Learning to Knit auf Deutsch

I had several objectives when I went to live in Tübingen, West Germany (as it was known then) in Fall, 1987: live among total strangers for a year, improve my German, see Michelangelo’s David, and see Peter Gabriel. Despite having such a bizarre collection of goals, I succeeded in realizing them surprisingly well. Although I did not manage to live among strangers for the entire year—several people from home managed to find their way to Germany and me—I did improve my German (enough for a young woman from Hamburg to think I was “echt Schwabish”), I did get to Florence to see David, and I did see Peter Gabriel in concert. What I did not set out to do when I went to Germany was to learn how to knit. Yet, I managed to do that as well. And now, almost twenty years later, I remember little of the Peter Gabriel concert (such as what city it was in, how I got there or back home, or even who I went with) and my German has deteriorated pitifully. I vividly remember walking into the room that houses David and the feeling of seeing the sunlight on his marble surface, as well as my disappointment at seeing many attempted and abandoned versions of David—wasn’t Michelangelo genius enough to get it exactly right the first time? Apparently not. And I haven’t forgotten how to knit.

Before I went to Germany, I had never seen anyone knit. I knew that there was such a thing as “knitting,” though I had no idea how it worked or what it was about. My grandma wore tiny booties knit for her by her mother, but they seemed utterly foreign to me: thick, dowdy and dangerously slippery (a bit like the woman who knit them, except for the slippery part). So knitting was about making strange things that I didn’t want. It had no interest for me.

It didn’t take me long after arriving in Tübingen to notice that every female of every age was knitting. They knit while waiting at the bus stops, while waiting between university classes, and while chatting in the evenings in our shared student housing kitchen. This was strange enough, but I was really floored when I arrived on the first day of my philosophy seminar in one of the oldest university buildings in Tübingen. The classroom was what all German university classrooms ought to be like: a tall room, one wall with floor- to ceiling windows, and a series of wide, dark oak tables of gently curving semi-circles, leading higher and farther away from the front of the room. The professor was truly geriatric and, I was told, lecturing on aesthetics. I couldn’t understand a word he said—I had only arrived a few weeks earlier and my German had not yet improved noticeably—but even if I could, I would not have been able to concentrate on his lecture because I couldn’t stop staring at the dozens of women knitting during the class. Not one took notes, not one even looked at the professor while he spoke; they just sat and knitted, needles clicking unashamedly as he spoke.

Later that day, when I got back to the communal kitchen that I shared with eight other students (six German, one Japanese and one French) I related what I saw. “They were KNITTING during the lecture!”, I said—or, more accurately, conveyed given how ungrammatical my German was. “So what?” was the response, in grammatical German. I think I gaped for more than a few seconds, trying to process what I was hearing. Did I misunderstand or did they really see nothing bizarre about this? Dzintra, whom I later learned was a very accomplished knitter, went on, “It makes perfect sense to knit in seminar. I can listen to what the professor is saying and get something accomplished at the same time. What is wrong with that?” There was a general murmuring of agreement from the other German women. (In retrospect, I don’t remember the German men contributing to this conversation. I was later told that all German boys were taught to knit in school, but the German men I lived with didn’t show any signs of knitting.) It was then that I found out that all the German women I lived with knit as well—each of them knit every day, as often as they could. Suzanne, who agreed to teach me to knit, got her current project out: an olive green, long sleeve sweater with an impossibly complex cable pattern running throughout. I was intrigued: it was nothing like my great grandmother’s booties: it was not sturdy or dowdy and was not at all slippery; it was a piece of art.

I wish I could remember what happened next, but I can’t. All I know is that Suzanne was going to teach me to knit and this required her taking me to a yarn shop. I do remember her telling me that my first project should be something small and simple: a potholder or, at most, a scarf. I wouldn’t have it. I wanted a long sleeve sweater covered with a complicated pattern of cables…in brown. She tried to reason with me—the expense! the frustration!—but I wouldn’t budge. I wanted a sweater and that was it.

A few days later Suzanne and I were off to the yarn shop. I had never been in a yarn shop before and was intimidated. Not only was it a beehive of activity, the woolly smell was slightly intoxicating. Suzanne wasted no time: What kind of yarn? Wool. What weight? Thick, so it knits up fast. What color? Undyed brown. She stared at my body, then the yarn label, muttered mathematical formulas. She announced that I needed 10 skeins. I paid for the wool—slightly dazed by the sticker price (a feeling that I still experience with every yarn purchase I make) and went home convinced that I was making a terrible and costly mistake yet excited by the prospect of making my very own sweater.

Back at our home, she brewed a pot of tea (which was to become an essential part of our many, many knitting sessions, though chocolate featured quite often) and we set to it. Suzanne explained that I had to make a “swatch.” I didn’t want to mess around with a patchwork piece, I wanted to get to business. “Can’t we just start with the sweater?” “No,” she said firmly. She then asked me endless questions about cables—how many, what in between? I must not have had anything interesting to contribute to the design of the cable pattern, because I remember her inventing the pattern completely. And now, finally, we got to the first step: casting on. I am certain she made me cast on myself. I remember working the needles—circular, a contraption I had never seen before—and yarn at an agonizingly slow pace. Worse still was the fact that she insisted on teaching me to knit in German. My German was poor and my biggest weakness was prepositions—over, under, through, nominative, accusative, dative, masculine, feminine, neuter—the chances of getting the phrase right were slim to none. The yarn (What is the gender of yarn?) goes around the needle (Is that accusative because it is the object of the nominative or dative because the yarn is in motion—unless, because the motion is localized, it is accusative? And what, by the way, is the gender of “needle”?) and then back through the loop (and the gender of “loop” is?). Around the finger, over the needle, off the needle, through the stitch …the prepositioning never stopped. Over and over, I got it wrong, with both my propositional phrases and my stitches. Suzanne was a strict teacher and never allowed me to keep an incorrectly made stitch (or let go by a misspoken German sentence). I undid hundreds of stitches but, nonetheless, my swatch grew larger. Drenched with sweat, my neck and back aching, I worked my way through row after row of my swatch. After what had to have been several hours, Suzanne said, “Ach! I must have a break! Let’s make spaghetti for dinner.” I was a bit nonplussed until I looked out the window and saw that it was completely dark out. Where had the day gone? It was only just after noon when we started. After dinner, we agreed to let the knitting go for the rest of the day, but I made Suzanne promise to knit with me again tomorrow. I wanted to get past this swatch business and on to my sweater.

True to her word, Suzanne agreed to spend the next day with me and my swatch. This time, the knitting was easier and soon my swatch was done. Once we knew how many stitches I knit per cm, and exactly what size I wanted my sweater, we were really in business. Suzanne then took my swatch, pulled it of my needle, and ripped it apart. I shrieked in horror. My swatch—nothing but a piece of wrinkly string! She laughed and explained that the yarn was better used in a sweater than in a tiny square, but I didn’t believe her. It was all I had to prove I had knit anything, and now it was gone.

Again, the cast on (which I had since yesterday forgotten how to do) and the beginning of the ribbing along the bottom of the back. I can only say that a kind of fever came over me; I knitted like a thing possessed. I wasn’t fast, but I was determined, and I couldn’t stop. Every chance I had, I knit. The back, loose and misshapen, got done. Then the front, tighter and more even. Then one arm, better still and then the other, even better. Finally, the last part, the neckline (not so well done—rather loose and saggy). A few Saturdays later, Suzanne and I looked at the just finished piece. She praised me effusively, and insisted that I put it on and model it for everyone in the kitchen. I didn’t want to. Not only was I not comfortable modeling anything, but I wasn’t happy with the sweater. Why did the back hang down 6 inches longer than the front when I knitted the same number of rows for each piece? Suzanne explained about tension and how, as my knitting improved, my tension got righter. Hmmph, I thought. But why did both sleeves cling so tightly to my arms—I know I increased the right number of stitches from the cuff to the shoulder. That’s because we had to adjust the pattern to accommodate the increases, and that changed the tension, too. We forgot to take that change into consideration. Harumph, I thought again. Faced with these as-of-yet unconsidered complications to sizing, I came very close to slipping into a deep sulk. It didn’t seem fair to work so hard to master “knit” and “purl” and then be foiled by tension at every turn. Suzanne seemed to sense this and, as she would do many times during my year in Germany, took me in hand, persuaded me to put on the sweater, and went with me to the kitchen. I was met with what I believe were sincere Ooohs and Ahhs coming from my housemates, not possibly because they thought my knitting was excellent (I had seen the knitting abilities of all my female housemates and knew very well that they were treating me as a beginner and not their equal) but because of my evident determination and ability to complete what each had more than once told me was a foolishly ambitious first knitting project. “Well, what next? Or are you done with knitting?” asked Dzintra. “No,” I said, “I want to knit another sweater. But I don’t know what it will be like.” (But it will NOT DROOP, I thought to myself). Suzanne promised to lend me her knitting magazines for inspiration. I thanked her, not really thinking about it and still sulky about my monstrosity. (Little did I then realize, standing there in that ridiculous wooly tube, the power these German knitting magazines would soon have over me. I soon had to buy my own copies and spent hundreds of hours poring over every page. I still have them. More about them in the next entry.)

The sweater was really, really hot. After a polite period of time, I went back to my room and took it off. I don’t think I ever wore it again; if I did, I certainly only did when I could wear a large coat over it and knew I wouldn’t have to take the coat off. I still have the sweater and still have mixed feelings about it: I still think it is a horror, yet it is my first finished piece of knitting and so I will save it forever. Here it is: