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 day, sauerkraut juice sneaked into my apartment – definitely in disguise, otherwise it would have been refused entry. I tried it, gagged, tried it again, and, as the bottom fell out of my world in one great burst of intestinal enthusiasm, I felt purged, smug and suddenly skinny. Drinking sauerkraut juice is not unlike trying to get mild, non-fatal dysentery on a tropical holiday – a little stomach rumble, a little inconvenience, then sit back and wait for people to notice your newly emerged collarbones.

After some online investigation I’ve learned that sauerkraut juice is a wonder food. It not only cleanses your colon and zaps free radicals, it also makes you live forever, improves your German grammar and recalibrates your moral fibre. I am hooked. These days, friends from abroad must sit through my sermons on sauerkraut, their sceptical silence only broken by their stuttering refusal to try my fearfully wonderful juice.

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 earlier seen walking around the station rapidly asking everyone for a cigarette, with a hint of desperation in his voice. He gave one the impression that his mind was not in touch with “reality” to the fullest extent, to the say least.

I was listening to music on my headphones and noticed him trying to talk to anyone who would make eye contact with him. Unfortunately, I noticed his eyes fall onto me, although I looked away. Being a young woman of 22, people often appeal to me for coins, so I had expected this turn of events. Without looking up I saw him ogling me from the side of my eyes, and saw he was trying to speak to me. I pretended not to notice over my headphones and kept writing. Then he leaned over towards me and began reading my journal, much to my shock. I doubt he understood it because it was in English and he had been mumbling in German, and my writing borders on illegible. I began laughing at the strangeness of it. He said something to me and I put my journal away protectively. I had stopped at the line which I had been writing just as he began spying on me which read, “there is a strange man sitting next to me on the U Bahn, who very badly needs a cigarette and some cologne.”

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 blockade. My coal merchant carried 100 pounds at a time in a wooden box on his back: he charged a D-Mark extra per floor climbed, and I gave him a tip and a Schnapps to salve my conscience, which was uneasy because I saved my spine at the expense of his. Once he came with his teetotaler assistant. After downing his own shot, he asked if he could have the assistant’s, too. When I emptied the ash into a metal bucket to carry downstairs to the trash, a fine cloud of it spread a dull, ugly smell through the room.

Once I stayed within a meter of my heater all day, sweltering on one side and freezing on the other, while feeding it two coal bricks an hour. That for a 16-m2 room. Next day, I left for work, all bundled up to walk where strewn salt had cleared the snow from the sidewalk (crushed rock came years later, and nowadays winter no longer means much snow). When I reached the street, I couldn’t seem to get any air into my lungs and I panicked: is this an asthma attack? That particular fear was allayed when, eyes smarting, I looked down the street. It wasn’t my lungs it was the air: thickly yellow with coal smoke, pouring down from the chimneys. When I descended the steps to the subway, the air got a little better.

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 questioned about where we got our money. At that time it was not legal to bring East German money into the country if it had been acquired at a western bank. So most of our money was confiscated. In addition, at the time Americans could only cross at certain check points and during certain hours. Because the border patrol delayed us, we arrived close to midnight and hastily crossed into West Berlin before the gate closed for the night. When we arrived at our intended address, a cheap youth hostel we had chosen in our travel book, we found it was no longer operating. We had no place to stay for the night, and there were no other options in the neighborhood. Just then a young Berliner approached us on her bicycle, and inquired about our predicament. She quickly proclaimed that we would have to stay with her for the night. She and her fiance fed us bread, cheese, and wine. We talked until late into the night, and the next day they sent us off with a full itinerary of sights to see in the city, the culmination of which was a joyfully affordable performance of the Berlin Philharmonic. It was a wonderful end to an exciting and memorable trip.

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 surprised that your neighborhood grocery store finds room to carry things like chocolate fountains, ladies’ bathrobes, and decorative garden baubles. Approach the supermarket with a shopping list and you will learn how it makes room for the chocolate fountains: by not carrying spinach. Or chickpeas. Or avocados or couscous or chicken breasts or black beans or risotto rice or any number of other things you used to think of as kitchen staples and now learn to view as exotic items sold only in specialty shops.

Cycling or walking through Berlin, one sees startlingly few billboards. One of the city’s charms is the absence of the consumerism-as-barrage that marks cities like New York. On a good day, the supermarket seems to be part of the same pleasing austerity. Nobody really needs the number of products an American supermarket holds, after all, and isn’t a relief not to have to make the number of minute consumer choices the American supermarket demands? (White or orange cheddar? Block, pre-sliced or pre-shredded? Full-fat or reduced-fat? Berlin supermarkets will not waste your time with any questions beyond: Is there cheddar at all?) But on a bad day, when the Kaiser’s in your East Berlin neighborhood doesn’t have any salt, you grumble that these people might as well just go back to communism already, cause they’re really bad at capitalism. A supermarket that doesn’t even have salt! you marvel to yourself on the walk home, your anger dissipating into wonder.

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 wife, we’re separated, what do I have to do?”
“Ah, I really don’t know…”
“And here- I just put my new address here?”
“Yes,” When I had helped as much as I could, after glancing at my paper enough times he asked:
“You’re from California?”
“Uh, yes, I was born there.”
“Ohh.- What kind of man are you???!!! You left paradise to come here?!?”
“Well, it’s no ‘paradise’, people have the same problems there that they do here.” “Hmpf.— Really??? Hmm.”
His eyebrows bobbing and bowing as he processes this information.
“Ok, thank you very much.”
He returned to his seat and tells his friend
“This man is from Santa Frandisco in California and he came here, HERE – can you believe that?!?”

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 day today!” A man of decent vintage and wider girth has sat down but two tables away, replete with designer mutt and cut-off Jamaica t-shirt on account of said good weather (the t-shirt that is, not the dog). Taking off his matching baseball cap the aforementioned proceeds to parley at some volume with his imaginary dining partner who, given the choice, would doubtless also have opted for the fish platter combo – which will presently be eaten with some great gusto you bet! Overly fond of the rhetorical gambit, said salt-and-pepper baldy warms to his theme, upping the decibels accordingly. “Glorious!” he declaims to no one in particular. “Capital weather!” he roars, all the while surveying the room in the vain hope that a hapless tourist, passing suit or even errant Tourette’s sufferer will be spontaneously moved to confabulate on the merits of the really rather fabulous weather. Happily, no one’s playing. “Fish!” he shouts, warming to his theme and getting slowly but surely to the matter at hand. The dog lolls listlessly between his glistening-with-sweat legs, no stranger to its owner’s motoric outbursts. Licking his lips in greasy anticipation of his fishy treat, our hero’s eyes fix upon two teenage girls sitting at an adjacent table. “Lovely weather girls!” he bellows; his intended victims’ stoic refusal to play the attention-seeking fool’s game a tribute to studied teenage ambivalence and a preternatural ability to render pensionable lotharios in ill-fitting denim shorts invisible. A kitchen hand collects some plates.

Do you have your own Berlin Story? Send it to us in 300 words or less. If we like it, we’ll post it here.

submit your Berlin Story