Gdanskand the Pomeranian Feast

This cod, salted and served with the bones and skin on, is quite close to the traditional Basque style of preparation. They salted the fish heavily and then dried it on the rocks of the Newfoundland shore, a cod so hard it could travel for months. Regardless, its creamy and salty flavor goes well with a good German beer.

German beer gets characterized a lot of different ways. German beers, in general, are not strong, are not dark, nor unusual. German beers, rather than being novel, on a whole are simply well refined. Not refined as in snooty; refined as in the taste is perfected.

Beer was not invented in Germany. It has existed for almost as long as man became agrarian, and some archaeologists even argue that the first farmers grew grain for beer before they grew it for bread. But Germans are noted for making the most progress. The North Germans were brewing beer of such quality by the 1200s that an early gigantic export industry was forming in port towns like Bremen, Hamburg and Wismar. By the fourteenth century, Hamburg alone had hundreds of breweries, and a small inland town called Einbeck became so famous for its strong beer that Bavarians, borrowing it, eventually shortened the name to bock. Ships were setting sail for England, Scandinavia, the Baltic towns of the Rus. But so too then, were pirates, thirsty for loot and beer.

Piracy in the Baltic was rampant. The response to this was key for the development of the Baltic cities. It gave them reason to protect their wares in the form of merchant associations called the Hanseatic League. It began, in part, with a pact between Lübeck and Hamburg to protect the road that carried salt from the mines at Lüneburg to the Baltic, where it met the herring. The two commodities were tied by their function in preserving herring. But the Hanseatic League expanded to nearly two hundred towns, with trading houses as far east as Novgorod in Russia and as far west as Bruges and London. Ship merchants would band together on their routes, forming armed sea caravans to thwart the constant threat.

Brewers organized into guilds across the Hanseatic towns, and the beer never stopped flowing. In the middle ages, Northern Europeans, men, women and children, drank beer the way we drink water, because it was often safer than water. Most of it was weak “small beer,” but by some estimates a laborer or a sailor might put away a gallon a day.

Nymphs in the Pines

In the morning, we crossed by caravan into the Polish province of West Pomerania over the Oder River just south of Szczecin. Polish Pomerania is a view of agriculture fifty years removed from the free market. The wheat fields are all poppies and lavender, the barley fields have gone to pine seedlings. The after-effects of communism can be disquietingly pleasing, but also a shame. The first thing you wonder about Polish Pomerania is what’s up with those prostitutes hanging out in the woods?

They wear all white, and their hair is bleached white too, so that, against the green of the second-growth pines on the side of the otherwise empty road, they look like bad Shakespearean nymphs.

But there are more than just hookers here on the road through the woods. Mushroom hunters too. In between the shade of the trees you can catch their diminutive Polish cars discreetly parked on logging-roads or simply under a tree.

I wondered if the hookers were strutting their white skirts for the mushroom hunters. Like some mushroom guy is walking along looking for some chanterelles and then all of a sudden a damsel in white appears. So the mushroom hunter holds up his bag of mushrooms for trade and points to the nearest blueberry patch.

They say that prostitution is the oldest profession in the world, but we all know that gathering is the egg to prostitution's chicken. Picking mushrooms came first. What else would early man have to offer the woman? Chanterelles are a distinctive mushroom, looking more like an upside-down gas-funnel than a Smurf house. Their color ranges from pale to bright orange, and even draped in cheese or gravy, their wild flavor abounds.

As over-hunting thinned out Pomerania’s game, the mushroom would fill in for its meatiness. Present-day Poland is home to thousands of species of fungi; wet Baltic air, moist woodland, rich soil. Mushroom picking is practically a national sport, and in late summer the roadsides fill with people selling baskets of chanterelles, which the Poles call kurki, little hens.

There are no freeways in Polish Pomerania. It's all two-lane. The roads are the same size as when the Prussians lined them with limes, oaks, and chestnut trees, a tradition of tree-lined avenues encouraged since the days of Frederick the Great. I ask dad about those trees. "They got rid of them in West Germany," he said.

Those trees planted to keep the soldiers and traders cool in the bright sun are the most consistently endearing and beautiful characteristic of Pomerania.

Those roads march haphazardly, above marshes and over hills, and through woodland. Always there is an old steeple or an unkempt palace in the distance, and always the ultra-weird concrete of communism's beehive dwellings.

But the roads have defied convention and modernism. Still they go, carrying along, adding continuity and warmth to seas of grain and forgotten farms.

The roads remind me of the stark contrast to American roads, where we have neo-glo road signs for everything. Like how you have fifty signs with arrows that say it’s time to turn right. In Poland, as in all of Europe, signs are understated and lend a certain regard for the intelligence of its citizens. The trees, occasionally, because they are near the road, kill a drunk driver. But trees don't really actually kill people, people do.

In overlawyered countries, you can imagine how oversafety turns the aesthetic of your countryside into a dump. I am no humanist, I'll keep the roadside trees.

There is an adage in the world of economics that goes like this: If you want to save more drunk drivers from death, do you cover your driver's cockpit with airbags? And external panelling of your car with safety mechanisms? Or do you regulate that every car bears spikes brimming preciously close to the driver's body? The economist might argue that the spikes, like the trees, may discourage the drunk from driving, and that oversafety, and overregulation actually make us dangerously carefree.

The Palace of Caged Birds

We arrive near the town of Maszewo. The Maciejewo Palace, the German Matzdorf, lies about fifty miles east of Szczecin on a lake in the woods. It is a neo-Gothic castle built around 1900 for the von Flemming family, the provincial nobility who had held this estate since at least the 1600s, and for whom, in many cases, my relatives were the farmland administrators.

After the war it became a state agricultural school, and like other historical buildings, it has since been carved into a hotel, much like the Paradors of Spain and the Pousadas of Portugal. This one features a menagerie of old Polish carvings, a dusty collection of aging European and African taxidermy, and dank halls. An aviary lies on the property; the collection is of old world pigeons, peacocks and Asian wild chickens. It’s unadvertised, but if you wander far enough into the woods, you'll find the hotel has built a giant climbing wall.

The noise of the birds is constant enough that by evening, isolated and encroached upon by scouring trees, the palace emits a sound itself; the constant cry of caged fowl. The Maciejewo Palace; another reminder that the traveler's life does not begin and end with Hilton Rewards Points.

Our Pomeranian family were immigrants, according to Uncle. They originated in what is now perhaps Holland and Belgium. We know this only because of our last name, which if you follow its tracks, seems to have gone Germanic as the name migrated west to east.

Uncle says that the spotty recollection of our family history is due to the Thirty Years War, which, he says, was as devastating as World War II for Pomerania. He is not exaggerating by much. Between 1618 and 1648, Pomerania was occupied by imperial armies and then by the Swedes, and it lost perhaps a third or more of its people to fighting, plague and famine. The Catholics and Lutherans and Calvinists, the Austrians and Spanish and French and Swedes, they were all frothing at the mouth, and regardless, the German states had fallen into this chaos, and therefore also into civil war. When the war ended, Sweden kept the western half of Pomerania. Families and records were destroyed. Our family history will forever remain a book with most of the pages torn.

According to uncle, a certain Mr. Martin Gauger 'paid himself out of bondage', and married a woman called Eva Bliesener in 1687. Forty years later, another Bliesener married another Martin Gauger. A grain mill had existed in Regenwalde, today the Polish town of Resko, since at least the fourteenth century. But it burned during the thirty years war, and was later rebuilt. The Bliesener family took over this mill's lease and handed its administration to this same Martin Gauger. From then on until 1945, Gaugers would stick close to the milling industry. Even today, of my generation's six Gaugers, half of us earn our keep through agriculture.

For lunch, I order duck liver with peach and orange sauce, herring, onion soup, cabbage stuffed with meat and rice. I order gołąbki, little doves, cabbage leaves stuffed with rice and pork, served with tomato sauce. These cabbage dishes feel as old as populated Northern Europe itself.

Cabbage's wild ancestor still grows on the sea cliffs of Atlantic Europe, from England to Spain, and the Greeks and Romans prized the cultivated plant long before it came north. But it was the north that made cabbage a staple, because it grows in cold ground and it keeps. Traders found that, like herring, the cabbage could be preserved with salt, fermenting slowly in its own brine. Instead of protein, it yielded vitamins, enough to keep scurvy at bay through a Baltic winter. And so the cabbage, like the herring, would cross seas in barrels. This preserved cabbage, the Germans called sauerkraut; the Poles call it kapusta kiszona, and they added it to nearly everything.

Boar for a Seventieth Birthday

We are on the Palace veranda with brothers and cousins, and I'm trying to order a glass of water for Hans and Jane. A glass of water, in America this is free. In Europe ordering water is expensive and nearly impossible. And when you get it, it's like a teacup, a mouthful. If you drink your teacup in a single sip, as Americans do with water, you are fucked. It will be another fifteen minutes before your waiter comes by to fetch you another bottle of overpriced water. What you do is you say you want your water in a beer glass, what you do is you say niegazowana — that’s Polish for give me some water without those euro-bubbles. What you do is you order three waters at a time.

Dinner is uncle's 70th birthday. That means Germans and Poles and Spaniards and English and French and Dutch. It also means salmon with a mustard sauce, red cabbage, and wild boar in a chanterelle gravy.

The star game of the von Flemmings and their hunting guests had to have been the wild boar. In Northern Europe, it was considered the most dangerous animal — wild, gigantic, prone to charge. The giant head, the very centerpiece of Maciejewo’s game room, is evidence of the ancestral boar’s size. The boars of Central and Eastern Europe are among the largest anywhere, outsized only by their cousins in Russia and the Far East, where old males can top six hundred pounds. Western Europe was not so kind to them; Britain hunted its wild boar to extinction by the seventeenth century. But here in the Baltic forests, the boar never disappeared, although geneticists find that today's wild boar carry a little domestic pig in their blood, the legacy of centuries of escapees and crossbreeding.

The boar is one of Earth’s most far-reaching animals — historically it stretched from Africa to Europe to Asia, including Japan. As with Japan, it crossed into places like England and Scandinavia when Ice Age water levels meant land bridges. Even in the Americas, a set of distant evolutionary cousins thrive from the deserts of Southern Arizona to South America. They are the peccaries, a separate family that split from the true pigs tens of millions of years ago, and the rare explorer of Panama’s Darien wilderness is always wary of a potential attack from a herd of them.

The domesticated pig, one of the primary sources of protein in nearly every corner of the globe, was actually domesticated independently from continent to continent. The pig was first domesticated in the Near East, in what is now Turkey, some ten thousand years ago, and again, separately, in China about two thousand years later.

When early farmers brought their pigs into Europe, those pigs bred so freely with the local wild boar that within a few thousand years Europe's domestic pigs carried almost nothing of their Near Eastern ancestry. Today, like any domesticated species or cultivated plant, those ecological distinctions have amalgamated by cross-breeding and the roar of modernization. The importance — however, of maintaining the various regional evolutionary traits of domesticated pigs is not lost on countries like Italy, Spain and Germany — which rely on distinct ancestral pigs to create their various delicacies: prosciutto, jamón ibérico from the black Iberian pig, Westphalian ham.

Heritage breed groups, like Britain's Rare Breeds Survival Trust, founded in 1973, have spent decades trying to keep these old regional breeds alive.

The Polish eat pork liberally. One of the most enjoyable foods I found in Pomerania was a home-made smoked pork sausage.

But nothing represents to me the southern Baltic states more than the wild boar. I grew up on the French comic, 'Asterix', about a village of Gauls in Brittany holding out against Rome, and Obelix, lusty for the meat of the pig's wild ancestor. In Northern Asia, the boar is a symbol of the violent side of nature. Celts, French and British all considered the boar supernatural. Princess Mononoke, which for a time was the highest-grossing film in Japanese history, stars a race of giant supernatural boars, which symbolize the country before modernism. The Celts carried boar standards into battle, Anglo-Saxon warriors crested their helmets with boars, and the Iron Age Britons struck them on their coins.

But I had never had boar until now.

The taste, like the mushroom, is distinctly wild, like the smell of a Baltic forest. It’s no coincidence, then, that boar is so often cooked with mushrooms. Like a pre-civilized Pomeranian, the wild boar forages the forest floor, rooting for acorns and beechnuts, roots, and the mushrooms it finds along the way.

The House by the Mill

From the old palace of Maciejewo, we drive a short distance to Regenwalde. On the gray walls of the old Communist buildings is a bounty of graffiti, written almost exclusively in English. In Tschew, the graffiti says, "Mushroom Sweat!" Another, here in Regenwalde says, "Dig it Octopus."

We knock on the door of the lady Danuta. Her home is small, and sits adjacent to a river, facing a now vacant flour mill. When she answers the door, she erupts into a welcoming smile. She speaks little German, and understands nobody. But she has made a berry cake and a berry-alcohol, which she distilled herself, from her own garden, on her lot in the middle of a place I had never before considered. And uncle, without the benefit of Polish, is managing to make her laugh.

Her home was formerly my grandparents’, along with Uncle and dad, before the Polish ousted all Germans from the now Polish section of Pomerania following World War II. At Potsdam in 1945, the victors moved Poland's border west to the Oder, and the Germans who had not already fled ahead of the Red Army were expelled, while Poles, many of them expelled themselves from Poland's lost eastern lands, moved into their houses.

She has never married. On the wall hangs a photo of her standing next to the Pope in Israel. Her professional hospitality probably means she has an active life in the Catholic Church. But this, all these foreign faces, has to faze even the veteran entertainer.

Few things have changed in her home. There is some element of the 1970’s in her furniture, sure, and the walls have been painted. But this house is essentially the same as where Uncle spent his earliest years. She shows us her garden, which is alive with peaches, cherry trees, strawberries, blackberries, lettuce, rhubarb, carrots and celery. There is an organized display of cabbages, all sorts of them, and plums hanging above.

That vacant mill — that was great grandfather’s flourmill. And, like my grandmother’s father’s own mill, which stood in a nearby town, it was a vast construction.

Violet Light in Gdansk

The next morning, we drive further east through woodland and farmland. Our goal is Słowiński National Park, one of Poland’s natural crown jewels. It encapsulates the giant Lake Łebsko, more than twenty-seven square miles of shallow water, a long coastline, and a series of coastal dunes which stretch for miles. The dunes, some of the largest moving dunes in Europe and up to a hundred feet high, are constantly on the march, as much as thirty feet a year, so that every year they overtake new forest and swamp. This murky water-covered forest is a hint of the wildness of old Pomerania. Even stepping a few feet from the dunes into swamp, my feet go swollen with the bite of ants. In minutes, they harbor even the bellows of my camera.

This is the northern route to Gdansk, the great Polish port on the eastern edge of Pomerania, twice a free city-state, that has changed history as much as it has changed hands.

The next morning, the first summer light in Gdansk comes before three-thirty, and the sun itself is up by a quarter past four. The post-communist smog is thick with purple, and so am I. I have been suffering a constant state of jetlag. A constant state of Pink Floyd’s Comfortably Numb for the last eight days. I walk to the Maritime Museum, where, I gathered, my camera could capture Gdansk in the nordic morning light.

But the museum was gated, and when I fiddled with the gate latch, the guard woke and yelled at me from the premises, like the eternal café-bound European and his pigeons. But when the sun broke, and that odd Gdansk light covered water and land in haunting violet, I went under the gate, camera and all, and set camp.

One shot, two shots, and the guard was again awake. He came to me with a vengeance, but my bags were already packed, and comfortably numb, I was on the other side of the gate.

Rain on Dlugi Targ

The rain in Gdansk today is unrelenting. So much so that there seems nothing better to do than take refuge in a small café on the expansive baroque Dlugi Targ Street with wife Jane and brother Hans. We are sipping on Bitburger, watching the swarms of people under their umbrellas: a man with a monkey on the leash is hurrying, an elder woman is selling lavender bouquets and a trio of female teens are sucking on wet gummi bears, laughing and chatting under their hoods. Hans says that this is how he imagined Hemingway’s ‘A Moveable Feast,’ only in Pomerania.

“What exactly did he mean by moveable feast?” I asked, thinking that Hemingway was referring to a big picnic. "This is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy," Hemingway wrote, but Hans says, “A Moveable Feast was about being able to take your Parisian experience with you, to wherever you go.” He's right. Hemingway told a friend that if you were lucky enough to live in Paris as a young man, it stays with you wherever you go, and his widow put that line at the front of the book.

“I apologize,” I said to the two of them, “we have to find a piece for my tripod, I hate to drag you into this, but this will not be easy in this town...”

What I meant is this would mean we would have to walk all over the city in the rain, on a hopeless venture that could result in nothing more than an expansive exploration of Pomerania's greatest city.

“Call it a dragable feast,” Hans says. Yes, a Pomeranian Feast.

Gdansk, often remembered as the Free City of Danzig, an independent city-state between the great wars, was also a member of the Hanseatic League from 1361, a constant maritime presence in the Baltic and a center for grain, timber and shipbuilding. For centuries, Polish grain floated down the Vistula to be loaded onto ships here, bound for Amsterdam. Jewelry and amber trade flourished, and so did the arts. The Baltic amber, fossil resin from forests forty million years old, still washes up on these beaches after storms. It lies between the Baltic and the delta of the Vistula River, which connects almost all of Poland by water.

But so much more happened here, and you can almost feel that weight. One of Hitler’s most insistent demands was that Danzig be returned to Germany. It’s no wonder then, that World War II began here, when the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish garrison at Westerplatte at dawn on September 1, 1939, and Polish postal workers held out in the city's post office. It was here, too, that Poland rose against communism: shipyard strikes in 1970 ended in bloodshed, and in 1980 the strike at the Lenin Shipyard gave birth to Lech Wałęsa's Solidarity, the first independent trade union in the Soviet bloc.

Uncle says that during the war, Hitler declared Gdansk be defended at all costs. The Russian answer to this was to simply level the city. And they did, blitzing one of Europe's most astounding cities into a heap of rubble. Only two of the ornate homes on the Długi Targ survived the bombing, he says. By most counts, some ninety percent of the old Main Town lay in ruins.

The communists, sensitive in their early idealism, ordered the most historical and stunning components of the city rebuilt, as much as possible, down to the last brick, working from old photographs, drawings and paintings. The Polish, always starkly at odds with the Soviets, maintained a respect for their religious and cultural backgrounds in the second half of the twentieth century. Rather than mow over the old city, the churches, the castles, as the Soviets did in Königsberg, the Poles rebuilt it, choosing to emphasize its Renaissance and Flemish past and its long ties to the Polish crown over its Prussian years. Because of that, Polish Pomerania is still Pomerania. They respect their heritage, even the historical German side of it.

More importantly, as a part of a country that is more comfortable with home-cooked meals than going out, Gdansk has one of Poland’s best markets for good restaurants.

The Case for Polish Pasta

In the evening, (where the graffiti says ‘Lucky You All Coppers are Bad’) we meet up with relatives at a canal-side restaurant. I am wondering if there is a correlation between all this strange North European graffiti and their bad taste in music. Maybe it's the bubbles they put in the water.

I order a Polish dish called Pierogi; ravioli pasta stuffed with pork, sauerkraut, mushrooms and fruit. My Italian cousin balks at this, because, of course — you order ravioli in Italy. Cristiano is no snob of Italian cuisine. He does wonders with olive oil and pasta and whatever is in the kitchen. And, he always affirms that ‘some of the best pizza is from New York.’ But there is something suspect about pasta from Poland.

There is no doubt that Italians, like Germans with beer, perfected pasta. And for staking claim, the Italians do so with most vengeance. But like the Basques and the New World, there are a group of food historians who believe pasta was invented, well, here in Northern Europe. The old story says that Marco Polo brought noodles home to Italy from China in 1295. The Chinese do have the oldest noodles ever found, a four-thousand-year-old bowl of millet noodles dug up at Lajia on the Yellow River. But the Italians didn't need Marco Polo. Dried pasta was already being made in Arab Sicily when the geographer al-Idrisi described it in 1154, and a Genoese inventory lists a basket of macaroni in 1279. Like beer, which was invented in several regions in prehistory, pasta may have been invented in multiple regions.

One admittedly unlikely theory holds that pasta was invented in German lands. And introduced to Italy long before the age of Marco Polo. Pomerania, which has been called the ‘corn granary’ of the historical state of Prussia, was likely a center for grain storage — one of the most vital of northern states’ interests was its ability to stock grains for cold winters.

Italian food historians have traditionally always been up in arms about this, especially because of the claims of American food writers, who seem to stretch old world history myths for the benefit of 'color.' In one instance, in a movie called “The Adventures of Marco Polo”, actor Gary Cooper points to a dish of noodles in Asia and asks what it is. “Spa Get!,” the man answers.

More likely, in Germany as in all the other places that have claimed to invent pasta — Persia, the Arab Mediterranean, France — these places probably simply found ways to preserve grains for bad times, cold winters and droughts.

Making something from grain became so important in Germany and Poland that by the seventeenth century, grains had a similar status to the potato in Ireland.

The continuous migration of Germans into Slavic Pomerania, which began in earnest in the 1100s and 1200s, when the region's own Slavic dukes invited settlers in, was welcomed, because the Germans were viewed as master farmers, with heavy plows, new crops and the latest in mill technology. They became kind of like a farming class.

But Pierogi is its own deal. Mushrooms, pork and sauerkraut and it’s all Polish, despite how it’s wrapped. And delicious, especially down with a good German beer, overlooking history itself.

The Road to Seelow Heights

We left Gdansk following the southern Pomeranian roads. In lands south of Wacja, dad and Hans and Jane and I stop in the pines to pick wild blueberries and look for chanterelles. We collect a handful each, and up the road in a small town, we buy cherries and smoked sausages. I can think of no better way to spend an afternoon, eating as you go, dad talking about the advance of the Russians on Berlin in World War II.

Dad has said that picking berries is one of his favorite pastimes. In the field, he says, it's no coincidence that it's often Germans doing the same. That my parents spend long August hours picking their own crop of Minnesota berries — despite the mosquitoes and humidity — is probably also no coincidence. This modern act of gathering seems almost a Northern Seas trait.

Jane is looking forward to Berlin. They say there is a Prada super-store there. Out the window, the brick wall enclosing a field of garden gnomes is sprayed in red. "Bucky Luckball breaks the Chocolate Order!"

We cross the Oder River and up a hill called Seelow Heights. This is the last high ground before Berlin, just south of Pomerania, and the setting for the final weeks of World War II, when the Russians had advanced to within miles of the capital. In April 1945, the Germans dug in on this ridge above the Oderbruch, the flat river valley below, and flooded it by releasing water from a reservoir upstream. Zhukov answered with some nine thousand guns and rocket launchers, firing half a million shells in the first half hour. His tanks and infantry still bogged down in the mud, making easy pickings for the Germans above. But after four days, the Russians’ sheer numbers won out, and the road to Berlin was open. And Pomerania’s borders would change again. Nazism to communism.

Grandfather had been asked by the Nazis to operate the flourmills of the Ukraine region. His instructions to Grandmother, if things went bad, were to flee Pomerania for a town called Einbeck, the old Hanseatic beer town that gave the world bock. In his jail-time letters to Grandmother, he wrote of his post-war dream to build a chain of bakeries across Northern Germany.

Grandfather’s decision for the family to flee to Einbeck was a lucky one — Einbeck was west enough not to make the cut of East Germany. Although Grandfather’s bakeries never came to be, he stuck to grains. Grandfather retired as the manager of a flourmill. He never returned to Pomerania until forty years later.

Mom and dad had brought me to Berlin when it was still communist. Dad would park the car on empty stretches of West Germany, near the border — the places where 'The Wall' was just fences and minefields and mud trenches. He would throw rocks at the minefields, and say, "look at the towers, they are all turning to us." I asked if the dark figures in the distant towers would shoot at us, but dad said they couldn't, because we were West Germans.

That is how I learned about the world, dad saying, "look, that's where they let the dogs out to kill you if you try to escape."

My childhood fantasies about the dark world behind the iron curtain, about ‘Red Dawn’ and the nuclear siren warnings in Minnesota, are shattered by the reality of communist Europe. It was far worse. East Berlin was perfumed with gasoline and waste, and the city-dwellers appeared to have constipation — their faces gray with sweat. East Berlin, the showcase of the Eastern Bloc, was a place you awoke from in a cold sweat. It wasn’t until after all this that we found our ‘behind the wall’ relatives were just like us. Although, too much Metallica and not enough English. These cousins, who once met me for a meal of Korean bulgogi in Los Angeles, spent their post-communist youth traveling. One cousin’s family once gave him up for lost, when he disappeared traveling across Africa, by bicycle.

The Vegetarians of Berlin

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 said it himself, over dinner in November 1941, in the rambling monologues his staff wrote down and later published as Hitler's Table Talk: “…there's one thing I can predict to eaters of meat, that the world of the future will be vegetarian!” By then his doctors had him on a meatless diet, although by some accounts he never quite gave up his liver dumplings.

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. Goebbels wrote in his diary that Hitler meant to take up the question of meat after the war; for the time being, it would not have won him any friends among the sausage-loving 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 word Aryan belongs to the ancient peoples of Iran and India, who used it for themselves. Nineteenth-century scholars borrowed it for the whole Indo-European family of languages, and the Nazis bent it into a master race. But the Indo-European tongue is shared just as much by the Slavs he persecuted as by the Germans he exalted, and it spread out of the steppes north of the Black Sea, not out of Germany.

The starkly blonde-haired, blue-eyed European is a patchwork too. Geneticists now find that some of the earliest Europeans known to carry blue eyes were dark-skinned hunter-gatherers who roamed the continent after the Ice Age; that pale skin arrived later, with farmers from Anatolia; and that one of the oldest known genes for blond hair turns up in a boy who lived in Siberia some seventeen thousand years ago. There is no pure people here, only a meeting of immigrants.

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 tart, cloudy wheat beer that comes to the table dyed green with a shot of woodruff syrup, or red with raspberry.

 

 

Where is Pomerania?

Pomerania, from the Slavic po more, ‘by the sea,’ is a historical region of the southern coast of the Baltic Sea, now split between Germany and Poland. It includes several Baltic islands, among them Rügen, Usedom and Wolin, and, in its broader sense, the city of Gdansk, the heart of the eastern region the Poles call Pomorze Gdańskie.

Map of Pomerania

Historical Pomerania spans today’s German–Polish border, from Rügen and Usedom east to Gdańsk. The dotted line is our road across it, from Warnemünde to Berlin.