Scausländer Zeitung: Creating a German Language Student Newspaper in Liverpool!

Posted on: 2 March 2022 in 2021 posts

As students of Modern Foreign Languages, much of our time at university is spent writing: essays, articles, reviews, and the like. But very little of this writing is ever seen by anyone other than our lecturers, rather it remains buried on our computer hard drives never to be seen again. However, this semester we, a group of final year German students, decided that we wanted to change this. Plus, the focus on writing articles for a theoretical student newspaper in our German language module was the perfect opportunity to do this. What if we were to turn this theoretical student newspaper into a real one?

One evening, all huddled round the small table in my kitchen, we set about making this a reality by constructing a website to host our articles. Of course, we then needed to come up with a name for our newspaper, one which encapsulated the fact we were based in Liverpool but would be publishing content in German – no mean feat! We eventually settled on the name Scausländer Zeitung, Zeitung being the German word for newspaper whilst Scausländer is an Anglo-Germanic pun combining the term ‘Scouse’ with the German word Ausländer which means ‘foreigner’ or ‘stranger’. The former gives us an explicit link to Liverpool, whilst the latter links to the fact that we were all initially “strangers”, both to the places we visited on our year abroad as well as to Liverpool itself when we began studying here four years ago.

Last week, we were fortunate enough to have the chance to present Scausländer Zeitung to Dr. Clemens Kohnen, who is head of the political department and representative for the Northwest of England at the German embassy. During his visit to the university, we spoke about our motivations for creating the website and how we plan to continue building upon what we have created so far. Whilst presenting Dr. Kohnen some of the articles we had published, we also had the chance to discuss a wide range of current topics with him, notably Brexit and its impact on the university year abroad, the German teaching situation in British schools and even whether he thought the Northwest of England had strong ties to Germany! It was great to be able to discuss these topics with an official from the German embassy and, above all, exhibit out hard work on our website.

Although presenting Scausländer Zeitung to a German diplomat will be a tough act to follow, we are planning an event to unveil our newspaper to German students in first and second years at the university. Hopefully, this will inspire them to get engaged with our project too, even if that is just through writing comments on our articles! In the meantime, we plan to publish more of our work which will not only expand the range of articles on our website, but also allows us, most importantly, to continue practicing our German writing skills.

If you would like to take a look at Scausländer Zeitung, it can be found here. 

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