Gunter Böhnke · Säggs’sch – Fast vergessen

In the organizer's words:

Author reading

I was on a cruise ship with my sister the other day. After we had spent quite a while on the back deck No. 10 in the morning, I said to her: "Let's go to lunch now, we can't spend the whole time sitting around here."

She looked at me questioningly. She obviously hadn't understood me. Even though she had lived in Dresden all those years. She assumed I had used a Leipzig dialect word. That wasn't the case. But I had used a word that I had heard from my grandmother Hedwig. And now her granddaughter couldn't understand it.

Gunter Böhnke deals with Saxon words that have died out or are slowly disappearing in his new booklet ("entspricht meiner Körpergröße") Säggs'sch - Fast vergessen.

He deals with scientific opinions: "Saxon as a dialect is largely extinct today, but as a regiolect it is still alive and offers great potential for identification." - And how! Goethe already knew that: "Dialect is what the soul draws its breath from."

The history of Saxon is explained in a short digression. And every child knows that the people of Leipzig speak Southwest East German! The book describes quite vividly what was going on in Saxony between 1920 and 1950. And we learn a lot about the life of Böhnke's grandmother.

You can recognize a colloquial language by the way people use it. That says a lot about a society.