Just when you start to think that Germany, as a culturally and technologically advanced western nation is just like the good ole USA, a quick comparison of pop culture iconography, as exemplified by what’s on TV, quickly disabuses you of this silly notion. Now, don’t misunderstand me--we have an amazing amount of unbelievably weird and I’m sure to a foreigner, incomprehensible stuff in our own pop culture idiom. I’m not making a comparative value judgment here—just pointing out two examples that have struck me this summer as both, hilariously funny and consummately strange.

“Hausmeister Krause”, a sitcom of sorts here featuring as the main protagonist a sort of bumbling concierge and his family. In the episode I caught last week, Krause is attending a meeting of his dachshund fanciers club—I’m not kidding. Now I’ve known since my first time living amongst the Germans that der Dackel was the dog of choice. Not the deutsche Schaeferhund, not the Doberman Pinscher, but rather the wiener dog is top dog in these parts and don’t you forget it! Germans enjoy a wide variety of wiener dogs with the, rare for us in the States, wirehaired dachshund seemingly the most popular of all (unofficial survey conducted by me). I am by no means the first amateur sociologist to make this observation. In fact, some former dweller in my apartment in Düsseldorf (a fellow Ausländer, I presume) left a rather funny little book behind, “The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs” by Alexander McCall Smith (a Zimbabwe born Brit now living in Scotland and author of the “No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency” series).

Back to Krause. In this episode, Krause meets his Dackel buddies, all men, for their regular meeting and there they are. Large, middle-aged German men, in their Dackel club uniforms, lots of medals, you get the picture and each is holding his personal Dackel. Some are of the wirehaired sort, others the smooth or longhaired (the dogs, not the men). Their club leader rules with an iron hand and, on command, all the members rise, their Dackels in their arms, and proclaim “Alles für die Dackel, alles für die Gruppe!”, “All for the Dachshunds, all for the Group!” I just about plotzed it was so funny and so completely alien.

Perhaps even weirder, no wait, definitely weirder is Bernd das Brot. Bernd is sort of a German Muppet, except that he is a walking, talking, singing, loaf of bread. I suppose he is intended to appeal principally to children but I’m not sure. Saturday nights he shows up on TV with his buddies, a sort of giant, animated Brussel sprout and a sheep. Bernd also like to sing and performs regularly on the show with a full band and backup singers and dancers. Only a picture does this concept justice and I‘ve included one with this post. Now we all know how much the folks here love their Brot and their Brötchen, and their Kuchen and I do too. It is one of the many pleasures I enjoy when in Germany, I go on the ultra-high carbohydrate diet! Perhaps Bernd springs from the carb saturated collective unconscious of the German Volk. For myself, Bernd, who speaks in a rather resonant baritone, reminds me disturbingly of the current governor of California. Bernd’s tag line, however, is not “I’ll be back” but rather, at the end of each episode, “Geh nach Hause!”, “Go home!”.