All badged up

The overarching message from today’s exercise in re-badging my leather jacket, now returned from the cleaners, seems to have been that you can make statements without appearing to do so.

I started badging it some years ago, seeing it as a very personal form of ‘rock chic’ and absolutely refusing to add any obviously ‘political’ badges.

Over the last few years, it’s attracted plenty of comment and enquiry. Perhaps counter-intuitively, I think it says more about me and what I believe in than if I’d dressed the jacket in rather more obvious pins.

Loosely, there are themes. And as Thomas Mann once said: “Everything is politics”.

So here’s a guide to my newly badged jacket.

From top left (approximately) – travel is good. We start with a flag pin representing Lübeck. This was my destination as a 50th birthday ‘thang’: I’d never been out of the UK on my own before this and it was a (long overdue) rite of passage to prove I could travel to ‘Abroadland’ all on my own.

I chose Lübeck because of Mann and Günter Grass and because I’d spent around 10 years teaching myself a bit of German so felt a certain confidence in the idea that I might be able to communicate at a basic level.

It was a fabulous and seminal trip.

Füssen? More German stuff – Bavaria; the Alps; simply gorgeous. Ties in with the edelweiss pin.

Then Thomas Mann – I have spares ope this pin; that’s how important it is to me. I loved Buddenbrooks … but then I read Death in Venice and my mind was well and truly blown.

The travel section includes Collioure – of course – plus Vienna, Sorrento and Sicily: all are special to me.

Beethoven is crucial: I love classical music and Ludwig in particular. And his 250th birthday is next year, so it would be poor tom leave him out.

That Concorde? A lovely pin, bought in Folkstone, together with a Spitfire pin. But at present, wearing a Spitfire could send out all the wrong signals, while this suggests European co-operation.

The Royal Opera House? Well, if you read this blog regularly, you’ll know why.

The Haring ‘resist’ pin? Haring at Tate Liverpool was my art revelation this year and resisting the Establishment and racism and bigotry in general is good.

The birds? Well, I saw a kingfisher this year and interacted with a raven (my absolute top bird). I love corvids in general, including those beauties, magpies. Red squirrels – only seen in Germany and Austria – but wonderful nonetheless.

Stephen Sondheim is a god, Star Wars is a big part of my cultural life, along with The Wizard of Oz (and as some of you will know, I’m a ‘friend of Dorothy’), while Captain Haddock represents comics and cartoons, and Shakespeare … well, I ‘dig’ The Bard big time.

This is how to make comments about yourself but leave others imply enjoying the colour!

An epic, green fairy tale for the here and now

Illustration by Günter Grass

Just over a year ago, on my first trip to Lübeck, a little mystery confronted me on a visit to Günter Grass-Haus – why was one of Grass’s sculptures of a rat displayed alongside a trio of Smurfs?

As we prepared for this spring’s trip to Schleswig-Holstein, this question popped into view of the little grey cells once more.

Now I knew that Grass had penned a book called, simply The Rat – his art has frequenyl been directly connected to his writing – so I looked it up and, having found it to be out of print, bought myself a second-hand copy.

Thus it was that it accompanied me on the journey to Travemünde. And on the evening on 2 May, as we lounged in our railway cabin, heading from Paris to the German border, I let out a yelp.

For there in the pages of the novel were not only to be found plenty of Rattus rattus (not forgetting Rattus norvegicus and others), but myriad Smurfus smurfus too.

The Rat was first published in German in 1986, at around the time that Grass himself settled in Lübeck.

But while knowing this connection, I hadn’t realised that the book would itself be partly set in Lübeck and Travemünde, and encompassing the wider Baltic.

If last year’s trip had had, quite deliberately placed at its heart, Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, then it became clear that this year was going to have a literary theme too – whether I’d planned it that way or not.

Grass brings so many strands together into a coherent whole – he weaves together the Brothers Grimm and their fairy tale characters, the infamous German painter-forger Lothar Malskat, who repainted the frescoes of the Marienkirche in Lübeck after WWII, and industrialists and corrupt politicians and bishops.

We also get the chance to catch up with characters from his first novel, The Tin Drum, and from the later The Flounder – it helps to be familiar with at least the first of these.

The overarching theme here, though, is an environmental one – of humanity’s crazed destruction and despoliation of the planet.

Early on, he gives an idea of the scale of the garbage that humans leave behind them – the endless mountains of trash – but in this apocalyptic novel, what eventually kills of humankind is a nuclear accident.

And who would be the natural replacement for humans once the dust has died down?

Here, it is the rats, one of whom talks constantly to the author in his dreams, relating rat history as well as what has happened since “Doomadosh”, because the author is now only a figment of ratty imagination.

Or is he?

It’s rather easy to feel that, with the end of the Cold War, the nuclear threat has died away – although most of the missiles are still around and there are still plenty of  ‘rogue states’ that might not be trusted not to use such a weapon. And that’s without mentioning the threat of chemical weaponary.

But even if readers falls into that camp, the environmental concerns are every single bit as relevant.

In the 1980s, Germans had just started to comprehend the scale of death that was visiting the country’s forests.

It was a vital wake-up call. And just a fortnight or so ago, on a cloudy Sunday, the country produced 74% of its energy needs from renewables in an illustration of how domestic policy has moved since then.

That rather makes a nonsense of the objections of those who oppose, say, the generation of wind power. But then one is reminded of Grass’s industrialists and their political and religious apologists in the novel.

The threat to the forests has not ceased, due to climate change, but action has helped to stabilise the situation.

And while the book only really touches on the pollution of seas and rivers, its references to the rubbish generated by human existence bring to mind recent reports about our trash being found in the deepest parts of the oceans, thousands of kilometers from land.

Similarly, a recently-unveiled study from Havard Universityhas shown that the frequently-reported threat to bees is a direct consequenceof certain classes of insecticides.

Yet the corporations that produce these poisons are reluctant to stop – evidence, were it needed, that just as Grass’s fictional industrialists are motivated only by short-sighted greed, so too are the non-fictional ones.

All is finally clear

In neither of these cases do you have to be a dyed-in-the-organic-wool eco warrior to see trouble ahead if such things are simply allowed to continue unabated.

So Grass’s novel continues to be every bit as topical as it was when written.

Quite apart from it being shameful, on the grounds of its continuing topicality, that it’s out of print (in at least some countries) it’s well near criminal on a literary basis too.

However gloomy it sounds, it somehow avoids that and is often funny and frequently endowed with a great warmth.

Yet however much control there is to the entire piece, it’s also a massive howl of rage against the prevailing insanity.

The frequent use of poetry within the text reminds one that Grass is not ‘just’ a novelist (and a sculptor and artist etc), while the tone, the language and the characterisation are simply first rate.

Even those blue and white smurfs play more than a passing role, as the book also explores the creation of religion, the death of fairy tales, rampant commercialism and the question of what is real and what is not.

For all the seriousness of its message, this is never dull or difficult, but rattles along at a cracking pace, and leaving you unsure of the eventual outcome until the very last.

In terms of scale, imagination, organisation and the sheer complexity of vision, The Rat is a staggering achievement, and one that illustrates, yet again, Grass’s genius in general, and more specifically, his command of magic realism and his gift as a storyteller.

Indeed, it’s a reminder of the power of stories too.

That I had not expected it to be directly related to the area we were visiting simply served to increase its impact.

That reading it also fell at a time of local and Europe-wide elections, where we saw widespread revealed large levels of dissatisfaction and a general misunderstanding of the key problems, while the same industrialists and their friends in big finance continue to fiddle, gave a further layer of significance to the experience.

Twenty-eight years on from its original publication, The Rat’s message is as clear and as important as ever. And in literary terms, it’s a reminder – were that needed – of the genius of Grass.

Sophisticated dining – including some wurst

Delicate couscous and feta

If Germany provided plenty of hearty, down-to-earth dining experiences, it also provided two really top-notch fine-dining experiences.

But while the food was excellent, perhaps the most interesting aspect of those meals was that they illustrated that German culinary tradition, far from being something to sniff at, is well worth looking at.

For the first couple of days, adjusting to later starts, larger-than-usual breakfasts and then larger-than-usual lunches meant that we were not in the mood to try either of the hotel’s two restaurants.

Belle Epoque is the flashiest of the two, with Michelin-starred food that, as the name implies, has its roots in what Michel Roux Jr would call “The Classics” – or a certain type of French cuisine and approach – and which is open to non-residents.

There's no escaping Thomas Mann

Downstairs, and also used for breakfast, lunch and afternoon tea, is Holstein, the hotel restaurant for residents. And as that name suggests, it has a rather more local ethos.

During last year’s solo trip to Lübeck, one of the highlights – one of the core things I’d set out to do, indeed – was dinner at Schiffergesellschaft.

The centuries-old seaman’s guild is housed in a 1553 building that still serves as a restaurant.

There, I’d tried the iconic labskaus, a seaman’s dish of pickled or corned beef, the meat mixed with onion and beetroot, and traditionally served with a fried egg on top and a plate of good old matjes herrings on the side.

A superb spargel soup

Schiffergesellschaft gets a mention in Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, and I was delighted to find that the Holstein has a large, black and white photograph on the wall of the man himself, taken outside the hotel in 1953.

But then the author considered Travemünde as something close to a paradise.

It too features in Mann’s first great novel, and even if worthy Lübeckers were mightly offended by his 1901 literary debut, there is plenty to suggest that their modern-day descendants appreciate the added value it lends the area – there is even a Buddenbrooks restaurant in a hotel just a couple of hundred metres from where we stayed.

But back to the pickled beef.

The first thing on the Holstein menu that caught my eye – a couple of days before we were first ready to dine there – was a labskaus.

How would an essentially modern and smart restaurant tackle such a dish?

Labskaus, deconstructed

I kept that question in mind until the first evening on which we’d actually left enough space for a three-course meal.

Before we get to that, let’s start by saying that, we waited, we were served with a selection of very nice breads, plus quark (a sort of German yogurt) and a lightly spiced relish, plus butter, and then with a small plate that was less an amuse bouche and more an hors d’oeuvres, involving very delicately prepared couscous and crumbled feta that was, if not very Germanic, then certainly very pleasant.

And of course, since The Other Half doesn't like cheese, I got his feta too.

But as a first course proper, both of us opted for the spargel soup.

The asparagus season enjoys cult status in Germany.

Known by a variety of nicknames, from ‘Königsgemüse’ (king’s vegetable) to ‘Frühlingswonne’ (springtime delight) and ‘Zartes Elfenbein’ (soft ivory), restaurants across the country add special asparagus menus, while little stalls set up on the streets to sell this seasonal glory.

While Germans prefer the white asparagus, the green that we’re more familiar with is not neglected.

Matjes herring on onion

Back in 2009, when we were in Berlin in early June, we ordered spargel soup at the iconic Lutter & Wegner, but were disappointed with the overly salty result, which suggested that it had been hanging around for some time.

This time around, the result was quite simply superb, with a creamy base, slivers of perfectly cooked white asparagus, drops of delightful tarragon oil and a few croutons for added texture.

Next up for me at least was the labskaus – which turned out to be deconstructed.

There’s always a danger with this approach that it can look good but not actually achieve anything much for the palate.

Here, it proved a very enjoyable exercise in appreciating the tastes and textures of a mixed dish – I bet those sailors never thought their dish would assume the level of haute cuisine.

Wonderful blutwurst

The meat, combined with some beetroot, came in quenelles, with the fried egg replaced by a breaded quail’s egg atop onion and herbs, a roasted beet purée, homemade potato crisps, matjes and shredded gherkin.

I opted for the almost inevitable ice cream after – but was too stuffed to make much headway with that.

The Other Half, having opted for a rhubarb crumble after a beef dish, reported himself more than satisfied.

Our final night saw us decamp to Holstein yet again and this time, the hors d’oeuvres was an incredibly delicate matjes herring on top a sweet and gentle onion, very finely chopped, a hint of bitter herbs and a little tomato.

Zander, with beetroot and potatoes

Lovely – and ensured The Other Half didn’t leave the country without at least a taste of herring.

Again, we both opted for the same main course – blutwurst (black pudding).

Gloriously moist and tasty, it was complimented by a bitter salad and quince two ways – as small triangles of jelly and as a rather larger wedge of mousse.

A real joy, this.

For a main course, the Other Half opted for zander, a German fish that is often translated, rather meaninglessly, as ‘pike-perch’, which are two altogether different fishes.

But then there is no British alternative, although it was introduced to the Fens some time ago and is considered a pest – can I try to get rid of it by culinary methods, then?

While he enjoyed that, I dined on lachs (salmon), with new potatoes and white and green spargel, which was very nice if not earth-shattering.

For dessert, however, I picked apple three ways – a slice of feather-light strudel, a sorbet and calvados-infused brunoise on a crisp, all made with Holstein cox. Absolutely gorgeous.

Apple, three ways

On the matter of wines, we drank a German red with the first meal at Holstein: that was a first, and very nice it was too.

For the second meal, we opted for a white – a Grauburgunder: a 2012 Kabinet, trocken, Weingut Bimmerle from Baden, which was also extremely nice.

We left thinking that that was food we’d be more than happy to eat again.

What Holstein perfectly illustrates is that German cuisine is very far from being sausage and pickled cabbage.

It can be hearty and simple and comforting, but done like this, it can also be as sophisticated as anything that most of us are likely to eat anywhere.

The wurst a foodie can get?

Bratwurst in Lübeck – on a proper plate

Germany remains low on the list of travel destinations for Brits - and to be honest and from a rather selfish perspective, I rather like that.

Back in 2000, my parents visited the country for the first time as part of an organised trip to see the Oberammergau Passion Play.

Performed by the village people every 10 years or so since 1634, the millennium staging coincided with my father’s retirement, so his parishioners had thought it a fitting present.

The thing that worried him most was the very fact of going to Germany – for some, The War has never really ended.

That all-important first beer of the trip

Indeed, as I have been reminded more than once, “we didn’t win the war just so the Jerries could rule us through the EU!” and as I remember clearly when coming home from my first day in the second year at Fairfield High School for Girls: “We didn’t win the war so that you should have to learn German!”

In the event, both parents were charmed. And this seems to be the case for anyone visiting.

But while scenery and beer might be attractions, one thing that is not standardly viewed as a selling point for Germany is cuisine.

After all, it’s really just sausages and pickled cabbage, isn’t it?

As only a slight aside, it should be noted here that sauerkraut is not pickled, but is fermented, with the finely-shredded vegetable layered between salt in barrels.

But back to sausages.

Matjes herring with a jacket potato

One of the tedious little rules that those who complain about ‘red tape’ love to hate came I to force in 2003, when it became law that sausages be labeled so that you know how much actual meat is in them – and not just a figure that could include all sorts of parts of the animal, plus the ‘pink slime’ that has been blasted off otherwise stripped carcasses.

But while the foodie-based revival of the humble British banger has improved things greatly, millions of the smooth, pink slimy ones are still sold, leaving one with a sense of culinary despair. And I must admit, at this point, that it not so long ago that I preferred these – although now I find them fairly repulsive.

But back to Germany and wurst.

Breakfast, with fish and small frikadellen

Our trip to Schleswig-Holstein was always going to produce some wurst opportunities, and it was in Lübeck where I enjoyed a very nice bratwurst with chips and the obligatory mustard.

Germans make some very nice mustards indeed, from the mild, yellow senf that’s just perfect with a bratwurst, to the grainy, sweet type from Bavaria.

But that really was my sole taste of wurst on this trip, although and I was delighted to find a gift box of three tins of Bavarian weißwurst and a small jar of the latter in Hamburg Airport on the way home.

Instead, I made the most of the opportunity to enjoy the fish – whether fresh, smoked or soused, and starting every day with matjes herrings at breakfast.

"A great British tradition"

Indeed, a first meal selection on German soil involved matjes herring, fish that has been ‘ripened’ by soaking in a mild preserving liquid for a few days.

The flesh is firm, boneless, easy to digest and has a delightful, delicate taste. It can be served with a variety of sauces, including a very traditional one of sour cream or yogurt, and dill.

On this occasion it was served in full fillets alongside a jacket potato with sour cream and chives.

Among the other non-fresh delicacies tried came smoked mackerel and sprat, proper gravadlax – or as the Germans call it, gravad lachs – and eel.

Passing a small shop in Travemünde itself gave an opportunityfor a glance into northern German fish culture – an absolute Aladdin’s cave of piscene wonderfulness.

The Swinging Mods set the beat

Eel featured again on the trip – but as a combination of literature and jewellery: I bought a small one in the form of a pendant, based on a Günter Grass sculpture. Readers of The Tin Drum will know the role that eels played in those pages.

Other pleasures included a piece of fried turkey with a lemon hollandaise on Sunday after our long coastal walk, and, of all things, fish and chips on the Saturday.

The latter was served from a van at a May festival that we joined, where a husband and wife team advertised this as a “great British tradition” and were really chuffed when we told them that it was very good, which it was.

Black beer

Washed down with serious black beers, as the Swinging Mods rocked the air with the sort of ’60s sounds that encouraged an amount of unabashed dad dancing on a small wooden dance floor.

On the Sunday night, we hit a restaurant on the water front, where we enjoyed a vast spread of cod, with fresh cucumber salad, buttered potatoes and pickled cucumber and a mustard, cream sauce on the size.

The Other Half, gazing at this as it was laid before us, murmered, of Germans as a whole: “when it comes to portion size, they don’t fuck about!”

We had one below-par meal – but that was more a question of the restaurant being in chaos, only one man being in the kitchen and clearly refusing to try to speed up to keep up with the influx of customers.

Portion size!

We tried cake too – and oh, German cake is a thing of very great pleasure. Forget the cliché of Black Forest Gateaux (although a real one is a real delight) – I enjoyed a local speciality topped with marzipan, because Lübeck is, after all, the marzipan capital of the world, and a deep, dense chocolate torte.

There were other points of note on the culinary agenda too: honey – the hotel restaurant had at least 12 varieties available at breakfast and lovely were the six that I managed to try during our stay.

And breads too – again, the breakfast buffet included several varieties of traditional German breads, most of them organic. I’m not quite a pumpernickel girl, but I do love a good volkornbrot, a traditional whole wheat bread.

Beer everywhere was, of course, clean and a pleasure to enjoy – slowly!

Serious, serious chocolate cake

And one evening, after that poorest meal, we relaxed in the hotel bar, The Other Half with a cocktail and me with a glass of a very light beer and a Fürst Bismarck ‘doppelkorn’ schnapps on the side. It has to be done at least once.

The only disconcerting point was that these drinks were ordered by me in such immaculate manner that the woman serving declared that I spoke German “so sweetly”! I am not sweet!

We had two evening meals in the hotel restaurant – of which much more another time. But all this – the much more ‘humble’ fodder – had more than enough to recommend it and more than enough to make it memorable.

But oh, oh, oh – the herrings!