“Du guckst doch bei einer Glastür durch das Schlüsselloch.”
Literally, “you’d look through a glass door by looking through the keyhole.”
That is, a put-down of someone too dumb to see the obvious without making it far too complicated. A similar English expression might be “you can’t see the forest for the trees”.
Am I close?
I would say no. Your translation, to me, describes a person who is nosy and makes something harder than it needs to be (which by extension suggests they are not very bright).
I can not think of an idiom in English which captures that (maybe one will occur to me later).
“You can’t see the forest for the trees” describes someone who is so focused on minutiae that they can’t see the “big picture”. Although I don’t speak German, I don’t think that that’s what the German expression is saying. A closer English equivalent might be “You couldn’t find your ass with both hands and a roadmap”. However the German also seems to have the sense of doing something easy in a stupidly difficult way. I can’t think of an English idiom with that particular sense.
@Civil_Guy Thank you for making me aware of this expression.
Native German speaker here. I’ve never heard that phrase, so it doesn’t seem idiomatic (at least it isn’t to me), but I would have interpreted it the same way as the OP: Pointing out how stupid someone is for choosing a complicated technique where a much easier solution would have been readily available.
When I googled the phrase, Google’s AI-powered search result advised me (in German) that it was a well-known (well…) saying to describe someone who does something superfluous or unnecessary. So perhaps the emphasis is, after all, on the avoidable complication rather than the stupidity of the person talked to.
As for the forest and the trees, we have the exact same saying in German.
When Dave Berry was active decades ago he wrote of his two dogs wanting to go outside. He’d open the back door and they’d bound out to the screened porch to wait by its door for it to be opened to the back yard. Then since he lives in Florida, a hurricane came through and carried away the screens miraculously leaving behind just the screen door in its frame.
The dogs would still wait by the door so they could pass through it.
Another German here, and I concur with everything you said. I don’t think it’s a common phrase, or maybe a regional saying I’ve never heard before. But the meaning is obvious. @Civil_Guy , can you give a context where you encountered the phrase?
I think so, too. Like the construct ‘a few dis short of a dat’ where dis and dat are clever pairs items and set.
a few cards short of a deck, sandwiches-picnic, forks-table setting.
I’m not sure it’s really analogous, but it reminds me of one of my father’s expressions:
“ couldn’t pour piss out of a boot with the instructions on the heel.”
The door still demarks a boundary past which the dogs aren’t allowed until their human lets them. That’s the rule, and dogs can be pretty good about following rules.
“Working harder, not smarter”?
Some dogs do. Others “forget” or rules-lawyer when it benefits them like any ten-year old.
“Oh-h-h. Stay out of the garbage ever! Not just when you’re looking at me.”
That’s certainly the correct spirit. IMO there’s no sense it’s about stupidity. Just about a useless tendency to overcomplicate for the sake of overcomplicating.
Whatever the best English equivalent is, my late MIL would be its patron saint.
Thanks all for your responses. It showed up on my Facebook page from some group I didn’t recognize, and I wasn’t getting far in trying to understand the responses there. It seemed like it could be a common insult with nuances not immediately obvious. (FB has seemingly figured that I understand some German. Yes, and I’m open to learning more, but not currently able or wanting to spend too much time at it.)
I think that the best translation would be to just translate it literally. Even if it is an idiom in some region or subculture of Germany, its meaning is plain enough from the words. And it might not even be an idiom, just a clever turn of phrase by that particular writer.
This discussion reminds me of the Canadian band Crowbar. They got their name because they were the backup band to Ronnie Hawkins, who said “Those boys could fuck up a crowbar in fifteen seconds.”
It’s similar to the joke about gynecologists papering the hallway through the letterbox.