VISITING AUTHOR/EDITOR ARTICLE

JANUARY  2011

St. Louis German Cultural Society

My First Business Trip

By Nikolaus Messmer

Forwarded From German Cultural Society, St. Louis

          When I came to this country in 1958, I had already nine years of English in Austria, so I was sure, I should make it without too much trouble. Little did I know about the intricacies of English, the many idioms and local expressions of the spoken language.

          Within two weeks of arrival, I found a job with a small family-owned manufacturing firm off South Broadway starting as a draftsman in the truck-body business which in German is known as Karosserie- und Fahrzeugbau. The owner and his wife worked there in the office, and so did three other relatives. There were also five non-relatives, including me, the guy with the heavy non-Irish brogue. The company structure was simple: the owner ran the company, the relatives did the accounting work, and the outsiders ran Engineering, Sales, and Production. They were all extremely nice to me, and things worked out well.

          But it didn’t take me long to run into some trouble. They all addressed the owner’s wife, who was about my mother’s age, by her first name, and that is how she was introduced to me. I should have caught on at that time, but it sounded disrespectful to me, and I simply could not do that. I felt much more comfortable to address her with the French title of honor, Madame, followed by her last name, as in Madame Curie, for instance. That form of address was at the time quite customary in Europe in situations like that. After addressing her a few times in that format, she looked at me over her glasses and waved me over to her desk. “Nick”, she said smiling, “I know you mean well, but would you please stop calling me madam?” There were only a few people in the office at that time. She must have chosen that moment so that she could tell me something that not everybody else would hear. “Would you do me a favor and call me by my first name?” After I got home that evening, I grabbed my dog-eared Langenscheidt Dictionary and looked up that word, the French and the English version. It was, as I knew it, in the first and second definition a polite and respectful term of address for a woman, but the third English definition read something like “the woman in charge of a house of prostitution’. That part I didn’t know. They must really have kidded her about the title that little Kraut had bestowed upon her. When on the next day she came by my drawing board and said, good morning, Nick, I turned around and said, good morning, Catherine. She smiled, and we got along beautifully ever since.

          The company was building a plant in southern Missouri and I had to go along for a three-day visit. There were three of us: The man in charge of Engineering and Production, his assistant, and I came along for the ride without a specific assignment. We left after work in one car and stopped at the halfway mark for dinner. They ordered T-bone steaks; one ordered his rare, the other medium-well. I had no idea what that was all about. They didn’t have steaks in Sacklas. The cows were primarily raised for the production of milk. Only after they were beyond that stage were they sold to the butcher and used for meat. That was one tough cut of beef. But I have to say that after boiling it for a few hours, it made very good Rindsuppe (beef soup), especially when served with homemade noodles or Grießknödeln (semolina dumplings). But the meat was tough. Franz Dimster coined the appropriate term, Gummifleisch (rubber meat). Yet, when served with boiled potatoes and an abundant supply of ‘Gappersoss’ (dill sauce), it made a delicious meal. The waiter wanted to know how I would like to have my steak done. The boss had ordered his rare (which I translated as selten), his assistant medium-well (halb gut), so I reasoned why not go all out and order mine very well (ganz gut). The waiter grinned. He said that their cook had unintentionally burned a few steaks beyond recognition, but officially their highest degree of doneness was well done. That was fine with me. The steaks looked and smelled great when they served them sizzling on hot platters with baked potatoes on the side. We were hungry, and we dug right in.

          My steak was a little darker than the rest of them, but I ate the whole thing, fat and all, ‘rumps und stumps’ as they would have said in Sacklas, only the bone was left over. That’s how we were taught at home: you eat everything on your plate. My mother would have been proud of me. Not much was said during dinner. I watched my companions finish their meal and could not help to observe - what seemed then to me – their awkward and inefficient way of eating. They cut one or two bite-size pieces of steak off, laid the knife down, transferred the fork to their right hand, and ate. Then, the process started all over again until they were done with their meal. The German procedure is more direct and efficient: The fork is held in the left hand, the knife in the right, and they stay there until a particular course, requiring both utensils, has been eaten. Of course today, my visiting relatives from Germany must have similar thoughts about my eating habits.

          After dinner, we continued our drive to the small town in southern Missouri where our new plant was under construction. We checked in at a local motel and went right to bed. We were to meet at 6:30 for breakfast; wake-up calls were set for 6:00 a.m. I got up on time, but regardless how many knobs I turned, the shower produced only cold water. I didn’t call the Front Desk because I did not know the English word for shower and I didn’t have my dictionary with me. In German, it’s Dusche, and in French, it is douche. Surely, they wouldn’t use the German name, but French had some possibilities. I showered in cold water, and went downstairs. My companions were already there. I told them what had happened. They just laughed: This guy is something else! Last night, he ate like Jack Sprat and his wife (I learned later, this was a reference to a nursery rhyme which goes something like this: Jack Sprat could eat no fat / his wife could eat no lean / and so betwixt them both you see / they licked the platter clean), and this morning, he took a douche. They still laughed as we drove to work, and I laughed right along with them. There is no better way to defuse a situation when the joke’s on you.

          This can only happen in America. Despite of my obvious shortcomings, they gave me more than an equal opportunity to learn and to work, to fail and to achieve. I rose through the ranks and eventually became President of the corporation, which by then had an impressive product line and had grown to about 500 employees.

By Nikolaus Messmer