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deceze
[ Editor ]
The correct spelling should be:
Wer den Zeitgeist heiratet wird früh Witwe.
I have never heard this before and don't think it's (currently) very popular or well known.
It translates as "Who marries the Zeitgeist will soon be a widow", meaning (in my interpretation) that trends come and go and that you shouldn't blindly subscribe to any currently popular views, or you'll find yourself left behind soon enough.
UPDATE
The actual sentence is:
Wer den Zeitgeist heiratet wird früh Witwer.
Contrary to the comments, this sentence is male. It is exchanged between men after all. The discussion is about the old man (the father?) not wanting to adopt some sort of new business model proposed by his son(?). His reasoning being that even if the chances may look good now, it probably won't hold for long.
It's uttered in a dialect (can't quite put my finger on which, Hessisch perhaps) and is pronounced more like Witwa, which may not be easy to distinguish from "Witwe".
Interestingly, in English, “widow” is a gendered implicitly female, with “widower” as the term for a male who survives his spouse. Therefore, rendering this statement gender-neutral in English can only be done with something clunky like: “He or she who marries the Z__ will soon be a widower or a widow.” Not terribly elegant. But you could do better (arguably) by using “widow” as a verb, as in “Who marries the Zeitgeist will soon widow.” (I don’t mean to be critical, just geeky.)
