The Germans Think You’re Your Own Evil Twin!

When his wife isn’t looking Mr. Pete places tiny tinfoil hats on his infant twins.  He doesn’t like the idea of them talking to each other with their minds.  He’s not alone. Anecdotal evidence indicates that one will grow up to be evil, and there’s no sense in corrupting the other one so early.

Me, I’m from the Hollywood version of twins, where the bad one isn’t “evil,” so much as the good one has a stick up his ass!  Like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito, those girls from Double Trouble or Hayley Mills in the original Parent Trap.  While twelve-year old Lindsay Lohan needed an identical sister to start some hijinks in her 1998 Parent Trap, adult Lohan is her own evil twin, what the Germans call a “doppelganger.”

You got to give it to German precision.  They’ve come up with a word that means one’s malicious duplicate who is not a sibling.   Just like nighttime Lohan, Bizarro Superman or Tyler Durden from Fight Club.  According to German wordsmiths, at some point your clone, or the future you, or an angry phantom who looks like John Locke, or even your own mind could snap and you’ll literally have to fight yourself.

There is, however, one instance where New World twinning meets Bavarian internal struggle: David Hasselhoff.  The episodes of Knight Rider when he played both Michael and Garthe Knight battling for dominance were all critical successes (at least in my house).  And while in modern America his career has become unfortunately unspectacular, his doppelganger, singing Hasselhoff, is a German icon.

We also have the Germans to thank for pretzels.  Yay!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 25th, 2010 at 2:49 pm.
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