While I’ve been using German in one way or another, off and on, for most of my adult life, my listening comprehension is not always up to the task, particularly when it comes to low-fidelity recordings or historical audio. Such is the case with a small part of this YouTube video, which I am otherwise able to follow pretty well. Unter Lebensgefahr in die Freiheit (Through Danger Into Freedom) which shows Konrad Adenauer’s visit to West Berlin, a few weeks after Ida Siekmann died while trying to escape to West Berlin by jumping from her apartment window. (The building was in East Berlin but the sidewalk (pavement) was in the West.)
A description of the action and my English translation follows:
Beginning at about 4:24, we see Adenauer arriving in a large crowd next to the Berlin Wall. The narrator says:
(Now the camera cuts back and forth between Adenauer alighting from a car and walking through the crowd, and, over the Wall, the loudspeakers blaring forth the official response of the GDR, which addresses Adenauer directly.)*
And that’s about all I can understand of what comes from the loudspeaker.
I can’t understand that last word either, but at least we now know, from the structure of the sentence, that it must be some noun of neuter gender. The long way [from Bonn to Germany] excuses you… does sound sarcastic enough when it must have been only a few hours by air.
I cannot conclusively understand the word either, but it might well be Säumen (tardiness) - I assume the East German loudspeaker message alludes to a well-known quote from Friedrich Schiller’s Die Piccolomini (the middle play from his Wallenstein trilogy)
(Illo: ) * Spät kommt ihr - doch ihr kommt! Der weite Weg, Graf Isolani, entschuldigt euer Säumen.*
To me the main vowel of the mystery word sounds more like German “ei”. (For any non German speakers following along, that’s more or less like the “i” in bite in English. The main vowel in Säumen, by contrast, is more like the vowel sound in the English word toy).
Is it possible that the word on the film is, in fact, Säumen, but due to some dialectical quirk of the announcer’s, it comes out sounding more like Seimen? After all, given everything I’ve read here, and having now read the passage in the play, I don’t see how it can be anything else.
Eastern Germans trying for standard German (like the East German speaker in the video) often sound a bit off (the inter-German border was sometimes referred as Gänsefleischgrenze, from clichéd border guards asking in Saxon-inflected standard German: Gennsefleischt mal den Kofferraum aufmachen?)
The Schiller quote is quite known to Germans (the main translator of Donald Duck comics to German, the inimitable Dr. Erika Fuchs, even introduced it to the Duckverse), and the inclusion of the title Doctor Adenauer (to parallel Count Isolani in the Schiller quote) also points in that direction
Gänsefleischgrenze means “goosemeat border”, in case anyone wonders. (Literally, “gooseflesh border”, but I don’t recall whether the German word for gooseflesh shares the figurative overtones of the English word.)
I never studied Schiller’s writings, but from all of the foregoing the passage seems to be the German analogue of the best-known Shakespeare quotes in English.
FWIW, this German had never heard of the phrase, so I was quite impressed with Mops’s find. I definitely wouldn’t say it’s on the same level as “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks” - but then I don’t really care much for the German classics.