Das ist Frau Ehlers. Frau Ehlers steht vor dem Herd. (1)

When I was teaching at a school in Tipton, I found a copy of the textbook “Sprich Mal Deutsch!” and had a flick through. The school had bought a set of these textbooks in 1981; this was the second edition, the first edition having come out in 1967. The methodology is very old-fashioned, which was surprising enough (I remember having used Longmans Audio-Visual French at school back in the seventies, which was space-age stuff by comparison), but what was more shocking and/or funny was the blatant stereotyping.

The book’s author, William Rowlinson, was a senior lecturer in Education at the University of Sheffield. He got out of the textbook game and into the dictionary game, which isn’t surprising, given the Victorian style of this book.

Rowlinson could almost be Walter Abish. (How German Is It came out in 1980.) We shall end our first glimpse into the world of the Ehlers with a little story: