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LITERARY CODE-SWITCHING AND BEYOND indeed to offer observations and insights into European society, mentality and way of life gained through adventures and encounters with the locals in different contexts and circumstances, as well as to make his audience laugh. The book is strongly characterized by funny anecdotes and stories which are often the result of Twain’s “fertile imagination.” During this European trip, Twain’s goal was also a linguistic one. He wanted to “learn the German language” (Twain 1880, 3), a language which played a key role in his life and which is central throughout the entire work. Twain’s German Twain was described by Cracroft (1993, 11) as a “self-proclaimed philologist” who wrote numerous essays on a great variety of languages - Italian, Portuguese, English, American English and French — showing also in his novels a remarkable language mindset (Sewell 1987). For instance, in the Introduction to the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain explained that to faithfully reproduce the languages spoken in the area where the novel was set, Missouri, he had to use: “a number of dialects [...] the Missouri Negro dialect; the extremist form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary ‘Pike County’ dialect; and four modified varieties of this last” (2014, 3). This testifies that languages and varieties of languages were a key component in building his characters and stories. Despite his interest in numerous languages, no language could be compared to German, which occupied him for his entire life, which he “loved with a rare intensity” and found “most intriguing and stimulating” (Hemminghaus 1966, 477), although rather challenging and not all fun and games. Hedderich underlines that Twain’s contact with German was twofold: on the one hand, Twain strongly admired it; on the other, it caused him “severe frustration” (2003, 30), as Clearly stated by the writer himself in the famous Appendix The Awful German Language included in A Tramp abroad. Here, Twain explains the effort he made to learn it in a hilarious way: “If he [the Heidelberg Castle’s keeper, whom he addressed in German] had known what it had cost me to acquire my art [the German language], he would also have known that it would break any collector to buy it” (390). This life-long fascination with German has been reconstructed by critics multiple times. The first contact with the language could possibly be traced back to Twain’s youth in Hannibal, Missouri, where he was raised and had the chance to come into contact with German settlers and immigrants. Missouri, as Hedderich reminds us, “had a sizable percentage of German immigrants” (2003, 2). In St. Louis, where Twain moved when he was 18, he collaborated at the Anzeiger des Westens, a popular German newspaper in America. Later in .38 +
