Complete unrelated to what you actual wrote about, but... This is the second time in a week that I hear dreck used in english. Before, I never noticed it anywhere. First was from the "singing chemist" scene in Breaking Bad, and now in your writing. I wasn't aware english adopted this word from German as well. Weird, that I never heard it until just now, while the scene I watched is already 15 years or so old...
As another commenter noted, it was loaned from Yiddish rather than German, although the two languages are very closely related. There are many Yiddish words in English that have come from the Jewish diaspora. Common ones I can think of are schlep (carry something heavy) and kvetch (complain loudly). Since this is Hacker News, the Yiddish word I think we use the most is glitch. Of course there are also words from Hebrew origin entering English the same way, like behemoth, kosher, messiah...
Well, while I can never be sure about my own biases, I submit this particular instance is/was not an "illusion". I truely never heard the word dreck used in english before. Why do I know? I am a german native speaker, and I submit that I would have noticed it if I ever heard it earlier, simply because I know its meaning in my native lang and that would have made spotting it rather easy.
I also believe noticing Baader-meinhof in the 90s is rather unsurprising, since RAF was just "a few years" ago. However, "dreck" as someone else noted is documented since the early 20th century. So I dont think me noticing this just recently isn't a bias, rather a true coincidence.
