German Joys

Schnakertzman Says

"Think about our sleeping neighbors. Thanks!" Spotted at Haus Schnakertz (g) in Cologne-Nippes, home to the best damn Wiener Schnitzel outside Vienna.

Delectable Stereotypes

Spotted at my favorite bakery, Cafe J-----, a few days ago:

They were in a big display with a several other petit fours with geometric decorations (no, not swastikas). I had to specifically ask for the 'Moor' and the 'Chinaman'. The woman who served me was, by the way, Turkish.

Anyway, ah done ate me one Negro and one Chinaman. They wuz dee-licious, and the Negro wuz full o' rum. Typical!

Previous coverage of German ethnic insensitivity here.

The Glorious German Canteen

Compared to the U.S., Germany is slightly behind the times, often in charming ways. Another way of putting this is that the U.S., world capital of creative destruction, has casually exterminated hundreds of institutions and folkways which live on in Germany, as they do in most of the other countries on the earth.

I have a list of these somewhere which includes:*

• Having the same postman who always comes to your house
• Independent pharmacists
• Places to drink coffee which are not named Starbucks, and which are actual cafes
• Traveling circuses
• Summer holidays**
• Seasonal fairs
• Weekends

Add to this the firm canteen. I am a frequent visitor to my university's canteen (but when it's at a university, it's called a mensa for some reason). A friend of mine is a big fan of the Deutsche Post 'Casino' here in Düsseldorf (g). Another swears by the canteen of the Nordic Embassies in Berlin.

Who can resist the allure of the bulky, brusquely efficient Eastern European women with hairnets; the warm plastic trays slightly redolent of bleach; the artificial plants; the chef's state-issued license proudly framed where everyone can see it as they wait in line; the buzzing fluorescent lighting? It's a Xanadu of efficient dining that seems to be the same everywhere in Germany, and was probably the same in both Germanies back when they existed. The German canteen is not just a place to get mashed potatoes glopped onto your plate by the unsmiling, mustachioed Ludmila: it's a demonstration of Germany's commitment to providing decent, no-frills services and institutions at a modest price.

That's why I was delighted to see Stephen Evans, the BBC'S Berlin correspondent, filing a report on yesterday's PM program singing the praises of the humble German canteen. It's non-embeddable, so I clipped it for you:

Stephen Evans BBC 4 on German Canteens

Germans Spend An Average of €1.20 per Bottle of Wine

According to this article in favor of cheap wine from Slate:

Americans' ... annual consumption is around one bottle per month (PDF) per capita—but perhaps they would if the industry hadn’t taught them that truly affordable wine isn’t worth drinking. The evidence is right across the Atlantic: In Europe, consumption is 3-to-6 times higher than in the United States. But only the most affluent would spend 11 euros to drink a bottle of wine at home on a Wednesday night. Europeans seem perfectly comfortable cracking open a 1-euro tetra-pak of wine for guests. Germans, for example, pay just $1.79 on average for a bottle of wine.

Not long ago, American wine-buying habits were very similar to the Germans’. In 1995, 59 percent of the wine purchased in the United States sold for less than $3 per bottle. By 2006, controlling for inflation, that share had dropped to 29 percent. Wines over $14 per bottle more than quadrupled their share of the market during the same period. Looking at raw consumption rather than market share, sales of over-$14 wine increased sevenfold. Sales of wines that cost less than $3 per bottle actually declined 28 percent, during a period when overall wine consumption was rapidly increasing.

The pretty stunning figure of $1.79 per bottle comes from the linked report here, which is a pretty interesting analysis of German wine-buying habits, although it'S from 2007. Here's the relevant passage:

Despite the increasing sales of premium quality wines, Germany still is a market with a low average price of €1.77 (US$2.38) per litre in the off-trade in 2006. This is due mainly to the fact that the discount chains, which sell more than half of the total volume, move over 77% of their portfolio at below €1.99 (US$2.68) per bottle. When looking at all trade channels other than direct sales, the category under €2 a bottle has a 74.7% market share.

Yep, it must be the discounters, all right. In their scuffed and dingy aisles, you can find cardboard cartons of wine from all over the world for 1-2€ per bottle. And if you try enough bottles, you can often find something relatively drinkable. I remember Netto had a line of €1.50 Argentine cabernet that that was not half bad. Right now, my source of cheap tipple is my man Werner März, of the Natürlich Natürlich organic food store at Brunnenstr. 32 in Düsseldorf. In addition to plenty of other organic treats, he sells Vida Feliz organic wine from Spain. The absurdly low price of €3 per liter can't be beat, and the stuff is thoroughly drinkable. Since it's organic, you never know exactly what you'll get, which I find a feature, not a bug. But it's usually a simple, ripe, fruity red. Plus, you often actually see lees at the bottom of the bottle!

Ambivalent Drinkers Unite!

Speaking of intoxicants, cultural anthropologist Kate Fox looks at different drinking cultures:

There is enormous cross-cultural variation in the way people behave when they drink alcohol. There are some societies (such as the UK, the US, Australia and parts of Scandinavia) that anthropologists call "ambivalent" drinking-cultures, where drinking is associated with disinhibition, aggression, promiscuity, violence and anti-social behaviour.

There are other societies (such as Latin and Mediterranean cultures in particular, but in fact the vast majority of cultures), where drinking is not associated with these undesirable behaviours - cultures where alcohol is just a morally neutral, normal, integral part of ordinary, everyday life - about on a par with, say, coffee or tea. These are known as "integrated" drinking cultures.

This variation cannot be attributed to different levels of consumption - most integrated drinking cultures have significantly higher per-capita alcohol consumption than the ambivalent drinking cultures.

Instead the variation is clearly related to different cultural beliefs about alcohol, different expectations about the effects of alcohol, and different social rules about drunken comportment.

...

Our beliefs about the effects of alcohol act as self-fulfilling prophecies - if you firmly believe and expect that booze will make you aggressive, then it will do exactly that. In fact, you will be able to get roaring drunk on a non-alcoholic placebo.

Germany, I would say, fits into the 'ambivalent' group, as any Italian or Spaniard will be happy to tell you.

Friends of Hemp in Germany and the U.S.

Picking up a theme from a few weeks ago -- how the old saw about puritanical America versus liberal Germany needs to be updated -- here are the results of a few recent opinion polls on whether marijuana should be legalized. About the U.S., the L.A. Times reports:

Slowly but surely, Americans seem to be making peace with the pot pipe.

According to a poll released by Gallup on Monday, 50% of Americans surveyed say marijuana use should be legal — up from 46% last year. This year, 46% percent said it should be illegal.

Those numbers mean that, for the first time in the poll's 42-year-history, Americans who say that marijuana should be legal outnumber those who say it should be illegal.

Societal acceptance of marijuana has come a long way since 1969, when Gallup first posed the question "Should marijuana use be legal?" Back then, only 12% of Americans favored legalization of the drug. From the '70s through the mid-'90s, support remained in the 20s, but it has been climbing steadily

The Spiegel reports a recent German poll showing that only 26% of Germans favor legalizing marijuana, as opposed to 36% who wish to keep it a crime. The remainder want it designated as an Ordnungswidrigkeit, which is basically a minor misdemeanor punishable by a fine, similar to a parking ticket. Thus, overall, a majority of Germans favor reducing the punishment for marijuana to something less than an actual crime, but only 26% are willing to go as far as Americans are.

Count me among that 26%/50%. Marijuana doesn't cause physical dependence, cannot cause overdose, and does not contribute to violent behavior. In other words, it's about as harmless as drugs can get -- much less harmful than nicotine and alcohol -- and has only been prohibited, I would argue, because those who originally used it were stigmatized outsiders (blacks, foreigners, hippies, the young). Like single-malt whisky or a fine Bordeaux, pure, fresh cannabis sativa is a feast for the senses. Why governments are continuing to waste millions of dollars and euros prohibiting it is beyond me. But note that more Americans are asking themselves that question than are Germans, at least for now.

Germany's Boring Beers

The Washington Post examines Germany's dull beer landscape and declining output, and diagnoses a case of hostility to innovation:

“If you look through the economy, what Germans are good at is taking established ideas and making them a lot better,” said John Kornblum, a former American ambassador to Germany who still lives in Berlin. “They are the gold standard for all modern industrial products.”

But, he said, there are “outer limits of inventiveness. … They’re never going to produce a Steve Jobs, but they will produce lots of people who make really high-quality stuff.”

For beer drinkers, Germany continues to be a country to find predictably good drinks — not new ideas. Americans who have grown used to a pick of dozens of beers at their grocery store might be disappointed upon arrival in the birthplace of beer culture.

In America, “there is more beer diversity on the shelf than you will find in Munich or Prague or various other classic brewing centers,” said Julie Johnson, contributing editor at All About Beer magazine. “I don’t know if the German brewer is open to the kind of thing that we’re open to.”

In recent years, American brewers have tried making ever-more-unusual beers. Dogfish Head, near Rehoboth Beach, has tried replicating fermented drinks from ancient China and Egypt. Others age their beer in bourbon barrels to infuse it with the taste of whiskey.

In Germany, by contrast, the craziest thing that many brewers have done is add fruit flavors to their lineups.

No More Berliner Fahrbier?

Ahh, the beloved German custom of drinking an ice-cold brew wherever you please. The Fahrbier, or 'beer for the journey', I call it. Alan Nothnagle reports from Berlin that transport officials there are mulling a ban on drinking on subways:

THERE'S A MOVEMENT UNDERWAY calling for a complete ban on the consumption of alchoholic beverages in the vehicles and stations of Germany's [sic, he means Berlin's] far-flung public transport network, the BVG, and I think it's a bad idea. Sure, I understand where the initiative is coming from: alcohol-fueled violence and vandalism, let alone the inevitable mess they leave behind, have long since reached unacceptable levels, and the city's passenger association, under the leadership of a conservative Christian Democratic suburbanite, wants to put a stop to it. But is banning booze on the bus, as other German cities have done, the solution? No, it isn't. At least, it isn't as long as Berlin doesn't want to become like any other city.

Since reunification, Berlin has heroically defended the wide-open, "Wild East" quality that it earned in the "front city" days of the Cold War and the mad years following the fall of the Berlin Wall. As globalization and the simultaneous consolidation of corporate power endeavor to make our increasingly bland and overheated planet safe for Facebook and Amazon.com, Berlin remains "free" with just a hint of genteel anarchy. You might call it "sin," but we call it "Berliner Luft" (Berlin air). It may not smell very nice, but it sure is refreshing.

Take the city's relationship to alcohol. As things still are today, you can buy any kind of alcoholic drink in any of hundreds of all-night shops and consume them pretty much anywhere in the city. Not only are sidewalk cafés everywhere (without the railings that my own American home town insisted on before it finally legalized such cafés after a decade of controversy), but particularly young people, wary of high bar tabs, increasingly choose to pick up a few bottles of beer or cheap champagne and guzzle them in parks or on bridges. The large, trendy thoroughfare near my flat becomes a sort of mobile saloon every evening as the tourists wander along clutching half-liter beer bottles in their feverish provincial hands. Booze is still banned in schools, the last I heard, but it is a popular beverage in movie theaters, right alongside Coke and Red Bull. The only restriction on beer is that you have to be at least sixteen years old to buy it.

I strongly second Nothnagle's sentiments. If they ban public drinking anywhere in Germany, I pledge to go to that place and engage in massive civil disobedience.

One quibble with the piece, though: Nothnagle claims banning subway beers in Berlin will make it 'like any other city'. This is a piece of 'only-in-Berlin' preciousness. You can drink in public just about everywhere in Germany. The same goes for most of the other things Nothnagle mentions about Berlin, such as the omnipresence of legal bordellos, streetwalkers, adult video stores, nude bathing, and people casually lighting up a spliff in public. You'll find these things in all major German cities.

So, if Berlin actually did ban public drinking, that would actually make it stand out from every other German city. And it mark yet another depressing stage in Berlin's steady transformation into a tame, homogenized outdoor shopping-mall.

Limburger on Your Lathe

Lapham Quarterly has a piece about the 'dark, evil-smelling sprite' of Limburger cheese:

In very explicit way,” says Tia Keenan, a chef-fromagere in Manhattan, “Limburger was something humble and stinky and strange that came from Europe.”

Originally from Liege, Belgium, Limburger accompanied mid-nineteenth century Germans and Belgians immigrating en masse to America for its rapidly modernizing, expanding economy. For them, it was a nostalgic, cheap saloon food. They liked it in a sandwich, with pumpernickel, spicy mustard, raw onion, and cold beer—a collection of sharp tastes. The jokes met Limburger at Ellis Island. Vaudeville comedians called it the “cheese you can find in the dark.” By the 1880s, the malaprop-laden dialect of German, Dutch, and Yiddish comedians like Weber and Fields, and later the young Groucho Marx, was dubbed “Limburger English,” whether they told cheese jokes or not. Limburger symbolized low class, “funny” immigrants....

It was as if a dark, evil-smelling sprite had escaped the Black Forest of Germany and wafted its way to the New World. In 1884, a troubled woman in upstate New York tried to burn down her family’s Limburger cheese plant. In 1885, police arrested Mrs. Teresa Ludwig in downtown New York, for attempting suicide while intoxicated by leaping off Pier 1 on the North River. An Irish woman, Mrs. Ludwig complained that she had married a German who ate Limburger in their apartment and then made amorous advances while it was still on his breath. April 1895, a strike broke out at a Newark butter plant when a Swedish prankster smeared Limburger on his coworkers’ lathe, arousing anti-Swedish slurs, a fistfight, and a walkout of Swedish workers until the American apologized. 1909, Denver chemist Philip Shuch, Jr., grief-stricken over his mother’s death from cancer, swore that he would find a cure. His quest led him to the leper colonies of Venezuela, where he struck on a new idea—that the bacteria found in Limburger could act as a cure for leprosy. Shuch advocated smearing a mixture of pulped Swiss cheese, bacteria-ridden Limburger, glycerine, and quicklime on diseased skin.

I, for one, quite like Limburger, which is available in any grocery store here. It's a little fragrant, sure, but nothing compared with Pont L'Eveque, if you ask me.

Dealer for a Day

 'The regally-named Wells Tower goes to Amsterdam to learn how to sell dope in a legal coffeehouse. It's a weirdly-regulated industry, so sellers have to be quite careful. Here's his summary of the legal situation:

Marijuana and establishments that sell it remain illegal in Holland, but the industry operates more or less in plain sight through a statutory gray area known as gedoogbeleid, roughly "tolerance." The tolerance policy protects smokers possessing five grams or less but cuts local government plenty of prosecutorial slack to harry shop owners at the first shift of Holland's culture wars. The national statutes are sufficiently loose and leaky that almost forty years after the first coffee shop opened its doors, the center-right Christian Democratic Appeal—until recently Holland's ruling party—has pledged to shutter every hash bar on Dutch soil. And while coffee shops operate at the pleasure of city government, not national parties like the CDA, Holland's dope outlets have undergone a substantial die-off of late. In 1997, at least 1,019 coffee shops were doing business in the Netherlands. But after a quiet epidemic of denied shop-license renewals and selective enforcement of gedoogbeleid's caprices, today's number is closer to 700. Rotterdam alone closed a third of its shops in 2008. These are anxious times in the dope trade, which is why, through voluntary measures like today's clinic, shop owners are doing all they can to stay on the good side of the law.

So here in the dunce row, determined to be the most upstanding dope dealer I can possibly be, I'm jotting notes at a stenographic rate. The lecturer is just now getting into the most crucial leg of his spiel, the five unbending commandments of pot commerce: Coffee shops are forbidden to advertise, to sell to persons under 18, to cause a public nuisance, to sell hard drugs, or to maintain an inventory of more than 500 grams (about 17.6 ounces). Breaking any of these could result in fines, closure, or a prison term.

Tower then tastes some of the really good stuff:

Harry sees fit to break out this monster sack of extremely good Dutch Isolator, the kind of hash that costs you sixty euros per gram in the shop. Under a microscope, a THC crystal looks like the end of a car antenna: a stalk with a terminal ball. By passing the resin (in a suspension of chilled water) through successively smaller screens, Harry explains, the manufacturers of Isolator hash strain out just the balls, the purest part of the crystal. He tips a bit of brown powder onto a portable scale (to ensure that he doesn't share too much of the costly goods) and loads and lights a glass pipe. "Full melt!" he cries. "Full fuckin' dome!" (Translation: "You can tell this is great stuff because under the flame it doesn't char briquettishly but liquefies and balloons as only the best hash does!")

He passes the pipe to me, and against my better judgment I take a solid pull. The flavor is so purely chemical that it tastes less like an agricultural product than a hit off a Scotchgard can. To my surprise, my suddenly extremely stoned mind doesn't begin its habitual uncellaring of '45 Mouton Rothschild self-hatred and social anxiety. Nor do I experience the urge to flee all human company or sink into fearful silence. Instead, I feel clairvoyant, adrenalized, and full of bonhomie. I loiter on the sofa, chatting amiably and confidently, utterly untroubled that I can't recall a word I've said the instant after I utter it. It's a wonderfully liberating, energizing mind erasure. At last, on the cusp of middle age, I've discovered a strain of dope that I like very much, though it's probably a good thing that it sells at twice the price of gold.