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“Hand aufs Herz” recap: Guten Tag, Lesbians!

I find it inexplicably difficult to keep up with the dozen American TV shows I watch every week, even though they are delivered to my DVR for my anytime viewing pleasure and are also conveniently presented in English. So when a cacophony of AfterEllen.com readers started suggesting I track down the German soap Hand aufs Herz to watch Jenny (Lucy Scherer) and Emma (Kasia Borek), I did not feel adequate to the task.

Look, I have a deep fondness for Germany. I’ve traveled to Deutschland more than once and eaten the delicious sausages and drank the delicious beer and chatted with the delicious women and fallen into the Rhine River with a fully-loaded hiking backpack – but everyone kept describing Hand aufs Herz as “the German Glee” and, honestly, I almost always need subtitles to understand what the f–k is happening on American Glee, so it seemed like an awful lot of work. But Jenny and Emma fans would not be denied: They made me track down Hand aufs Herz.

I’m glad you did. So glad. But you guys were selling it all wrong.

Hand aufs Herz is like if Sue Sylvester got herself a gun and backed up all her magnificent one-liners with bullets, and then maybe sometimes buried the victims of her wrath under the school volleyball court. Which is to say: Hand aufs Herz is what would happen if Glee and Pretty Little Liars and Coronation Street had an Weizenbock-fueled threesome that produced a love child. Which is to say: Hand aufs Herz is maybe the greatest show ever invented.

So, let us tell the tale of Jenny and Emma. (Only, listen, be gentle with me if I mess up some stuff. I’ll get better at it. After only six months of recapping Coronation Street, I became a professional Mancunian-speaker. I expect I’ll be fluent in German by autumn.)

Emma is – let’s call Emma the opposite of Rachel Berry. She’s a member of STAG, her school’s glee club, but she’s shy and insecure about lots of things, including her vocal abilities. Also, she has no idea that she might be harboring homosexual tendencies, even though when we meet her she is wearing the gayest plaid button-up you ever did see. I mean, everyone knows a plaid button-up is like the global uniform of lesbians. In fact, if you’re reading this recap about kissing girls and wearing a plaid button-up and you’re not sure about your sexual orientation, let me just spell it out for you with a handy visual aid.

Jenny and Emma are smitten with one another the moment Jenny transfers to Emma’s school. Jenny even thinks about joining STAG, but decides on the volleyball team instead. Emma’s best mate, Hotte, is into Jenny something fierce, and after a whole lot of pleading, Emma agrees to help him hook up with her. Hotte’s idea of a good first date is a séance to locate their missing pal Sophie, and Jenny agrees to come if Emma will write a paper for her. Emma accidentally writes the paper on the wrong Martin Luther (Protestant Reformation guy instead of Civil Rights guy), and Jenny goes berserk, assuming Emma did it to sabotage her academic career.

Jenny and Emma are catastrophically awesome at misunderstanding one another, which makes exactly zero sense because I don’t speak German and even I can tell the thing they’re saying over and over is, “If we don’t make out soon my brain is going to melt!”

Anyway, Jenny decides to get back at Emma by beating her at her own game: The Game of Glee Club. Jenny enters a singing competition and because no one bothered to check YouTube for videos of Lucy Scherer bringing down the motherf–king house as Glinda in Wicked, they didn’t know she was going to destroy them all at singing. She wins like a gazillion Euros, which she donates to the school to build a new beach volleyball court. The headmaster makes the kids dig up the new court with their bare hands and underneath all the dirt, they totally find a human skeleton.

The STAG kids go out for a drink – as you do when you accidentally uncover the remains of one of your classmates while doing a little after-school hard labor. Jenny takes Emma home after their night of drinking, and even though she stole Emma’s choir thunder and also accidentally hit her with a car a couple of days ago, they manage to have a lovely chat without getting into a brawl. Jenny watches the sway of Emma’s hips as she walks from the car to the house. I didn’t tell you Emma performed “If I Was a Boy” earlier, but she absolutely did, and Jenny totally doesn’t need her to be a boy. She’s gay for her like plaid is gay for everyone.

Jenny and Emma accidentally get jobs working together at a Restaurant called Saal 1. Jenny tells Emma she has a beautiful smile, and Emma blushes to beat the band. Then Jenny tells Emma she got a sweet tip because she flirted with this lady customer, and Emma is like, “I DON’T FLIRT WITH LADIES. I’M NORMAL.” And down the vindicate rabbit hole Jenny falls again. This time she botches up Emma’s orders to the point where Emma loses her job.

At school the next day, Emma’s like, “Uh, you kind of got me fired, bitch.” And Jenny is like, “You’re kind of a narrow-minded jerk who isn’t even listening to her own heart, bitch.” And Emma is like, “Psh, my heterosexual heart is perfectly heterosexual, thank you very much.” And Jenny’s like, “Yeah? Then see me make out with your best dude friend and watch your heterosexual heart burst into flames and explode from your chest.”

Emma chats to her BFF Luzi about “Watching Jenny and Hotte kiss made me want to commit many murders; that must mean I am in love with Hotte.” Luzi goes, “You’re in love all right, but not with Hotte.” And so Emma stumbles around in a haze and ends up following her heterosexual heart back to Saal 1 where she saves Jenny’s ass and also gets her own job back. But she doesn’t know if she wants her job back because Jenny makes her feel weird feelings. First she’s warm, then she’s cold, then she’s a badass, then she’s kissing Hotte.

“What’s your problem with me?” Emma asks at school the next day. And Jenny just leans in and kisses the question right off her face. “That’s my problem with you,” she says.

And that’s the end. No more misunderstandings. Happily ever after.

Wrong! The angst and the sweetness are about to amp up to an unbearable degree. My heart is clenched up like a fist just thinking about it.

Check back Monday for the second part of the Hand aufs Herz recap. Until then, how in love with Jenny and Emma are you?

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