Löwenzahn, or "dandelion" in English, is one popular German children's show. Photo (cc) flickr user Anja Jonsson

So you’ve moved to Germany.  It took you a while, but you mastered the language.  You understand all the words that your friends are saying, but you still have a lot to learn: because you didn’t grow up in Germany, you don’t have a clue when people start talking pop culture references or reminiscing about the shows they watched when they were kids.  It is a cultural currency all its own, and it’s worth spending some time re-living the German childhood you never had in the name of understanding.

Being from America, and Germany being a big importer of American television and film, I often found that my friends and I had watched the same shows as children, played with toys of the same characters.  We had all watched The Smurfs (die Schlümpfe auf Deutsch), Rainbow Bright (Regina Regenbogen), and Sesame Street (Sesam Straße), but I had never seen Sendung mit der Maus or Sandmännchen.  And did you know that in German many of the Sesame Street characters have different names?  That there are several characters that don’t even exist in the American version?

As I live in a Bauwagen myself, one of my favorite discoveries in the world of German children’s series has been Löwenzahn with moderator Peter Lustig (Peter Funny).  Löwenzahn first aired in 1981 on ZDF and is still being produced and shown today, though since 2005 with Fritz Fuchs (Guido Hammesfahr) as moderator.  The show centers around Peter Lustig (now Fritz Fuchs) who, in the show’s first epidsode, decides to move from his house to a Bauwagen that he spends much of the show fixing up.

Löwenzahn is at its base an educational show, with Lustig explaining topics from Roman culture to salt production to animal habits.  The show is divided into shorter segments covering various topics as well as some sort cartoons.  And at the end of the show, he looks at the screen and tells kids to turn off the television.

You can watch the entire first episode in three parts by following the links: Part One, Part Two and Part Three.

What pop culture defined your own childhood?