The Language of Thieves, by Martin Puchner
Tibor Fischer
TIBOR FISCHER
The Language of Thieves By Martin Puchner Granta Books £16.99
It infuriated Luther, intrigued Kafka and probably annoyed Hitler during his Vienna years.
The Language of Thieves tells the story of Rotwelsch, beggar’s cant, a sort of poor man’s Yiddish, that was spoken by vagabonds, fly-by-nights and criminals, few of them Jewish.
Rotwelsch-speakers also had a primitive writing system of zinken, markings they would use to give warnings or advice to their fellows.
The author, Martin Puchner, manages to weave in his family history as his grandfather, father and uncle, for different reasons, were keen students of the ‘language’. Language, dialect, sociolect or jargon? Puchner quotes Max Weinreich’s neat aphorism: ‘A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.’
A native Nuremberger, Puchner emigrated to the United States, where his determined investigation of Rotwelsch began in Harvard’s Widener Library. He had the idea of checking whether the library had any of his grandfather’s works. They did, including an article in a 1934 journal mentioning Rotwelsch. The article was entitled Family Names as Racial Markers. You can see where this is going.
Puchner certainly isn’t the first German to discover that Grandad was a Sieg Heiler. But his family history is weirder and more complicated than that.
Fittingly for a book dedicated to generations of wanderers, Puchner rambles through all sorts of subjects, from Luther’s irate compendium on beggars, through Esperanto, to his own naturalisation as an American citizen and Guantánamo Bay.
The subtitle of the book is One Family’s Secret History. It turns out that the Puchner family history is not so much a closely guarded secret, as a tale of members not paying much attention to facts and events being poorly remembered, or enthusiastically forgotten, as happens in most families.
You do get the feeling that some of the domestic matter is there because there isn’t that much to say about Rotwelsch itself. Hence a chapter on Yenish, another cousin of Rotwelsch.
The meandering storyline and descriptions of pubs is nevertheless something that Puchner manages to pull off (the samples from his father’s poetry, on the other hand, could have been dropped).
It’s also fantastic how the reader is treated to some of the favourite German stereotypes. Luther’s main objection to beggars seems to have been their irregular, unordered life, and Puchner can’t help being outraged by typos in the sheet of lyrics of The Star-spangled Banner he and his fellow pledgers are given when they become American citizens.
Germany is such a paperwork paradise. It’s probably the only country in the world where being an archivist is cool and where archives keep files on their archivists (fortunately for Puchner, this greatly aids him in his investigation into his family).
As much of the action takes place in Nuremberg, I was waiting for Wagner to make an appearance, but Puchner outfoxed me. Nuremberg does provide a passage on Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and the Nuremberg Trials. Puchner’s great-uncle Otto, a former Brownshirt who breezed through the de-nazification process, helped to organise the immense number of
files generated by the trials of the Nazis and ended up as ‘the number-one expert’ on them.
Puchner also relishes the irony that the Nuremberg Trials are the birthplace of simultaneous interpretation, that invaluable tool of international conferences and understanding.
Nuremberg should be proud, Puchner argues, of its role in pioneering the notion of ‘crimes against humanity’, and ‘demonstrating to the world the possibility of international justice’. I doubt everyone would agree that those trials brought about any substantial justice.
Puchner’s affection for Rotwelsch is obviously deeply felt. According to Puchner, the one term that’s in regular use in English that comes from Rotwelsch is ‘to be in a pickle’.
He extols a number of his most cherished expressions: to ‘make a rabbit’ is to scarper, and prison is referred to as a ‘school’.
Perhaps it is the influence of Rotwelsch, but I’ve come across many references to prisons as ‘schools’ or educational establishments, and I can’t help wondering whether this witticism wasn’t a conceit that was itching to happen everywhere.
A book about Newgate Prison, published in 1703, dubs it ‘Whittington’s Colledge’ (sic). Its blurb boasts: ‘Giving an Account of the Humours of those Collegians who are strictly examined at the Old Baily, and take their highest Degrees near Hyde Park Corner.’
The Tyburn Tree, the gallows, was at Hyde Park.