List of terms used for Germans
What is dubbed the "Hun speech" (Hunnenrede) was delivered on 27 July 1900, when he bade farewell to the German expeditionary corps sailing from the port of Bremerhaven to take part in suppressing the Boxer Rebellion.
The relevant part of the speech was:Kommt ihr vor den Feind, so wird derselbe geschlagen!
Wie vor tausend Jahren die Hunnen unter ihrem König Etzel sich einen Namen gemacht, der sie noch jetzt in Überlieferung und Märchen gewaltig erscheinen läßt, so möge der Name Deutsche in China auf 1000 Jahre durch euch in einer Weise bestätigt werden, daß es niemals wieder ein Chinese wagt, einen Deutschen scheel anzusehen!Come you in front of the enemy, the same will be beaten!
The French songwriter Théodore Botrel described the Kaiser as "an Attila, without remorse", launching "cannibal hordes".
For example in 1941, Winston Churchill said in a broadcast speech: "There are less than 70,000,000 malignant Huns, some of whom are curable and others killable, most of whom are already engaged in holding down Austrians, Czechs, Poles and the many other ancient races they now bully and pillage.
"[6] Later that year Churchill referred to the invasion of the Soviet Union as "the dull, drilled, docile brutish masses of the Hun soldiery, plodding on like a swarm of crawling locusts.
[11] For example, in the film 1941 the Slim Pickens character calls a German officer "Mr Hynee Kraut!".
[12] In German, Heini is a common colloquial term with a slightly pejorative meaning similar to "moron" or "idiot", but has a different origin.
The term came up after the American entry into World War I, which followed the Turnip Winter and had resulted in the food trade stop for Germany through neutral states.
The analogy of this term is the starving soldier of World War I, who ran out of supplies for a long war-period and needed to eat wild cabbage.
Before the Second World War the term was used in relation to cabbage, because anti-German boycotts and de facto trade limitations hit Germany's food imports.
Sauerkraut was also a common food served on German ships to fight scurvy, while the British used limes and got called limey.
It is a shortened form of the French slang portmanteau alboche, itself derived from Allemand ("German") and caboche ("head" or "cabbage").
[32] The term Boxhead, commonly used after World War II within the British Armed Forces in the former West Germany is derived from this.
[33] Since Prussia no longer exists, the term now refers to the cliché of a pompous northern Protestant German in general and a Berliner in particular.
However, the citizens of the free Hanseatic cities and the former northern duchies of Oldenburg, Brunswick and Mecklenburg are also quite offended by the terms Piefke and also by Saupreiß (a slur for any German who is not native Bavarian).
In 1990, Austrian playwright Felix Mitterer wrote and co-directed a TV mini-series, Die Piefke-Saga, about Germans on holiday in Tyrol.
While Austrian infantry rations included butter and lard as spread, German troops had to make do with cheaper ersatz "Marmelade".
Boches is an apheresis of the word alboche, which in turn is a blend of allemand (French for German) and caboche (slang for head).
[36] Casque à pointe is derived from the French name for the traditional Prussian military helmets worn by German soldiers from the 1840s until World War I.
In modern French Sign Language the word for Germany continues to be an index finger pointed to the top of the forehead, simulating the Pickelhaube.
Sometimes it is also modified to "Besserwessi", from the German word Besserwisser which means Know-it-all, reflecting the stereotype that people from the Western part of Germany are arrogant.
In the 18th century various German-speaking peasant groups settled in Hungary in large numbers to inhabit the vast territories being depopulated during the Osman rule, they are known as Danube Swabians (Donauschwaben), though most of their forefathers have Bavarian or Thuringian roots.
One of the explanations of the name in Hebrew is "Yehudi Kshe Havana" יהודי קשה הבנה "A Jew who hardly understands" for the so called "stiffness of their mentality".
The term appeared in a popular Latvian legionnaire wartime song Ik katru sestdien's vakaru ("Every saturday night") about trouncing the blue-grays after beating up reds (sarkanos) or lice-infested ones (utainos) – the Soviets.
[43] In the late 16th century the area just beyond the current northeast border between the Netherlands and Germany now known as East Frisia and Emsland, as well as the people that lived there, used to be referred to as Muffe.
[44] A popular humorous (but false) etymology of the word mof by the Dutch is that it is a German abbreviation meaning Menschen ohne Freunde ("people without friends").
Poep is a term used in the northern eastern part of The Netherlands, in the province of Drenthe, referring to a German from nearby Westphalia.
[49] Contemptuous term for a German soldier of the Wehrmacht during World War II as the word szkop in Polish meant a wether, or castrated ram.
In Early Modern Spanish (for example in Don Quixote), tudesco (cognate with deutsch and the Italian tedesco) was used sometimes as a general name for Germans[52] and sometimes restricted to Lower Saxony.
