Month: June 2007

When I first moved here, I lived in a neighborhood known as Moabit. The name is a corruption of the French term “terre maudit,” or cursed land, but it’s most familiar to Germans as the name of a prison, which, sure enough, stood right up at the end of the block. It was where many of the Baader-Meinhof Gang were held, for instance, and, during my tenure in Moabit, it was the home of the famous folk-hero/extortionist known as “Dagobert,” which is what the Germans call Scrooge McDuck. Dagobert had extorted money from several department stores, and kept getting away with it. Once, the cops were hot on his trail, and in a very Berlinisch moment, lost him when they slipped in dogshit on the sidewalk while chasing him. One of the buildings there is quite old, and has classic barred windows. Women gather in the park across from the prison on good days and have their kids wave at Daddy.

So I thought that was all there was to Moabit Prison, and my obsessive walking through the neighborhood during several months’ total unemployment saw to it that I knew the surrounding area very well. Leave it to Berlin, though, to confound that idea.

Last week, I had an appointment on Kantstr., way over in scary West Berlin, and, for old time’s sake (and because I’m once again totally without work), I decided to walk. The easiest way is to head to my old neighborhood via Invalidenstr., past the Hauptbahnhof, then across the Spree and follow the S-Bahn. I gave myself lots of time so I could take the occasional diversion down back streets for old time’s sake.

But I’d no sooner gotten just past the Hauptbahnhof and all the myriad new streets the tunnel there has spawned, when I found something which must have been there in the old days, but which I’d totally missed. It was now a new park: Moabit Prison Historical Park. I took a glance in and told myself I’d be back. And today I was.

The bland outside, it must be said, masks an even blander inside. Had it not been for the glass-encased explanatory posters, I’d never have guessed what this was. I was shocked to find that it had once housed Wilhelm Voigt, the “Captain from Köpenick” himself — the Dagobert of his day. Several notable Socialists were also thrown in the klink there by the Nazis as was one of the 1944 Hitler plotters. But most of the inmates were just run-of-the-mill criminals, something Berlin never had a shortage of in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Inside, there isn’t much to see, mostly because the thing was almost totally destroyed by Allied bombs. Instead, it’s filled with symbolism.

I forget what the cube represents, other than the center of the buildings’ wings. The trees planted within the walls all have symbolic meanings, as, no doubt, do the small concrete posts with constellations etched into them. A couple of the building’s wings are represented by trenches, one of which you see here. I kept having to run outside to one of the entrances to see what symbol I was standing next to at any given time. There’s a dolorous poem whitewashed across one of the walls, the beginning of which is visible here:

The tall building is one of the houses where the “civil servants” (ie, the guards) lived. I have no idea why the signage uses that name. Here, however, is where most of the folks lived:

Well, not actually. That’s a reproduction of the dimensions of one of the cells, and, according to the list of symbols, contains a sound installation. I not only couldn’t hear it, I couldn’t find any means by which it would be broadcast, so maybe that’s a coming attraction.

Although the place is pretty stark and uninviting, there’s a climbing wall and see-saw for kids, and a couple of nicely shaded picnic tables. Despite the fact that it was a nice day, I was usually sharing the park with no more than two other people — on one occasion two huge women and their three huge dogs, one of whom came up to me to get his ears scratched, which I did, but apparently not enough, since he refused to leave until he felt he’d been properly appreciated.

Maybe it just hasn’t been discovered yet: it only opened last year, apparently. Or maybe the symbolic sculpture and landscaping make it hard to use. Or maybe Berliners are getting tired of feel-bad monuments, since this one certainly does evoke the starkness and isolation of imprisonment.

Naaah. Can’t be that last one. Berliners love to feel bad.

For a city that doesn’t like food, Berlin’s sure got some action on that front these days. Maybe it’s just the dream of grabbing the tourist dollar, but a lot of new restaurants and delis (many with the inevitable English “Free Wireless Internet” signs) seem to be opening up, and not just the faux-French ones I commented on a while ago.

More to the point for residents, though, is the war shaping up on and near Senefelderplatz in Prenzlauer Berg, where two well-funded organic food shops are practically next-door neighbors.

It started about a year ago, when viv BioFrischMarkt opened pretty much next door to the former Polish Consulate, which is now a (very good) pizzeria. It wasn’t one shop, but three: a Drogerie (a term meaning basically a drugstore only without drugs: cosmetics, brushes, stuff like that), a “Lounge” (ie, a restaurant-cafe), and the aforementioned BioFrischMarkt. I investigated the latter, of course, and found it a nice, if unexciting, health food store. (A note on the term “Bio,” incidentally. It does not mean “organic.” That’s öko. Bio is a step just below. It could be that the EU has more stringent “organic” labelling laws than the U.S., too, and for something to be öko it’s got to jump through more hoops. My readers being who they are, I’m sure we’ll all find out in the comments section soon…) One decided advantage was that it didn’t have That Smell. I don’t know what it is, but it’s found in most health food stores. (Some speculate it’s from brewer’s yeast, which might be true). But it also didn’t have anything particularly interesting that would induce me to walk all the way over there.

Then, on the triangle of land where Kollwitzstr. and Schönhauser Allee come together, an apartment building started going up. As soon as the outer walls were firm enough to hold it, a big vinyl sign announced that LPG would soon open “Europe’s largest Biomarkt.” And open they did, albeit a month later than announced, and, being bored, I decided to head up there this afternoon and see if they’d started fighting yet. (Two Italian restaurants in my neighborhood once had a showdown with knives right in the middle of the street, after all, so I was wondering if mellow organic German hippies might become similarly riled).

Well, LPG’s new store may be the largest in “Europe” until tomorrow, when Whole Foods London opens up (unless England’s no longer part of Europe: it’s been a while since I’ve been there). But, more to the point, it’s not much more exciting than viv is. Oh, it’s got an escalator you can take your shopping cart on. But so does that supermarket in the suburbs I visit with friends when Heribert Kastell gets a wild hair and sells wine in the mall. It’s got organic frozen pizza, so they know their neighborhood (I estimate that around dinner-time, at least 30% of my neighbors on any given evening are cooking frozen pizza). It’s got a good selection of organic wines and beers — every organic beer I’ve seen in Germany, in fact, is in stock. It’s got lots and lots of potatoes and not very many green vegetables, and lots and lots of bread. Upstairs, it’s got a lot of stuff in jars (including — gack! — natto), but, the Japanese stuff (yes, natto!) aside, nothing else exotic, not even Indian stuff, which is the backbone of a lot of organic food stores these days, Indian food being heavily vegetarian and all. And while viv segregates its Drogerie in a separate shop, LPG segregates what looks like a women’s-and-children’s store with low internal walls, which I found distinctly unfriendly.

Now, maybe it’s because I grew up with Whole Foods in Austin (John Mackey ran the organic grocery store a block from my house before he joined with the others to open the first Whole Foods down the hill), and have sort of internalized their philosophy, but the reason I’m not moved to consider either viv or LPG for my shopping is simple: their stock is boring. Whole Foods always introduced new items, and always had someone on hand with samples. There was, eventually, a sampling station where either a WF team member (they don’t call them employees) or a representative of the product being sampled could stand and give stuff away. This meant that people were gradually introduced to new flavors, and, over time, added them to their shopping lists. I remember when Dean (the vegetable guy — now a vice president) introduced me to jicama. If jicamas didn’t weigh about ten pounds I’d have had one on call all the time: that stuff’s good.

But Germans, by and large, don’t like variety in their food, and certainly don’t like trying unfamiliar things: someone giving away samples of something unusual would probably stand there all day watching the stuff go bad. If the local cuisine (which is not to say I mean all German cuisine by this, just the local variety) were something precious, I’d say this is a good thing: this is how traditions get preserved. But it always disheartens me to realize that the yuppies who, by and large, make up the Prenzlauer Berg population may be young, may be affluent, but they really don’t have any interest in expanding their culinary boundaries past German and their conception of Italian food. LPG isn’t going to challenge that, nor is viv. And Whole Foods, during their promotional blitz for their London flagship, announced that, while Europe is definitely on the list to conquer, Germany, in particular is not.

The other thing that’ll discourage me from LPG is that it’s yet another extremely expensive co-op. Check out the membership costs: €51.13 to join (and where’d they pull that number from?), and €17.90 per month for a normal adult, €12.78 for low-income and unemployed adults. A single person would have to do a lot of shopping there to make that worthwhile — and, like I said, the stock doesn’t invite that.

Not my problem, anyway. There’s no way to get to either place with public transit, which means I’d have to walk. I’ve got two places (with That Smell) within a couple of blocks, although I rarely shop at them, either. But lifestyle wars like this do interest me, so let’s see who’s the fittest and who’ll survive. And if the knives come out.