Herr McGlothlin, now there's a good old German name
he probably meant in this sense
Hochdeutsch - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
However, he could have been fudging the "class" question. According to my Scots friend, Rhona, who has lived in Regensburg for half a lifetime and my Viennese friend, Barbara, the High and Low thing is also a class/snobbery thing ie the aristocracy v the peasants.
Who knows what it means in the culinary usage.
Yep, I'm sure that is exactly what he meant. He would tell us that we were learning high German and may have trouble understanding someone from the low lands as they spoke "low German." I didn't get the idea that it was about class or formality at all. He would compare it to someone who learned English in the UK speaking to someone who was born and raised in deep in the southern country of the States. Native English speakers would navigate it, but a new learner to English would struggle in that situation. It made sense to us.
It also makes sense that regional cooking may differ too. He told us that Beer and Brats were more Bavarian and most of us would think of Bavarian kind of food as "German." Oh, and top it off with Black Forest Cherry Cake from the Black Forest (of course.) We went to a restaurant while visiting Milwaukee that was known for its southern German food, which served what we would think of as "German" except they would not give us Bier.
Rhineland, he told us, was good for food like sauerbrauten, sauces and stollen.
We were told to "go north" for fish.
I'm sure there is a lot of mingling of regional foods now. I was in Berlin two years ago, and could find most anything.
It was high school and our German exchange student taught us a wonderful and highly inappropriate song that helped us remember the "three regions" of Deutschland. The refrain translated to, "There's the highland Deutsch and the lowland Deutsch, the Rhineland Deutsch and the other [censored] [censored] (which referred to those who claimed to be German but really were a gazillion other nationalities.) Other smaller areas in the country all seem to fall in to one of the three large regions: Northern, Southern, and Rhineland.
Wow...and I thought I remembered precious little from high school. It must have been the graffiti wall in the back of the room. All in German, of course. First thing written on it: "Wo ist Pieter? Im Boat mit Helga." For the record, we had many things written about Pieter und Helga.
