Same word, different door. Someone who’s quick with a comeback, or quick on the draw, gets pursued — rhetorically or legally. Someone who beats the cream, or beats the other team, gets richly rewarded.
My childhood was shaped by the blow — back in the fifties and sixties. Striking children was, as a rule, accepted by society — often without any rule behind it at all. For the adults, a convenient solution. For the children, often a tragedy. No, I was never struck by my parents, though they tried more than once. At school, the situation was radically different. I was struck, and I struck. And I’m certainly not proud of it.
At some point I traded physical blows for rhetoric. Fist for word. The right line often landed better, and longer, than any physical exchange of blows. What’s more, a quick comeback spared me more than one brawl.
The word itself — Schlag, “blow” — is incredibly rich in meaning. And that alone has always fascinated me. How can one short word carry so many meanings, each showing a completely different view of the world? Someone who nails the somersault — the Überschlag, the “over-blow” — hopes for a medal. Someone who botches it hopes for a doctor. When the “liberating blow” — the Befreiungsschlag — comes into play, you can be fairly sure there’s a war going on. And yet the word itself promises liberation right there in the blow. The only question is: liberation from what?
I like the handshake. It’s an unverifiable sign, in itself, that two people have agreed on a deal, a contract. In business, that used to be an everyday thing. The hands seal the agreement.
If the blow is well-behaved — schlagartig, “sudden as a blow” — then an event has shown up quite abruptly, uninvited. Suddenly, without so much as a knock, the situation changed in a flash. Full stop. A stroke rarely announces itself beforehand. It simply arrives, and leaves its consequences behind. A few good friends of mine have learned this the hard way.
What choice did they have? They had to admit defeat — to give themselves up as beaten. And that alone is frustrating, when a situation can no longer be fixed, or only in small steps.
A small consolation is the heartbeat. This compact muscle in the chest is a professional brawler of the finest kind. The heart is one of the most reliable organs the body carries in its portfolio — always ready to strike. I still marvel, sometimes, at how the heart’s chambers give themselves over to constant beating, day after day, without interruption. A hundred beats a minute, seventy years running, no breaks, no union. On top of that, the heart has taken on a side job besides all that beating. Warmth of heart. Heart’s desire. Heartache. Heart and Cupid teamed up and, in their spare time, invented love. Mere pumping was too cheap for them. Plain pumping, it seems, was too monotonous for the heart.
One term still strikes me as a bit mysterious: the schlagende Verbindung — the “striking fraternity.” These are mostly found at universities, built around the tradition of fencing duels. No, these aren’t youth gangs that have turned beating up minorities into a sport.
There are beaters I’ve always admired. Because I tried my hand at this particular exchange of blows and failed miserably: the drummer — the Schlagzeuger, literally the “beat-striker.” These are the men and women who set and hold the beat in every band. They dictate the tempo and build the foundation for every song. Naturally, I have a favourite in this profession: John Bonham. The man didn’t just drum — he created his own melody, his own individual line, to support or compete with Jimmy Page’s guitar. I’m drifting off far too suddenly.
Now I take a look at the world’s headlines — Schlagzeilen, literally “blow-lines.” I’m bound to find a story or two where some trickster outwits someone else — strikes a little snap on them, as the Germans say. But maybe a bridge or two was also struck up to the enemy. Perhaps goods and opinions changed hands, or someone checkmated their opponent.
The world consists of striking, and of suggesting — Schlagen and Vorschlagen. And we grapple with it, we struggle through it.
Has the world taken one too many blows, or what?
