The genitive case
| The genitive case usually indicates possession and very often equates to the use of ’s and s’ in English or to ‘of’, e.g.:
die Kinder meines Lehrers my teacher’s children | ||
|
The ending -s occurs in German too as a sign of possession but it is limited to personal names and no apostrophe is used with it, e.g. Ottos Schwester/Marias neue Küche/Thomas Manns Romane Forms like Frau Emsbergers Hund (Mrs Emsberger’s dog) and Herrn Müllers Büro (Mr Müller’s ofi ce) are also possible. An expression such as ‘my aunt’s dog’ cannot be expressed in this way in German but must be rephrased as ‘the dog of my aunt’ where ‘of my aunt’ is in the genitive case, i.e. der Hund meiner Tante. In more formal sounding German the -s ending is applied to the names of towns and countries but in everyday German is replaced by von, e.g. |
die Hauptstadt Deutschlands/Deutschlands Hauptstadt/die
Hauptstadt von Deutschland
Germany’s capital city/the capital city of Germany
in der Nähe Berlins/in der Nähe von Berlin
near (lit. in the vicinity of) Berlin
The adverbial expression eines Tages (one day) takes the gen. The adverbial expressions morgens/vormittags (in the morning), nachmittags (in the afternoon), abends (in the evening), nachts (during the night), as well as tagsüber (during the day), have all been derived from genitive forms but are no longer seen as such; compare ‘of a morning/evening’ etc. in English.
The genitive of the interrogative pronoun ‘who’ is ‘whose’ or wessen in German and the genitive of ‘whose’ as a relative pronoun is dessen or deren.
