literally: “bung stroke” / meaning: curfew
“Okay young man, one more round of Fortnite, but after that, it’s Zapfenstreich!” That’s a sentence you might hear in some German children’s rooms in the 2020s.
The word Zapfenstreich represents the moment someone should stop their activities for the day and head straight to bed. It is also used to describe the closing time for bars and pubs, after which no more alcohol is served. The term entered everyday language via the German armed forces. There, it is still used today for the military curfew. An anecdote about its origin is that to mark the end of the day, a guard used to stroke his saber on the bung of a beer barrel.
In another figurative meaning, the word was probably the most used term in German media on December 2, 2021. That was the day of the so-called Großer Zapfenstreich (“big bung stroke”) for Angela Merkel: a military ceremony that signaled the end of her time in office as chancellor. There is no record of whether she actually went straight to bed afterward or played a round of Fortnite first.
