Text: Bernd Huck

Talk like an Egyptian – Teach your Teachers

There was a terrible crush outside the Al Ittihad Alexandria Club building. The tournament was already over when a young man approached me: mid-twenties, very thin and tall, with a faint wisp of a moustache and gleaming white teeth. In good English he asked whether I was German and whether I would like to talk with him.

Of course, why not? So we talked about the tournament and its atmospheric final; he was pleased that Al Ittihad Alexandria, his club, had won. He would have liked to see us Germans as their opponents in the final. Then a few sentences about the city, the country and the people; he told me a little about his studies, then paused and thought for a moment.

He looked at me and said how surprised and at the same time pleased he was that I was talking to him – and in English, too. At school, he said, he had learned that Germans couldn’t speak English and wouldn’t talk to foreigners anyway, neither in Germany nor anywhere else.

I objected that this simply wasn’t true: the vast majority of Germans can speak English perfectly well – after all, English is taught as the first foreign language in schools – and, what’s more, most Germans are very happy to talk to foreigners. Why wouldn’t they be?

He seemed relieved. That was good, he said, because then he could keep liking the Germans. After all, he was a big fan of Adolf Hitler.

I beg your pardon? At first I thought I had misheard him. But he really had said it. And our conversation had started so nicely. I remembered that in Alexandria we had seen many street vendors offering Hitler’s book “Mein Kampf” in Arabic.

I replied sharply. Was he serious? Hadn’t he paid attention at school? Hitler was just about the very last person anyone should be a fan of – a man who drove people into war and cruelly murdered more than six million Jews. Didn’t he know that?

No, he said, that was news to him. He had learned that Hitler had brought people a lot of good things, motorways for example, and yes, he had known that Hitler couldn’t stand the Jews, but Hitler had had to protect German men from the Jews because they were taking the Germans’ women away.

For a moment I lost my composure and gave him a bit of a telling-off – though unfortunately I couldn’t think of any good English equivalents for the German insults that came to mind. I asked him again where he had got this nonsense from. He now seemed a little frightened and repeated that he had learned it at school.

I suggested he search the internet for relevant sites, preferably English-language ones rather than Egyptian ones, and notice the differences. Then we exchanged e-mail addresses and I had to go.

A few weeks later he wrote to me that he was no longer a fan of Adolf Hitler. He had also spoken to his teacher. “I teach the teacher,” he wrote.