Just kidding. That’s Yiddish.

And that means schmusen und Wein in German. Almost. Schmusen in German means to cuddle. Shmues, however, although taken from schmusen, means schmooze, as in gossip or conversation.
So, German of the day Shmues un Vayn, which is actually Yiddish, means getting together for wine and conversation. I think. Now was that so hard?
You can now hear people speaking Yiddish in bars all over Berlin – A Yiddish conversation group meets biweekly at locations around the city. Other people think they’re speaking Swiss German.
As a Brit I lived in Switzerland for 8 months and can testify that Swiss German is really hard. When Swiss are on German TV they get subtitled in high German 😉
The German element makes up around 70% of Yiddish vocabulary – but that doesn’t mean it’s easy for a German speaker to understand Yiddish. A lot for sure.
I’m almost positive that the German word comes from the Yiddish in this case, and not vice versa. The Yiddish word shmues (שמועס) just means “conversation,” but a lot of times when Yiddish words are borrowed into other languages like German and English, they take on other meanings or develop a more specific connotation. The English shmooze is also much more specific than the Yiddish shmues. I’m really not sure how the word evolved in German to reach its current meaning…
Of course there are plenty of other words in Yiddish that came from German, either more recently (especially in the late 19th century) or through their common roots in Middle High German during the Middle Ages.