ABSTRACT
The perfect tense in German is usually used to refer to events in the past. Some of these may have relevance to the present, e.g. Schau! Ich habe diesen Wein gekauft ‘look, I’ve bought this wine’ (and it’s still here to be drunk), others may be completed actions in the past which would be expressed using the past tense rather than the perfect in English, e.g. Was ist gestern Nacht passiert? (line 18) ‘what happened last night?’, NOT *‘what has happened last night?’ This means that events in the past can be expressed in German either by using the past tense (see Ch. 12) or the perfect. The main difference in usage is that the perfect is mainly used in spoken German (and forms of writing which imitate speech: e.g. dialogues, hence the extensive use of the perfect in the chosen text) while the past is usually used in written narratives (see the news report in the previous chapter).57
