Oh superlative Sauerkraut. When we first moved to Berlin my attitude to sauerkraut, the stinky, fermented cabbage, was disparaging in the extreme. The level of cabbage-worship displayed in this country gave me excellent ammunition for illogical, verbal assaults on the entire nation, usually fired off during a non-cabbage-related argument with my German husband. Then, one… Read more »
I was sitting on Berlin’s lovely U Bahn minding my own business, or writing in my journal to be more exact, when a man dressed in ripped jeans, an old leather jacket and smelling strangely like a mixture of eggs and ash plopped down next to me. He was the same man who I had… Read more »
I was sitting on Berlin’s lovely U Bahn minding my own business, or writing in my journal to be more exact, when a man dressed in ripped jeans, an old leather jacket and smelling strangely like a mixture of eggs and ash plopped down next to me. He was the same man who I had… Read more »
Around 1980, a “Spiegel” cover showed one of the grimmer portraits of Luther in furs and the headline “New Little Ice Age?” Intricate frost patterns brocaded our windows. Back then, every apartment in Kreuzberg heated with coal. West Berlin’s government stored hundreds of thousands of tons of it in warehouses against the chance of resumed communist… Read more »
In April of 1990, I was 20 years old and studying abroad in Vienna. I took a trip with a classmate to Berlin and Prague for the weekend. At that time the city was still divided by the wall, and the currency was still separate as well. We were stopped by the East German border patrol and… Read more »
In a city where so little of daily life feels specifically German, the supermarket is always there to remind you that you’re foreign. Walk into a typical Berlin supermarket and you will first notice that it is small by American standards, the aisles about two shopping carts wide. With space so limited, you may be… Read more »
A heavy-set Mediterranean man with salt-and-pepper gray hair taped me on the shoulder and began asking questions about the Anmeldungs form. In broken German with a mottled accent he began pointing at the different portions of my form and mumbling his questions is a low voice: “and this section, I am not moving with my… Read more »
Sitting downstairs in the food court of the 205 cantonment consumerplex in Friedrichstraße – I only come here because I don’t know where else to go – between bites of the lunch and the reading of the Tome I’m startled out of my book-induced reverie by a curious sound. “And is it not a fine… Read more »
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