Post Cards from Hanover

I took the post cards and painting we bought in Hanover to my German lesson this week because Antje was curious to see them and I had hoped she would be able to translate them for us.  She was able to give us an idea of the topic of each one, but a word for word translation turned out to be quite difficult. I was surprised to learn that the alphabet used for all three of these is not the modern day German alphabet, but Sütterlin. Sütterlin was the last widely used form of Kurrent, the historical form of German handwriting. Antje mentioned that her Grandmother and mom (to a lesser extent) learned Sütterlin, but by the time she was in school it wasn’t taught. How strange that Antje’s mom and grandmother learned a totally different alphabet, so different that Antje has a hard time even understanding many of the words! She printed out a copy of the Sütterlin alphabet for me – the e’s look like n’s, the s’s look like l’s, v, x, and y are totally unrecognizable!

The oldest postcard is from 1896 and was a new year’s greeting to friends.

The second oldest is from 1918 and is from a girl to her mom. On top of being in Sütterlin, it is smugged since it was written in pencil and is very hard to read.

The third is from 1936 and is a postcard to a friend talking about how it has been many years since they have spoken and wanting to catch up.

Anyway, I thought these were interesting so I thought I would share. You can read more about Sütterlin here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%BCtterlin

Another interesting thing I learned during my German lesson today – it is popular in Germany to do a farm vacation. You rent a cottage or apartment from a farmer for a week or two and help around the farm, let the kids play with the animals and ride on the tractor, etc. I guess if you live in Berlin of Munich and your kid doesn’t get out in the city much I could see this as being a good experience. But, overall I think it is hilarious and wouldn’t be how I’d want to spend a vacation. Getting up at the crack of dawn to milk cows or shovel poop? No thank you!  But from what Antje said this is very popular. Who knew? Either way, I don’t see a Bauernhof vacation in our future any time soon!