i wish i could explain this in a way that doesn't make me sound completely deranged but i am convinced that a big part of what made nico rosberg want to dropkick teenage max in the face is their mutually strange relationship with the german language, and its consequences. "spire what the fuck are you talking ab-" shut up bear with me okay. so you know how the reason max is fluent in german is because his dad would speak german with him at the track and dutch at home to "keep them separate" (unclear if he also learned some from going on vacation with uncle michael?). so technically although he is not a fully native german speaker it is also not a second language in the conventional sense, it's more, like, semi-native, right? it occupies a very specific space in his brain, said space being The Car (and possibly uncle michael). i can say, from personal experience, that learning a language like that, which you only use outside of home, but at a very young age, does bestow you with an incredibly fucking stilted relationship with said language. in which way it becomes stilted is probably very different from person to person, but i think the bare bones of it is that having a "home speak" and a "work speak" gives ample way for compartmentalization of the home self and the work self, the emotional entity and the big boy seriousman knower-of-things.
that aside, let's go back to nico. let's actually go back to keke, first. he grew up speaking finnish with his family, and then, still at a young age, moved to a swedish-speaking part of finland, without knowing much swedish himself, which caused some troubles in communication. this is one of many ways you can develop resentment towards your own language, when speaking it makes you the object of ostracization, obviously. this alone would not make me say "this person hates their native language", but if later on, that same person went on to have children and entirely give up, from the very beginning, on teaching them the language... still, there are many ways one could interpret this. when keke explained to the finnish media why he never taught nico the language, he said: "It was a completely rational decision at the time. The family lived abroad and it was a fantastic opportunity to teach him many foreign languages" (this is not the important bit), and: Still, Keke refuses to question Nico's Finnishness. "After all, our entire west coast is full of people who don't speak Finnish, and no one has ever questioned whether they are Finnish or not," Rosberg pointed out.
now, i will not claim to be privy to anybody's states of mind but my own, but to me it's telling. it sounds, just a tiny wee bit like the wound speaking.
back to nico. you go to international school, you learn all the useful languages, the ones that everybody speaks. nobody speaks finnish (an amount of people that's about half the population of london does. you don't really know any of those people) (mom and dad certainly aren't those people) (you know the useful languages, the useful countries, the useful people)
who even speaks finnish? dad doesn't, because dad speaks german, right? dad speaks german with you, like mom, because it's good, because it's useful. the nannies speak english, and the people in monaco speak french, sometimes italian. this is how the world works. you learn it all. you're good, and useful, and can speak to everyone in the whole wide world.
(sometimes dad does speak finnish, you hear him speak finnish all the time. you hear him speak finnish with mika, with his family, with people important to him. he'd speak with mika about racing the way you agreed he would never speak to you, so that you could be your own separate person and not just his son, and you didn't understand a word of it, but mika did. so many recordings of your dad, sounding foreign. finnish becomes a foreign language, and simultaneously the kind of topography which you cannot see because it is too close to home. it becomes something stolen, that you never had.)
you go on big boy television and speak big boy german in front of thousands and maybe it's a bit too obvious that you've never lived there either, with your too-neat hochdeutsch that you picked up from your interpreter mother and finnish father, and michael fucking schumacher is on the other side of your garage giving you the stink-eye and using turns of phrase you may have never heard before, the way you sound like you're from nowhere, like you've checked a box, is all. you go on big boy television and kimi is speaking big boy finnish to the press, right next to you, and you know that it's not really useful, that nobody really speaks it, but then 2007 ends and for a moment it may seem like it would have been the most useful language in the world. alas. we don't dwell. 2013, 2014 roll around, and it's a mighty great time to speak german, even if michael is no longer on the other end of the garage. you're mostly glad about that, but you don't say it out loud. speaking of michael, maybe your garage is not the last time you hear his turns of phrase, his intonation, maybe all the things correct in their slight incorrectness.
maybe there is, then, 2015, you hear something that turns your head a little, maybe he's seventeen and he saw you on television wearing the flag to cheer for the german football team, he saw you give all your perfect little hochdeutsch interviews and didn't quite pick up on what everyone else did, on it not being right. because he's also learned to speak your language from a father who didn't speak it with his family but thought it would be useful, from boring long textbooks in belgian school, from correctness. because he's seen you on television, picking up trophies, because he's seen you on television next to uncle michael and he thinks, naively, that maybe if he speaks your language with you, you will become friends. what he doesn't know is that maybe, to you, he sounds like the worst of both worlds. he is not sebastian, not nicolas, whom you can from afar admire the naturality of, but he's not quite not. he's got that limburg lilt, but that childhood in hasselt under his skin, that vague, shapeless feeling that on his way back to school he might've one day overheard a coffee table conversation entirely in german, and understood it whole. that classmate that might've been from the east cantons, or maybe a familiarity with a certain niederrheiner whom you share a name with, all of it, all of it and maybe just on top of it all, that abhorrent feeling you can't shake that sometimes, he might earnestly sound like somebody who called michael schumacher uncle; maybe he says, carelessly, a word you'd only ever heard michael say, or maybe it's just your imagination. it's not like you lack in that department. maybe it all reminds you, bitter and too late, that if your own voice feels foreign it's because you are not trying hard enough. maybe he's looking back at you and thinking that for whatever reason, you sort of sound like home. who knows.
