D as in "Dora" — or "David"? The Nazis had eliminated Jewish names from the German spelling alphabet. The names are to return, at least symbolically. It is a common situation during a phone call ...

But this is not the only version of a phonetic alphabet to have existed, with the first German version going back to the 1890 Berlin telephone book, in which every letter was assigned a number.

Stand-up comedian Henning Wehn takes over a German class and highlights the importance of the four additional German letters in the alphabet, the ß, ä, ü and ö. Where would Düsseldorf be ...