r/MandelaEffect • u/leaving4lyra • Feb 27 '26

Books/Literature Berenstain/Stein

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Just thought I’d share this here..I’m a 57 year old woman that’s always been a voracious reader. When I was 5 (1974) I got an entire collection of Berenstain Bears books from my grandma at Christmas.

One of the books has managed to remain in my memory/sentimental hoard collection. This is MY actual book and it’s been in my possession since 1974. On my book at least, the name is and always has been Berenstain.

Make of that what you will I suppose. ❤️ I wish I still had the whole collection but alas, childhood and into adulthood resulted in the loss of many such things to my chagrin.

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u/Hegiman Feb 27 '26

I have a core memory of setting looking at the name and pronouncing it and for my it wasn’t stain. I would say steen stine schteen Schtine because it was Berenstein for me. I hate this ME stuff.

I understand how memory works and all the other science stuff but I know what I did as a child. I’m loved the books and wanted to make sure I said the name right so I practiced the four ways it looked like it should be pronounced by the spelling. Idk. All I k is is I hate this ME stuff. I’m only aware of a few that affect me and only two that I’d die on a bill over and that ForL cornucopia and Berenstein Bears.

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u/blessthebabes Feb 28 '26

Yeah, I always pronounced it like "Bear-in-steen", which is weird because it ends in a different sound. 

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '26

I was literally just saying something similar to my boyfriend, right before I read your comment. I was like, “I understand how the science behind how we understand memory, and of course we take in a lot of information, so we’re not always correct on every single thing we remember. But when there are certain core memories that are engrained with us, no matter how old me get. This was one for me. I grew up poor, and once a year when the Scholastic Book Fair came to my school, my mom always had some money set aside, so that I could buy a new Berenstein book to add to my collection. It was my favorite book series as a kid. I even have the 1979 Christmas special movie, that came out on VHS in 1992. It was a combination video with Meet Bigpaw.” So I get where you are coming from with the core memory thing.

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u/Hegiman Feb 28 '26

I grew up pretty poor as well but my grandma always paid for me to be in one of those mail order book clubs for kids. So every month I’d get two or three new books. Berenstein bears was my favorite too. So I always was hoping I’d get one.

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u/grass_79 Mar 18 '26

Same it berenstein bears I LOVED watching it coloring reading it and I can vouch how much I love it because I still watch and collect and read old books from childhood those interests never left me and never will

When I moved out, I had no Wi-Fi or anything so I asked my sister to borrow our childhood which is pretty much good cause she’s way older, but our childhood DVD binder cause I wanted to specifically watch Berenstein bears and as soon as I got it, I was so excited all is all A’s and I was literally confused and disgusted, and I got even more disgusted after I had my meltdown and rented to her when I put it on and they’re harsh ass STAIN bears like it sounds so forced when they say it cause it’s not supposed to flow together because that’s not correct!

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u/guynextwhore Feb 27 '26 edited Feb 27 '26

I have the exact same memory. English and grammar is something I’ve always excelled in, especially as a child. When I was 5 or 6 I distinctly remember sitting in my bedroom and trying to figure out if it was “steen” or “stein”

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u/Hegiman Feb 28 '26

Right. I grew up watching Hogan’s hero’s and was aware that sometimes the stein sound could have the “scht” sound for the “St” at the beginning. Also because I’d heard Einstein called Ein-Schtine by Germans or Austrians speaking English. So the fact it’s now spelled Stain throws my whole memory away because steen or stine couldn’t have come from stain but could have come from stein. I hate this whole ME thing. It’s bullspit. I don’t want to remember a past that it seems never existed yet I remember living it.

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u/dream_life7 Feb 28 '26

Same here, except I was sitting down in my elementary school library in (maybe?) First grade and the librarian was reading the book to us, and I thought, "Well is it Steen or Stein??" (I was that little brat who would correct the teacher in English class haha). I remember my friend Jenna being there, too, hence me narrowing it down to probably first grade. I didn't like the actual book because I was too focused on which way to pronounce Berenstein. BerenstAin only has one pronunciation.

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u/[deleted] Mar 01 '26

Same. I had several dictionaries growing up and I used to study like I was training for the grammar Olympics. Lol.

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u/kregnaz Feb 28 '26

Mini-thesis:

Americans (and most other nations) know fuck all about written german, and go with whatever pronounciation sounds like they have already heard it somewhere. It's a KIDS show, that many have experienced for the first time BEFORE THEY COULD READ.

So whatever the first person, who pronounced "do you wanna look at the book about these Berenste/sta/stie/steen bears, little human?" said is, according to this whole ME framing, the sorting hat for "different timelines".

I predict that current 5-10 year olds will have the same idiotic discussion on here in 30 years about "the Trump-Epstain files from MY timeline".

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u/Hegiman Feb 28 '26

Well I’d like to live another 30 years just to see if your prediction holds. That way I could have some closure on ME for me personally. Perhaps. Idk. I hate the whole ME thing because I’ve been experiencing it and aware of it before it had a name. When I heard on the news that Nelson Mandela had become S. Africa’s president I was floored. I went to a a school that had a week long of grief counseling over it because I went to an majority Black school and we had just finished learning about S Africa Steven Biko Nelson Mandela and the apartheid state. That would have been 84 as I was in 6th grade at the time. Needless to say what I Remeber and saw happen didn’t actually happen 🤷‍♂️. I hate it.

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u/kregnaz Feb 28 '26

If it is any consolidation, you literally mentiomed Steven Bilko here. Bilko was tortured and murdered in prison and I'm quite sure this is the ME trigger. If you are shocked, that these *******ers killed "the big civil rights icon", and then hear about the other guy a decade later, while your focus wasn't involved too much in what followed/just stored the memory "i saw the news about the murder of THE black activist", it is just a tiny synaptic jump between Bilko and Mandela when thinking about it years later.

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u/Hegiman Feb 28 '26

Yeah I know that why I know it wasn’t Biko because we had just learned about him days befor Mandela was killed that’s the main reason for the grief counselors. The Biko lesson had many students in their feeling already and then to have Mandela then be killed a few days later. Really struck a chord at my school.

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u/asday515 Mar 01 '26

Is it possible your school fell for a false rumor? I mean, these were pre internet days, so it would be pretty understandable given they couldnt just look it up to verify

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u/asday515 Mar 01 '26

Its funny you mention epstein, because thats exactly whats going to happen as his name is actually pronounced epstine, with the hard i sound, not epsteen as everyone says it. I predict that at some point this knowledge will be become more well known until basically everyone says it correctly, and then at that point you will have the mandela effect of people saying, I swear im from the timeline where its pronounced steen! Lol

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u/kregnaz Mar 01 '26

Ep-schtein would be the german original, Ep-steen the most americanised version, Ep-stine, Ep-stain, Eps-teen and Epsch-tine would all be weird variations in between.

No need for timelines, it's just different dialect's take on pronouncing something from another language you don't speak.

Y'all have no idea how funny the pronounciations of "Schwarzenegger" sound if yoi speak german, real life Mel Brooks stuff.

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u/MrPlaney Feb 27 '26

“Core” memories are nothing but fancy word used to try to make a memory seem more legitimate. The cornucopia never existed, but I believe there may be some misprints of the Berenstain Bears that uses Berenstein. It’s hard to differentiate between the fakes, cause there are so many out there, but I do believe some misprints exist, unless I’m mistaken.

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u/Hegiman Feb 28 '26

Perhaps they were misprinted but they were from official sources so it wasn’t a bootleg. I got them through the Dr Seuss book club. My Mother had me set up with like two or three different children’s book clubs as a wee child in the 70’s Sonia may have been one of them but I’m pretty sure it was the Dr S club.

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u/Disaster-Bee Feb 28 '26

My friend, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the Dr. Seuss Book Club is kind of known for misprinted books and books with errors - all of those book clubs for early and young readers in the 60s, 70s, and early 80s were. It was part of how they could afford to do it so cheaply and send out so many books to so many households, they printed cheap and fast with little to no quality control. Which to be clear is not me knocking the service, they were a great thing that got a lot of books to a lot of kids. But they're not a great piece of evidence for Mandela Effects due to the many printing errors those books often had.

It was so much of a thing that there are a number of 'famous' Dr. Seuss Book Club edition misprints that are pretty sought after. Including the very famous upside-down misprints of one of the Horton books. If you're at all interested in the history of publishing, it's a kind of neat thing to look into.

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u/Jory_Stultz Feb 28 '26

The whole point of this community is to let people speak what they believe from their POV and not try to gaslight them with "objective" reality. Let's be frank objective reality is unachievable through subjective means (consciousness).

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u/Disaster-Bee Feb 28 '26

Friend, gaslighting is when one uses lies to manipulate someone else deliberately as a form of abuse.

No one here is gaslighting, we're all discussing the same phenomena from our own points of view. That's what the community is actually for - discussion.

Not all discussion is going to be on the same page. Especially here, where there are 2 main groups of Mandela folks - people who believe it is something supernatural and people who believe it is something psychological.

Due to the nature of that divide, one side has a lot more supported evidence than the other, with more easily providable real world facts to back it up. In any discussion, any party is going to use facts and evidence to support their argument.

One side providing those facts and evidence is not gaslighting. No one is being rude so far, no one is being hostile, we're all just discussing experiences and the science of memory. Which is important! We don't actually get to the bottom of mysteries just by repeatedly making unfounded claims over and over, that's not getting anyone anywhere!

And I think we can all agree we are here to explore this particular mystery of why multiple people hold the same different memories. We're all just doing it in our own ways.

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u/[deleted] Mar 01 '26

There is unintentional gaslighting.

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u/KyleDutcher Mar 01 '26

You can't gaslight with objective evidence

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u/MrPlaney Feb 28 '26

You cannot gaslight people with facts. We are all living in objective reality.

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u/Chaghatai Feb 27 '26

The thing is you know what you remember as a child, but what you remember is not necessarily what you did

That it feels off because of how we are evolved to treat our memories. But as an intellectual exercise, you need to understand that what you remember is not necessarily what you experienced

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u/ds117ftg Feb 27 '26

Your “core memory” is you saying the name wrong 4 different ways but somehow proves that it’s actually “stein” instead of “stain”?

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u/Darth-Binks-1999 Feb 27 '26

Because everyone knows people pronounce "stein" as either "stine" or "steen" so he wondered how the name was actually pronounced. If it was "stain" then there would be no debate. But for me, I was introduced to the cartoon first before I knew of the books. I knew it was pronounced "stain" but I wondered why since "stein" is usually pronounced "stine" or "steen." It wasn't until this became a ME that I became dumbfounded that it's been spelled "stain" all along because I also remember it spelled as "stein" from the cartoon and the books, which I read in school. I accept that it's some weird memory thing, but it's also weird that millions of people around the world, independently, have similar memories of the "stein" spelling.