There is another Germanism in the English language that I didn’t know about. It is the term “Ansatz” (pronounce: ‘un-zuts), which means approach. It refers to very different processes, as a matter of fact, but always means that it is the beginning of a bigger picture. Basically, it’s the seed of an idea.
The field that causes the most uncomfortable associations for me is that of mathematics and physics. Not that I was a failure in either – it depended on the field, and when I finally got a marvelously dedicated and patient math teacher in grades 12 and 13, I came around to prove him that I was well capable of understanding integrals and differentiation. To be honest, though, these educated guesses one made to receive the desired results are not the foremost thing when I think of an Ansatz. Nor do I feel very passionate about them.
I had a friend who played the French horn and actually later became a professional musician in a big orchestra. The way you place your lips against the instrument while shaping the correct position of your jaws is also called Ansatz. As we used to perform together a lot, back in the day, she in the orchestra, I as the soprano soloist, I knew that the correct Ansatz decided about the sound of an instrument and the comfort of its player, be it woodwinds or brass.
Ansatz is also where something new starts – such as the hairline or the fringe on a dress. I doubt, though, that these latter two meanings are associated when the English language uses the term.
In the culinary world, an Ansatz means the outset for something that is meant to ferment into what will be used for a food or beverage creation. Such as adding barley, yeast, and malt and a lot of time until it turns into beer. Similar works for schnaps. Or think of … sourdough.
I can’t really remember when it became a fashion. It must have been at the first height of the Green Party movement in Germany, around the early 1980s. One day, one of the hipper girls in my class turned up with a lidded jar containing some murky, milky liquid with a lump of similar color in it. She presented it to a friend of hers, calling the contents of the jar Hermann. Indeed, it turned out to be a sourdough Ansatz, and it seemed to multiply among the fashionable girls in my class. I never received such a gift – I was an unfashionable nerd, after all. Not that I minded, really. I was not into baking or specifically craved something that looked so very unappetizing. Today, I sometimes keep thinking that I would like to create some sourdough starter for my bread baking. Maybe, I will someday. But my baking skills are limited, and so is my passion for this field. Basically, that enthusiasm for baking has been stuck in the ansatz. There you go with a word-by-word translation of a German idiom for the English one “stuck in the beginning/its early stages.”
Ansatz – probably everybody has one or the other basic idea in their minds that they don’t follow up with. But it’s literally a starting point for something that might give us so much joy. Though sometimes it might not turn out to be a piece of cake.
