Wrong Address; Return To Sender (Avengers: The Initiative 1-2)

Avengers: The Initiative 1 - Happy Accidents (2007-04) and 2 - Hero Moment (2007-05)

I'm not sure this Baron von Blitzschlag is undead or just old, but he certainly is another Nazi scientist. This is starting to get silly.

"Blitzschlag" translates to "lightning stirke". Not a last name I ever encountered. If someone reading this is really curious about the "Baron" bit, you could look into Freiherr.

What's really interesting is the way he talks - not the over the top accent, but the fact that he consistently addresses Doctor Hank Pym as "Herr Pym".
This can come across as a bit of a snub, since he does not address him as "Doctor Pym" (or even "Doktor", if need be).
It's also interesting to see that he knows the address "Mr" (last page of #1), yet chooses to use "Herr" to address Pym.
With both combined, also considering the "I'm your greatest fan" speech in #2, it looks to me like von Blitzschlag is trying to get on Pym's nerves.

Unfortunately we have a "Herr Gyrich" earlier, so it seems like the "Mr. Secetary" might have been a slip, and I might be reading entirely too much into it.


A general note regarding having German characters use "Herr"/"Frau"/"Fräulein" instead of English forms of address: For most characters, it's nonsense.

Apart from the fact that something that common is easy to pick up when you learn a language, you would have to have spent your life alone in a cave to not know Mr and Mrs and Miss. It's all over entertainment.

We get a lot of movies and TV series translated from English. Those are not subtitled, but dubbed. However, even when speaking German, the characters use the English forms of address. (I'm not saying you couldn't find counter-examples, though I can't think of any right now.)

This is not a new trend. Even in the German dub, that pointy-eared guy from Star Trek is called "Mister Spock". The oldest example I could find in a hurry was Gone With The Wind (1953).
This also extends to titles, for exampel right now "Mr. Bean macht Ferien" gets advertised, and off the top of my head I can think of "Mrs. Doubtfire", "Mr. Bill" and an old cartoon show called "Mr. Maggoo".

Considering present day settings, "Fräulein" is particularly inappropriate, because it's obsolete. If someone who was not a senior citizen had addressed me as "Fräulein" when I was a teenager (last decade), I'd have thought they were making fun of me.

So, yeah, quite a few Germans in English comics sound very weird to me.


Back to the comic at hand, there's a small point left: In Avenger: The Initiative #2, von Blitzschlag calls M.V.P. "die Übermensch". That schould be "der Übermensch" (grammatically masculine, rather than feminine).

It's in a name... (Thunderbolts 110)

Yes, sure, give the company that makes the propaganda toys making the villains look like heroes and the other way 'round a German name; frequent (and in contrast to this reasonable) Nazi references in the Civil War storyline really weren't enough. -_-

My first association for translating "Mittelwerk" would be "middle work", but I'm not sure if that makes sense.
"Mittel" can mean "middle, center" - for example "Mittelerde" is the German name of Middle-earth - but also "means" or "instrument" ("Mittel zum Zweck" = "means to an end"; "Der Zweck heiligt die Mittel." = "The aim justifies the means.")

Considering context, I suspect the aim was something like "tool factory".

Edited to add: Turns out I was wrong, and this is not a gratuitous "German= evil" reference, but another Nazi reference, Mittelwerk having been an actual factory producing weapons during WWII.

It's still obviously something on author/real world level, and therefore I consider it gratuitous.

Nazis and spelling (The Ultimates Annual 2)

The Ultimates Annual 2, October 2006

This issue features another sort-of undead Nazi scientist (his mind has been copied into a computer), as well as some German language. The latter includes the most hilarious mess-up in that field I found so far.

Nothing to say about Zola but "another undead Nazi scientist?", so, language.

In case you're not interested in longer ramblings, here's the fun bit:

A kind of biological weapon was called "Weiber Staub" - "dust of broads".
I can see how that happened: They translated "white dust", found "weißer Staub" and mistook the ß for a B, giving them "Weiber", which is the plural of "Weib", which is an old-fashioned and nowadays derogatory term for "woman" or "wife".

To the helpful part: If you come across ß and can't use that letter, replace it with ss. If you are writing in allcaps, even do that if you could use ß, since this letter only exists in lowercase.


So, any and all German apart from "ja", "nein" and "Heil"...


Cap: "Haben Sie keine angst". (Don't be afraid.)
Nearly; It should be "Angst" - all nouns start with a capital letter.

Cap: "Ich verletze Sie nicht." (I don't hurt you.)
It sounds a bit stilted, but is not incorrect.

Cap: "Wissen Sie, wohin sie gehen?" (Do you know where they are going?) 100% correct, and got something kinda tricky right. "Sie" can mean "she" or "they", or, as a formal form of address, "you". In cases where it means "you", it starts with a capital letter.

Minor note: "Sie" as an address is formal. It's what you use talking to strangers, your boss, generally when you're being polite. A grown-up talking to a child would use "du"; e.g. "Weißt du..." - But, well, all things considered it fits the situation.

Boy: "Zur geheimen Festung. In den Bergen. Wo die geistmänner sind." (To the secret fortress in the mountains. Where the ghost men are.)
That should be "Geistermänner" - again, all nouns get capitalized, and, well, I can't explain the compound well. "Geistmänner" reads more like "men of the spirit" than "ghost men".

Cap: "Danke, kleiner Soldat." (Thanks, little soldier)

Boy: "Guter glick, Kapitän Amerika."
Unless that boy is speaking a dialect I don't know, that should be "Viel Glück" - you wish "much", not "good" luck in German.


Zola: "Schlecht und tot!" (Evil and dead.)
Pretty much right. I think "böse" is a better match for "evil" than "schlecht", but it works.

Zola: "Schützen Sie mich!" (Protect me!)
Zola is surprisingly formal here, but what do I know about etiquette 40 years before I was born...

"Siegsoldat" translates to "Victory Soldier".

Zola: "It's as der Schwarze says. I am nichts." (... the black [man] ... nothing)
Right.

The "Weiber Staub" bit goes here.

Zola: Ich bin nur der Geist in dieser maschine. (I'm only the ghost in this machine.)
Again with the capital letter: Maschine.


"Seigsoldat" ...
Oh, come on, you got it right the first time. :(

Zola: Sicherung Kapitän Amerika!
"Sicherung" can mean "fuse" (the one that blows when something with electronics goes wrong) or "safety (catch)" (the one that keeps a gun from firing), or "protection".
Maybe they wanted "Sichert ...!" ("Secure ...!") .


Zola: Herr general!
General. Noun.

Zola: Amerika today, and tomorrow der welt! (... the world)
That should be "die Welt".
"Der Welt" would be posessive case, for example "der Rest der Welt" (the rest of the world).
The full phrase in German would be "Heute Amerika, morgen die Welt".

Zola: Nicht wieder! (Not again)
Nitpicking: should be "Nicht schon wieder." It's just one of those phrasal things.


All in all, the German here was better than I have come to expect from American comics. :)


Unrelated but still related: I like Cap's oldschool costume here way better than the modern one. The shield also looks way better to me than the bullseye design nowadays.
The slight redesign they did in Ultimates v2 to make his hood look at least slightly like a helmet seems also like an improvement to me.

Talking about Hitler... (Ultimate Spider-Man 107)

Ultimate Spider-Man 107 - Ultimate Knights pt 2

On the topic of killing the leader of an organization being pointless because someone else would step in, Daredevil says, "Not necessarily. They killed Hitler. And that was that for the Third Reich."

In the real world, Germany was bombed until most of the cities lay in ruins. The armies were beaten. Then Hitler committed suicide.


I'd like to go off on a tangent here: Do you know when the last time someone in Germany was killed by a WWII bomb?

It was last year.

He was killed during roadworks when the machine he operated struck a bomb that had been buried since about 15 years before he was born.

It happens only every couple of years that someone is killed (which is bad enough), but every year in Germany hundreds, if not thousands of tonnes of WWII bombs that failed to explode are found.

It might sound pretty self-centered, but, honestly, I think me being used to having about once a year roads blocked for bomb removal somewhere in my hometown or its suburbs is a big part of the reason why I react badly when someone makes light of war.

Villain and failed spellcheck (Sensational Spider-Man #30)

Sensational Spider-Man #30 from November 2006.

We have our first German bad guy, garnished with a great dose of WTF. Sure won't be the last, but might be the weirdest: a man-shaped swarm of "bees and wasps controlled by a dead Nazi scientist's reanimated skeleton."

For a bit of nitpicking on a different topic, let's look at two narration boxes near the beginning:

"Before he was a super-villain, before he was a telephone-wire repairman, Dillon dreamed about being an artist."

"(The same way a young German man named Adolph once did.)"

Assuming that's supposed to refer to Hitler, the spelling's wrong - his first name was Adolf.
Arguably it's also a factual error: He was still Austrian when a young man trying to get accepted by the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. (Vienna's the capital of Austria.)

What this is about, and New Mutants #36

I read comics. I sometimes even read Superhero comics. I'm fed up with the following:

• Germany being depicted as "place where everyone lives in Fachwerk houses and wears lederhosen".
• Roughly 9 of 10 German characters being villains.
  
• German language being usually completely butchered.

So, I'm going to point out this nonsense as I find it, serving the double purpose of letting me vent, and maybe, maybe helping someone out there avoiding factual errors. I will also point out comics that get things right, or at least not wrong, to see if things are really as bad as my current impression suggests.

I'm pretty sure other countries and languages are getting similar treatment, but I feel unable to accurately comment on those issues, so I'll leave that to other people... Thought I might be the only nutcase interested in something like this. :D

For a start:

2 panels from Marvel Comic's New Mutants #36 (published in 2007)

Yes, there are woodframe construction buildings in Germany - I even happen to live in one. It's not the norm, though.

However, Lederhosen are completely ridiculous as "typically German". First, they are "typical" for some parts of the Alps (parts of Bavaria, Switzerland, Austria, northern Italy).

Second, they are not everyday wear, but traditional costume. Ethnic. Folkloristic.

"Lederhosen" relate to "typically German" roughly like "traditional Native American costume" relates to "typical for the USA".

It's ridiculous, and not in a good way.