Ah, Berlin, Berlin. My friend Nathan and I spent this past weekend walking around the different neighborhoods of Berlin - a city that feels strangely familiar and fascinating at the same time. It has room for everybody and everything, from urbane street art to the gritty urban landscapes, the moneyed few to the transvestites.
And of course, 20 years later, Berlin has The Wall. Once I actually saw it, it made me unquestionably angry and upset. In the various history and political classes I have taken throughout my life, The Wall became distilled into more of a concept and less of a thing. It somehow got lumped into the gore and travesty of everything World War II-related in my head, making it an intangible story about “way back when.” But when you are face-to-face with it (I feel really silly saying this) it’s seriously just a wall. A wall that damaged so much and still holds so much power.
The first time I saw it I actually didn’t know what it was. It was early on the first day I was in Berlin and I was wandering around a residential area in the East. Rounding a corner and I saw ahead of me an ugly, gray wall. There was nothing special about it, nothing out of the ordinary. It was just long, ugly and gray. I thought it was kind of odd that unlike the other walls I had been walking past, it wasn’t plastered with ads promoting Whitney Houston’s new CD (did you know she was making a comeback? I didn’t). I then realized why it was different. When you look at the Wall, especially when you realize how ordinary it really is, the Berlin Wall signifies everything that is stupid and careless and hurtful. And the damage caused by The Wall becomes just that much more pointless.
Berliners haven’t let the Wall define them or the city as stupid and hurtful though. The Wall is still making an impact, albeit in a completely different way. I went to one of the Renegade Craft Fairs last year when I was still living in Chicago and saw these old dominos turned into earrings with a photo hodge-podged onto them. As I started talking to the artist, she told me that she had recently taken a trip to Berlin and turned all of her photos of the Wall into jewelry. I ended up buying them and I wear them all the time. The silly, stupid Wall became a catalyst for creativity for her and she is not the only one. In Berlin, the best example of this is the East Side Gallery. The Gallery is a long stretch of the Wall that has been turned into an actual art canvas. Artists from around the world are invited to paint images on sections of the Wall, like the one found on my earrings. Some of the images are positive, some play on the changes that have happened since 1989, some evoke the pointlessness of the Wall in general. It’s a project that uses The Wall like any public wall should be used. A sort of sweet form of justice for the united Berlin, I imagine.
We spent a majority of our time exploring East Berlin. After twenty years, the city’s two sides seemed to have flip positions. East Berlin is full of the trendy, artsy and unique. West Berlin, at least from what we saw, is full of the quieter, older, more suburban. Angie, our fabulous host for the weekend, was born and raised in East Germany and moved to East Berlin with her family a year or two before the Wall fell. She claims that she can’t really say much about the difference between West Germany and East Germany growing up. To her, her childhood in East Berlin was normal, she knows no other way of growing up. After the country’s division, her family was distantly divided, with extended family on the Western side of the country. She remembers their visits before 1990 because they brought her toys like a Barbie doll and Legos. And as for when the Wall came down? She only remembers how excited her parents were the night of November 9th. Her father went to the Wall to see what was going on and crossed over to the West. He quickly crossed back into East Berlin because no one knew what would really happen to those who went on the other side of the Wall. He came home drunk.
She now works in advertising, loves Robbie Williams and Sex and the City and eats sushi on a regular basis.
Another thing about Angie is that she loves food and we did a lot of eating and drinking in Berlin. Having her as a guide and armed with suggestions from Luisa and my friend Daniel, Nathan and I were continually surprised by the depth and range of food that Berlin has to offer. On our first night there, Angie took us to Café Datscha in her neighborhood of Friedrichshain. The menu offers blinis stuffed with sauerkraut and chicken, or salmon and red caviar, borscht dolloped with sour cream and meals like “The Proletariat,” ”The Farmer,” “The Intelligentsia” or even “The Collective” – a combination of the Proletariat and Intelligentsia for 2 people. Quantities of vodka are optional with the order.
I felt like I was eating a Dostoevsky novel. We ate pickled herring on brown bread, hard-boiled eggs donned with shiny salmon caviar, marinated mushrooms, and boiled potatoes with sliced pickles. I decided to opt out of the bottle of vodka and washed it all down with a hoppy local beer. It’s been several days since we ate there, and I am still thinking about the pickled herring on brown bread. It was creamy and fresh and laced with enough salt that it enhanced the earthiness of the bread without killing any of the flavor. And most importantly, it tasted like herring. There is nothing worse than eating seafood that tastes of tinny fish-flavor.
But most surprisingly was how delicious Currywurst is – in a gross, self-indulgent sort of way. There was no way I could go to Berlin and not try Curry wurst (one word? Two words?) the epicenter of all things Curry-wurst and a cuisine that Berliners hold near and dear to their hearts. Currywurst is a sort of food that is delicious in its hedonistic, fatty way. What it comes down to is a fried wurst (like brat wurst) graciously sprinkled with curry powder, topped with a special type of ketchup and accessorized with fries. It’s the sort of food that feels like it was invented by a very hungry, very drunk person searching for something to sop up the alcohol when they’ve forgotten to go to the grocery store.
And when you are in Berlin, and especially East Berlin, your first Currywurst stop is Konnopke Imbiss. It’s a currywurst institution and has been doling out currywurst to the masses for over 75 years. It’s a food stall that lost its mobility years ago as benches, tables and food-related street art popped around its thin, corrugated metal walls. The women who work Konnopke’s counters wear baby pink candy striper smocks and occasionally sport a fashion scarf or two. It’s such a small gesture but really classes the place up. They efficiently fry, slice and sprinkle up plates to the begging masses that start lining up at 6 am for their wurst-fix 6 days a week. Their currywurst is a tangy affair as the curry powder pops on your tastebuds, leaving your mouth literally tingling with pleasure. And their fries. Ladies and gentlemen, fries sprinkled with curry powder are insanely delicious. It was such a simple culinary eureka moment that I can’t wait to figure out what other starchy, fried things taste better with a firm kick in their pants by a shake of curry powder. Please, go find some of the best fries you can get your hands on and generously sprinkle them with curry powder. Afterwards, you can thank Berlin.
Datscha
Gabriel-Marx-Str. 1, Ecke Wühlischstr., 10245 Berlin
Konnopke Imbiss
Schönhauser Allee 44a
Berlin-Prenzlauer Berg
