Maybe you've been following my blog these past few weeks, or even months. Maybe you randomly clicked the link on Facebook while you were stalking me. Either way, odds are you don't know what
der Landstreicher means. According to my Langenscheidts Wörterbuch (wordsbook—>dictionary), ein
Landstreicher is a
tramp or a
hobo. According to
LEO, it can also mean
vagabond,
vagrant,
yegg,
landloper, or
rolling stone. (And rolling stone comes with a female equivalent,
die Landstreicherin...maybe I should go for that.)
First, I would like to point out that
landloper is very old, and very Dutch. It doesn't even come up on Merriam-Webster.com unless you have a paid account. But I guess that's okay. It means literally
land walker, or a
wanderer,
vagrant, or
adventurer. More questionable is
yegg. Like seriously, what? A
yegg is a
safe cracker or a
robber. Have you ever heard or seen that word before?
I am certainly not a yegg. (Hahaha.) Or a vagabond, vagrant, or hobo. Nor a tramp, in any sense of the word. I do, however, walk on land—who would have thought—and hope to consider myself an adventurer soon. There are so many places I want to visit, and also many I'd like to try living in, so it seems like a fitting title. I originally learned it with only the definitions
tramp and
hobo. I was trying to read
Knulp, by Hermann Hesse, and after getting sick of constantly stopping to look up words, I tried a few pages without a dictionary. Then I got frustrated with not understanding all the words and I gave up. But the word
Landstreicher really bothered me, because I thought I should have known it, but I didn't.
The word I had been thinking of was
Anstreicher, which means house painter. Or in the context of what we read for class, the person painting the world with propaganda, aka Hitler. But when I looked up
Landstreicher and read
tramp, hobo I laughed to myself, because
hobo makes me think of
bum (even though they're not the same thing) and I call myself
a lazy bum all the time. Later, when I was trying to come up with a German title for this blog, I remembered
Landstreicher and decided it was good, at least for the time being.
Later on, I looked into
Knulp and the word more, and decided that if I was going to use it as my title, I needed to know what I was alluding to. Plus
Knulp takes place in the Black Forest, which is where I was headed, so with four days left in Ann Arbor, I checked it out of the library and read it—in English, because the German version would have required making a request and four times as much time.
Knulp a novella made up of three stories about Knulp,
der Landstreicher, from different phases of his life. The translation I read used
tramp every time.
I know this is long, but this the word's first occurence in the book, in a passage explaining Knulp's carefree, restless existence.
"Keeping his roadbook in order was indeed one of Knulp’s hobbies. In its dazzling perfection, his roadbook was a delightful fiction, a poem. Each of the officially accredited entries bore witness to a glorious station in an honest, laborious life. The only seemingly discordant feature was his restlessness, attested by frequent changes of residence. The life certified by this official passport was a product of Knulp’s invention, and with infinite art he spun out the fragile thread of this pseudo-career. In reality, though he did little that was expressly prohibited, he carried on the illegal and disdainful existence of a tramp. Of course, he would hardly have been so unmolested in his lovely fiction if the police had not been well disposed toward him. They respected the cheerful, entertaining young fellow for his superior intelligence and occasional earnestness, and as far as possible left him alone. He had seldom been arrested and never convicted of theft or mendicancy, and he had highly respected friends everywhere. Consequently, he was indulged by the authorities very much as a nice-looking cat is indulged in a household, and left free to carry on an untroubled, elegant, splendidly aristocratic and idle existence." (p. 9)
I recommend it. And I also would like to enjoy the untroubled, idle existence of a nice-looking cat.
It's supposed to snow in Freiburg tomorrow or Friday, I forget which. The month ends tomorrow (tomorrow is Friday in this context...). I feel like Maraia just pointed out to me that we'd been here eight weeks, but the ninth week is already over half done.
Classes are a lot of reading, which is a lot of work. There's also a lot to do, and a lot of traveling across the city. Tonight I decided to be social despite not sleeping enough last night, and then managed to miss the Straßenbahn by like a minute and therefore arrived home much later than I had planned. For some reason, now I'm updating this instead of reading/reviewing vocab/packing—tomorrow, after a four-hour block of class, I'm traveling to Aschaffenburg, where my aunt lives.
For now, I just wanted to reassert my existence and put up a few of my fall-y pictures from my trip from however many weeks ago, to remind the world that it's a little early for snow. Especially since my winter coat is with my aunt and I've been so cold! Life is good, but way too busy right now.
Photos: 1. View out the train over the Rhine in the Rhineland. I love trains.