Transcript of “What Is “the German Disease”?”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Annette calling from Utah.
Hey, Annette, welcome to the show.
What’s on your mind today?
So as a child of a linguist, you can usually figure things out, but this is one that stumps me, and I thought Martha and Brad can help me figure it out.
Child of a linguist, a dangerous, dangerous connection. You must have had an interesting childhood.
Oh, yes. I did not know that discussing etymology over the dinner table is not normal.
What? It’s normal in my house.
What? Great childhood, really, truly.
So my mother is an immigrant. She was born and raised in Helsinki, Finland. And my paternal grandmother was also an immigrant. Her family immigrated from Germany to Idaho when she was just an infant. And so she didn’t remember Germany, but she grew up speaking German in the home and then learned English in the community and school.
So the story that has me stumped is my mother talked about a time when she was speaking to then her mother-in-law, my grandmother, about some illness that my grandmother had as a child. And apparently, according to my mom, grandma said that it was the German disease. And my mother, being relatively new, really immigrated herself. Oh, maybe I don’t know English as well as I thought. What is that? Tried to figure it out. Couldn’t find anything, of course, in English that would explain that. So she thought, well, I wonder if, you know, my grandmother had heard this term at home in German and then as an adult just translated it to English and didn’t know that’s not how we say it in English.
So my mom said that she had looked it up in some German dictionary and lo and behold, it’s rickets or something like that. Like a nutritional deficiency. I have tried searching it. Can’t find anything to corroborate that. No Deutsch anything. And so I’m wondering, is this a German thing? Is it an Idaho regionalism? Is my mother remembering the whole thing wrong? Hopefully you guys can have an answer for me.
So just to get this straight, your Finnish mother heard this from her German-speaking mother-in-law.
Yes.
Okay, gotcha. Yeah, this is super interesting. You were opening up a whole can of worms, Annette. And how old was the person when they had the German disease?
I got the impression that she was quite young. But I’m not. Again, this conversation happened in the late 60s before I was born.
Yeah. So what are we talking?
Yeah. Pre-adulthood?
Yes.
Okay. It would have been a childhood thing. And you’re going to understand why I asked. It’s because the affliction that’s most often called the German disease is syphilis. So if she was a kid, she probably did not have syphilis.
No. And this isn’t English, mind you. But there’s another disease, and the flu was sometimes called the German disease, rightly or wrong. We called it the Spanish flu because the Spanish were more open about the fact that this disease was roaming their country, that they had this epidemic. And so we call the Spanish flu, even though it’s not really from there. And so there’s this whole thing that happens throughout the world in every country where you blame your neighbor.
And so just to go back to syphilis, it was called the German disease by the French. The Italians called it the French sickness. The French called it the Neapolitan disease from Napoli, Italy. English called it the French pox and the Neapolitan bone ache. And we just go on and on. And the Dutch played in the Spanish. The Polish played the Germans. The Russians played in the Polish. And in India, they blame Portugal. In Japan, they blame Portugal and China. And in Muslim Turkey, they blamed all of Christianity. So it’s just, and these are the names that this disease took. And you can almost track the progress of syphilis through the world by these names.
That is hilarious. Yeah, most people seem to think that it first appeared in a serious way in parts of Italy, among the maritime crowd, the sailors. So more than likely, if she was a child, what she caught was the flu. However, it’s possible that when she said the German disease, she meant German measles for rubella, although people don’t usually call it the German disease.
Yeah, that occurred to me as well. I don’t have any indication anywhere that something was called the German disease that involved rickets. I just have no information on that at all.
Yeah, and I couldn’t find anything either, so that didn’t seem right to me. But, again, that’s why I called.
Yeah, there we go. Well, I think you’re on the right track, and you just needed confirmation, and we’re happy to give it to you.
Yeah, we’re glad you called. Thank you so much. That was fascinating.
Yeah, our pleasure. Take care of yourself, Annette.
All righty. Bye-bye.
Bye.
