I’ve heard this joke with German tourists in an Italian or Greek city, parking their car and writing down the name of the street as (translated) “no parking” or “one-way street”, but I have a very hard time believing it could happen in real life.
A street sign with the name of the street on it looks likethis orthis
A traffic sign for one-way street (Einbahnstrasse) looks like this. Even if you don’t know the language, the arrow with a white/dark colour scheme is very wide-spread.
I find it hard to believe that people who are paying attention (not drunk, hung-over or tired) can confuse traffic signs with street signs in general, because of (intentionally) different formats.
While I don’t know the reasons for Americans, I think several have been given:
People watch a play/ musical/ opera/ read Mark Twain about Heidelberg specifically
People or their parents/ older relatives were stationed there because it was a big spot for bigwigs after WWII
In addition:
Heidelberg is very big on marketing itself as “the most romantic of all German towns” (it’s part of the Romantische Strasse - Romantic street)
Heidelberg is popular not only with Americans, but with tourists in general.
Why would Germans want to go to Muncie, Indiana? Is there anything special there? Isn’t Indiana one of those fly-over states with nothing much to see?
I’m a bit surprised at that reaction, because it’s not exactly a mystery in Germany that tourists come to Heidelberg for the romantic stuff. The ads certainly hype it that way, and it keeps other towns that are also nice, free. Besides being mentioned by Mark Twain and in operas, it also has an old university, leading to long-standing jokes (back in the 50s) of how the explorer meets a (cannibalistic) tribe in darkest Africa, when suddenly the Chief recognizes him as fellow student from Heidelberg, where he got education. (Do Brits tell the same clichee joke with Oxbridge?) (In the 60s, the joke was updated to the African having learned German when he studied in East Germany, because of the race between East and West to colonize/ recruit the newly independent African countries to their side by offering bribes).
If you really want to puzzle Germans and Austrians, start talking about the Sound of Music. Nobody knows that movie. The closest we have is the Heimatfilm with Ruth Leuwerik from the 50s, The family Trapp, shown sometimes on Saturday afternoons. But only older women watch these Heimatfilme, everybody else finds them kitchy and cheesy and full of clichees and old-fashioned.
The Austrians have caught on and offer special bus tours to the places where the movie was filmed - only in English, because only the American tourists are interested.
That’s really embarrassing for the British cops, given that both the new EU drivers license and the old ones follow the same schematic of numbered listings with surname, first name, date of birth and so on.
Your inexperience with human cognitive missteps is noted. I’ve absentmindedly thought stranger things without being drunk or tired.
In 1993 there was at least one 18 year old, sober and not unusually tired Norwegian male who made that mistake. I recall the sign, in Berlin on or near Ku’damm, as being just black letters on white with a pointy end, like any free standing street sign, but knowing the German penchant for uniformity, I readily accept I may be mistaken instead rather than it being an old or otherwise non-standard sign.
I did say alert - absentmindedly mistaking things is normal, and happens to many people.
There are old street signs around, certainly. But not with the distinctive arrow shape of a one-way traffic sign.
While old street signs are not replaced unless there is need to, out-dated traffic signs are exchanged despite the extra cost precisely in order to not confuse motorists too much.
And that’s the phenomenon that you’re seeing in mistakes like our temporary confusion about the “Einbahnstrasse” signs in Heidelberg. We saw a few street signs with scientists’ names on them, and we were thinking about the names rather than about the visual details of the signs. Then on another corner we saw another sign with similar-looking text and verbal content (with no regular street signs in its immediate vicinity to point up the visual contrast), and it just didn’t occur to us to compare the design of that sign with our visual memories of the design of the previous street signs. And thus the mysterious “Dr. Einbahn” was born.
Yes, if you’re paying attention to signage details you can easily spot the differences between German street-name signs and the “Einbahnstrasse” signs. However, if what you’re concentrating on is reading the sign content in an unfamiliar language, in a strange city where many of the architectural and infrastructure design elements all around you are also unfamiliar, then it is perfectly possible that you just won’t notice those differences immediately.
Of course, nothing I can say on this messageboard (or pretty much anywhere else) can directly convince you of the factuality of an anonymously recounted anecdote about the experiences of two jet-lagged young tourists a quarter-century ago. But if you read about various psychological studies of perceptual ability (such as the infamous “basketball players with gorilla” experiment), I think you’ll come to agree that it really is surprisingly easy for human beings to overlook even very obvious visual information, even when they think they’re paying attention.
As for the OP’s original question, I’d like to reiterate my previous point about the geographical convenience of Heidelberg as a tourist destination if you’re starting in the Rhine valley and heading for Switzerland. It’s not so much that Heidelberg is where we Yanks have always been longing to go, but that Heidelberg is conveniently located at reasonable distances from other places that lots of us are going.
After all, most Americans planning to visit Germany are probably not saying to themselves “Let’s see, out of all the places in Germany, which are the handful that I think are really the most important and best worth seeing?”, but rather something like “Let’s see, we’re leaving Amsterdam on Tuesday and have to get to Zurich by Saturday, what would be some good destinations in Germany to fit into our itinerary?”
(And gaffa and Spavined Gelding, I saw what you did there. Chuck 'em out, the brutes!)
Similarly, when I sometimes whimsically think about starting an American travel/tour agency specifically targeted at German speaking peoples, I sometimes try to think of an appropriate chartered and guided “Winnetou Tour”- maybe start in Denver to Wyoming, Arizona, New Mexico… Or maybe the Dakotas and some of the midwest. I’m not familiar enough with the books to really know. But it would be a guide of the fictional book and real reservations and Indian monuments. Amazing how much Karl Mays books have romanticized and colored German thinking about America and its aborigines. I think it would be really popular, Along with my Cracker Fishin’ Florida tour.
Which, also kind of answers the OP question. How many countless Americans have been on chartered bus tours down the Rhine, for wine, and scenery, and finally the Alps. Heidelberg is a major destination on the route… much as I’d probably make Jackson Hole, Wyoming a stayover destination for a day or two on the Winnetour.
The Karl May society has an annual Winnetour around the Southwest, were most of his Wild West adventures take place. And I think the University of Arizona has one professor (of German?) who has started researching Karl May.
Um, no. Winnetou calls gold “Deadly dust” because of the senseless greed it causes in white people, and several stories deal with how the palefaces loose all constraint and act like possessed or in a fever at the opportunity to get gold.
So a casino run by Indians where white people loose their money is not really fitting for Winnetou.
In his last Winnetou book, Winnetous Erben (Winnetous heirs), Karl May dreams of a revival of both the dying Indian race and the money-oriented wrong-direction going Yanks by pairing the good sides of the Indians with those of the Germans* and getting a new race, able to survive in the modern world but less money-oriented and destructive than the Yanks. Sadly, that dream didn’t come to pass, and the early prototype of an airplane that Young Eagle uses became first a weapon of destruction in the Wars and then a method of transportation that now damages the environment.
Remember that Karl May wrote before even WWI and thus before he could see the bad sides of nationalism. Rather, at his time, the British empire was obnoxiously putting their noses everywhere and dictating the rules, and so he imagined the decent, honest, hard-working Germans standing up to them and evening things out.
I apologize if I have insulted you in any way. I don’t want to accuse you or doubt you, it’s just that I’ve heard this type of story so often that I wondered if it happened in real life and not just in jokes. Your explanation does make sense (and yes, I watched the BBC doku about the gorilla-basketball experiment) and explains why it can happen even when it should be obvious.
BTW, in some cities they put little extra-signs underneath the streetsign, with a short note about the person the street is named after. It costs extra money, so the notes are still rare, but I think it’s a neat idea to give that information so people don’t have to wonder. For my city, there’s also a book listing all street names alphabetically and who they are named after.
Or, in the age of cell phones today, you can just google/ wikipedia it.
That’s okay, no offense taken! I was just pointing out that I realize there’s no possible objective evidence for my little story, but it really did happen.
It probably does seem very absurd to a German-speaker that anyone could not notice the difference between two such different-looking signs. But it’s amazing what you can fail to notice when you’re concentrating on something else, and when you’re new to reading German you tend to focus very much on the textual content of signs and not their general appearance. You start with a preconception that “sign with text that ends in -strasse” means “street name sign”, and it takes a while to overcome that assumption.
Likewise, the mishap I described upthread with the Dutch “Doorgang verkeer” sign also really did happen. And that was a sign that was right there on the same signpost with genuine place-name signs, so you think I’d have been easily able to spot the difference between them! But again, I was starting from the assumption that “sign on Dutch bike path signpost” means “sign with destination place name”, and by the time I thought to question that assumption, the doorgang had verkeerd and I was lying on the path with my bike on top of me.
I think these sorts of boo-boos become standard jokes because it is easy for outlanders to actually make such mistakes, even though it may seem implausible to locals who don’t understand how anyone could be confused about it.
I was there for a few days last year and I didn’t meet many americans, or tourists in general.
I really enjoyed it there, and I’m sure it does get plenty of tourists in summer (I was there about this time last year), but what I’m saying is it’s not quite what you may expect after reading this thread.
