TikTok, Ghosting, and Triggerwarnung were new additions, as well as Mocktail and Gojibeeren. Words about the COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine were also added.

So imagine the challenge, then, of adapting the story of America’s first treasury secretary for a German-speaking audience — preserving the rhythm, the sound, and the sensibility of the original musical while translating its dense libretto into a language characterized by multisyllabic compound nouns and sentences that often end with verbs, and all in a society that has minimal familiarity with the show’s subject matter.

Markus Willy “Leo” Horovitz, a Berkeley resident of nearly six decades who is one of the only known people to repatriate to Germany as a senior citizen after fleeing from there as a child during the Holocaust, died in Frankfurt on January 13. He was 90 years old.

The first thing you have to know is that Germans love America. They love the country and they call it Amerika in conversation even though they know one is supposed to say Vereinigte Staaten, United States. During my Berlin childhood, the word Amerika cast a powerful force field; it rang with possibility and promise.

You can bet your bottom dollar that your teachers didn’t tell you these colloquial words and phrases when they taught you how to speak Hochdeutsch (Standard or High German) perfectly.