Das ist ein Geben und Nehmen. — It is a giving and a taking. Said of any arrangement that only works if both sides contribute.
Leben und leben lassen. — Live and let live.
den Bogen überspannen — To overdraw the bow. To push too far.
den Hals nicht vollkriegen — Not to get one’s throat full. Said of a person who keeps asking for more.
Der kluge Richter, the wise judge, is one of Johann Peter Hebel’s calendar stories. It appears in his Schatzkästlein des rheinischen Hausfreundes of 1811, and it still appears in school materials. A rich man loses a cloth with money sewn into it. He promises the honest finder a reward of one hundred thalers. A good and honest man finds the money and brings it back. Now the rich man looks for a way to cheat the finder out of the reward. He claims that there were really eight hundred thalers in the cloth, so the finder must already have taken his hundred. The judge accepts the claim as stated. If eight hundred were lost, this cannot be the same money. The finder takes the money home and keeps it safe. The rich man must wait until someone finds his eight hundred thalers. So sprach der Richter, und dabei blieb es. So spoke the judge, and that is how it stayed.
Heinrich von Kleist published the full novella Michael Kohlhaas in 1810. A horse dealer leaves two horses as a pledge with the Junker von Tronka. When he returns, they are thin and ruined from hard field work. Ich will meine wohlgenährten und gesunden Pferde wieder haben! I want my well-fed and healthy horses back! He goes to court, fails, and turns to violence. At the end of the novella, the Junker is sentenced to two years in prison. Kohlhaas is sentenced to death. Before his execution, he is shown his two black horses, fattened by the Junker’s men and shining with health. Kohlhaas tells the archchancellor with joy that his highest wish on earth has been fulfilled. Then his head falls under the executioner’s axe.
Kleist calls him one of the most upright and at the same time most terrible men of his time. His sense of justice made him a robber and a murderer.
Mein Sohn, sey mit Lust bey den Geschäften am Tage, aber mache nur solche, daß wir bey Nacht ruhig schlafen können. My son, take pleasure in business by day, but make only such deals that let us sleep peacefully at night. In Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (1901), the family gives Thomas Buddenbrook a large memorial tablet with this motto in Gothic letters. The occasion is the firm’s hundredth anniversary on 7 July 1868. Thomas has just bought the entire grain harvest of the estate Pöppenrade while it is still standing in the field. He paid half price to an owner who badly needed money. When he first thought about the deal, he described it in his own words: Unreinliche Manipulation … Im Trüben fischen … Brutale Ausbeutung … Einen Wehrlosen übers Ohr hauen … Wucherprofit. Unclean manipulation, fishing in muddy water, brutal exploitation, cheating a defenseless man, a usurer’s profit. During the anniversary celebration, a telegram arrives. Hail has destroyed the Pöppenrade harvest.
The motto is said to come from the author’s own family firm. The sources disagree on which Johann Siegmund Mann wrote it.
Honesty lasts longest. A German proverb, and the argument in it is about duration rather than virtue. It does not say honesty is right. It says honesty is what survives — which is the same argument the culture makes about agreements, prices and partnerships.
The jug goes to the well until it breaks. A German proverb about repeated advantage-taking. The jug does not break because of any single trip. It breaks because the trips continued past the point where they should have stopped, and nobody was counting.
Trade and change — a fixed German pairing for commercial life as a whole, in use since the Middle Ages. The rhyme yokes commerce to movement and mutual dealing. It describes trade as something that circulates between people rather than as something extracted by one from another.
A deal has to work out for both sides. Said flatly in German business, as a statement of how transactions function rather than as an appeal to decency. Rechnen is the verb for calculating. The claim is arithmetical: a bargain that does not add up for one party will not hold.
Right and fair. A fixed German pairing, and billig here is not the modern word for cheap. It is the older sense: equitable, proportionate, what is due. The drift of billig from fair to cheap is one of the more telling movements in the German language, and the old meaning survives only in this phrase and in the law.
To over-advantage. A single German verb for taking more than your due from a transaction. It sits in ordinary speech and in legal drafting alike. There is no neutral English verb for it — to get a better deal carries no fault, and übervorteilen carries nothing else.