If You're Losing Your Mind In The Age of Idiocracy, Here Is A Grammar Lesson For You

When I for some blurred reason had chosen German as my foreign language in the secondary school in an Anatolian city, it took me only two lessons to feel what a mistake I had made. Not that my teacher was bad; it was the clash between my love of the rock music and lyrics from Britain in the late 60s, and my inability to understand them properly. The German language, at that time, was somehow against the Zeitgeist, I thought.

Exactly the opposite for John Le Carre, who puts everything in timeless perspective. 

"I began learning German at the age of 13, and I’m still trying to explain to myself why it was love at first sound. The answer must surely be: the excellence of my teacher. At an English public school not famed for its cultural generosity, Mr King was that rare thing: a kindly and intelligent man who, in the thick of the second world war, determinedly loved the Germany that he knew was still there somewhere ...One day, he used to say, the real Germany will come back. And he was right. Because now it has."

Le Carre argues that we need the German language - more than ever - like a bold medicine for logic and sound reason. A powerful cure against Orbanism, Erdoğanism, and, most unexpectedly visible of all, Trumpism. 

"In the extraordinary period we are living through – may it be short-lived – it’s impossible not to marvel at every contradictory or unintelligible utterance issuing from across the Atlantic. And in marvelling, we come face-to-face with the uses and abuses of language itself.

Clear language – lucid, rational language – to a man at war with both truth and reason, is an existential threat. Clear language to such a man is a direct assault on his obfuscations, contradictions and lies. To him, it is the voice of the enemy. To him, it is fake news. Because he knows, if only intuitively, what we know to our cost: that without clear language, there is no standard of truth.

How wrong I was, then, to reject learning German! 

Schade!