radiopin.pl.

A while ago, my mother sent me a newspaper clipping about Japan and its love for Baumkuchen, a German cake specialty that is rather time-consuming to make. It turns out that the Japanese discovered baumukuuhen, as they call it, as early as in 1919, when a German pastry chef baked it in a Japanese prison camp. Today, according to the article, baumukuuhen is omnipresent in Japan, whereas it can only be found in a handful of bakeries in Germany. There are even shops specializing in baumukuuhen, and it comes in a variety of different flavors (e.g. green tea or pumpkin.)

Click here for the newspaper article about the phenomenon (in German.)

The image is from http://www.kitakaro.com/item_detail/24. A big thank you to Stefano Suigo for finding it for me!