About Us

I am a graphic designer, illustrator and writer from Portland, Oregon, now working as a freelancer in Hannover, Germany. I am married to a beautiful, smart and (unintentionally) hilarious German woman. She has two Master’s degrees and is currently working on her Ph.D., so she thinks she’s smarter than me. However, I continue to remind her I am emotionally intelligent, which is why I am able to gently explain the shortcomings of German television programming — like the amazingly awful crime show Tatort — without spending more than one night on the couch. Maybe two.

I started ‘Oh God, My Wife Is German.‘ back in August of 2011, but it REALLY started years before, when I began writing down the hilarious things my German wife was saying on a daily basis. I had a stockpile of quotes, denglish mistranslations and priceless idioms saved on my iPhone, just sitting there for us to laugh at during dinner. We started sharing them with our close friends and quickly realized these were not just inside jokes, but actually funny pieces of humor with widespread appeal. I asked her permission to begin a blog with her quotes as the focal point, and she said yes. To this very day, she remains the blog’s biggest fan.

It began with 1 or 2 followers, of course, but grew steadily over the months as people began to take notice. We had a couple hundred followers — which grew to a couple thousand — and then one of my posts about Americans marrying Germans was featured on WordPress.com as a “Freshly Pressed” article, and that gave the blog another bump. After we moved to Germany, I began including posts about culture shock and life as an American expat, and then our readership grew quickly through word of mouth. Before I knew it, we crossed the 10K mark, and new readers starting gathering around us like a bunch of rubberneckers gawking at a flaming car wreck. Since then, our blog has grown to over 200K+ readers.

Our readers are awesome people and I love to hear from them. My goal for ‘Oh God, My Wife Is German.‘ is to make our readers laugh. Plain and simple. That’s why I always post on Monday mornings, when people need to laugh the most. But the one person I truly want to make laugh is my beautiful German wife. She’s the funniest, most wonderful person I know, and really, this blog is just one long love letter to her (written with a near-lethal dose of sarcasm).

Thank you for reading.

— Zack Zwieback

Honors, Awards & Features: