Why is Attack on Titan so closely related to German?

——How did you come up with so many names?

Tanaka: I was still a graduate student at that time. There was a whole row of international yearbooks in our library. There were many names of senior government officials and presidents in it. The first and last names of these people were arranged in two. Platoon, and then connect them, you can get the names of these characters now. I still remember that Bittenfeldt (Note 6) was the name of West Germany’s Minister of Education around 1950 (laughing). Reinhard seemed to have come up with it quite naturally. Looking back now, he might have got it from a German short story called "Immensee" (author: Sturm). That book tells a beautiful story about an old man recalling his first love. The protagonist's name is Reinhardt. Although the character's personality is completely different, I just decided the name sounded good to me.

2.——There are a lot of German words in the work.

Tanaka: I thought that from the perspective of a unified world view, it should be attached to a certain culture. If it was Anglo-Saxon, it would be boring, so I chose another one. Because if the story turned into "John and Smith's cosmic showdown" (Editor's note: It means building a worldview in English), it would definitely be very sad (laughs). At that time, I saw this statement in a magazine, saying: "If you want to be accepted by women, you must use French or Italian names. German or Russian names will not be accepted." At that time, I thought for sure There will be no female readers who read my book (laughs) and decide to use difficult and boring German. The reason why Russian is not used is because some people call Russian the "whisper of the devil". What would you think if the name was not Reinhard von Lohenkramm but Ivan Andropov? It won’t be liked by Japanese readers.

3. Not only is it German, many characters’ names are composed of a combination of English German, Greek German, and Old Norse German. , probably to show that the people in the city are the descendants of immigrants from different countries. As for the op, the lyricist Revo also likes to write lyrics in various languages ????for his previous songs, so the use of German is also suitable for this work.