The Wurst Post

I'll be the first to admit that life in a small, provincial German town may not offer the forms of excitement that people my age are on the look-out for. There isn't an endless stream of beautiful, thick-framed glasses-wearing18-30 year olds to hang out with, no bowling alleys, and definitely no occupy protests condemning neo-liberal governmentality (there are farmers' markets though!). Since I basically know no one here, my option for entertainment most evenings is limited to either watching the latest Coen brothers film I've downloaded, reading in my internet-less room, or...worst of all...continuing to work. But, on the other hand, being exiled to an area that is as authentically German as can be with very little foreign influence has provided me an up-close look at what traditional German life is like which I otherwise might miss out on in a big city.

And at the top of the list of what makes up 'traditional' German life is German cuisine. In my mind, three types of food stand-out as being the most important to Germans: the wurst, cabbage, and beer. This post is dedicated to the wurst and cabbage with a little reflection on the German character at the end.

Wurst is probably the most emblematic food of Germany with a staggering 1500 regional variants from the classic Bratwurst, Blutwurst (blood sausage), the Frankfurter Bockwurst, Knackwurst, Weisswurst (white sausage), Leberwurst (Liverwurst), and so forth. Each wurst differs slightly depending on the seasoning and the type of meat used (venison and horse seem to be popular locally--I just had a venison wurst for lunch) The local wurst, the Thuringer Rotwurst is apparently quite famous.

Right now there is some sort of festival going on in Gotha and of the 7 stands selling food, 6 of them are selling different types of wurst.

 Traditional German event music consists of old German men playing their favorite American 70s rock with racist Americana as their backdrop.

If you wanted to go out on a limb and ask what the Wurst tells us about the German character, one could possibly say something about how the wurst developed as a product of efficient butchery techniques. Efficiency is something very important to Germans. The wurst is made (or once was) when the butcher took all the scraps from the animal (intestines, fat, organs, blood), mixed them all up and then preserved them by salting and putting them in the intestine casing (the exterior skin of sausages). So it was the way to eat any kind of meat that wasn't fresh which explains its popularity and usefulness. But this attempt to connect wurst to the German psyche is feeble at best. Wurst is just as popular in the rest of continental Europe.

In any case, Germans do eat a lot of meat. No doubt about it. But when Germans aren't eating some form of wurst, they are most likely eating some type of kohl (cabbage). Kohl is another linguistically manifold culinary concept. There are an incredible number of different types of vegetables bearing the name of kohl in German. Rosenkohl (brussel sprouts), Blumenkohl (cauliflower), and Grühnkohl (kale). Then there is Kohlrabi, Rotkohl, and of course the most important form of German cabbage, sauerkraut. Sauerkraut is fermented cabbage slicings and is of course an important condiment put on the Bratwurst.

The other day, I found myself in a lunch conversation with my German colleagues about all the different types of Kohl and the different regional ways of eating or preparing it. I ended up thinking about how the anthropologist Frank Boas highlighted the fact that inuit and saamis have an incredibly developed vocabulary for snow. Being in such close proximity to this natural phenomenon, they have many more words to describe its various forms than people from more southern climes. I had this same sense for the German appreciation of wurst and cabbage and food culture in general. In my opinion, continental europeans' relationship to food is fundamentally different from that of Americans. Even though we have very 'American food' like hamburgers, milkshakes, and so forth, there isn't a strong sense of deeply traditional regional cuisine in the same way as Europe. In the US, our diet is a mish-mash of a hundred different national cuisines and you can pretty much eat however you want wherever you are (despite bbq and grits being especially important to the south). With Europeans, you really stick to traditional cuisine. Sometimes I am really taken aback by how closely my Hungarian friends stick to just eating their national foods.

But this closeness to certain types of food makes sense when you realize how tied Europeans are to their local regions where their ancestors have been settled for hundreds of years. It is very different than Americans who are on average much more likely to move from state to state throughout their lives. Europeans derive so much more of their identity from their local regions than I feel is the case in the US. Each region's cuisine and culinary habits differs a great deal (maybe not to an outsider) from the next region. What type of wurst is popular, what type of chutney or sauce you use, and so forth.

And the average German is very knowledgeable about food in a way that Americans aren't, i.e. it isn't pretentious. I just had a conversation with an Italian friend about how for my generation in the Anglo-world, caring about food, being able to cook, knowing about incredibly obscure vegetables--in other words being a foody--is a very trendy and hip skill to have. As a mark of culture, this I feel would be kind of lost on Europeans. Knowing about food and cooking at home from scratch is just second-nature and how life has always been for Italians, the French or Germans. My italian friend said she is still shocked at the thought of eating food from cans. So I think our generation's pride about cooking with fresh food and gourmet food in general (perhaps as evidenced by our desire to photograph it) is more about the novelty of such a lifestyle and distinguishing ourselves from a reigning food culture of canned or fast-foods inherited from our parents.

Moving from objects to people, one of the things I like about Germany is striking up conversations with older Germans about their past lives. It's a good way to practice German in a non-threatening environment since old people are very egotistical and like to talk about themselves. But that's ok because older Germans have the right to blabber on about their life experiences since recent German history is much more tumultuous and interesting than American history (excluding our grandparents generation of course). For example, just the other day I was at a conference in Marburg and I ended up having dinner with the extremely charismatic organizer, Winfrid Schröder. He started talking about his childhood and specifically about the conservative post-WWII culture that reigned in Germany. He mentioned how his father was a very silent figure who was wounded on the eastern front and how his uncle was a womanizer who then joined the SS--but not just any old humdrum SS unit. He was a member of Hitler's special bodyguard SS division, the 1st SS Panzer division or "Leibstandarte". He was killed sometime during the battle of Berlin. For someone like me, a former WWII buff, this type of personal history always blows my mind. An uncle who was in the SS!!! Not that I think that is cool or anything.

And just yesterday I struck up a conversation with an old lady in the train who was on her way to her home town in eastern Germany to celebrate the 65 anniversary of her confirmation (a German tradition apparently). We started to chat about where she had lived in Germany and she began to tell me about her family's escape from East Germany in 1952. Her family were actually all from West Germany and had only immigrated to East Germany to find work during the 1920s. When the war ended, his father secretly secured a job at a West German company and they facilitated his family's escape through West Berlin. She talked for a while about how they simply had no future in East Germany. If any of them wanted to go to college or a blue-collar job, then they would have to join the party. And this was something they despised having just lived through Nazi times. Towing the line and constant surveillance coupled with economic stagnation didn't sit well with them.

While I am personally a pro-war activist, having a sense of Germany's past of political totalitarianism and state surveillance is important to understanding their approach to contemporary politics. Germany, more than any other state, abhors the idea of a centralized collection of private data under the name of security. They went berserk during the NSA scandal. While I personally see this obsession with privacy as slightly neurotic, it is important to understand this obsession in its historical context. The memory of Hitler and especially of the East German secret services (Stasi) famous surveillance programs has made them wary of any compromise of privacy rights.

On the other hand, and perhaps paradoxically, Germany stands as the example par excellence of a controlled, orderly, and secure society which is achieved through an often inflexible, burdensome, and bewildering (for foreigners) bureaucracy. Germans are often thought of as hyper-rational in their obsession with record-keeping and following protocol. They are careful only to cross the street when the man is green, they exhibited a macabre meticulousness in carrying out and recording the Holocaust, and the Stasi recorded everything about an individual's life down to what they ate in the morning and the kind of trash they produced. This mindset considers it very important that all situations have to be thought out, recorded, and a rule made for how to proceed which then must be strictly followed. Germans today have a saying which sums up this attitude about how this type of micro-management: "Vertrauen ist gut, Kontrolle ist besser" ('trust is good, but control is better').

The rules for entering and leaving the research center at which I work might serve as a small example of this mentality. When I arrived in Gotha, I was given a lengthy orientation of all the things I had to do to properly use the research center building. One of the most peculiar aspects of the protocol for the building is this:

It is a board with slots for all of the fellows and employees using the building. The names are arranged in order of the most senior fellow at the top to the least senior (yours truly) at the bottom. Every time we enter the building we are supposed to move our name-tag over to the 'present' slot to indicate that we are in the building and to move it back to the 'absent' slot when we leave. This way everyone will know if there is anyone else in the building so the last person can know to turn on the alarm. As one German friend said with deep primal satisfaction when he saw it, "sehr praktisch" ("very useful"). As for us foreigners, we kind of roll our eyes. The building really isn't that big and it's pretty easy to know who is still left in the building. But even if it seems like micro-management, it does make entering and exiting more efficient. As a footnote, I also enjoyed one of the instructions in the manual we were given about using the building (yes, we got a 10 page manual for how to use the building). The line in question stated without any irony "If you are the first to enter the building and are assaulted by intruders who force you to enter the alarm deactivation code, be sure to enter the following code which alerts the authorities instead of the usual code..." I kind of laughed at the thought of being assaulted and then calmly thinking through the appropriate protocol delineated for us to use in such a case.

I would say that for most Germans today, the national values of micro-management, hyper-efficiency, and social order on the one hand and a fierce defense of private data on the other don't seem contradictory--and for the most part they're not. Efficiency and order aren't intertwined with a totalitarian system as they once were, but are rather held up as the reason for German success in economic and industrial matters (thanks to German engineering it is one of the world's largest exporters), on-time and expansive public transportation, and an overall highly-functional hybrid welfare state.

Well, I'm pretty tired of this mediocre post. Until next time!