Germany wakes up to the fry-up as British cuisine takes off in Berlin

Just read an article in The Guardian about an apparent rise in the popularity of British cuisine in Berlin…

Is there really any such thing as British ‘cuisine’? (especially as curry is the most popular dish in England) Is it just that there are more Brits here now? Who knows…

Supermarkets, Socialism and Chocolate Biscuits

In England, you can stroll into a supermarket and pick up almost anything from star fruit to various Indian pickles, Quorn products, tortillas, short crust pastry and frozen, well, everything really.

Here, I’ve had trouble at various times locating; canned chick peas (which are currently stocked in the exotic foods section at the Kaiser’s in Schönhauser Allee Arcaden, and are sometimes available in supermarkets, sometimes not), passion fruit, Mexican food products that I can buy without ending up in the same financial predicament as Italy, Weetabix, mint sauce, maple syrup, frozen sweetcorn, sweet potatoes, decent tea like PG Tips…Things that I consider pretty basic, but are obviously not.

So now I consider recipes very carefully before deciding whether hunting down the ingredients in a manner comparable to cave men of the Ice Age is actually worth it. And, when guests from England come over, I request gifts of self-raising flour, salt and vinegar crisps and dark-chocolate covered Digestive biscuits.

When I was a child, we used to visit India with suitcases stuffed with Cadbury’s chocolates and cheddar cheese, but this stopped several years ago. “We get everything here,” they said.  And they did. Deutschland has not yet reached the same level.

The Bavarian loves it when visitors come bearing gifts. My cousin recently brought with her four packs of Chocolate Digestives. We finished them in one week. (That’s 1.6 Kgs, and around 8000 calories.) I say we, but mostly it was The Bavarian, who stuffed a whole one into his mouth at a time, as one would a Pringle. If anyone out there has attempted to stuff an entire Digestive into their mouth, you’ll know that it’s almost impossible. Even The Bavarian, who has a big mouth and a talent for stuffing as much as possible into it, was struggling. I watched him for a while, to see whether he would catch on to the fact that these things had to be nibbled, or dunked into tea and bitten, but after while I felt it was my duty to intervene.

Me: Why are you eating them like that? They’re not Pringles.

The Bavarian: Because they’re only safe from you once they’re in my mouth.

In our flat, it sometimes feels as if we’re living during war-time, when luxury goods are in short supply and people resort to hoarding or gorging whenever they get their hands on some. I like to think that The Bavarian’s paranoia is not caused by my voracious appetite, but by some kind of collective consciousness inherited from being born in a nation that has suffered two world wars; when his grandmother passed away, they found stacks of food stored not only in the kitchen but in wardrobes and under the bed.

Despite the fact that most supermarkets are useless, they seem to be opening up at the same rate as Bubble Tea joints in Prenzlauer Berg. Within a mile of where I live, there are no less than fifteen supermarkets. This year, Prenzlauer Berg saw the opening of Germany’s biggest Vegan supermarket (Veganz, Schivelbeiner Straße 34, 10439 Berlin) and Kochhaus (Schönhauser Allee 46 10437 Berlin) .

Kochhaus’s products are organised around recipes. At each table you will find a suggested dish – carrot and ginger soup, spaghetti carbonara etc – along with all the ingredients you will need to make it, a little card to take home with the recipe on it, and any equipment you may need – so in the case of the soup, this would include serving bowls and a hand blender.

At first I was flummoxed as to why anyone would shop here…it’s über-expensive (on the board at each table, it tells you the cost per dish per person, which averages out to about 4 or 5 euros, for which you might as well save yourself the hassle and eat out in this city), and restrictive – you can only buy stuff that relates to the dozen or so recipes they suggest, everything is sold in small quantities measured out for two or four servings, and there is only one choice of product per table – so if you need salt, you’re going to have to pick the only bottle of salt on the table, which is pink and from the Himalayas and has been blessed by the Dalai Lama and is therefore more expensive than gold.

On the surface, this supermarket can be seen as a symptom of just how far Prenzlauer Berg has moved from its poor Socialist past, but essentially, being given just one choice of product per item harks back to the days of shopping during The Wall.

According to Barry Schwartz, who gave an interesting talk at TED about the paradox of choice, the official dogma of all western societies – that if we are interested in maximising the welfare of our citizens, the way to do that is to maximise  individual freedom, and the way to maximise freedom is to maximise choice – is paradoxical because people don’t actually like having too much choice. It produces a) paralysis – a study of voluntary investment plans showed that for every ten mutual funds the employer offered, the rate of participation went down two per cent – and b) if we overcome paralysis and make a choice, less satisfaction, because the more options there are the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the option you chose.

This is all very well and good, and maybe the people of Prenzlauer Berg are happy with less choice, but it probably means that we won’t be seeing any Chocolate Digestives in the aisles any time soon

The British Germans

Interesting radio programme on the BBC called The British Germans, currently available on iPlayer. Programme summary from the BBC below:

The British armed forces are due over the next decade to complete a final withdrawal from bases in Germany. But they’ll leave behind a remarkable human legacy – many thousands of former soldiers who have decided to stay in Germany. In this programme Chris Bowlby goes in search of these ‘ British Germans’, and traces their relationship with Germany and Germans. He meets a soldier who was punished by the British army for marrying a German woman just after the end of the Second World War. He hears about the pubs where Brits and Germans learnt each other’s language, the struggle to understand each other’s humour, the belief among many ex-soldiers that Germany offers a better society than Britain. And he finds that the children of British-German relationships are becoming increasingly influential in today’s German society as he meets a potential future German chancellor called David McAllister.

Listen here or read the article on The ‘British’ Germans the war left behind

Photos from Not In Kansas

Last night’s reading was a success; Cafe Hilde was packed, our audience was rapt from beginning to end, no one threw tomatoes at us, and everyone had a fantastic time…

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Not In Kansas: An Evening of Literature in English

This promises to be a good evening: Writers read out a diverse range of literature in English (did I mention I’m organising it?)

Come along!

Visit our Facebook Event Page

International Literature Festival Berlin

Radio Eins interviews Pankaj Mishra

The International Literature Festival Berlin is well underway, with lots of interesting events going on around the city. This year there is special focus on the Asia-Pacific, with events covering topics from Reporting from Conflict Zones and Criticism of Islam, to Katherine Mansfield and Rabindranath Tagore.

Participants include Pankaj Mishra (you can listen to the brief interview he gave to Radio Eins here), Louis de Bernières and Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa. There is also a special section of events dedicated to International Children’s and Youth Literature.

On Sunday evening, C.K. Stead talked about what has to be one of my favorite novels My Name was Judas, in which Judas, now an old man living a peaceful life surrounded by his family, tells the story of his time with Jesus.

Priya Basil, C.K. Stead and Friedhelm Ptok at the International Literature Festival Berlin, 2011

Stead, New Zealand’s foremost literary critic, poet, novelist and writer, revealed that the novel began with a comment he made to his wife whilst writing about Katherine Mansfield, in whose life D.H. Lawrence featured, that trying to write about Lawrence was ‘like writing about God.” After making this utterance, he started thinking about how one would actually write about God. Different problems and solutions occurred to him, and the novel formed in his mind.

Not being a believer himself and having no relation to the characters involved, Stead wondered whether he was the right person to tell this story. He overcame this obstacle by making Judas close in character to himself. Instead of an evil betrayer, Stead’s Judas is an intelligent, skeptical man, who always has his childhood friend Jesus’s best interests at heart.

His portrayal of Jesus is similarly novel – it is almost as if the personality traits of the two characters have been reversed in this re-telling. Jesus is bright, charismatic, manipulative and sometimes fundamentalist. Stead tried to reconcile what he saw as two different Jesuses in the Bible – one loving and the other vengeful - through the application of a time frame, so that Jesus starts out with a message of love and progressively becomes more extreme. Stead further humanises Jesus through the difficult and often comic relationship between him and his mother.

The discussion covered the role of langauge, story-telling and the nature of belief. Stead read from one of the most dramatic sections of the book, which takes place just after the crucifixion, followed by a wonderfully read translation by actor Friedhelm Ptok. He also read a couple of the poems that end each chapter and revealed a little trick that I had failed to notice; every one of the stanzas has thirteen syllables.

Although the book is available in multiple languages, it has not for some reason been translated into German. Despite this, there was a good turnout – about 40 people in a venue that was a little too spacious.

By stark contrast, about a hundred people squeezed into the tiny space at Dialogue Bookshop for Conflict and Writing: How do we tell stories after a crisis? on Monday evening. Granta editor John Freeman chaired the discussion with authors Nam Le , Madeleine Thien and Berlin’s own Priya Basil.

Nam Le read from his award-winning debut short-story collection The Boat, Madeleine Thien from her novel about the Cambodian genocide Dogs at the Perimeter, and Priya Basil from her novel Ishq and Mushq, a love story set against the backdrop of India’s Patition.

The authors talked about their experiences and thoughts relating to writing about conflict, the language of conflict, the role and importance of literature dealing with conflict and of course, 9/11…I can’t reproduce the entire discussion here, but the most interesting part of it for me revolved around Don DeLillo’s thoughts, made years before 9/11, when he said, “I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness”.

The International Literature Festival Berlin is on until Saturday 17th September 2011.

Preview Berlin

We went to the opening of Preview Berlin: The Emerging Art Fair last night.

Sixty-one international galleries, from London to Israel, have set up exhibits in the open space of Hangar 2 of the former Tempelhof Airport.

Most of the galleries are from Germany, and of those, the majority are from Berlin, presenting a good overview of the city’s art scene, unlike the poorly curated Based in Berlin exhibition earlier this year.

As can be imagined, the range of art on display is wide, and each gallery has used their section in a unique way. Sculpture, photography, installations, drawings, paper art – it’s all there in different styles, sizes and materials.

In addition, there are two new projects this year: Video Art Box, presenting contemporary video art by Israeli artists, and Focus Academy, showcasing work from a new generation of young and promising artists from the Bauhaus University of Weimar, the Muthesius Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Kiel, and the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg.

Preview Berlin is open from 1 – 8 pm, 9th – 11th September 2011 at Hangar 2 of the former Tempelhof Airport. Public Transport: U6 to Platz der Luftbrücke (exit Columbiadamm) or bus no. 104, 284 to Flughafen Tempelhof.

Translation Idol

Far better than Pop Idol, Translation Idol is a regular Berlin event in which contestants battle it out to provide the best translation of a German text in English. The winners get…erm, nothing much really, but it’s an illuminating exercise.

The competition is organised by No Mans Land, the magazine of German literature in translation, and the fourth one took place at Dialogue Books  last night. Participants had to translate a particularly challenging section from Verena Rossbacher’s forthcoming novel schlachten. Ein Alphabet der Indizien. (you can see the excerpt at Love German Books)

It’s  interesting to see the multiple ways in which something can be expressed. Take, for example, “aber alle aalglatt und perfekt poliert und wie gut ausgebuttert und dass er abrutscht darauf,”  which was translated in various ways from “but all are as slippery as an eel and perfectly polished and buttered and he slips and slides over them” (Anne Posten), and “but everywhere is slippery, perfectly polished and oiled, so that he skids and falls” (Joseph Given) to “but everyone’s slippery as eels and perfectly polished and like greased piglets and his grip slips” (Bradley Schmidt, who is from Kansas, where they have greased pig contests – if you don’t believe me, you can see one here) and “but they’re a’ like Teflon, all polished tae perfection, they’re like slipp’ry wee sprats, so he slides right off em’” (Hugh Fraser, whose translation into Scottish dialect, strangely, made the most sense to me.)

Or “schnaufenden Projektor,” which was translated to “puffing projector,” “gasping projector,” “snivelling projector,” and, most commonly, “wheezing projector”.

Listening to the same text being read over and over again with slight variations illuminated it from different angles - a more intense version of re-reading a book. In the end, Tom Morrison won the Poet’s Prize (which was chosen by the author, who also attended and gave a reading at the event) and Bradley Schmidt won the Audience Vote.

Most of the participants were regulars and professional translators, and, strangely, men (8 out of the 10 contestants to be precise). Can that be an accurate representation of the male-female ratio in the translating business?!

If you’re interested in the topic, Translating Berlin is an entertaining blog by a (female!) American translator living in the city.

How German are you?

A recent study has shown that half of Brits could have German blood in them. The Sun has come up with a brilliant survey to assess your German-ness “oompah” rating.

Making a short film in 48 hours…

This weekend I took part in Shoot and Run, a Berlin-based project in which you and your team have just 48 hours to make a short film.  It’s a regular competition, which focuses on a different area of Berlin each time.

The theme / genre that we were given at the 7pm registration on Friday evening was “Bicycle Road Movies” and the setting was Charlottenburg.

Off we set, brainstorming ideas, scripting, planning, shooting and editing the movie in order have it finished and delivered to the organisers at the location of the screening in Charlottenburg by 7pm on Sunday evening.

Working collaboratively with a wacky group of amateur film-makers, all of whom met for the first time on Friday evening, was an incredible creative experience.

I know you’re curious, so here’s our Charlottenburg-based bicycle-road-movie:

Two prizes were awarded at the end of the screening: The Jury Award and The Audience Award. Our film won the latter.

It was a brilliant experience, but badly organised; the screening details on the website were incorrect; the actual location of the screening was outdoors, which, considering the cold, rainy weather yesterday was a stupid idea, on top of which the organisers made everyone wait around in the cold for almost two hours before actually showing the films.

Of all the films shown, the only one without a bicycle in it won the Jury Prize. Why? Because after we’d been told the theme, that team came along and complained about the ‘bicycle’ bit (like getting hold of one in Berlin is akin to getting hold of a Bible in Saudi Arabia or something), so the theme was changed to suit them, and no one bothered to inform us…I would express exactly how I feel about that, but then this site would need a password due to excessive use of outrageous obscenities.

P.S A few people have asked, so here’s the link to the film that won the Jury Prize, and managed to get the rules changed: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2IHvoHf6R4