At the presentation of his programme, the new artistic director of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Bonaventure Ndikung, also showed himself to be linguistically creative. In order to accentuate diversity and design as central motifs of his plans, he claimed that the world was not a noun, but a verb. At least in English: "The world is not a noun, but a verb: to unworld, to world, and to reworld."
In fact, the Oxford English Dictionary contains an entry for "to world". In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the verb, which was found to be rare and obsolete, was used to mean "to give birth". Occasionally it is revived in poetic language, as in 1973 by W. H. Auden in his "Address to the Beasts": "For us who, from the moment / we first are worlded, / lapse into disarray". From an epic poem printed in 1589 about the history of England, the OED cites two passages for the meaning "to populate", one of them in a Figura etymologica: "that World shall world an Ile". In the Internet dictionary Wiktionary, the earlier of two documents dates back to 1996.
A document from the "Tristan"
Jan Jindy Pettman titled her book on the foundation of a feminist foreign policy "Worlding Women". The Wiktionary attributes to the verb "to world" the meaning of looking at something from a global perspective or as a global whole, rather than making national or other distinctions. That's what Ndikung meant. If you want to translate your sentence into German, you are faced with the problem of having to form a verb from the noun "world", which is not possible without changing the word form. The German word formation thus makes it difficult to replicate the pun.
After all, the corresponding verb to "world" exists, it is "worlds". It is documented in the German dictionary by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. However, its use is "sporadic"; the verb was formed "at different times and in different applications." A particularly early reference can be found in the famous prologue to "Tristan" by Godfrey of Strasbourg, a courtly novel written around 1210. The prologue begins with eleven stanzas of four verses each, before transitioning into pair-rhymed verses. The last of these stanzas contains Gottfried's neologism "werlden": "Trîbe ich die zît forgiven hin, / sô zîtic ich ze lebene bin, / sône var ich in der werlt sus hin / niht sô gewerldet, alse ich bin." Rüdiger Krohn translated the verse as follows: "If I wasted my time uselessly, / although I am mature for life, / then I would not be so much a part of society in this world as I actually am."
The Middle High German dictionary by Matthias Lexer describes the meaning of "werlden" as "to be connected to the world, to be placed in the world". The German verb from the later Middle Ages thus means roughly the opposite of the English verb from the beginning of modern times. Gottfried's punch line, however, is that he does not mean the world per se, but makes it clear in the further course of the prologue that it is a specific world to which he wants to belong: In keeping with the story of Tristan and Isolde, whose love leads to death (which, in view of the Middle High German novel, should not be exaggerated as "Liebestod" in the sense of Richard Wagner), is about a world in which joy and fulfillment are not simply the valid ideals, but in which the necessary intertwining of joy and sorrow is affirmed in the sense of a view of life.
Gottfried uses oxymora to describe this special world, such as "sweet bitterness", "happy death" and "sad life" – the latter is already given to Tristan in his name. And it is one of the oxymorous monstrosities of this novel that Tristan, who stands for courtly perfection and refinement like no other when he comes to the court of his uncle King Marke, will finally lead this very court to ruin through his illegitimate relationship with Isolde, Marke's wife, caused by the love potion.
In the context of the author's programmatic statements, the verb "werlden" thus stands for a specifically aesthetic project, which, however, has ethical implications. There should be little for Ndikung's purposes. Where the contemporary artist enabler invokes the plurality and diversity of worlds, the medieval poet swore his recipients to a specific one. Gottfried von Straßburg did not complete his novel (others continued it in the Middle Ages, which did not know an emphatic concept of fragments, which was historically appreciated, but did not find the applause of German studies). There is a debate as to whether he was unable to complete the work for accidental reasons, or whether he did not do so for substantive or conceptual reasons. It will be hoped that he will be able to bring into the world what he has conceived.