“We’re doing Romeo and Juliet,” my daughter told me yesterday.
“Oh yeah?” I said. “Is it part of your English class?”
She looked at me and shook her head. “No. German.”
Auf Deutsch? Seriously?
“You’re kidding? Why would you be doing it in German?”
“I don’t know. We just are.”
That the Germans have a love of Shakespeare is a well known fact, but that he is integrated into the high school curriculum in translation suggests their love is as profound as any recounted by the bard himself. Even the one in question. It also suggests that besides Goethe, whose poems seem to occupy a 90 share of the syllabus, and have to be learned ad infinitum and recited ad nauseum, there are no German writers – dead or alive – worthy of presentation to the Facebook generation. Impossible. Or should that be Unmöglich!