Follow TV Tropes

Following

Gratuitous German

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/reinweisbritter.png
Rein Weißritter, a Gespenst mk.II customized to serve as a fire support unit for the Gespenst mk.III "Alteisen" and subsequently turned into a technorganic monstrosity by the extradimensional beings known as the Einsts. Last seen serving aboard the Dreikreuz mothership Dreißig Super Roboter Flugzeugträger.

"The entire Gestalt of the Weltanschauung of these former Wunderkinder was characterized by a certain gemütlich attitude toward each other's Schadenfreude."Translation 
Bob Woodward, Why Not Me?, "The Void: The First One Hundred Days of the Franken Presidency"

German inserted into a work, whether it is necessary or not. Because after all, Everything sounds Badass in German.

Sometimes overlaps with Bilingual Bonus, particularly if the author actually knows German. More often than not, however, this is not the case, and the use of this trope at least borders on Foreign Sounding Gibberish to native German speakers. Due to being a closely related language, sometimes gratuitous German will be used where gratuitous Dutch is intended.

This is a subtrope of Gratuitous Foreign Language and really should be used with extreme care. (Especially when dealing with umlauts, which carry meaning in German.)

By the way, if you use a German noun in a post, remember: In der deutschen Sprache werden Substantive immer groß geschrieben. (In German, nouns are always capitalized.)

See also Yiddish as a Second Language, which is essentially an older form of German with a generous sprinkle of Hebrew and a few other languages from Eastern Europe (how much and what else is in there depends on what dialect of Yiddish one speaks).


Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Werbung (Advertising) 

    Anime und Manga (Anime & Manga) 
  • .hack is full of this. The author of the Epitaph of Twilight and subsequent originator of The World was born west German, and the programmer of the original game also had Germanic origins.
    • The majority of the 'Lost Grounds' are made up of or take roots from German words: Dead World of Indieglut Lugh ('Dead World of into-the-embers Lugh'), Briona Gwydion the Dragonbein Range ('bein' also stands for 'bone'), Arche Koeln Waterfall (Combination of Arche, 'ark', and Köln, the German city of Cologne), Wailing Capital Wald Uberlisterin ('Tricker of the Forest'), and finally Hülle Granz Cathedral ('Shell Gloss Cathedral')-which also features one of the two only songs in-game with an actual language, in full German; the other one being the variations of Aura's Theme.
  • 07-Ghost also has quite a few examples:
    • Names: Teito Klein (small), Frau (woman or Mrs.), Fea Kreuz (cross), Verloren (lost)
    • Other: Sklave (slave), Begleiter (literally 'companion'), Antwort (answer), the land of Seele (Seele means 'soul')
  • Attack on Titan:
    • Apart from some characters featuring obviously German names like Hannes or Armin or even the protagonist Eren JÄGER (the last name is German for 'hunter'), the opening somehow lives from it. The first words are 'Seid ihr das Essen? Nein, wir sind die Jäger', which translates to 'Are you the food? No, we are the hunters'.
    • There are also two insert songs sung entirely in German: "Vogel im Käfig" (caged bird) and "Bauklötze" (building blocks). It's worth noting that the soundtrack was composed by Hiroyuki Sawano, the same man behind Guilty Crown's "Bios". He pretty clearly has a fondness for this trope.
    • Additionally, the second opening of the anime is "Flügel der Freiheit" ("Wings of Freedom" in German).
  • In the English version of the Azumanga Daioh anime, Kagura's frenzied attempted conversation with a foreign man was in mangled German rather than English. "Helpen? Das help? HELPE MIEL!"
  • The Panzer Kunst in Battle Angel Alita is the main example, but not the only.
  • Black Lagoon, especially around Those Wacky Nazis. Fuck Plan vom Schiff, indeed.
  • Bleach:
    • The Filler Bount Arc is full of (poorly translated) German in attack calls. A grand ritual to open a portal uses the words "Tauch dich sofort auf!" ("Dive yourself immediately open!"; correctly: "Öffne dich jetzt!"), which translates into the command "Open!" towards the door.
    • The Quincies have a European vibe, with their iconography specifically reminiscent of the Teutonic Knights. Accordingly, most of their attacks and artifacts named in the series have pseudo-German names (Letzt Stil, Seele Schneider, Heizen, Glitz(ern), Sprenger, etc.). When the Vandenreich appear, the Teutonic Knight themes have been updated to Nazi themes, akin to the real-life Nazi Party's appropriation of all things Teutonic Knight. The Kanji Vandenraihi means "invisible country" while Vandenreich (the official English translation) is supposed to mean "walled kingdom", though "Wand" refers to the side of a building while "Mauer" is the thing you build for protection.
  • Mephisto Pheles of Blue Exorcist usually says "Eins, zwei, drei!" (one, two, three) when performing magic.
    • In which he also often uses the wrong "Ein" instead of "Eins"
    • The manga now adds "Das stärkste Gefängnis" (The strongest prison). (Or that is what it was supposed to say, scanlation display it as "Das stärksten Gefängnis".)
    • Also Kuchenkuckucksuhr meaning cake cuckoo clock.
    • Two songs in the soundtrack have German lyrics which are a) sung by a beautiful chorus b) grammatically correct and c) relevant. Someone associated with the anime obviously did the research involved.
  • In Case Closed the 'Nacht Baron' (Night baron) is a recurring fictional character and also a codename for several other things.
  • Satella Harvenheit, the Jewel Witch, and Fiore, her sister in Chrono Crusade is German, and all of her attacks are called in that language. Another Woolseyism of the English dub is the fact that her voice actor speaks the language.
  • A spell Dark cast in D.N.Angel was apparently supposed to be German.
  • Hans, the Token Minority German dude on the team of burglars in The Daughter of Twenty Faces, does this a lot, dropping "Fräulein Chiko" all over the place and once having a short conversation in German with Chiko in (terribly pronounced) German.
  • At any given time, if a Digimon run isn't doing Gratuitous English, they're probably doing Gratuitous German. The most prominent instance is Digimon Frontier, where a sizable portion of the main cast is made of this trope: Volfmon (wolf-mon), Löwemon (lion-mon), Reichmon (empire-mon), and KaiserLeomon (emperor-Leo-mon), along with all of their attack names. Other examples from elsewhere include Duftmon, ShineGreymon Burst Mode's Torrid Weiß attack, and JagerDorulumon.
    • Digimon Adventure 02: During his evil phase, Ken Ichijouji styles himself as the "Digimon Kaiser" ("Kaiser" being German for "emperor").note  Oddly enough, no other aspect of his role involved this. Although Ken considered himself Kaiser, though, he still mentioned in one episode that he had yet to become the king of the Digital World...
  • ef - a tale of melodies features this in the Eye Catch images.
  • Embalming has tons of it (and tons of strange English, too, considering the title). "I'll die if I don't eat a Baumkuchen!"note .
  • Fafner in the Azure: Dead Aggressor includes some examples of this trope, the Fafner units are named after German numerals (Mark Elf, Mark Zwei, Mark Sechs, etc) without forgetting the famous "Mark Sein" (which, funnily enough is homophone to '[es] mag sein.': '[it] might be.'). Fafner is a dragon from German and Norse Mythology.
  • Fate/stay night, mainly with Rin's spells (for example "Neun, Acht, Sieben, Stil schießen, beschießen, erschießen!note ", "Abzug, Bedingung, Mittelstandnote .", "Ein Kämpfer ist ein Kämpfer!note ").
    • Fate/Zero's anime adaption also, especially the Rin-focused episode 10.
  • The names of the three main characters of Fireball are in German. Especially Drossel's name is made of multiple with German phrases, Drossel Juno Vierzehntes Heizregister Fürstin, which together don't make a whole lot of sensenote 
  • In Fruits Basket, the half-German Momiji speaks entirely in German when he first appears, making Tohru assume he's a foreigner. From then on, he constantly peppers his speech with German words and phrases. In the 2001 anime, he doesn't do this since his German heritage isn't brought up at all.
  • Future Diary is more into Gratuitous English (and lots of it), but for some reason, "eins, zwei, drei" occurs twice in the first opening theme. The subs just read "one, two, three" as they would for Japanese counting, so you have to be listening closely to notice.
  • Galaxy Fraulein Yuna - German "Fräulein" (technically a diminutive of "Frau", woman or female title of address) being an obsolete address for an unmarried woman, and in this case a sort of Alternate Character Reading for "ojousama".
  • Geisters - German "Geister" (ghosts) apparently pluralized again in English just to make sure.
  • Ban from Get Backers is one-quarter German.
    • Ban might actually be an aversion, as he rarely (if ever) speaks the language. The closest he comes is translating a letter (written by a Romanian woman to a Japanese man, but they both worked for the Nazis, so German might have been the language they had in common...). His father, on the other hand, is known as "der Kaiser."
  • As one might expect, fairly prominent in Girls und Panzer. The command "Panzer Vor" (Tanks Advance) is used as a catch phrase, and quotes from Rommel and Guderian are featured. This trope is used especially prominent in one of the fan sub groups. Interestingly enough, most of it comes from fansubbers with the German-themed Kuromorimine Girls' College (which typically called "Kuromorimine", or "Black Forest, while only once being caled "Schwarzwaldspitze"). For example, in the fan subs for Episode 11, Erika's saying "Kuso!" is translated as "Scheiße!" in one fan sub, but "Damn it!" in Crunchyroll's subs.
  • Many songs with vocals that are included in the Guilty Crown soundtrack turned out to have German lyrics. The most prominent example would be the song bios which played at the end of episode 1 and 4 during Shuu's asskicking moment. While the pronunciation is horrible enough to fool even native speakers into thinking it's another language, [[the grammar and spelling of the lyrics is - except for a few details - actually pretty good. The song itself is still freaking awesome. The lyrics also aptly describe the relationship between Shuu and his sister Mana.
  • This was inserted into the original translation of Guyver. While the Big Bad's name is usually translated as Richard Guyot, he's known as "Reichmann (realm-man) Gyro" in the old translation, in part because he's a huge, blonde, pseudo-German guy.
  • The evil vampire Nazis in Hellsing.
    • Alucard also sometimes speaks German, once saying 'Heil den Ich' after he makes a 90 degree landing on a aircraft carrier. It means 'Hail the I' and in correct grammar 'Heil mir!' ("heilen" also means "to heal", though Alucard probably uses the old meaning).
    • Integra Hellsing's Evil Uncle Richard kept calling her "Fraülein" for no reason, considering that he is an Englishman with Dutch ancestry, except to underline that he is evil. Only evil people speak German, right?
  • Hetalia: Axis Powers:
    • The series has this for Germany. He says "MEIN GOTT!" once and one of his Image Songs is titled "Einsamkeit" (Solitude).
    • In the dub, this can overlap with Bilingual Bonus. In the episode where Britain and France are spreading nasty rumors about Germany, Britain tells Italy that Germany "hates [him] and thinks [he's] stupid." Italy goes over to Germany and asks if he hates him. Germany's response? "Lies. Actually... ich liebe dich," the German portion of which means "I love you." The shippers rejoiced.
    • Germany's mochi counterpart speaks entirely in German, as can be seen in the video at the bottom of this page. While understandable, it's still obviously written by a non-native speaker.
    • And then there's Prussia. His song with a title that no one really knows how to translate (the one from the "Ore-sama CD") contains many lines of badly pronounced and Google Translatorish German. "Über dem Rand" (over the edge, but as in "above the edge", not "falling over the edge" - the latter would be the accusative "Über den Rand") is just the beginning.
  • In Infinite Ryvius, German names are extensively used for space ships(Liebe Delta, Gestalt, Gespenst) and space phenomena (Geduld)...
  • In the English dub of Infinite Stratos, the German, Laura does this (considering that she is voiced by the same actress as Asuka and the aforementioned Satella), fitting in better with her thick accent. The original didn't bother.
  • In K - "Macht nichts... Ich bin unverwundbarnote ." When the Silver King regains his memories. Justified in that he is German.
  • Kämpfer(in).
    • "Kämpfer" means "Fighter(s)" and Kämpferin would be the female version.
    • Also the different types of Kämpfer are users of either Schwert (sword), Gewehr (rifle) or Zauber (magic).
  • Kill la Kill, yet another soundtrack composed by Hiroyuki Sawano, has Ragyo's Leitmotif "Blumenkranz" (floral wreath). The pronunciation hasn't improved, though the lyrics are near-perfect.
  • Of course, Kujibiki♡Unbalance with Ritsuko Kübel Kettenkrad. Special mention to her German helmet. Fun fact: Kettenkrad is an abbreviation that refers to the world's only half-track bike and Kübel means "bucket".
    • The "Kübel" probably refers to the VW Type 82 "Kübelwagen" or "bucket car" (named so for its so-called "bucket seats")
  • Legend of the Galactic Heroes: Also titled: Heldensagen Vom Kosmosinsel ("Hero legends from Cosmic Island", literally - what makes this gratuitous is the grammatical case and wrong-gender article: it should be "von der" instead of "vom"="von dem"). The empire is clearly based on an anachronistic collage of Germanies, mostly Das Kaiserreich, or at least the theme-park version. They spout out a fairly large number of catchphrases: Prosit (cheers!), Feuer (fire!), Kaiser (emperor), and Neuland (lit. "new land", virgin soil) being prominent. Justified, in that the first Kaiser was apparently an enthusiastic Germanist and Kaiserreichish sort of guy.
  • The opening chapter of Lychee Light Club consists almost entirely of German commands and exclamations in its first half.
  • In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's, Belkan AIs all speak German, while Midchildian AIs speak mainly Gratuitous English. This gives the viewer a double bonus, as Vita's Armed Device, Graf Eisen ("Count Iron"), is a magical hammer that speaks German! Signum's device Laevatein speaks even with a Large Ham.
    • Hayate's Unison Device, Reinforce Zwei, sometimes addresses her as "Meister Hayate" (By contrast, Signum, Zafira and Reinforce Eins call her "Aruji Hayate," translated as "Mistress Hayate"). Later on, Agito does the same, even though Signum is her actual Lord. In the Nanohaverse, Meister is actually a shorten form the term "Device Meister", a Device engineer.
    • The Saint Cradle speaks German, too, and has a lot of lines in the final episodes of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS.
  • Count Brocken from Mazinger Z was German -a German Nazi ex-officer to be exact-. In one of the manga versions sometimes he fell into uttering some sentence his native idiom occasionally ("Gutten Abend").
  • Ho Yay anime Meine Liebe has such brilliant characters as Fuerst Oberst von Marmelade, (Lord Colonel Jam / Jelly).
    • There's an Oddly Named Sequel, Meine Liebe wieder (my love again)
    • The country is actually named "Kuchen" meaning "cake," though there is a town in Germany called "Kuchen"! And its neighboring town is called "Suessen" - "sweetening"...
    • Zwiback (should be Zwieback, a type of dry sweet cracker backed twice, as the name implies (Zwie-> Old German for Zwei, two. It survives in the word Zwielicht, twilight)).
  • This pops up a few times in Mobile Suit Gundam and its sequels and alternate universes. The Zeon enemy faction was clearly based on Nazis, and had some German phrases (such as the infamous "Sieg Zeon!") and some German Mobile Suit and Mobile Weapon names, like the Dom Tropen ("cathedral tropes", which doesn't make even a little sense) and Neue Ziel (new target).
    • Tropen could stand for Truppen, which is of course German for troops. Spelt Tropen, it means tropics - or tropes. It was the successor to the Dom Tropical Test Type...
    • Also, later installments often had an edge towards German language (Wing used German numbers for Zechs and Noin (actually in German written 'sechs' and 'neun'), SEED had, among others, Tolle Koenig, which translates into 'awesome king' (funnily enough, in the older use of the word it would mean "insane king"), 00 has the Meisters, which are simply put masters, as well as the Gundam Thrones: Eins, Zwei, and Drei ("one, two, three"). Mobile Fighter G Gundam, on the other hand, surprisingly averted its gratuitous use: the only suit with a German name was from Neo-Germany.)
    • Many of the weapons used in Mobile Suit Gundam SEED are named in German. Included are the "Igelstellung" (hedgehog position) vulcans, the Strike Gundam's "Armor Schneider" (Armor Cutter), and the Sword Strike's Anti-Ship Sword "Schwert Gewehr" (sword rifle), Rocket Anchor "Panzer Eisen" (tank iron or armour iron) and Beam Boomerang "Midas Messer" (Midas knife). And that's just the Strike Gundam!
    • Gundam X seems to have German in place of English (which seems to be a more common choice) as the "setting language" - note the name of the ship (Frieden) and a lot of the characters' names. Which is bizarre, really, since the main characters are from (post-apocalyptic) America.
    • In Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans, Gjallarhorn has four mobile suits with German names, namely the Schwalbe Graze (Swallow Graze), Graze Ritter (Graze Knight), Graze Stachel (Graze Spike) and Graze Ein (Graze One). However, unlike the first three, Graze Ein is a prototype weapon named after the pilot Ein Dalton, who has become a part of the mobile suit, rather than being a conventional Graze variant with a German name by default.
  • In Ep. 2 of the Anime version of Myriad Colors Phantom World, Haruhiko explains us some alterations of the brains in the intro, with depiction of the brain lobes in German.
  • In The Mystic Archives of Dantalian, while Dalian says Yes and No, we have Rasiel who says Ja and Nein. She even says Es ist das Ende (It is the end) in the anime.
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion:
    • The names of the organizations SEELE (soul), GEHIRN (brain), and NERV (nerve) are all in German. Rebuild of Evangelion also has WILLE (will).
    • Asuka is German, and so uses some rather poorly done German phrases throughout the series. The dubbers and her English voice actress all had a better grasp of the language, resulting in much improved pronunciation. The English dub also had her exclaiming "Mein Gott!" quite a bit, gave her a penchant for referring to Shinji as a 'dummkopf' (literally 'stupid-head', but good enough fit for Japanese "baka"), screaming "SCHWEINHUNDS! (correct: "Schweinehunde" - pig dogs) when fighting the JSSDF in End of Evangelion, and generally added a lot more German into her regular speech.
    • Asuka in the Spanish dub is very fond of uttering phrases in Gratuitous German. In her introductory chapter from the Japanese original, when Shinji and Asuka must open an Angel's mouth in order to make it swallow a battleship, she says "Open, open, open!"; the dub, however, replaces it with "Öffnen, öffnen, öffnen!" . And she also loves exclaiming "Scheiße!".
    • In the manga, some of the German edges into As Long as It Sounds Foreign. Example.
  • Many of the characters in Nodame Cantabile, especially those with a connection to von Stresemann. Stresemann himself uses the alias "Milch Holstein", his manager sometimes speaks in German, etc.
    • To explain why native speakers might burst into laughter at this point, "Milch" translates to "milk" while Holstein is a breed of cattle famous for its milk output. On a more intellectual level, Gustav Stresemann served both as chancellor and foreign minister during the Weimar Republic.
    • Actually lampshaded in-story: Chiaki is fluent in German, and immediately makes the connection to milk and cattle when he hears the pseudonym for the first time.
  • In One Piece:
    • Captain Morgan has the word "Möwe" (German for seagull) written on his metal chin.
    • Chopper's attack "Kakuho: Elf" (Kakuho being japanese for Horn Cannon, Elf is German for either eleven or elve)
    • In one of the early SBS when asked how far Luffy can stretch, Oda responses that Luffy can stretch exactly 72 Gomu Gomu, while 1 Gomu Gomu is 100 Märchen Gomu Gomu (Märchen is the German word for fairy tale)
    • Capone "Gang" Bege uses the incantation "Rook in Voller Größe" (Rook in Full Size) to transform into the Big Father.
  • PandoraHearts has a character by the name of Zwei (two) . Rather fitting, as she's Echo's second personality...
  • The two main characters of Phantom of Inferno are called "Ein" and "Zwei".
  • In Princess Tutu, when Fakir dramatically fetches his sword, he says something in badly, badly accented German. The series is set in Germany, but still...
    • Fortunately, the English dub (and Chris Patton) does a better job with the accent, turning the scene into something that's...almost a little badass.
    • Also, all of the readable text in the show is in German, although again the show's set in Germany, so it might not be all that gratuitous...
  • Many of the runes in Puella Magi Madoka Magica turn out to be German when deciphered. Also, virtually all witches bear German names - Gertrud, Patricia, Kirsten, Isabel, Kriemhild Gretchen...
    • There's also the name of the final Witch in the series, Walpurgisnacht. This is a Central/Northern European holiday on the eve of May 1st, exactly six months away from Halloween (All Hallow's Eve).
    • The biggest (and not gratuitous) of them is Homura's familiars announcing that Gott ist Tot.
  • Practically the whole premise of Pumpkin Scissors is Post WWI Pre WWII Germany. "Gespenst Jäger" (Ghost Hunter, though "Gespenst" is only the singular - correct version would be Gespensterjäger, as one word) and "Himmel" (a drug) which means heaven/sky, are the ones you hear mainly.
    • All of the invisible 9 units were identified as ""Related title" Jäger", including the real-life Fallschirm Jäger (lit. Parachute Hunter, AKA Paratroopers).
    • That said, it wasn't actually set in Germany at all, but a Fantasy Counterpart Culture where evidently the exact same language is spoken. In the English dub, characters tend to pepper their speech with German phrases, and a few even have German accents.
  • The name and episode titles of Rozen Maiden are both in an English influenced German (the proper translation would be "Rosenmaid". The doll's names are also apparently translated from German, for instance, Reiner Rubin is Shinku (pure ruby).
    • The same is true of Elfen Lied. However, the reason that Nozomi, a main character who sings the song the show was named after, was written out of the anime was most likely to avoid this.
    • And Knight Hunters: Weiß Kreuz, apparently mostly because Takehito Koyasu thinks German is cool. The series group takes its name from the broken German for White Cross — the grammatically correct version would either be "Weisses Kreuz" or "Weißkreuz", the German name for lachrymatory gasses used in World War I. The other rival groups are Schwarz (Black) and Schreient (misspelled, means screaming).
  • The ending theme for The Saga of Tanya the Evil is in German.
  • In Sailor Moon, Ami Mizuno has a German setting on her handheld computer.
  • In an episode of Zoku Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei, when Chiri becomes a giant to fight off an army of alien Humongous Mecha, most of her attacks are accompanied by German exclamations. Abiru wonders why German, in particular. (It was actually a homage to Evanglion).
  • Sound of the Sky has several dialogs entirely in German which is called "Roman" in the anime. The Arcadians appear to use French, but this only appears in writings and city names.
  • Justified in Spice and Wolf: All of the writing is in German, but the series takes place in an alternate universe version of medieval Europe, presumably based on Germany.
  • Übel Blatt. The intended meaning is "evil blade". While "übel" can mean "evil", in modern German, it usually means "sick" or "queasy". "Blatt" is also a valid translation for "blade", but only for saw blades or blades used in machinery. The more common translation is "leaf", so that the intended "evil blade" instead becomes a "queasy leaf".
  • Valvrave the Liberator, on the Dorssian side. They're particularly fond of Blitzendegen ("Lightning rapier") as a battle cry, salute and all-purpose catch phrase. (The last one is a parody, but it just shows how gratuitous it is).
  • Walkure Romanze features some German books that were quite obviously translated with google translator, as that software's old problem of some words being translated into ENGLISH (and not the intended target language) runs rampant in these fictional documents.
  • World's End Harem: Fantasia: "Macht", the magic that Lati arranges for Arc to acquire, is just the German for "power", "strength", or "authority". And somewhat amusingly given this is a Harem Series, it's a feminine noun.
  • Yozakura Quartet features this in an episode. A few phrases and words, actually expected since the character is getting ready to go to Germany.
  • Zatch Bell!: The real name of character Umagon (Ponygon) is Schneider.
  • Zoids:
    • Zoids contains more gratuitous German and Italian than you can throw a braunschweiger at, it's just that for some reason the dub worked the names out from katakana, resulting in such hilarious names as Schubaltz (Schwarz) and Alcobaleno (Arcobaleno (rainbow)). Even the seemingly normal names like Flyheight and Zeke were originally Freiheit and Sieg. In the case of the Berserk Führer, they probably bowdlerized it.
    • Each of the Liger Zero's armor units in Zoids: New Century has a German name — Jager, Schneider and Panzer. These correspond to the armor's specialty — the Jager (hunter) has incredible speed and advanced scanning equipment, the Schneider (cutter) has seven laser blades mounted all over its body, and the Panzer (tank) is incredibly heavy and equipped with ridiculous firepower. Funnily, Schneider also means tailor without technical context.
  • Practically any time something is named Harken in a localized anime or Japanese video game, it is actually the German word Haken having gone through two more languages. This includes your Double Harken, Slash Harkens, and Lady Harken. Translating it correctly like Haken Mode is catching on, but raises an important question: do we really want to replace the word Harken when it sounds so cool, especially for giant scythes?
    • Though Harke does mean the tool "rake"; maybe in some cases it's a misdeclension instead?

    Comic-Hefte (Comic Books) 
  • In Kingdom Come, Von Bach peppers his speech with German, but betrays himself as a poser, as Captain Comet, a World War II veteran, notes no German would say Schweinhund, just Schwein, guessing Von Bach watched too many Hollywood films.
  • In the parts of ElfQuest dealing with Ember's tribe (part of Hidden Years and the Wild Hunt storylines, all (co)written by Joellyn Auklandus), quite a few character names are German words. The two most prominent examples are Tier ("animal") and Angrif (properly "Angriff", means "attack").
  • Nightcrawler from X-Men. "Mein Gott!" "Unglaublich!" " Liebchen"
    • "Ach du lieber...!" ("Oh you dear...", a common set-up for a swear word, which may intentionally be left out.)
    • And, always, "Mein Freund."
    • He addressed Beast as "Liebchen," which is inappropriate unless they were going for some all-blue Ho Yay. It's an out-of-date expression for "darling", the modern word being "Liebling".
    • Not to talk about that it is often (mis)spelled 'Leibchen', which means camisole.
  • Generally, German in Marvel Comics is nothing short of abominable ("Eyige!" "Hurensohn!" "Vas der teufel?") - the first issue of the Ultimate imprint comic "The Ultimates" made for a nice change in that regard. "Mein Gott! Erschiesst es! Erschiesst es doch endlich!" which is something you can imagine Captain America must have heard an awful lot.
  • Marvel has a little-known German superhero called Vormund, which means Guardian. Legal guardian, to be precise. He was previously known as Hauptmann Deutschland, which sounded much like something the Nazis would have come up with.
    • The German edition of MAD once presented German Marvel Superheroes. Their Cap equivalent? Oberst Deutschland.
  • There used to be a German parody strip, Deutsche Helden, in which Nachtkrabbler (Nightcrawler), der Rote Schädel (the Red Skull) and Elektroblitz (Blitzkrieg) share a flat. The first two are literal translations of the English code-names and sound unintentionally funny to German ears. Which is probably why in the official German editions they generally prefer to use the English names.
    • The Marvel villain "Baron Blitzkrieg" is called "Baron von Blitz" in the German volumes because of the Unfortunate Implications. He's still a Nazi, though, so it's Bowdlerise meets No Swastikas.
    • Though until the '80s they did translate all titles and names. Interesting they renamed the X-men as X-Team.
      • Also known, back in the day, as "Gruppe X" (literally "Group X").
  • Powerhaus of DV8, real name Hector Morales, is normally a big fan of Gratuitous Spanish — but has a Gratuitous German codename as a tribute to his German-born mother.
  • Savage Dragon gives us Brainiape, who is of course Adolf Hitler's disembodied brain in a glass bowl on top of an ape body with zome of ze worst violence ever visted on ze German sprache in a bildergeschichte.
  • Commando has this, spoken by none other than Those Wacky Nazis. Most commonly used are various military ranks and exclamations in the middle of other dialogue. Commando is even a Trope Namer, as Gratuitous German is commonly referred to as "Korkkarisaksa" (Commando German) in Finnish.
  • Vampirella has a lot of this, given the abundance of Nazi foes. The best name must be "Scheisskopf" (shithead). It works without them, either: In "Feary Tales", Vampirella (as Cinderella) meets her evil ugly stepsisters Angriffe note  and Schleimhaute. note 
  • "Marvel What-The" had some parody of Thor, and his date going south as his vision of romantic music was very Wagnerian, with him banging his hammer as percussion and shouting random German words: "Bluten! Gluten! Muten!" OK, mostly German, probably there was some other -uten thrown in.
  • In the first full-length Mortadelo y Filemón adventure, El Sulfato Atómico, the two titular heroes travel to what is essentially a parody of Nazi Germany, Tirania, under the yoke of dictator Präsident Bruteztrausen. The whole place is full of actual German signage and the locals alternate between proper German sentences and Spanish words ending in -en. In the German localisation they kept all the actual German intact, only modifying the parody words, although they renamed the villain to Brutalevic to make him seem Balkanic instead.

    Comic Strips (Comic-Strips) 
  • Calvin and Hobbes: In one strip, Calvin is pontificating about the high-flown academic meaning of his artwork, as explained in his artist's statement. As Hobbes reads it, he merely comments, "You misspelled Weltanschauung."
  • U.S. Acres: In the April 4, 1987 strip, Booker tries to trap a worm by sitting on its hole. The worm uses a spiked helmet like those worn by German soldiers, and as Booker shoots up into the air, it says, "Ach du lieber! A flyink chicken!"

    Fan-Fiktion (Fan Works) 
  • Mecha calls Brownie a Dummkopf in the fic Rainbow in the Dark. The author revealed that she uses German insults with her close friends and is said in a heartwarming way. Aside from that, she knows nothing of German.
  • A Crown of Stars: Asuka speaks German very frequently:
    • When she showed her new war mecha to Shinji:
    "There! Meet my new baby, Der Roter Wirbelsturm!"
    • When Shinji tried talking her into staying behind as he fought, arguing that he could not stand if she died...
    "Me?! What about you? Du verflucht Idiot! Du hirnlose Ochse!"
  • Advice and Trust: Asuka, of course, falls back on her mother tongue occasionally, especially when she is angry. When Zeruel was stomping on her Unit 02 she shouted: "Du Arschloch! Sie Ente verdammte Scheiße Esser! Ich bring dich um!"
    • Kaworu, having "grown up" in Germany, occasionally does this. At one point he even claims he was doing so when he accidentally brings up classified terms.
    • Shinji also starts speaking German as time goes on, due to Asuka tutoring him. He was even planning to speak nothing but German during her birthday party, though she shot down that idea because she thought that everyone else present would have trouble understanding.
  • Asuka & Shinji's Infinite Playlist When Asuka sees Horaki talking to Suzuhara, she mutters for no particular reason: "Liebe ist in der Luft." (Love is in the air).
  • In Power Girl story A Force of Four, it's used by Paula Von Gunter when three Kryptonian criminals are burning Paradise Island down.
    "I'm burning up," said Paula Von Gunter, a human despite all her Amazon training. "Mein Gott, I'm burning up."
  • The Child of Love: Used by Asuka here and there. Unfortunately, it is obvious that the writer did not know German and he sometimes misspelled words (like "oberarsche" or "scheist").
    Asuka: Guten Morgen, Shinji-kun!
  • Children of an Elder God: Asuka uses her mother tongue extensively.
    • Chapter 4 -where she shows up- is full of examples:
      • When she is ordered to trap an Angel alive: "Scheiss egal" (literally, "shit doesn't care", an expression meaning "I couldn't care less".)
      • When Amaliel rips her robot's hand off: "ICH WILL DIESEN KLEINEN SCHEISSKOPF TOTEN!!!" "I want to kill this little shithead!)
      • When she emerges from her robot after battle: "Hat jemand ein Handtuch?" ("Does anyone have a towel?")
    • In an omake NERV makes figurines of the pilots as part of a money-making scheme. If you squeeze one of the Asuka action figures she says: "Gott in Himmel!", "Halten Sie!", "Schnell!" or "Sieg Heil!"
  • Doing It Right This Time: Asuka thinks or exclaims "Mein Gott" ("My God") every so often:
    Mein Gott, she thought to herself.
  • Dueling Trigger Finger: Just like in canon this fic's version of the KCGP arc includes Zigfried Lloyd and his thick german accent. He even ends up calling Junko a "Miststück" ("Bitch") at one point.
  • Evangelion 303: Asuka often slips in her mother tongue, using German expressions such like: "Guten Tag", "Heilige Scheisse", "Scheiße!", "Schnell!", "Sheibe" or "Gott".
  • HERZ:
    • Asuka and Akiko often use German words. Asuka often uses "dummkopf".
    • When she passed by Col Strasser in chapter 4 she greeted him: "Gutten morgen, Her Strasser."
  • Last Child of Krypton: In chapter 11, when Shinji is gravely wounded, Asuka whispers over and over again:
    "Oh Gott, nicht zu sterben. Bitte nicht sterben. Ich brauche dich. Bitte."
  • Once More with Feeling: Preparing for Asuka's arrival, Shinji learnt some few German words. In chapter 10 both teenagers exchange some sentences in German:
    Asuka: Hullo Shinji! Guten Morgen!
    Shinji: Guten Morgen Asuka. Wie Geht Es Ihnen?
    Asuka: Wundervoll! Ich wußte nicht, daß Sie Deutsches sprachen Shinji?
    Shinji: Uh, actually, I don't speak German. I just learned a few words here and there after I heard you were coming over.
  • The One I Love Is...: Asuka uses her mother tongue liberally. For example, in chapter 5 she exclaims "Gott sei Dank!" ("Thank God!") when she sees Shinji is cooking.
  • In My Immortal, Ebony and B'loody Mary watch "Das niteMARE b4 xmas".
  • In What About Witch Queen? prince Ferdinand sometimes has outbursts of German, which is apparently native tongue for citizens of Southern Isles. He also starts to ramble in German (called Islander in-story) when he's raving and has no idea that person who takes care of him doesn't know the language.
  • In Nobody Dies, Unit 02's AI is named Zwei (the German numeral 2) since that Eva was built in Germany.
  • The 1983: Doomsday Stories for Hetalia: Axis Powers contains a nice helping of (largely translated) German. Given how most of the stories take place in Central Europe, it makes sense. Which makes the sudden appearance of Gratuitious Hungarian deliberately jarring.
  • Time Of Your Life is doing it very poorly.
  • Since the Griffins of Summer Days and Evening Flames are based on Germanic tribes, it's often names and titles are in German. Occasionally, Gilda slips into her native tongue when vexxed or not focused completely.
  • Grazie, the beautiful new girl did this a couple of times.
  • Jericho (MLP), a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic, has the narrator, the eponymous Jericho, drop bits of German when he speaks. Jericho also notes that when he gets nervous or otherwise heavily emotional, he tends to speak in more a more literal German-to-English manner, which effectively makes him sound as if he were speaking straight out of Shakespeare. Justified in that German -— in-universe, called Teutsch —- is his first language, and (very rarely) he does mistranslate.
    Talking to himself: "Yeah, you've got a good point. On the other hoof, monologing aloud is quite grand. And as we all know, reality is flexible when something is aroused." I blinked. "Cool! The Equestrian word is cool, ours is geil, which technically means aroused! Do not confuse these two. Especially not when these Equestrians are all naked."
    • The most notable time Jericho slipped into Teutsch (which he immediately translated) was when he broke his Code of Honor and subsequently had a mental breakdown. He went on about a certain code of warrior's honor, which was a German homage to the Gunslinger's Creed:
    Ich ziele nicht mit der Hand. Wer mit der Hand zielet hat das Gesicht seines Vaters vergessen. Ich ziele mit dem Auge.
    Ich schlage nicht mit der Hand. Wer mit der Hand schlaget hat das Gesicht seines Vaters vergessen. Ich schlage mit dem Verstand.
    Ich töte nicht mit dem Schwert. Wer mit dem Schwert tötet hat das Gesicht seines Vaters vergessen. Ich töte mit dem Herzen.
    "I aim not with my hand. He who aims with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I aim with my eye.—I swing not with my hand. He who swings with his hand has forgotten the face of his father. I swing with my mind.—I kill not with my sword. He who kills with his sword has forgotten the face of his father. I kill with my heart." (Ignoring how, for some reason, the author chooses to refer to a pony's hooves as "hands" when using German.)
  • Griphons randomly slip into it in Twillight Sparkle's awesome adventure, as well as having a German Funetik Aksent at all times.
  • The bits of griffon language we get in Heart of Gold, Feathers of Steel are all German.
  • In Twilight Sparkle: Night Shift, the Germane region around Horsemouth and Stutencröe speak a German analogue, although it's translated to English/Equestrian because Twilight speaks the language. (She's part Germane - her father's original name is Nachtlicht.) More notably, two of the Horsemouth cult leaders are known as "Nichts" and "Nie" - "Nothing" and "Never".
  • German is used at times in stressful situations and others in The Matrix fanfic Bringing Me To Life. Justified for one character Max, as in one chapter it's revealed that Max's Grandmom was from Germany and taught him.
  • Naturally shows up in Broken Souls, since Harry and the MCS are dealing with the death of a German reporter. The characters mainly refer to Germans as "Herr" and "Frau" rather than "Mr." and "Mrs./Ms.".
  • In Thousand Shinji, Asuka falls back on her mother tongue several times when she's annoyed or shocked.
    • After Shinji has spent a good while teasing her:
      "Ich zerreiße Ihren Gott verdammten Kopf weg!" Asuka cried out in German while trying to get at Shinji.
    • After Kaji has informed her that Shinji's synchronization ratio with his Humongous Mecha is higher than hers:
      "Gott in himmel!"
  • In Neon Genesis Evangelion: Genocide, it's used by Asuka every so often:
    Asuka: Gott, I just came back and you are already having lewd thoughts about me.
  • The author of Neon Metathesis Evangelion is German, and has a bit of fun letting Asuka speak and think in German now and then. In fact, most characters have some level of understanding of the language - Misato and Kaji have each lived in Germany as a guardian to Asuka, and Rei, Ritsuko, Fuyutsuki and Gendo know at least some German as it is a required language in Metaphysical Biology studies. Rei tries to approach Asuka by speaking German at one point, though she gets the grammar partly wrong.
  • In the Danganronpa fan comic Dreadnought Despair, the SHSL Opera Tenor Siegfried Iskandar tends to drop a few German words in his sentences.
    Siegfried: You need not lie to me, Herr Woodworth. I know that my voice, it is… nicht gut.
  • Going Another Way: Thanks to the author being German himself, Asuka does speak flawless German, which she also does often. Thankfully, her German dialogue is mostly translated with subtitles for the reader.
  • Superwomen of Eva: Legacies: True Blue: In the Legacies series, Tokyo-3 is a very metropolitan place, with English and German commonly spoken along with Japanese. To help illustrate this, Hikari has an exchange in German with a student from Sakura's year.
  • You Are (Not) At Fault: As soon as the first chapter, Asuka roars: "Das ist es! Ich werde sie am ENDE!" when she is taunted by an enemy.
  • The Nowakverse:
    • Despite speaking English fluently, and although hardly anyone around him with the exception of Widget would even understand him, Kapitänleutnant Jürgen keeps slipping back into his native German. His reaction upon Gadget's self-made flame-thrower is just one example.
—- Jürgen: Flammenwerfer!
  • Widget also isn't immune, shouting the German command "Los!" right after specifically reminding herself not to do that.
  • And then there's the character Muenster von Kublewagen-Nebelwerfer

    Spielfilme (Films — Live-Action) 
  • Die Hard has some gratuitous German sounding gibberish.
    • And what could be a Lampshade Hanging thereof; Hans Gruber has to repeat orders in English because The Dragon - much less the audience - doesn't understand the "German" orders.
    • Apparently, German terrorists say things like "mach los, mach schnell!" ("make/do go/fast") whenever they are in a hurry.
    • Funny enough, two or three of the terrorists are played by German actors and stuntmen and therefore speak flawless German - but there's also one who speaks with a thick Austrian dialect.
  • The German torturer in Hostel speaks gruesomely mangled German, while Paxton, an American student, speaks flawless German (though with an accent).
  • Shutter Island has actually rather decent German, though a native speaker notices the heavy accent and small mistakes.
  • This trope is Older Than They Think. In Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, Hynkel speaks German gibberish when speaking to the public or when he is angry.
    • Not that it sounds anything like German to natives. But the "German always sounds like someone being angry" stereotype is recognizable.
      • Not like German perhaps, but like the cleanest Hitler speech...
    • It's a variety act called "speaking Double Dutch" that Chaplin had learned to do when he performed in music halls and vaudeville before he got into movies.
  • House on Haunted Hill (1999) uses German writing printed on the walls of the haunted cellar, probably because someone thought that if you have a mad doctor performing vivisections on the inmates, you got to throw in a nod in direction of Evil Nazis (TM). The problem(s): first off, using German for official text makes no sense whatsoever in an asylum that's in the US, secondly the phrases are so mangled as to be barely understandable, and on top of that even what they mean - "stand away from the windows when the alarm sounds" - makes little sense when written on the walls of a cellar.
  • Averted in Sergei Eisenstein's classic WWII-era propaganda film Alexander Nevsky, noted for its musical score by Sergei Prokofiev. In this film, the villains are Germans, but recite their famous chant in nonsensical Latin.
  • The German in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is often a bit mangled. A particularly noticeable example is a button labeled with "Dringlichkeitsfreigabe", which then gets translated as "Emergency Release". It should be "Notentriegelung" or "Notentkopplung".
  • Monty Python did a couple of sketches specifically for German television. Since none of them spoke or understood enough German, they just memorized their lines and delivered them as they saw fit, which resulted in hilarious mispronunciations.
    • "Das bayrische Restaurant Stück" is a very good example for this. The pronunciation isn't actually that bad, every sentence is perfectly understandable.
    • Their sketch "The Funniest Joke in the World" in Monty Python's Flying Circus had the joke "translated" into German which actually consisted of meaningless words that weren't actually funny at all but still seemed to do the job.
    • Additionally, their sketch "North Minehead By-Election", also from Monty Python's Flying Circus, had Hitler campaign for election with pseudo-German gibberish inserted into heavily accented English. One line is almost actual German, though: "Und Bridgwater ist die letzte Fühlung das wir haben in Somerset!" Though sometimes they do use actual German too, like when Hitler can't remember what the word for "hike" is:
      Hitler: Was ist rückweise bewegen?
    • Neither of those lines are understandable to a German, though, despite using more or less actual German words. "Fühlung" doesn't exist, but from constructional logic it would need to mean something like "feeling", though not in an emotional but tactical sense, which doesn't mean really much in this sentence. Similarly, "rückweise" should be "rückwärts" and has nothing to do with hike. Also "die Fühlung" should be followed by "die", not "das".
    • And who could forget the sketch about Johann Gambolputty de von Ausfern Schplenden Schlitter Crasscrembon Fried Digger Dingle Dangle Dongle Dungle Burstein von Knackerthrasher Applebanger (Horowitz) Ticonlensic Granderknotty Spelltinkle Grandlich Grumblemeyer Spelterwasser Kurstlich Himbel Eisenbahnwagen Gutenabend Bitte Eine Nurmburgerbratwurstle Gersputen Mitzweimache Luberhundsfut Gumberaber Shonedanker Kalbsfleisch Mittleraucher von Hautkopft of Ulm?
  • The German in The Incredible Mr. Limpet starts off sounding legit but quickly descends into this.
  • The Return of the Living Dead: Ernie is a man from Germany (who is strongly implied to be an escaped ex-Nazi due to him listening to a WW2 march about panzers in Africa and having a portrait of Eva Braun on his wall) who comments that the acid rain is "Coming down like einen getrunken soldat" (like a drunken soldier).
  • Top Secret! has quite some written Gratuitous German, for example, signs like "Der Pizza Haus" or "Das Fencen Switchen". Amusingly the first means "pizza hut" (even though it has a wrong article. It should be "Das Pizza Haus" or even more correct "Das Pizzahaus"), which is called just that in German too. The latter are just capitalized English words with a German ending tacked on.
  • Muppet Treasure Island: During the song "Cabin Fever", a chorus sings "Ach du lieber Volkswagen car/Saurbraten weiner schnitzel und a wunderbar".
  • The Rocketeer has lots of decent German, except for one line where a Nazi agent says to Nazi spy Neville Sinclair "Ich habe meine Bestellung, und du auch!", which means "I have my orders, and so do you!". Except the "orders" mentioned here are the sort of orders one gives a waiter. He really should've said "Ich habe meine Befehle".
  • Kindergarten Cop is one of the few films in which they don't pretend that Schwarzenegger's character is American, with him saying "Das macht mich stinksauer! Jetzt bin ich sauer!"note  and his partner later putting on an accent when pretending to be his sister from Austria.
  • The Good German has Cate Blanchett making a sound effort at speaking German, while George Clooney (whose character is supposed to have lived as a correspondent in Germany for many years) doesn't seem to care and stumbles through a phonetically pronounced, wrongly inflected and almost incomprehensible German conversation with a child.
  • A scene in POW movie Stalag 17 has all the prisoners dress up as Adolf Hitler and stage a mock rally, as the resident prankster reads from one of the copies of Mein Kampf they were all given on arrival and spouts random German words (the script simply says Harpo Does Something Funny);
    Bagradian: Czechoslovakia und Poland - kaput! Und der Fräulein mit der Glockenspiel und der Bustenhalter - verboten! Und der Apfelstrudel mit der Liederkranz - Gesundheit! Everything is Gesundheit, kaput und verboten!
  • Gabrielle Union's character in Neo Ned (an independent film starring Jeremy Renner) is committed to a mental institution because she thinks she's the reincarnated Hitler. She delivers about three barely understandable German lines. This trope is subverted later in the movie when she admits that her German is pretty "shoddy" and that she only had a few German classes in High School.
  • Done as a riff in Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie. The film, This Island Earth, has one scene where the alien Exeter attempts to stop the Mut-Ant from attacking Cal and Ruth. Tom Servo immediately starts speaking in German, apparently greeting it good morning and offering a cigarette. It's highly possible that Servo's puppet wrangler, Kevin Murphy, is fluent in German.
  • Some German soldiers, probably mercenaries, can be heard speaking their native language in the opening scene of the With Fire and Sword movie.
  • Averted in the movie The Diary Of Anne Frankenstein which is part of the movie Chillerama: All actors speak very good German. Parodied for Hitler, who does speak only gibberish. He starts out with some phrases that do sound like German but are just utter nonsense. As the movie within the movie progresses, Hitler's lines become more and more gibberish, that doesn't even sound like German anymore. All the other characters understand him perfectly fine at all times, though.
  • Alita: Battle Angel keeps the name of the titular heroine's martial art, Panzer Kunst, from the manga it's based on. It consists of the German words for "tank"note  (Panzer) and "art" (Kunst). Together they mean... nothing that makes immediate sense, although with generous application of creativity one could interpret it as the art of becoming invulnerable. Still, combining two utterly opposed terms like these just to include something that sounds foreign means that any native German will probably either chuckle or groan upon hearing it.
  • National Treasure: During a dispute after the Declaration of Independence is stolen, Abigail yells to Ben what Riley recognizes as the German for "Damn you!" ("Pretty sure she was swearing, too.").
  • Colonel von Gutz and his men from Up the Front pepper their speech with German words such as "schnell".

    Literatur (Literature) 
  • In the first book of his The Expanse series, James S.A. Corey introduces the reader to his version of a pan-European space accent made up of various languages spoken by the working-class Belters. When Detective Miller tries to quell a riot, he is confronted by a brute telling him to "Schrauben sie sie weibchen". There are mistakes in both orthography and punctuation (the correct version being "Schrauben Sie, Sie Weibchen."), but that may be explained away by the fact that it's the future and the speaking person is uneducated. However, the words don´t even make sense on the most basic level. "Schrauben" is the literal translation of "to screw", but in German does not carry the sexual connotation. Moreover, the expression "screw you" would in German require a reflexive pronoun ("sich"/"yourself") if the brute (uncharacteristically) uses the polite "Sie"("Thou") instead of "Du"/"Dich"("you"). Finally, "Weibchen" only means "female animal of any species", not "bitch"/"female dog".
    • It's "Belter-inflected Gutter German". The German translation of the book here has "Leck mich doch, du verdammte Erdschlampe" which is exactly the intended meaning.
  • Baka and Test: Summon the Beasts: Minami tends to babble in German when she's upset, a good example being in the Beach Episode after she sees Himeji wearing a bikini. Justified, since she lived in Germany for most of her life.
  • Several stories of the Cthulhu Mythos make references to a book called "Unausprechlichen Kulten" as the second most popular book on cosmic horrors after the Necronomicon. Unsurprisingly, the grammar of the title is just wrong. It would be either "Unaussprechliche Kulte" (unspeakable cults) or "Von unaussprechlichen Kulten" (of unspeakable cults). It could be referred such in a proper German sentence with the right grammatical surroundings, but not on its own without the grammatical German context.
  • Erma Bombeck wrote a humor column early in her career about borrowing her husband's small mouse-gray car and his insistence that the driver has to speak to it. In German.
    "Du bist ein cheapie, that's what you are!"
  • Fitz Kreiner of the Doctor Who Expanded Universe Eighth Doctor Adventures occasionally employs this trope, largely because, as his namenote  suggests, he is half-German, although he doesn't seem to speak the language to any useful degree. He once referred to the Doctor as "Herr Doktor" for the crime of trying to make Fitz have a nice time, and, during a Heroic BSoD, started talking to himself:
    "For you, Britischer pig, ze var is over."
    • In fact, he speaks no German at all beyond "Stock" phrases from films, having been raised by his mother (British) in post-War Britain.
  • In President's Vampire the the undead soldiers are always referred to as Unmanschensoldaten (literally "inhuman soldiers"), and Konrad sometimes spices his speech with short German phrases or words.
  • Lots in the work of Sylvia Plath (both her parents were German), most evident in Ariel.
  • In Rivers of London, when DC Grant comes across a German family while trying to escape from the middle of a riot he yells "Raus, Raus" at them while thinking that he hopes it means "move, move" like it does in War Movies, because it's the only bit of German he knows.
  • Rudolf Von Flugel, from Richard Scarry's children's stories, is prone to this sort of thing.
  • Holmes drops some German in Sherlock Holmes, quoting Goethe at one point. It's also a plot point in A Study in Scarlet, where "Rache" has been written on the wall in blood and Holmes tells Scotland Yard not to bother looking for a woman named Rachel because the word is German for revenge. (This is fairly gratuitous, as both murderer and victim did speak English as well as German; it just made a better convoluted clue than if he'd simply written Revenge in English.)
  • The Machine Gunners by Robert Westall uses this; "Hande hoch!" and "Raus! Raus!" come up a fair bit after a German airman is captured by the main characters. It gets lampshaded as their sole source of German is dialogue in War Movies
  • Rick Yancey's Monstrumologist series features the Austrian Von Helrung as a mentor to the monstrumologist in the second book and let's the two exchange some very heterosexual endearments in German.
  • Abounds in the two books of John Ringo's Legacy of the Aldenata co-written with Tom Kratman that play out in Europe, "Watch on the Rhine" and "Eye of the Storm".
  • In the Honor Harrington series, the Andermani Empire is based on Prussian culture, and uses German military ranks and noble titles. However, the author seemingly did not consult a native speaker, because the Andermani's German is wrong on many occasions.
    • Justified in-universe by a few hundred years of language drift and the influence of the Chinese parts of the population
    • A subversion in the infamous OOPSIE edition of "Storm from the Shadows", where the author accidentally leaked an early version of the novel, complete with notes to himself and his editors including one for the inner monologue of a character from a presumably German-influenced planet (called Dresden)
    "[...] were very different from people like that poisonous ["worm-eater": let's find someone who can translate this into German for us] Van Scheldt."
  • In Veronica Wolff's Young Adult The Watchers series, several characters try to talk in German, including (that should say: especially) the protagonist who refers to a generally disliked teacher as Adolph (Ouch!). But it's not just her:
    "Don't forget your etiquette homework, meine kleine Gummibärchen."
    • Apparently the author studied languages and art once..
  • In Illuminatus!, "Ewige Blumenkraft" translation , the slogan of the Ancient Illuminated Seers of Bavaria, was supposedly shouted by Mayor Daley of Chicago at the Democratic Convention of 1968.
  • In Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes, the Hessian soldiers use a few German phrases, which are translated in an appendix for the benefit of young readers.
  • In Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain, Penny invents a sphere-thing she calls the "German Grenade" to help her with her German class. Unfortunately, it doesn't speak German much better than she does, so it's useless for her purposes.
  • In Distortionverse, Chapter 2 - Rosenmaester qualifies for this on various levels:
    • Vortag Schlieber's name: Schlieber is not a German word whatsoever, while Vortag translates as previous day in English. And, no, it's not Played for Laughs.
    • the name Rosenmaester, though looking German-like, is just a combination of Rosen (rose) and Maester (???) which is a Final Fantasy X-version of Meister.
  • Robert Merle's book Death Is My Trade is a fictionalized biographical novel, narrated by the protagonist Rudolf Lang, who is based on Auschwitz commander Rudolf Höss. Since Lang is German, the entire book is supposedly translated from German; despite this, many German phrases remain "untranslated", and only explained in footnotes.
  • Philip K. Dick, who actually spoke the language, sometimes dipped into German vocabulary, especially when he went on one of his trademark philosophical or high-literary tangents and needed to discuss Das Land der Dichter and Denker. It served him particularly well in The Man in the High Castle, where half of the United States has been occupied by Nazis.
  • In Autobiography of Red, while the main character is in Argentina he adds fragments of German text, supposedly from Martin Heidegger, to his postcards home.
  • Comes up a fair bit in Victoria, where at least two main characters (John Rumford and Bill Kraft) are supposed to be fluent speakers. Rumford in particular is fond of saying Das Wesentliche ist die Tat.
  • In Decades of Darkness, Germany becomes one of three superpowers, thus German (or rather, neudeutsch) phrases tend to crop up, like "funk" (that's pronounced "foonk", for you anglophones) for radio.
  • The Journal Entries avert it at one point with Translation Convention, but you'll only get the reference if you already know the German. Ken describes his lover Aaden Satpulov as "the Black Ploughman of mephits". Aaden is a body builder, and Word of God is that "Black Ploughtman" is the correct English translation of Schwarzenegger.
  • Victoria, much like the author, has a fixation on Prussian German militarism. One of the most prominent examples is the official motto of the Christian Marines; Das Wesentliche ist die Tat. The Christian Marines, for the record, are American.
  • In Ascendance of a Bookworm most of the names of people and places are German or based on German naming. Even more so, their Gods have names that are simple German words or are corruptions of them, like Leidenschaft (passion) or Geduldh (from "geduld" which means patience).

    Fernsehen (Live-Action TV) 
  • 24: Jack Bauer pretends to be German in one episode and speaks it. When he is told he has an American accent, he explains he lived in America for years. Oddly, he is addressed as "du" instead of the more appropriate "Sie".
  • 30 Rock: Liz Lemon can speak German, just not all that well. We see her use it a few times, most notably when she accidentally sells NBC to a German cable TV company after confusing "verkaufen" with "kaufen" ("sell" and "buy" respectively).
  • The fifth season of Breaking Bad introduces the German backers of Gus, who have some interest in forming a new partnership with Walter. Like the Gratuitous Spanish from the other seasons, the grammar and use of phrases is excellent, but many of the actors speak their lines rather terribly.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer: In the third season episode "Gingerbread", the newspaper article the gang looks up and the chant Giles is doing at the end of the episode qualifies for this.
  • Doctor Who: "Journey's End" shows that Japan doesn't have the monopoly on Gratuitous German: "Exterminieren! Exterminieren!" Especially grating since "exterminieren" is not even a proper word (at least not one anyone actually uses), just the usual "Exterminate!" with a common verb ending. More accurate alternative would be "Eliminieren!" (which was used by the actual German dub), or "Vernichten!", which, while being closer to "destroy" or "annihilate", was what the... main inspiration for the Daleks used in a similar context.
  • Two of the people aboard the Demeter in Episode 2 of Dracula are of German descent (the helmsman and an elderly Grand Duchess, both allegedly from Bavaria). Dracula feeds on the former to have a brief but inconsequential conversation in perfect German with the latter.
  • Frasier played with this a few times throughout its run, most notably in the episode 'An Affair to Forget', where, after one of Frasier's listeners calls into his psychiatric-advice program thinking her Bavarian, fencing-coach husband was having an affair, Frasier begins to think (with good reason) that his sister-in-law is the 'other woman', leading to quite a bit of German; including a scene where the characters must translate from English to Spanish to German, then back again.
    • As Frasier is a Freudian, and Freud having been a German-speaker from present-day Austria, German psychological terms randomly pop up now and again.
    • Frasier is even enraptured with a new love interest when, among other interests, she admits to speaking German and liking the German war film Das Boot.
  • Fringe has quite a few examples. E. g., there's "Wissenschaft Prison Germany". What exactly is a "science prison" supposed to be?
    • Apart from that, writing "Wissenschaft Prison" as it is, is the German equivalent for what "Sciencegefängnis" is for English, complete with the (non)existent spaces between the words.
    • Most of the background chatter on the airplane in the cold opener of the series pilot. Hilariously badly spoken/accented, too.
  • Grimm's monster names and related terms are all terrible German. They go from simple grammar fail (e.g.: using adjectives as nouns; wrongly cobbled-together compound words; e.g. werewolves are called blutbaden. In fact, "Blutbad", plural "Blutbäder", means "bloodbath" or "massacre''. 'blutbaden' itself looks like a verb infinitive, 'to bloodbath' (which doesn't exist)) to horrible dictionary slips (e.g. the supposed 'bee queen' is called "bee gay [person]") and mess-ups of cultural context of phrases that completely destroy the tone of a scene (e.g. the quote "Alles hat ein Ende nur die Wurst hat zwei." which comes from a very well known comedic Break-Up Song from the late 1980s, but is used in the show as some kind of philosophical wisdom handed down the generations to say over a friend's dead body).
  • The German characters in Hogan's Heroes throw in a few easily-translated German phrases.
  • The authors of How I Met Your Mother seem to love German compound words...
    • In the aptly named episode "The Yips", Heidi Klum (who in Real Life is indeed a German native speaker) translates "yips" (the condition Barney has which renders him utterly incapable of flirting) with "Ach du meine Güte, gar nichts klappt mehr, so überhaupt gar nichts mehr. so ne scheiße". It means "Oh my goodness, nothing works anymore, just nothing works. what F##ing Shit", which is grammatically a whole sentence, although Heidi says it so fast that non-German speakers may be forgiven for assuming that it's one of those ridiculously long compound words.
    • In the episode "Farhampton", Klaus (the German suitor of Ted's ex-girlfriend Victoria) teaches Ted the word "Lebenslangerschicksalsschatz", which he (correctly) translates as "lifelong treasure of destiny". Grammatically, this are actually two separate (compound-)words ("lebenslanger Schicksalsschatz"). Also, this is not actually a common expression in German, though "Schatz" (treasure) is indeed a common German term of endearment, just like "honey" is in English.
  • JAG has two examples of this trope. In "Nobody's Child" multilingual Sarah Mackenzie correctly translates the hymn title Als ich bei meinen Schafen wacht to As I watch over my sheep. And in "A Tangled Webb (Part 2)" she speaks German with Mennonite settler in Paraguay.
  • MacGyver: Invoked and lampshaded whenever German is spoken; it's the one language MacGyver could never get the hang of. Sometimes Played for Laughs:
    MacGyver: [translated, speaking to Secret Police] We were picking apples in the forest. And this... [pointing to Jack] ...this is my wife!
  • In Majimuri Gakuen, the Absurdly Powerful Student Council are inspired by the Nazis and its members have German words as nicknames.
  • Malcolm in the Middle has the original German couple Gretchen and Otto, which spoke a weird broken "Deutschlish". In Germany they became Danish.
  • Dwight Schrute sings a couple of verses of John Denver's "Take Me Home, Country Roads" during an episode of The Office (US).
    Referring to copier instructions: This is either an incense dispenser or a ceremonial sarcophagus. My German is pre-industrial, mostly religious.
  • On Real Husbands of Hollywood, Boris Kodjoe, playing a fictionalized version of himself, speaks German sometimes (one episode features his German ex-girlfriend trying to get back with him). Kodjoe is actually German thus he is fluent in German as well as English.
  • Sanctuary: In the episode "Normandy" during the 1944 flashbacks Watson goes undercover as a German officer and has to bluff his way past a German roadblock. This turns into a discussion (in German) about his accent, as he pretends to be Bavarian to explain his mistakes and the soldier holding him up turns out to be from Bavaria as well. Both of the actors' pronunciation was mangled so badly that even Germans watching the original version needed subtitles, and, needless to say, neither sounded even remotely like he was from Bavaria.
  • Elliot from Scrubs speaks German, a fact that shows up in a few episodes, such as one with a German cancer patient; in fact, her German is way better than that of the "Germans", who speak hardly anything a German would accept as his native language. The actress, Sarah Chalke, actually is fluent in French and German.
    • In Germany, that was changed into Danish. In other episodes, she speaks Swedish or a Swiss dialect. As a rule of thumb for the German dub: When Elliot talks in a language other than German she speaks German in the original English version.
    • She also mangles it quite horribly, the first time it comes up. Granted she is angry with Dr. Kelso, but it takes a German a couple of viewings to realize that it is supposed to be German and a couple more to understand it. Other times she has a clear accent, but everything else is quite right.
  • Stargate:
    • Stargate SG-1: In the episode "1969", Daniel Jackson pretends to be a German archaeologist and has a conversation consisting of Poirot Speak English and surprisingly good German. Normally, this would be realistic when an American tries to con another American, but Daniel is supposed to be a genius linguist...
    • There's an episode of Stargate Atlantis in which a random extra playing a scientist makes some comments in German, like "this reminds me of the birth of my nephew" (about an alien wetware tech space shuttle they were dissecting). Unusually, the grammar and pronunciation of these lines is perfect. It turns out, the extra was actually a German ex-pat normally working in the make-up crew of the show, and the lines were ad-libbed.
  • Any episode of Supernatural featuring the Thule society is sure to include several instances of this.
  • Van Kooten En De Bie: Mr. O. den Beste who is a former German language teacher and thus often uses untranslated German expressions and sayings in his vocabulary.
  • In an episode of Voyagers! Bogg pretends to be a German boxer who volunteers to spar with Joe Louis prior to Louis's match with Max Schmeling in 1938. Jeff calls him to come over by saying kommen sie. Later Jeff encourages Bogg in the ring by saying fighten sie!
  • In the second season of Wynonna Earp, the Iron Witch (who looks like she's Latina or Native American) inexplicably chants her old family magic in German. We only hear parts of it, but what can be understood is grammatically wrong or clearly too-literally translated from English.
  • The X-Files has numerous examples of this trope. "Die Hand Die Verletzt" features a Satanic cult that inexplicably chants auf Deutsch during its ceremonies. "Unruhe" features a serial killer who taunts his victims in German, and in this episode, we learn that Scully learned German in college and speaks a few phrases. Actually averted in "Triangle", a dream/fantasy episode which recasts the series villains as Nazis in a World War II setting; as stated in interviews on DVD, the actors tried to speak German without an American accent and to pronounce words with "ch" correctly. Listening to the American audio as a native German speaker, you have to admit that they did their job very well.

    Musik (Music) 
  • The Beatles recorded versions of "She Loves You" and "I Want To Hold Your Hand" in German. They only knew the words phonetically, as none of them spoke German. Plus: none of them actually liked doing it. They almost boycotted the session but did it on the condition that they didn't have to do anything like that again.
    • This was ostensibly the decision of the record company, to break The Beatles to the German market. The Beatles became popular in Germany during their time spent in Hamburg during 1960-1962, well before they were widely known outside of Liverpool. The English language versions of "She Loves You" and "I Want To Hold Your Hand" had already been hits in Germany as well, and whilst the German-language single was a big hit, the English versions continue to be more popular. The German version of "Hand" was included on the US album "Something New" and is more widely known for this. Both German-language versions are also available on the compilation album Past Masters.
  • Blur did this on Parklife:
    • "Girls & Boys": "Du bist sehr schön/But we haven't been introduced" ("You're very pretty.").
    • "Parklife" "it's not always vorsprung durch technik, you know."
  • Franz Ferdinand's "Darts of Pleasure" from Franz Ferdinand (2004) finishes with a repeated chorus of "Ich heiße superfantastisch! Ich trinke Schampus mit Lachsfisch! Ich heiße superfantastisch!" ("My name is super fantastic! I drink Champagne with salmon fish!") The way it's sung is supposed to recall a (male) orgasm.
    • Let's not forget the title-only Gratuitous German "Auf Achse," whose title is a Shout-Out to a German TV series about truckers and includes a verse about Jesus.
    • And then there's "Tell Her Tonight," which is in English, yes...but then they re-recorded it with German lyrics. It's actually kind of awesome. (Compared to the original).
  • The opening phrase of Def Leppard's "Rock of Ages" is in what can be described as German-sounding gibberish. It was sampled by The Offspring for their song "Pretty Fly for a White Guy".note 
  • Elliot Goldenthal is a well known modern classical composer that has worked for the soundtrack of many movies and has a sense of humor when he puts titles on the tracks of his albums. One of the tracks in the Batman Forever soundtrack is "Fledermausmarschmusik". It's obvious what it means and what it sounds like. Another track in the same OST is named "Batterdammerung"
  • Slovenian band Laibach like to translate innocent songs like Life is Life into German and adapting the music ... slightly. The result would not be out of place at a Nazi rally. Their name also qualifies, as Laibach is the (now almost out of use) German name for Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia.
  • Frank Zappa enjoyed using German language in some of his songs:
    • "Didya Get Any Onya?" on Weasels Ripped My Flesh has somebody talk in a mock German accent about "years ago in Germany".
    • "Sofa" on One Size Fits All is completely sung in German.
    • "Wind Up Working In A Gas Station" ends with Zappa singing in a mock German accent near the end.
    • "Stick It Out" on Joe's Garage has several lines in German
    Fick mich, du miserabler Hurensohn ...
    • Some German is spoken at the start of "Welcome To The United States" on The Yellow Shark.
    • On Civilization Phase III, on the second disc, we hear several people speak German, Dutch, Turkish, Flemish, French, Italian and English. The track "Waffenspiel" is also a German word.
  • John Lennon speaks one line in German, "Gutenmorgen, Meinen Damen und Herren. This is the peace corps" on Wedding Album.
  • David Bowie's "Heroes" has a Title Track where two people meet near the Berlin Wall. The song became a monster hit in Germany, and thus Bowie also recorded a German-language version called "Helden".
    Fame, "Nein! It's mine!" is just his line
  • Tom Waits did this a few times too:
    • "The Black Rider" from The Black Rider is sung with a mock German accent.
    • "Kommeinezuspadt? Kommeinezuspadt? Kommeinezuspadt!" by Tom Waits, from his album Alice is more a case of As Long as It Sounds Foreign. Most of the rest of song is just vaguely German-sounding gibberish, though, and the title is intentionally misspelled - the last part should be "spät", not "spadt", and the title's spelled as one word but it's actually a sentence. "Komm eine zu spät" literally means "Come one too late". It's likely the actual title is supposed to be "Komm nie zu spät", which means "Don't come too late".
  • The American band tool has a song "Die Eier Von Satan," in which the singer growls out a menacing speech in German, punctuated by shouted crescendos that are received with wild applause by an audience. It all sounds incredibly Naziesque until you discover that the speech is actually a recipe for hash brownies. Also, the title means "Satan's Balls" (literally "Satan's Eggs"). The band also has a Gratuitous Italian song, "Message for Harry Manback," in which the speaker frequently curses in Italian.
  • Bill Bailey loves using German gratuitously in homages to Kraftwerk, with songs like "Das Hockey Kockey" and "Hosenbügler".
    • In fact, in Bill Bailey's Remarkable Guide To The Orchestra, he introduces a Baroque musical piece as 'Wie Tiefer Ist Deiner Lieber', more commonly known as How Deep is Your Love by the Bee Gees.
  • One word of Visual Kei bands Dir en Grey name exists in German too.
  • The song "Pussy" by Rammstein is either Gratuitous German by a German band, or Gratuitous English.
    • To clarify, the song is about a tourist who is out for a quick vacation fuck/ general criticism of sex tourism and the assumption that Foreign People Are Sexy and was thus deliberately given a "mangled foreign language"-look.
  • Swedish Power Metal band Sabaton uses German words frequently in their Songs, usually when singing about Germans. Anschluss, Wehrmacht, Panzer, Panzerkampfwagen and the like. They also covered the song "Für Immer" by German band Warlock, with actually pretty good German.
  • Isch lieben aus tubikler/Es kat mi madre monster...
  • KMFDM stands for the grammatically incorrect "Kein Mehrheit fur die Mitleid" (No Majority for Pity). However, the intro of "Megalomaniac" has the spoken words "Kein Mitleid fur die Mehrheit", which is the correct grammar for "No Pity for the Majority".
  • The Canadian industrial band Front Line Assembly uses it in many of their songs. But their leader, Bill Leeb, was born in Austria, and later moved to Canada, so when used in a very personal song, such as Angriff, it seems less gratuitous.
  • Hilariously parodied by Eisbrecher in their song "This Is Deutsch", along with Germanic Depressives and All Germans Are Nazis...but only if you actually speak German. Otherwise, it sounds like a straight example of all three tropes.
    • They are also quoting a piece of music (at about the 0:05 mark) from the 80s that is quite well known in Germany but obscure elsewhere. Doubles as Genius Bonus if you aren't German
  • Eric Bogle's "Flying Finger Filler'' contains a stanza sung in German that makes no sense whatsoever. Of course, the opening verse tells us that the entire song is supposed to make no sense.
  • When the British punk/dance band Fuzzbox covered Yoko Ono's "Walking On Thin Ice", they translated the spoken word passage to German for some reason. The translation is flawless however and so is the delivery. In fact, it sounds as if a native speaker spoke this passage, but the album doesn't feature any credits whatsoever so it can't be said for sure.
  • "Hello Earth" from Kate Bush's album Hounds of Love features one line in German near the end: "Tiefer, tiefer, irgendwo immer tiefer gibt es ein Licht." ("Deeper, deeper, somewhere even deeper, there is a light").
  • German band Scooter, whose vocals are usually in English, have the tendency to throw in a bit of Gratuitous German. A good example is the end of Posse (I Need You On The Floor), where HP says something that sounds like "Heili geili! Ihr Schweine", which really can't be translated at all. 'Heili geili' is nonsensical note , "ihr Schweine" means "you pigs", but most like is used as a form of praise in this context.
  • SoundHorizon's "Märchen". The. Entire. Album.
  • Despite hailing from Germany, Power Metal band Powerwolf sing all of their songs in English peppered with the occasional Latin phrase. Kreuzfeuer is the sole exception, being sung entirely in German and Latin.
  • Laurie Anderson uses spoken German language samples in "Example # 22".
  • Maxïmo Park has this in the bonus track on "Too much Information" - "Angst essen Seele auf". They translate it immediately ("Fear eats the soul"), and anyway it's a Shout-Out to the like-named German Fassbender movie.
  • The Fall: "Ich rausum mach aus Bremen Nacht". From "Bremen Nacht" (duh). The singer varies the phrase a lot, but doesn't manage to get it grammatically correct (that he leaves German town Bremen, for which reason ever).
  • Wire "A Serious of Snakes": "Then a pause for a German phrase Nie wieder nie wieder, nie wieder nie wieder Never again, none of your lip". The phrase BTW refers to never again fascism.
  • In the Sloth song for the Evillious Chronicles, ''"Gift From The Princess Who Brought Sleep," the word "Gift" is used over and over.Spoilers 
  • Norwegian Band Trollfes T plays this straight in nearly all of their songs. They wanted to sing German, "because it sounds evil", but since none of them actually speaks German, they have nearly no grammar and replace every word they don't know with Norwegian words. Sometimes, there are also some (mostly correct) English lines in their songs. They call it Trollsprak.
  • Ian Dury: "Hit me with your rhythm stick, das ist gut, c'est fantastique" (New! 2 gratuitous languages for the price of 1!)
  • Industrial metal band Hanzel und Gretyl takes this so far that it's sometimes tough to tell if they're doing this or Gratuitous English. Their average song is either nonsensical English lyrics with random German words thrown in ("Fukken Uber Death Party") or equally nonsensical German lyrics with random English. One of their songs, for example, is the grammatically incorrect nonsense phrase "Ich bin uber alles" repeated over and over before switching to the definitely not correct "Ich bin Mutter Fukker!"
  • British metal band Carcass has "Arbeit Macht Fleisch" from 1993's Heartwork which has lyrics entirely in English apart from the Title Drop in the chorus.
  • German Disco band Boney M (who sing in English) in "Rasputin", a ballad about the selfsame Russian celeb. That the ladies found him "wunderbar" is OK, this loanword has wandered into English anyway.
  • German heavy metal singer Doro Pesch records most of her songs in English, but the occasional song recorded in German will find its way into the mix.
  • Daniel Amos's album Doppelgänger was partly an homage to German Expressionism. The title is a loanword from German anyway; the two sides of the original LP were labeled "Side Ein" and "Side Zwei"; and the song "The Double" has the backing singers counting off the beat in German. For the Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition of the album, a third disc of bonus material was named Dreifachgängernote .
  • The Italian Eurodance artist Mo-Do recorded mainly in German.
  • UK trance supergroup duo The Argonauts' two singles were titled "Sommertag" and "Frühlingstag"; the latter sometimes misspelled "Frühlingftag" or "Flühlingftag".
  • French Canadian synthpop group Trans-X of "Living on Video" fame have "Ich Liebe Dich (I Love You)".
  • The English version of Trio's lone international hit "Da Da Da" retains the German line "Ich liebe dich nicht, du liebst mich nicht"("I love you not, you love me not").
  • Goldfinger's cover of Nena's "99 Red Balloons" uses the fourth verse of "99 Luftballons" in lieu of its English counterpart, possibly due to copyright troubles regarding the English verse's reference to Captain Kirk.
  • Swedish Europop group E-Type invokes this in the chorus of "Es ist nie vorbei (It's Not Over)", featuring Jasmin "Blümchen" Wagner.
  • Apoptygma Berzerk, who are Norwegian, have an EP titled Nein Danke!, which is ostensibly German for "no thanks".
  • Roxy Music's "Bittersweet" alternates between English and German lyrics. One of the models on the cover of Country Life helped Bryan Ferry with the translation.
  • The sole commercial album of American industrial act Fockewolf (itself a pun on the German aircraft manufacturer Focke-Wulf) is titled Die Toten Weg ("The Killing Path").
  • The Warrant song "The Bitter Pill" busts into German about halfway through the song.
  • English glitch-ambient artist Scanner (not to be confused with the actual German band of the same name) has an album titled Lauwarm Instrumentals(lukewarm), with a track called "Sonnenlicht"(sunlight).

    Wrestling oder Profi-Ringen (Pro Wrestling) 

    Brettspiele (Tabletop Games) 
  • In the Yu-Gi-Oh! card game, the Japanese and Chinese versions of Yubel's two evolved forms have names in horribly mangled German. When they were released in Germany, they got more sensible names (translated from the English ones, which are totally different). Interestingly, Yubel's name is a pun on the words "Jubel" (jubilation) and Übel (evil/bad).
    • Incidentally, the Japanese and Chinese names are legitimate German names, if you fix the mangling caused by Romanization; Das Abscheulich Ritter (Terror Incarnate) roughly means "The Detestable/Disgusting Knight", while Das Extremer Traurig Drachen (The Ultimate Nightmare) means "The Extremely Sad Dragons".
    • The correct phrases would be Der abscheuliche Ritter and Der extrem traurige Drache. The designers apparently still had trouble with applying the correct grammatical gender and case.
      • Actually, the grammar may not be inaccurate; "Das" is the article used with nouns that have a neutral grammatical gender and Yubel is a Hemaphrodite, "Drachen" or Dragons plural also makes sense since Yubel's final form has two dragon heads.
  • In Mutant Chronicles, Bauhaus takes the cake with "Kommandant", "Jaeger" and "Blitzer Kaptain".
    • The Sons of Rasputin from the spinoff Dark Eden have such interesting units as "Soldat", "Schwerwaffe Soldat", "Flammen Soldat" and "Cossack Kommendant".
  • Parodied in Robot Chicken during the Anne Frank sketch (starring Hilary Duff). Anne tosses a paint can at some Nazis coming up the stairs. As they fall, one of them screams "Mein Kampf!"
  • BattleTech has some of these, especially with the Lyran Commonwealth. Their rank system uses words such as Kommandant-Major and Hauptmann-Captain. Also shows up in the names of some of their units, like the Blitzkrieg and Eisenfaust (Iron Fist) Battlemechs, Schildkröte (Turtle) medium tank, and Morgenstern (Morning Star) aerospace fighter.
  • Warhammer 40,000: The home planet of the Death Korps is known as Krieg. Yes, Krieg, the German word for war.
  • Warhammer Fantasy has tons of these as the primary human faction is a Fantasy Counterpart Culture to the Holy Roman Empire. For instance, most of the provinces of the Empire have extremely literal names in German, such as the northernmost province being called Nordland, the central province being called Middenland, the easternmost province being called Ostland, the southernmost territory being called Sudenland, the land with the biggest university being called Wissenland (literally Knowledgeland), and the richest land being called Reikland (Reik is undoubtedly just a cooler way of spelling Reich, meaning "rich" or "empire" in German). Some places just straight-up have real German names, like Marienburg (which is strange, as the fictional Marienburg is supposed to be a Dutch-inspired city even though the real Marienburg was a German castle).

    Theater (Theatre) 
  • The musical adaptation of Grand Hotel has some Gratuitous German toward the end.
  • In Cabaret, many of the phrases in the opening number "Willkommen" are sung in Gratuitous German, then in Gratuitous French, then in Gratuitous English.
  • Leopoldstadt, which is set in Austria, only uses gratuitous German at one point between the two German-speaking family members in front of an English cousin who'd fled from Vienna in 1938.

    Videospiele (Video Games) 
  • In the Korean gameNo Umbrellas Allowed, Junghan says, "Auf Wiedersehen!" after becoming one of your investors.
  • Zig-zagged in Red Dead Redemption 2, which takes place in the wild west of 1899 and accurately features many first- or second-generation immigrants from the Germanosphere (such as the gang's accountant, Austrian Leopold Strauss), including a Silesian (and therefore either Prussian or Bohemiannote ) man whose mother tongue is actually Polish. While most of their voice actors are indeed native German speakers and the dialogue is largely error-free, there are some subtle instances of incorrect German.
    • Strauss' voice actor is American, which is betrayed by his occasional bad pronounciation of German terms.
    • The disappeared Luxembourgian princess Isabeau Katharina Zinsmeister's surname (which freely translates to taxmaster) is an occupational surname, and is a perfectly acceptable German name... for commoners and lower nobility (and even in the latter case, The Von Trope Family is in full effect). Like in the rest of mainland Europe, higher nobility in the Germanosphere traditionally style themselves after places over which they reign or once reigned, such as von Wittelsbach (a castle in Swabia) or von Hessen (a former landgraviate). The Real Life princely family of Luxembourg does, appropriately enough, style itself as the House of Luxembourg.
  • All three Xenosaga games were sub-titled with Friedrich Nietzsche works in German: Der Wille Zur Macht (The Will To Power), Jenseits von Gut und Böse (Beyond Good And Evil), and Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra). In addition, there was a Xenosaga Alle Spezielle (a as it is, is the German equivalent for what ll special) DVD. Which, again, got the grammar wrong ("spezielle" is an adjective, in female or plural form, but it has no noun to refer to. "All special" in German would be most likely rendered as "Exklusiv" (such as "Exklusive Bonus-DVD" or something like that.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles X: With its soundtrack being composed by Hiroyuki Sawano, this was inevitable. Wir fliegen (We fly) is probably the most notable example.
  • Etrian Odyssey is fond of this trope. One of the character classes is called Landsknecht (simply swordsman in the Japanese version) and the second game features a character nicknamed der Freischütz. You also come across a few weapons with German names, such as a gun called Hakenbuechse (bonus points for the correct usage of ue in place of ü).
  • Genshin Impact: Mondstadt is loosely based on Germany, and Fischl speaks with various German terms to give herself the air that a "Prinzessin de Vertilung" should have, but in reality she is just a Chuunibyou.
  • Every Quest for Glory game features several themes, and the themes of the first game were discovery, winter/spring, and Western European mythology, which resulted in a lot of Germanic-inspired stuff.
  • League of Legends demonstrates this trope isn't limited to Japan. Lux's ultimate attack is 'Finales Funkeln', which means 'Final Sparkle'. Mordekaiser's name is also German, literally translated as 'Murders Emperor' since they inexplicably used the plural form of 'mord'.
    • This is most likely a play on words with the name "Mordekai" and the word "Kaiser" (Emperor).
    • Finales Funkeln was renamed to Final Spark after the (anime-influenced) creator of that champion left the company.
  • From the Wolfenstein series:
  • Part of No One Lives Forever takes place in East Germany, with soldiers' usual exclamations being the standard "Ach-TOONK!" and "Töten Sie ihr!" (Kill her, which should correctly be "Tötet sie!". "Töten Sie ihr" means "Kill (polite form) to her!"
  • RosenkreuzStilette is not only titled in German: the characters have names like Spiritia Rosenberg, Sichte Meister, and Graf Michael Sepperin (himself a reference to Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin). Only Michael has a normal German given name, though.
    • The weapons too: for example, Spiritia's default weapon is named Seelegewehr (Soul Rifle, almost correct - should be Seelengewehr). Most of the names are tied to the user's.
  • Super Robot Wars:
    • Many, if not most, of the Original Generation Real Robots in Super Robot Wars have German names. The Super Robot Wars: Original Generation games give these robots the main roles.
    • Becomes a little unsettling, though, when you realize that the primary antagonists, the sinister alien Balmars, label all their stuff with gratuitous Hebrew.
    • Examples from Super Robot Wars Compact 2 include Alteisen (Old Iron, really "scrap iron") and Weissritter (White Knight), plus their upgraded forms Alteisen Riese (Old Iron Giant) and Rein Weissritter (Pure White Knight)(both derivatives of the Gespenst(Ghost/Phantom))... plus the Alternate Universe Alteisen Nacht (Old Iron Night) and Weissritter Abend (White Knight Evening). Some of the German names found in Endless Frontier also double as fairytale references, including but not limited to Aschen Broedel (Aschenbrödel, aka Cinderella), Haken, Zeit Krokodil ("Hook" and "Time Crocodile") and Schlafen Celeste. ("Sleep Celeste")
    • And of course all the Einst, who name all of their units and attacks in German. Even the mundane stuff like "Energy Drain"(an attack used by other units in the same game) which becomes the blatantly obvious "Gewinnenergie". ("Winnergy")
    • Pfeil means arrow in German, and the III is supposed to be pronounced in German as well.
    • A non-robot example of this trope would be "Ratsel Feinschmecker" (Mysterious Gourmet); pretty obvious since the character is actually of supposed German lineage.
    • In Super Robot Wars 30, the main battleship is known as the Dreisuträger, which is a pronamteau of the phrase Drei Superroboter Flugzeugträger, which rougly translates to "Thirty Super Robot Aircraft Carriers".
  • In the GBA game Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town, in at least one cutscene, you can get Pastor Carter to speak German. At no other time in the game does Carter even hint that he's of another nationality (other than the nebulous one wherever Mineral Town is located). It's considered by fans to be some sort of error.
  • The Medic from Team Fortress 2, a strange American example, is German, and likes to pepper his sentences with German words, even if they don't really make any sense in context ("Oktoberfest!").
    • His unlockables also share the Germanity (if that is a real English word), being named The Blutsauger (Bloodsucker, also: Vampire) and The Kritzkrieg (causes crits, named after the English-language nickname for the Interwar German doctrine of Bewegungskrieg.) As part of a development theme, his lines have numerous grammar errors, namely the plurals of "Dummkopf", and his voice actor isn't German.
    • Some of Medic's items have pseudo-German names (i.e "Metalmeatencasen", "Feelingbetterbager", or "Hazmattenhatten")
  • Ace Attorney:
    • Prosecutor Klavier Gavin from the fourth game loves to sprinkle German words and phrases in his dialogue. His name, Klavier, is the German word for piano.note His constant use of "Fraulein", however, is a little painful to native European German speakers. note  Note that other characters who grew up in Germany (such as Edgeworth and Franziska) do not do the same. Klavier's use of German in his sentences, as well as his name, are made funnier by the fact that he isn't even actually German, and at least some part of it is due to the rock star persona he actively cultivates.
      Phoenix: I like your affected Euro-rock accent, by the way.
    • Trucy Wright, a magician and Apollo's assistant frequently performs at a place called the Wunderbar, combining Gratuitous German with Punny Name.
    • Come Dual Destinies, Athena Cykes, who spent the majority of her teen years in Europe, likewise punctuates her dialogue with German at times. As well as Gratuitous French and Spanish.
  • The underwater theme park in which Ever17 takes place is run by a German pharmaceutical company, so all the signs and automated announcements are in German, and the computer system appears to operate in German as well. Additionally, all the tracks on the soundtrack have German titles except for the opening and ending themes.
  • Happens quite a bit in the earlier Atelier Series games, to accentuate the fact that the setting is meant to be a kind of faux-Renaissance Germany; Translation Convention breaking for flavor. This is essentially thrown out the window from Atelier Iris onward.
    • The main theme of Atelier Iris 3: Grand Phantasm is called Schwarzweiß -Kiri No Mukou ni Tsunagaru Sekai- (Blackwhite -Worlds Connected Beyond the Mist-) and even mixes the opening and ending with ominous German chanting. ("Ich gieren! Ich morden!") (Screeching, Killing?)
  • The anime and video game Kanon drew its name from Pachelbel's Canon. In his native German, it was Kanon und Gigue in D-Dur (Canon and Gigue in D major), or if you're being formal, Kanon und Gigue in D-Dur für drei Violinen und Basso Continuo.
  • The SaGa Frontier 2 OST is the soundtrack from the video game. Released in Japan, the album's printed paper inserts expect a native Japanese reader, but nearly all the track names are in German for no obvious reason. (A handful are in French.) Though, in fairness, the game's composer Masashi Hamauzu is a Japanese national who was born in Munich, Germany.
  • Being German, Lieselotte Achenbach of Arcana Heart peppers her speech with this in between her Funetik Aksent.
  • A lot of Square (now Square Enix) games have used German in their titles and other places, such as Einhänder (in which German is Earth's global language) and Ehrgeiz (Ambition). Einhänder also features an animated video billboard in the first level that cycles through the text "leben - fallen - Volksgasmaske" ("to live - to fall - the people's gas mask"). Volksgasmaske is the name of a gas mask produced during WWII for civilians.
    • All enemy characters in Einhänder speak German, generally just before a boss fight. The bosses all have German names as well (Drache, Spinne, Ausf D. Durer, Schwarzgeist, etc.)
    Gustav: Willkommen! Hier findest du nur dein Grab! (Welcome! Here you will find naught but your grave!)
  • The Final Boss battle against Yami in One Piece: Unlimited Cruise 2 has Ominous German Chanting for its BGM. While it sounds awesome, it's not particularly good or coherent German and seems to mostly consist of verbs thrown together.
  • Sieg Wahrheit (Victory Truth), the player character in Chaos Legion.
  • Soul Calibur 4 has lots of German names. Usually with horrible pronunciation and very bad grammar.
  • Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War pitted the player's country against the eponymous Fantasy Counterpart Culture of Germany, so a good 95% of enemy aces have had squadron names or callsigns named after things in German, almost all of them surprisingly accurate. All major (level boss) aces are named after colors sans Schnee which is German for "Snow".
  • In Death Vegas, Helmut's Victory Quote is "ICH BIN DER BESTE!" ("I AM THE BEST!").
  • The names of the twelve Dark Warlords in Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War are simply the numbers one through twelve in German.
    • The replacement characters in the Japanese version of Shadow Dragon are also German numbers.
  • In the Front Mission series, the Humongous Mecha are called "wanzers." Wanzer is a shortening of "Wanderung Panzer", where panzer means tank in German. Lastly, in the first game, there is a mech-mountable rocket launcher named "Wanzerfaust".
  • Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey takes place in the "Schwartzverse" in the Japanese version, combining the misspelled German schwarz ("black") with the Latin-derived "-verse". The English version goes all the way, calling it the "Schwartzwelt" ("black world") instead.
  • Two of the characters in Soma Bringer are called Welt (world) and Einsatz (mission).
    • Most of the NPC-crewman of the ship of the heroes as well as the ship itself have German animal names as names. And then there's also the ship of the guildmaster, which he calls Häschen (diminutive of bunny). Now, what do you think when the old man calls for his lil' bunny?
  • In the X-rated Visual Novel Madou Souhei Kleinhasa (Magic Trooper Kleinhasa), the protagonist and his squadmates all have pseudo-German names (Belcelica von Meltmann, Nicola Schonheit, Felicia Claushitz....) Perhaps they meant "Kleinhase", which means "little hare"...
  • In the Japanese version of Cannon Dancer, the Teki refer to their final joint attack as "Die Rudeltaktik," the German term for the "wolfpack" tactics employed in World War II.
  • In Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, Decus uses mostly German words for his Artes, such as "Ausbruch" (outburst), "meine Liebe" (my dear), "Lawine" (avalanche), "Sturmwind" (tempest) and "Strahl" (ray). His Mystic Arte is called "Sturm und Drang", (Storm and Stress), originally being a term to describe a literary period around the end of the 18th Century.
    • German also names Peridot Hamilton's sword moves in Tales of Hearts, which she combines with regular fire spells.
    • While most of Saleh's moves are in English, his Limit Break is the Odd Name Out in that its called "Steif Brise", meaning "stiff breeze" in German. This was fixed in the English release of Tales of Link where Saleh was a boss in some higher-level events. There, it was translated as..."Stiff Breeze", fittingly.
  • The bosses in Jett Rocket have oddly German names. The devs are German, but one wonders why the bosses have German names when nothing else does.
  • In Heroes of Might and Magic V a few of the Haven units have text written on their robes. You can clearly see "Die Heiligkeit" (the sanctity/saintliness) written on the cape and the robe of the Angel/Archangel. Other Haven units also have text written on their robes and various ribbons and parchemins. You cannot precisely read them due to the low resolution, but they seem to be in German and of the same kind, too. Though this is never explained why.
  • Akumajō Dracula X: Chi no Rondo (1993) aka Castlevania: Rondo of Blood (or to be gratuitously Germanic Devil's Schloss Dracula: Zirkel des Blutes) had speech in German in its introductory sequence. Also, the main character is called Richter.
    • It's a game that came out only in Japan; this wasn't a translated version for the German market (the manual included a Japanese translation). Considering that Dracula is supposed to be of Romanian origin, and there's the Vampire Vords trope, it makes little sense. Also, Hammer Horror was obviously one of the influences for the Castlevania franchise, and considering English is the international language, English with a British accent would make sense as well. However, it definitely sounds appropriately Gotik.
  • The original Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain (1996) by Silicon Knights has several German-sounding names for cities/villages (e.g. Vasserbünde, Coorhagen, Nachtholm, Steinchencröe, Uschtenheim - German speakers might know if they make sense or not), while the original script and voice acting of the game is in English.
    • "Vasserbünde" might either be "Wasserbünde" (Waterbounds?) or "Vagabunden" (Vagabounds), Steinchencröe might be Steinchenkrähe (Pebble-Crow, Steinchen meaning "Kleiner Stein" = Little rock. As for Uschtenheim: No idea.
    • All these name are perfectly fine names for cities or villages.
  • Castle of Shikigami 2 has this between-stages dialog during a two-player game with Kuga Kohtaro and Kim De John:
    Kohtaro: Ohhh... hurry, hurry, hurry!
    De John: Yes! Sturm und drang!
    At least, that's what the text box says. However, instead of "sturm und drang", the voice actor says "strong and dumb".
  • Shadow Hearts: Covenant... Sorta. You see, one character, Karen König, has special moves which had German names. Unfortunately, the transliteration from Japanese katakana to English didn't make it.
    • Heuervelk is supposed to be Feuerwerk, fire works.
    • Bullenfogel is supposed to be Brennvogel, burn-bird (although you'd say Brennender Vogel, burning bird in German - or, more simply: Phönix).
    • Geuschbenst is supposed to be Gespenst, meaning ghost (or, more literally, "spook").
    • Sonnestark is most likely wrong in the Japanese version, too , as it is supposed to mean "power of the sun", which would be "Sonnenkraft" (the Japanese word for "strength can mean stärke as well as Kraft in German. This is most likely a case of lack of research).
  • Suikoden Tierkreis has quite a bit of this: "Tierkreis" means "Zodiac", if memory serves; also, the nation of Ritterschild ("Knight Shield"), and its three representatives Geschutz, Minen and Buchse. Geschütz's name means gun or cannon, Minen means "Mines" and Büchse means tin can or can be a gun with a rifled barrel (which would be more fitting considering the other 2 guys of this trio).
  • Neinhalt Sieger from Samurai Shodown II has every single one of his special moves named in German, so we get odd stuff like Elefantglied (Elephant member (as in body part)), Vulkan Weinen (Vulcan Cry [as in 'weep', not 'shout']), and Blitz Jaeger (Lightning Hunter) mixed together with no apparent heads or tails to it besides "it sounds cool".
  • Japanese Fighting Game developer Subtle Style LOVES this trope, evident in the titles of some of their games (Akatsuki Blitzkampf, its arcade revision, Akatsuki Blitzkampf Ausführung Achse, and En-Eins Perfektewelt), character names (Elektrosoldat, Fritz, Tempelritter), and special events held for their games (Es gibt keinen Gott, Ein ewiges band, Adventskranz, Der kampf von meistern).
  • Umineko: When They Cry does this with the vocal version of the song "Fishy Aroma" making reference to an in-game clue involving numbers. This is an odd thing to do considering that Gratuitous Italian would make more sense with the series.
  • Pokémon, which has... a thing about names, deserves a mention for the pseudo-legendary introduced in Generation V: Hydreigon. Its first and second forms are Deino and Zweilous, respectively; Hydreigon is the third and final form. The head numbering also matches: Deino with one, Zweilous with two, Hydreigon with three. This would not be the first time they used a number theme in the English translation where there wasn't one in the original, as the first game's translation used Gratuitous Spanish to name three individual bird species Articuno, Zapdos and Moltres.
  • The toymaker speaks a bit of German in the PC CD-ROM adaptation of King's Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder!.
  • Blazblue, where all of Battle Butler Valkenhayn's special and super attacks are in, albeit choppy and broken, German.
    • Lambda counts in German during her Drive combo. Some of her attack names also use "Zwei" instead of "Two."
  • Final Fantasy XIII has Gestalt Mode for eidolons' special moves.
  • Herzog Zwei, right in the title (as well as the stage names). Interestingly, quite a few people didn't notice it was supposed to be German for "two", particularly as it was the sequel to a much more obscure game that was only released in Japan.
  • Your two helicopter pilots in Under Defeat both speak German, while the game's main antagonists all speak in English.
  • The Sega Saturn game Wachenröder which was only released in Japan features an opening narration in German.
  • Xenogears has the Gears Seibzehn and Achtzehn. Seibzehn is a misspelling of Siebzehn, meaning Seventeen in German. (Achtzehn is correct and means Eighteen.)
  • Warrior Blade: Rastan Saga Episode III has some German voiceover lines, e.g. "Es gibt keinen Ausweg!" Which is strange, considering that the setting is not distinctly Germanic, and there is no German text displayed anywhere.
  • Stahlfeder (a Vertical Scrolling Shooter for the PlayStation, whose name means "steel spring") has German ship and pilot names.
  • In Rochard, a malfunctioning computer abruptly switches to mangled German mid-sentence, with misspellings aplenty:
    Error, SR 215 detector failailailailure... Material lift fier einz acht, automatische kaput.
  • Brigid Tenenbaum in Bioshock 1 uses it occasionally. Justified as she was heavily implied to come from a Native German speaking area before coming to Rapture.
  • In Mario Party and Mario Kart 64 (Japanese only), Word of God is that Wario's infamous line "D'oh, I missed!" is actually a mishearing for "So ein mist!", which is the German equivalent of "Aw, crap!"
  • In Gabriel Knight Gerde speaks very good English, but uses a few random German words (e.g. "Früstück"). The second episode of the saga, "The Beast Within", takes it to the extreme, as almost all characters are Germans, dealing with an American.
  • The majority of Blanc's moves in the Neptunia series are in German while the other character's moves are translated as appropriate.
  • In the Groove 2 has a song called "Vorsprung durch Techno"(a pun on the phrase "Vorsprung durch Technik" - the marketing slogan of car-maker Audi), which is actually a Speedy Techno Remake of Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi's "Spring" concerto.
  • Paper Mario: Color Splash: Using the Battery Thing Card causes a snippet of operatic music to play, accompanied by the lyrics "Höret, ihr Narren, das aufgeladene Wort!" ("Hear, fools, the charged-up word!")
  • Carte Blanche's Arc Words are "-Another Schnitzel? -With apple sauce, bitte." "Bitte" in this context means "please", while the schnitzel is something that most characters have no clue as to what it is.
  • In Jet Moto 2, the penultimate circuit is called Mach Schnell("make haste" or "hurry up").
  • In Mary Skelter: Nightmares the monsters are known as Marchen (Fairy tale, and missing the umlaut in Märchen) and Mary Skelter Finale adds the locations Leichhardt Island (Leichardt being a surname) and Eisern Jail Tower (Iron Jail Tower), the latter of which has EisenFraulein (Iron Lady, and is also missing the umlaut in Fräulein) for its BGM.
  • In Purgatory (RPG Maker), Neun says "du mein gute!", German for "oh my gosh!", when seeing the explosion that D-005 caused through its laser eye beam.
  • In the Cute Monster Girl-themed Eroge Princess X, the Robot Girl love interest R-Komadori is, despite her Japanese-sounding name, the princess of the bizarrely German-themed machine empire- despite their designs invoking Those Wacky Nazis, their highly-advanced empire is actually located at the Mountains of Madness in the Antarctic. They sprinkle random German words in their speech (their ruler is the "Fuhrer", a low-class menial robot is called an "Arbeit", while the high-class Komadori is referred to as a "Frei") and (in a mix of this trope and Gratuitous English) Komadori's barrel-shaped maid robot 42 can only communicate by repeating variants of the words "Jawohl Mister".
  • Märchen Forest: Mylne and the Forest Gift: When she wakes up in the morning, Mylne proudly proclaims "Guten Morgen!", other than the "Märchen" in the title, nothing else implies that the story takes place in Germany.
  • My Child Lebensborn: One of the game's events consists of the Player Character discovering that their adoptive child sometimes randomly uses German words that they are implied to be remembering from their very early life, without realizing that they are German words. This happens little after the Player Character gets a reminder that the small Norwegian town in which they live is so zealous about getting rid of reminders of the Nazi Germany occupation that the German language itself is deeply frowned upon. It's up to the player to allow the child to continue using their "strange words" in public or to convince them to stop doing it.
  • Played for laughs in Jönssonligan: Jakten på Mjölner when Sickan shows up to his nemesis' party in a disguise to avoid getting recognised. He specifically pretends to be an elderly German lady despite his poor grasp on the language and everyone else at the party being native Swedes like him; most of the voiceclips you get while talking to NPCs in this disguise are grammatically suspect sentences (such as "Guten Heute?"note ) followed by whichever NPC he is talking to expressing their confusion — assuming they are listening in the first place. (Except, naturally, his nemesis who simply says that "it's a pleasure [to meet you]".) On another note, the protagonists actually visit Germany earlier in the game; while most of the spoken dialogue there is rendered with Just a Stupid Accent, the magazines you can get a glimpse of were clearly machine translated.
  • C14 Dating: A tendency to use random German words is all Hendrik and Rosemarie have to show for having worked in a corner of Germany in which they could get by on English alone.
  • There is a Japan-only Adventure Game for the PC Engine CD known as Götzendiener ("Idolaters").
  • In the PC-98 version of Life and Death, there is a rare chance that the nurse at the front desk will say "Wie geht es Ihnen?" ("How are you doing?") instead of her usual Japanese dialogue.

    Web-Comics (Webcomics) 

    Web-Originale (Web Original) 

    Westlicher Zeichentrick (Western Animation) 
  • Naturally a lot of Wartime Cartoon shorts will features some random German gibberish or words, most notably in "Herr Meets Hare", "Plane Daffy", "Daffy the Commando", "Blitz Wolf", "Russian Rhapsody" and "Der Fuehrer's Face". An interesting exception is "Education for Death" in which all the German is spoken by actual German voice actors and thus grammatically correct.
  • In X-Men: Evolution Kurt, who comes from Germany, is one of the main characters. There are a few times when he slips German into his sentences, but he stops this early in the first season. As it's a longtime trait of his character, it's also present in X-Men: The Animated Series and Wolverine and the X-Men (2009).
  • Animaniacs Besides Otto Scratchansniff, the stereotypical Freudian pee-sychiatrist assigned to the Warner Siblings, there's also the oneshot Bavarian Profesor Otto von Schnitzelpusskrankengescheitmeyer (That is *takes a deep breath* SchnitzelCutlet, Puss is English, Kranken comes from Krank (meaning sick, though the "en" is used to join substantives together) and "Gescheitmeyer" is Bavarian for a "know-it-all") and the "international friendship song", Schnitzelbank, that he teaches to the Warners.
    Wakko: Ist das nicht ein incredibly long name to have to try and say?
    • Ja, das ist ein incredibly long name to have to try and say!
    • Also, Newt. Justified in that the breed originated in Germany, and bonus points for bringing in Arte Johnson of Laugh In fame on board. Johnson voiced a stereotypical Nazi character who cropped up in many of the sketches.
  • Whenever The Simpsons uses German it is grammatically wrong most of the time.
    • "Burns Verkaufen Der Kraftwerk" ("Burns Sells the Factory") in grammatically correct German would be "Burns verkauft das Kraftwerk". That's probably because German words ending in -en just sound funnier to English speakers (which is also referenced in a brief "Germanglish" gag with Smithers in that same episode).
    • "Das Bus" would be "Der Bus". It's a pun on the movie Das Boot.
    • And Uter is not a German name, at least not in Western Europe.
    • Krusty's German-dubbed show in "In the Name of the Grandfather":
      Krusty: Heil! Heil!note 
      Sideshow Mel: [soaked by Krusty's mineral water gag] Oh nein, Krusty spritzen der Gaswasser!
    • The correct translation (without the allusions "Heil" and "gas") would be
      Krusty: Hallihallo! (Hello, hello!)
      Sideshow Mel: Oh nein, Krusty spritzt mit Mineralwasser! (Oh no, Krusty squirts with Mineral water!)
    • "When Flanders Failed":
      Lisa: Dad, do you know what Schadenfreude is? (...) It's a German term for "shameful joy", taking pleasure in the suffering of others.
      Homer: Oh, come on Lisa. I'm just glad to see him fall flat on his butt! He's usually all happy and comfortable, and surrounded by loved ones, and it makes me feel... What's the opposite of that shameful joy thing of yours?
      Lisa: Sour grapes.
      Homer: Boy, those Germans have a word for everything.
    • The only times The Simpsons ever got spoken German correct (or close to it) was when Homer sang the original German version of Nena's "99 Red Balloons" (that was on the episode "The Heartbroke Kid") and when Lisa was going over the different conjugations for the German verb "to eat" on her German verb conjugation wheel (she left out "Du isst" ["you eat"] but everything else was correct) and Homer responds, "Ich bin hungrig!" (though Homer's pronunciation of "hungrig" sounded Americanized). In the same episode, a German backpacker calls the then-obese Bart a "strudel-sucking Globenheimer", which isn't even a real German word!
  • In Phineas and Ferb, Dr. Doofenshmirtz sometimes slips German words into his lines. Slightly justified seeing as he is from Drusselstein.
  • In Adventure Time, Princess Bubblegum sometimes lapses into German, usually when she's surprised or excited.
    Princess Bubblegum: What is all that noise? Ach, mein Glob! ("Oh, my Glob!")
  • On My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Photo Finish says words in German a few times.
  • A segment of Family Guy imagines a talk show hosted by Adolf Hitler. The phone number to call in is, "213-DU WERDEST EINE KRANKENSCHWESTER BRAUCHEN!" The German part means, "You will need a nurse."Note 
  • The Lingo Show, an Edutainment Show, has a character named Lieb who teaches German in the same way Dora the Explorer teaches kids Spanish. But then again, The Lingo Show does this for many other languages as well.
  • South Park: In the episode "Funnybot" the German government interferes after being told that Germans are "not funny people". They speak actual German, though it's phonetically spoken by American voice actors.
  • Dingo Pictures, a German company that produced knockoffs of animated movies in the 90s, often has German words in the backgrounds of shots, examples being "Polizei" (police) and "Tierheim" (animal hospital). In some cases, they forget to dub over German words, an example being during their version of Pocahontas where the title character says "Nein!". In a number of cases, they either leave German songs in the English dub or they dub the English directly over them. Wabuu's theme song as heard during Countryside Bears is an infamous example. In addition, many of the characters retain distinctly German names, such as Wuschel the squirrel. In at least one case they lampshaded this by explicitly setting Mouse Police in Germany.
  • In The Crumpets episode "Granny Strip", Cassandra says a couple of German phrases and has an accent when she's pretending to be a German girl so she can entice Pfff. She learned from the advice of Pfff's grandmother, who saw the Femme Fatale characters of German actresses in the old movies.
  • Star vs. the Forces of Evil gives us the (very) minor character Ingrid, who is implied to be an exchange student at Star's school. To the show's credit, the German is grammatically correct, pronounced well and Actually Pretty Funny.

    Echtes Leben (Real Life) 
  • Nineteenth century Japanese didn't have an equivalent for "job," i.e. paid work subject to many constraints for both the employer and the employee dissimilar to a serf's "roboten" (German: statute labor, a serf's duty towards their feudal lord) which was the common form of "job" for non-landholding Japanese. They borrowed the German "Arbeit" and nihonized it into "arubaito", or "baito" for short. This occurs in nearly every anime where a character says they have a (part-time) "job," particularly wage-earner/blue-collar jobs. Case in point, Morisaki Taku's part-time job at a restaurant in Umi Ga Kikoeru.
  • Another German loanword that became a common Japanese term is "Märchen" (fairy tale), from which was coined the neologism meruhenchikku ("Märchen-tic," fairy-tale-like).
  • In the 19th and previous centuries, much of Central-Eastern Europe was under the rule of the Austrian Habsburg dynasty or a local German nobility. Germany, the easternmost "western" country, was seen as having gold-paved streets, and so many non-aristocratic, non-German citizens aspiring to a higher social station attempted to ape Deutschtum in a similar way to modern "weeaboos". These "Juniper Germans" (as they were called in Estonia) were held in about the same regard.
  • On the flip-side, the un-fanboyish use of the German language for convenience in trade in the Middle Ages, before national feeling really developed, leads to German names cropping up in weird places. The national epic of Estonia was first written down by a man called "Friedrich Reinhold Kreuzwald". Not the most Finnic-sounding thing in the world.
  • This was aided by the fact that German populations ended up scattered all over Eastern Europe, ranging from the Transylvania Saxons or the Teutonic and Livonian Orders (the cause for the aforementioned Estonia) to as far away as Russia.
  • In Latvia wannabe-Germans were called "Kārklu vacieši", willow-Germans, for some reason.
  • In the late 19th century on the territory of today's Czech Republic, which at the time was under the Habsburg Monarchy, the Czech language was spoken only among low-class citizens and the main and official language was German. This sparked the Czech National Revival whose main goal was to restore the Czech language. The problem was that there was no official Czech language, and many things didn't even have words in Czech and were borrowed mainly from German. The efforts in reviving the language and nation were successful, but it still has a lot of words that are German or are at least modified versions of them. To this day it is probably the second most important language in the Czech Republic, after English.
  • Japanese wrestler Masahiro Chono promotes his own line of clothing, ArisTrist, with the tag line "...geborene Kämpfer" ("born fighters"), which also appears on much of the line's apparel. There's a reasonable explanation, however - Chono's wife and co-designer of the collection is German.
  • Das Blinkenlights
    • "Blinkenlights" in turn is inspired by an infamous computer room sign from The '50s:
      ACHTUNG!
      ALLES TURISTEN UND NONTEKNISCHEN LOOKENPEEPERS!
      DAS KOMPUTERMASCHINE IST NICHT FÜR DER GEFINGERPOKEN UND MITTENGRABEN! ODERWISE IST EASY TO SCHNAPPEN DER SPRINGENWERK, BLOWENFUSEN UND POPPENCORKEN MIT SPITZENSPARKSEN.
      IST NICHT FÜR GEWERKEN BEI DUMMKOPFEN. DER RUBBERNECKEN SIGHTSEEREN KEEPEN DAS COTTONPICKEN HÄNDER IN DAS POCKETS MUSS.
      ZO RELAXEN UND WATSCHEN DER BLINKENLICHTEN.
  • Uber is correctly spelled "über". For non-German keyboards lacking the letter Ü, "ueber" would be the correct transliteration. The German word is mostly used to mean "over/above", but can also mean "beyond" if applied to a scale, or "super", indicating something is surpassing usual boundaries or limitations. You'll see this a lot with gamers. However, the English use of the word is a loanword that has been adapted to suit the English alphabet, in a similar manner to the way a lot of French words have done so (and something that is very common in Japanese as well). The correct German spelling is necessary in German but people who speak English are unlikely to notice such things.
  • The classical music world runs on this trope along with Gratuitous Italian. While the latter language is the standard for sheet music markings, larger musical concepts/philosophies tend to use German words (e.g. Gesamtkunstwerk, Klangfarbenmelodie, Leitmotif) thanks to Germany and Austria's place as the center of the musical world from the 18th century to the early 20th century, both in terms of great composers and the people studying and writing about them.
    • The opera and musical theatre world, similarly, has Sitzprobenote  and Wandelprobenote .
  • Germany was a major scientific center in the 19th and early 20th centuries, so a fair number of scientific terms are German in origin. Bremsstrahlung radiation emitted when an electron is deflected by an atomic nucleus is one example.
    • In mathematics and computability, we have the term "Entscheidungsproblem", literally translating into "Problem of making a decision". The Entscheidungsproblem refers to the question if a mathematical task is computable. Most famous use of the word is the article "On Computable Numbers, with an application to the Entscheidungsproblem", by Alan Turing, which defined the famous Turing Machine.
  • Philosophy has also led to a large amount of German words, primarily those describing abstract concepts, being absorbed wholesale into English. This is due to the large philosophical production of the late 19th- and early 20th century.
    • Martin Heidegger is one notable case here. This is because most of his terms are extremely difficult to translate.
  • Psychology: Sigmund Freud deliberately used popular-language terms such as 'ich' and 'es' instead of science-y latinate forms to stress the basic and generally-accessible nature of his theory of mind. This was initially imitated in English as 'I' and 'it', but to his chagrin soon changed to 'ego' and 'id', which is exactly what he wanted to avoid. A rare case where Gratuitous German would actually have been more appropriate.
  • City buses in Kabul are frequently Mercedes models. Their drivers usually have them painted in sober colours with short slogans in poor German along the sides.
  • Subverted by Finnish automobile retail and repair company Das Auto Oy. Not only does Auto mean "car" in both German and Finnish, but using the correct German finite article das also describes pretty well what kind of cars this company sells and provides service for.
  • The American fast-food chain (Der)note  Wienerschnitzel. According to The Other Wiki, one would normally use the neuter form "das" for "Wienerschnitzel". Additionally, a "Wiener Schnitzel" (which of course comes from Austrianote ) is a completely different food entirely from a hot dog (sometimes called a "wiener"note ), which the restaurant chain specializes in. In Germany, some sausages (similar to hot dogs) are called "Wiener Würstchen", hence the misunderstanding. And, by the way, the correct German name would be "Wiener Schnitzel" , not "Wienerschnitzel".
    • The most famous German restaurant in Tokyo is called "Die Wurst", meaning "The sausage".
  • The very words "Hamburger" (of or relating to Hamburg), "Frankfurter"note  (of or relating to Frankfurt), and the aforementioned "Wiener" as used in North America and around the world. Furthermore, it's unclear what Germany's role, if any, is in the creation of the modern hamburger sandwichnote .
  • The traditional motto of the Prince of Wales is Ich Dien—a contraction/slight mangling of Ich Diene (the final "e" is pronounced in German), meaning "I Serve". This motto's origins are obscure—tradition holds that Edward, the Black Prince took it off of King John I the Blind of Bohemia, along with another symbol of the Prince of Wales (three ostrich feathers) because he respected the Bohemian king's valour despite his disability and he thought the motto was cool, but although the story is near-contemporary (being first written down the same year Prince Edward died), it is considered to be unreliable (the only recorded crest for John I is three vulture's feathers and no motto is recorded).note  The Black Prince did use a "shield for peace" for jousting, which included three ostrich feathers, each with the motto "Ich Dien", on black. The most likely theory is that Edward inherited them from his mother, Philippa of Hainault, who — like John I of Bohemia — was descended from the counts of Luxemburg, who used an ostrich as a badge. (Hainault, which today belongs to Belgium, was part of the German Empire at the time).
  • In the middle ages, some German first names were successfully "exported" thanks to the fame of various kings, emperors and dukes, notably Karl ("free man"), which, possibly via the Latinized form Carolus became the word for "king" in several Slavic languages (e. g. король in Russian, król in Polish, král in Czech), and Heinrich ("ruler of the home") which was adapted into French as Henri, into English as Henry, into Portuguese as Henrique and so on.
  • A notable habit of the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin. He sometimes puts into his speeches and books whole german sentences. (For example "Dasein heißt Mitsein" meaning "Existing means existing together with other humans" or "Dasein ist Voelkisch", roughly translated to "Existence is closely related to Cultures/Civilisations". He even calls his magnum opus the "political theory of Dasein".) One big reason for this is, that he frequently refers to Martin Heidegger, whose terms are notoriously difficult to translate into other languages. This is the reason why some other Heidegger scholars also used german words to describe his philosophy. (This is one reason, why the word "Angst", literally meaning Fear or Anxiety, entered the English language. ) Dugin also often uses German words, which are deemed politically incorrect in Germany. Best example is the already mentioned word "Voelkisch", which has an extremely negative connotation because the Nazis called themselves the "voelkisch" movement. Dugin also adores the german culture til the 1960s (but he thinks, afterwards, globalism and Americanism have destroyed the original german culture.) and one of the main pillars of his Eurasian empire would be a close alliance between Germany and Russia.
  • In The Brethren: Inside the Supreme Court, Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong relate an incident in which William Rehnquist, then the youngest and most recently appointed justice on the U.S. Supreme Court and at that point possessing a reputation of such extreme conservatism that he was semi-jokingly referred to as a fascist, got the attention of a babbling crowd of clerks where no one else could by standing on a table and shouting "ACHTUNG!!"
  • Every year, before the final piece, the conductor of the Vienna New Year's Concert regardless of if he speaks German or not, will utter the famous phrase along with the orchestra: "Die Wiener Philharmoniker und ich wünschen Ihnen: Prosit Neujahr." (The Vienna Philharmonic and I wish you 'Happy New Year'!)
  • German cars are a staple in Japanese tuning culture. Some Japanese tuning companies specialized in German brands have adopted German monikers, the most notable possibly being "Rauh Welt Begriff", the company of tuning icon Akira Nakai known for his wide body conversions for Porsche's 911 model series. A very generous translation of the name would be "rough world concept", but to native speakers it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Nor is it gramatically correct (it should be "Rauhe Welt").


Na, schon 'ne Alkoholvergiftung?

Top

Mrs Goggins

Mrs Goggins is not happy.

How well does it match the trope?

5 (2 votes)

Example of:

Main / GratuitousGerman

Media sources:

Report