The Pennsylvania TV station PCN interviewed me recently. Francine Schertzer, the program host, asked me how the fall of the Berlin Wall had changed Germany’s food scene. I said there had been tremendous change for the good for East Germans. Continue reading
One of my favorite scenes in the great German movie Good Bye Lenin is when the main character Alex, a young man who in the last days of the crumbling GDR takes care of his gravely ill mother, fills West German pickled cucumbers into old East German jars to keep the illusion of the GDR alive, because any further upset could be a fatal blow to his mother, a staunch supporter of the ruling regime.
25 years after the Berlin Wall fell, the longing for the lost goodies, edibles and others, of the former East Germany is not that far from reality. It even has its own name: “Ostalgie”, the nostalgia for the East. Continue reading
If there is one thing I regret I did not do while I was still living in Germany, it is that I did not see more of the world behind the Iron Curtain that opened up after the Berlin Wall came down in 1989. I spent a good amount of time in Berlin in 1991, and I am glad I did because at least I got a glimpse how East Berlin had looked under communist rule. Continue reading
Spoonfuls of Germany 