speaking a language is weird

although my mother tongue is german, i write my blog posts in english. i know this isn't too out of the ordinary and there are good reasons for that. for one, it is obvious that a lot more people understand english than german, so it allows me to have a potentially much larger audience than writing in german would. this is not the main objective of having this blog, but i think there is a fantasy there that maybe somehow, someway someone i don't know could end up reading what i write here and want to talk to me. besides, having lived abroad and travelled a bit, there's a lot of people i know, who i would like to be able to read my things. so the decision to write in english is obvious, no?

well, i've realized recently that, no, it isn't really. i think there's also some good reasons to write in your mother tongue. surely, one is more proficient in the language one grew up speaking. also, i feel the native language would be closer to one's heart in some way, making it easier to express your own emotions. i've read somewhere before that this is one of the many reasons to raise your children bilingually if your partner is native in another language, because otherwise one of the parents would forever have an invisible barrier between them and their children. i don't know if this is actually true, but it always intuitively felt true to me.

and this is what is so confusing to me: if it makes sense to me that emotional expression is easier in your native language, why was it never even a question for me to be writing in german? in thinking about this (and a cursory look at a few psychology papers dealing with this question), i found a somewhat obvious answer. actually, it is easier to write when you're not too affectively involved. using a foreign language gives you a degree of separation from the text, which in turn lowers your inhibition to just let the words come out.

and this answer makes even more sense to me than the original intuition, because even the thought of having to express and publish these things in german makes me want to throw up out of shame. germany thinks of itself as the country of poets and thinkers and i know many a great writer wrote in german, but to me the language is somehow repulsive. i am fine using it in my daily life and i suspect this judgement is more rooted in personal issues with the country and its people than any objective facts about the language itself.

for one, it has been some time since this place has produced any art in its language of note or even of much interest to me. i have to admit, i'm not too well-versed in the current cultural landscape, but the vast majority of german popular music these days is so incredibly boring, everything feels stuck in the early 2020s. even worse in cinema. in the late 20th century, there were fassbinder, wenders and herzog (who obviously still make films, mostly not in german though). nothing of that caliber is coming after them. i don't know enough about literature to say for certain, but i would wager a guess that it is heading in a similar direction. this is probably not due to the language itself, but it would definitely make it a lot easier to like the language if the art made in it wasn't so damn provincial. i admit, there's probably some amount of a circular problem in here, where i don't even bother staying up to date with what is going on in german art, because i already discount the possibility of it being good, but i do believe there is a kernel of truth to what i was saying.

what is more interesting to me, is that there must be an element of self-hatred to this. i speak this language every day, what does it mean for me to find it repulsive? just by transitive logic, i'm kind of repulsed by myself if this thought is followed to its conclusion. i just typed an entire paragraph of snobbery based on very little actual knowledge and i've learnt about myself that when i'm being a snob it is mostly about my own insecurities of not being a sophisticated enough person. maybe, in a perfect world i would end up writing german some day. it would mean that i have gotten over my weird issues with this place here. that day is not today though.