Oma meaning grandma6/15/2023 ![]() Actual tote Oma does not does not contain any grandmother meat that we know of, and likely gets its name (as well as its other name, Verkehrsunfall, fair-CARES-oon-fall, or “traffic accident”) because of, well, you’ve seen it. In Schmidt’s dystopia, the Communists kept their society alive by actually killing their grandmas and making them into sausage. ![]() Except then (here’s the spoiler) we find out that the reason for this is that they’ve literally been cannibalizing their old people into food, and also everything else: shoe leather, paper, you name it. Meanwhile, the Russians have somehow created a magical utopia. The Moon has been divided between Allied powers (LIKE SOME OTHER PLACE THAT EXISTED ON EARTH, GET IT, IT’S AN ALLEGORY), and life in the American Sector is going very, very badly. The weirdest thing about this book is that it takes place simultaneously on a farm (in the aforementioned Kaff, or “boondocks”), and, you guessed it, on the Moon, where the people of Earth have relocated after the Cold War turned hot and blew the planet to Kingdom Come. Schmidt wrote this book entirely in highly-stylized phonetic German-like, imagine if my verkochte pronunciation guides wrote their own novels and inserted a bunch of ******* and > for the fuck of it, and then think about typesetting that shit in the godforsaken early “ Mad Men age”-and that’s not even the weirdest thing about it. At least one put-upon German is using it to make a big important point about post-reunification Germany, but I have to explain some stuff first before we get to him, so make like an East German who wants to get assigned a new apartment, and wait a sec.įirst things first: Unlike all of the other excellent German phrases I teach you on these pages (which I assume you are dutifully practicing at home and abroad), tote Oma is probably not something you should parade around saying, because it means “dead grandmother.” It is almost certainly not a direct reference to, but still very vividly evokes, the (SPOILER ALERT) climax of the strangest book I have ever read, KAFF auch Mare Crisium (in English, Boondocks/Moondocks ), the 1960 masterpiece by Arno Schmidt, literally the biggest weirdo ever to exist. ![]() Its name-in the immortal words of Dave Barry, I am not making this up -is tote Oma, which is pronounced TOTE-uh OH-mah. It was popular primarily in the German Democratic Republic-East Germany, land of the Stasi, the Trabi, and rationed food (hence, probably, the use of a bunch of gnarly-sounding offal as primary ingredients to sausage). The, um, unusual -looking entree you see above is a ground sausage made of barley, pork fat, crackling, lungs and blood, plus some finely chopped onions and spices.
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