Today's Berlin pulsates with life. Museums, there are way too many of them. But every building itself is a museum, being shed of its World War II bullet-holes and its bizarre ultra-commie facades. Berlin seems to be moving at a frantic pace; like the West Berlin I visited years ago, the whole Berlin today is both modern and aware of its past. Old buildings and new ideas. Berlin is known in Europe for its vegetarian restaurants.
Where Europe has hoped to bury its dirty past, the American vegetarian has declared war on Hitler. The problem that the political vegetarian always faces is the image of their movement, because far too often vegetarianism seeks to assert itself as a lifestyle; it becomes political and religious, and sometimes the healthfulness of it gets sided by self-righteousness. But what if, the political vegetarian believes, ‘our movement becomes tied with Adolf Hitler, the most hated man in the world?’
By all means, Hitler was a vegetarian, or like most vegetarians, he strove to be a vegetarian. Hitler wrote in Table Top Hitler, an unfinished sequel to Mein Kampf, “…there's one thing I can predict to eaters of meat, that the world of the future will be vegetarian!”
Hitler believed that man was ancestrally tied to vegetarianism. He said, "At the time when I ate meat, I used to sweat a lot. I used to drink four pots of beer and six bottles of water during a meeting…when I became a vegetarian, a mouthful of water was enough."
He believed the future of the Aryan race would be bound by vegetarianism. When he attempted to make this part of the Third Reich creed, his staff objected, for the reason that it would diminish their popularity in the eyes of the German populace. He continually noted that children have an “extraordinary antipathy…to meat." He believed that meat was unnatural to the human race. And that our cultural enlightenment would veer away from it during the thousand-year reign of the Reich.
But Hitler always had everything wrong, including history. The Aryans, who Hitler curiously depicted as people from Western Europe, were just the ancestral precursors to both Germans and the Slavs he persecuted – a people tied linguistically to their dispersion point in present-day India. The starkly blonde-haired, blue-eyed European – he was an immigrant to Germany; also from India but distantly removed from the Germanic and Slavic tribes. He was more recently Scandinavian, less traceable to Aryan roots - and his pigmentation was an evolutionary trait thirteen thousand years old. A trait he developed perhaps hunting large game on the ice floes of yesterday. An animal trait, which made him blend into the snow of the receding Baltic glacial ice.
He was a meat-eater at times, and a vegetarian at times. He dug on mushrooms, he lavished the wild boar.
It is just us in Berlin now. Dad drags us to a feast at the oldest restaurant in Berlin. Mom and I order a piquant venison goulash with forest mushrooms, apple on red cabbage, leek and bacon dumplings. Jane orders the smoked and braised loin of pork breaded with pumpernickel, stuffed with prunes, served with a claret sauce, and herb-flavored potatoes. Dad orders a large pickled knuckle of pork with wine-flavored sauerkraut, pea puree, pickled cucumbers and mustard. And what they call a Berliner Weisse, a green beer.
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