From Michelin stars to fast food; what eating out tells us about who we are
E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten
ISBN: 978-1-78227-310-3
Verlag: Pushkin Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Christoph Ribbat (b. 1968) has held teaching and research positions in Bochum, Boston and Basel, and is now Professor of American Studies at the University of Paderborn.
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2 POSTWAR HUNGER
James Baldwin is going to throw a jug of water at a waitress. What he really wants to do is strangle her. Baldwin grew up in Harlem, the heart of African American culture. He is the son of a Baptist preacher, and as a teenager he was already leading his own church services. In Harlem he is renowned for his sharp mind and rhetorical skills. Now, however, in the year 1942, he finds himself on the other side of the Hudson, in New Jersey. He is working in an arms factory. Geographically speaking, he’s not far from home. But many of his colleagues here, both black and white, come from strictly segregated Southern states. And so the codes of the South have been brought to New Jersey. It takes Baldwin a while to figure this out. On three separate occasions, he visits the same self-service restaurant, stands at the counter with white colleagues his age, orders and is confused as to why it takes so long for him to receive his hamburger and coffee. On the fourth visit, he realizes that he wasn’t actually served at all on the previous three visits. Instead, unaware, he had consumed another customer’s hamburger and coffee. In this establishment meals and drinks are not served to black customers. Segregation reigns everywhere – including bars, bowling lanes and apartment buildings – and again and again James Baldwin comes up against these unwritten rules. He stands out, is laughed at, shouted at. Eventually, he loses his job. On his last evening in New Jersey, he makes plans with a white friend. They go to the cinema to watch This Land is Mine, a film about the German occupation of France. After the movie, they go for something to eat. The restaurant is called American Diner. ‘What do you want?’ asks the man at the counter. ‘We want a hamburger and a cup of coffee,’ Baldwin retorts. ‘What do you think we want?’ But that wasn’t the question.1 * Simon Wiesenthal, an architect, survives his time in the ghetto. He narrowly escapes being shot. He makes attempts at suicide. He survives a death march to Buchenwald and a transport to Mauthausen. Now, in the spring of 1945, he is in the concentration camp’s so-called death block, and he is starving. He is 1.80 metres and weighs less than 50 kilos. The liberation is imminent and American planes are flying over the camp. But day after day in the block, the prisoners continue to die. Wiesenthal gets into conversation with a Polish food porter: Eduard Staniszewski. They know each other from Posen. Staniszewski wants to open a new gastronomic venture after the end of the war, and asks Wiesenthal to draw up some architectural plans for him. He brings him pencils and paper. Wiesenthal sets to work. He makes a variety of sketches for the establishment, enough for an entire book. He even draws the waitresses’ uniforms. In the death block, the prisoners are dying. Their daily food ration consists of two hundred calories. Eduard Staniszewski brings Wiesenthal extra bread in exchange for his ideas. They speak about what shape the tables should be. They discuss carpets and colours. Even after the liberation of Mauthausen, thousands of prisoners go on to die of malnourishment. Eduard Staniszewski will keep Wiesenthal’s sketches safely tucked away for many decades. The establishment they planned never opens. But Simon Wiesenthal survives.2 * Wolfram Siebeck is seventeen and hungry. He lives in Bochum, a coal and steel town in the Ruhr Valley. In the war he was a Flakhelfer, then, briefly, a soldier. He had signed up to the Wehrmacht voluntarily. In the spring of 1945, he manned an anti-aircraft post on the Oder river, then headed west, giving Berlin a wide berth. He has seen dead concentration-camp internees lying in ditches at the side of the roads. In May 1945, he ended up in a prisoner-of-war camp. With hardly anything to eat. Soon after, he was transferred to another camp. He went hungry there too, for months on end, and through all this he constantly played cards. After being discharged he spent time in the Black Forest, where farmers’ wives fattened him up with never-ending quantities of food. The hunger passed. Now he is back home in Bochum, where the steel mills have been destroyed by the war. And the hunger is back.3 In 1945 and 1946, adult Germans consume an average of 1,412 calories per day, though the official ration allows just 860 calories.4 Some of Wolfram’s older relatives have already died of malnourishment. Hoping to stave off his family’s hunger, he sets off to see a card-playing contact from the prisoner-of-war camp, a farmer living one hour to the north. But he is not the only one who has had this idea; he arrives to find his camp buddies already there. Now they are competing for ham, butter and potatoes. The boy from the Ruhr Valley turns up at the farm again and again. Often he has nothing he can exchange, not even for some grains or some windfall fruit. Black beetles scrabble around inside a sack of pearl barley he has managed to scavenge. He carefully picks them out.5 * American journalists are out and about in postwar Paris. They discover a new generation of French intellectuals who spend their days in cafés and restaurants. A reporter from Time magazine spots Jean-Paul Sartre in Café de Flore and claims that Sartre can always be found there, writing and preaching. The writer’s colleague, from Life magazine, heads to the same establishment and sees Sartre receiving visitors, having business meetings, giving interviews. The philosopher sleeps in a hotel room, according to a New York Times journalist, and lives at the table of this café. American reporters are so interested in French thinkers and their favourite establishments that, in December 1946, a Time reporter even asks a waiter from Café de Flore for his take on Existentialism. The waiter, whose name is Pascal, declares himself to be in full agreement with Sartre’s ideas. The American fascination with philosophers who dine out is not entirely coincidental. During the postwar period in the United States, the role of the intellectual is redefined. Influential thinkers no longer see themselves as critical outsiders, but as vital middle-class patriots. They are the driving forces of a new, efficient society which now finds itself in the midst of the Cold War. In contrast, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir appear as barely credible hedonists, their left-wing pessimism no more than a pose. To highlight the obvious contradictions of European intellectualism, the American media eagerly emphasize the luxurious hedonism of Sartre and de Beauvoir’s Parisian café lifestyle. They report on ‘succulent dinners, topped by excellent vintages and rounded off by age-ripened liqueurs’, and on their trips to nightclubs, where the pessimistic intellectuals dance into the early hours of the morning.6 * In the American Diner, Baldwin and his friend are turned away with the words: ‘We don’t serve negroes here.’ The usual response. Baldwin is struck by the irony of the restaurant’s name and the way it treats Americans like him. At first he stays calm. But back on the busy street, he is gripped by rage. He feels as though everyone around him is white, as if they’re all closing in on him, wanting to attack him. He walks on as though in a trance, hears the voice of his white friend behind him, speeds up, runs and feels his anger growing stronger. He reaches an elegant, sparkling, huge restaurant. He knows very well that they will never serve him here. But he doesn’t care. He goes in and sits at the first free table he sees. The waitress appears. She is white. Baldwin sees the fear in her widened eyes, and that makes him even angrier. He wants to give her a reason for her fear. ‘We don’t serve negroes here,’ she says. Her tone isn’t hostile, it’s apologetic, and genuinely afraid. Baldwin longs to feel her neck between his hands, to strangle her. He acts as though he hasn’t understood; he wants her to come closer, so he can attack her. She takes just a small step in his direction. Then she says her rehearsed line one more time. ‘We don’t serve negroes here.’7 * Joseph Wechsberg’s father fell in the First World War. His mother was murdered in Auschwitz. He survived. And now he is writing about the fascinating variety of boiled beef on offer in the restaurant of the Viennese hotel Meissl & Schadn. The following delicacies are served there, up on the first floor: Mittleres Kügerl, Dünnes Kügerl, Dickes Kügerl, Weisses Scherzl, Schwarzes Scherzl, Tafelspitz, Tafeldeckel, Schulterschwanz, Schulterscherzl, Hieferschwanzl, Bröselfleisch, Ausgelöstes, Brustkern, Brustfleisch, Kavalierspitz and Kruspelspitz. And more besides. Even ‘fellow Austrians from the dark, Alpine hinterlands of Salzburg and Tyrol rarely knew the fine points of distinction between, say, Tafelspitz, Schwarzes Scherzl and Hieferschwanzl – all referred to in America as brisket or plate of beef – or between the various...
