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UNESCO

Breadmakers: ‘we knead UNESCO recognition’

German bakers are calling for their breadmaking to be recognized by the United Nations' cultural organisation, UNESCO, as "intangible cultural heritage," alongside Argentina's tango and carpet weaving from southwest Iran.

Breadmakers: 'we knead UNESCO recognition'
Photo: DPA

“It’s a sense of home,” German master baker Karl-Dietmar Plentz muses, dipping his hands into a tray of flour and letting it run through his fingers as 26 types of bread bake in the ovens of his 136-year-old family business.

Behind him a worker deftly kneads two pieces of dough into identical loaves, one in each hand, as they roll off a cutting machine. They belong to a batch of “potato bread”, one of Plentz’s specialities that is still partly made the way his grandfather did it.

Pondering why Germany’s rich assortment of bread should be considered a global cultural asset, Plentz, a 46-year-old fourth generation baker from northeastern Germany who grew up behind the Iron Curtain, says “individuality” is important.

That’s not necessarily easy with supermarkets and petrol stations jostling to sell bread, cakes and pastries, and a changing on-the-go lifestyle meaning that Germany’s traditional ‘Abendbrot’ – supper of bread with cold meats – is on the wane.

About 500 bakeries closed over the past year, according to the German Federation of the Bakery Trade.

Peter Becker, federation president, said “diversity” was key to the UNESCO bid and would recognize the “pride in our products,” which are often crafted from recipes passed down from one generation to the next and may also reflect a regional identity.

“In France there are excellent baguettes, in Italy outstanding ciabatta, but worldwide, I think, only Germany has this variety, from wholemeal bread to good wheat bread,” he told AFP.

German bread ‘second to none’

Germany is due to become the 153rd state party to UNESCO’s 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage this week, with its 16 regions now collecting proposals for possible inclusion on a national inventory – a prerequisite for later UNESCO listing.

Germany’s history initially muddied plans to join the convention by raising fears that traditions distorted by the Nazis or the East German regime could be proposed, Benjamin Hanke of the German Commission for UNESCO said.

But other reasons also caused Germany to originally hang back, he said, including a general failure to grasp and clearly define the concept of heritage based on know-how rather than something concrete.

The baker’s federation threw its first “Day of German Bread” gala last month, appointing two “Brotschafter,” a neat blend of the German words for ambassador and bread, and trumpeted its ‘Bread Register.’

Around 3,000 speciality breads have so far been logged.

German bread has enjoyed high-profile endorsements recently. Outgoing US ambassador to Berlin Philip Murphy’s wife Tammy told reporters it was one of the things she’d recommend to visiting First Lady Michelle Obama.

“It’s second to none,” she enthused, while the frontman of US rock band 30

Seconds to Mars, Jared Leto, told fans at a concert “I love the German bread.”

The vast array of bread is partly down to Germany’s varied climate which allows all types of crops to thrive, Becker said.

History has ‘left its mark’

But history and geography too have played a role, he added, explaining that bread had been one way for the small princedoms that formerly dotted across Germany to carve out their own identity.

“Germany is located on the way to the sea. Many nations have come through here, the French for instance. Napoleon stopped over in Hamburg and we have here a ‘Franzbrötchen’ (French bread roll) which certainly originates from the French period.

“I believe it has all left its mark,” Becker said.

The baker’s trade now uses social media to attract fresh blood after an almost 30 percent drop since 2007 in apprentices amid a shrinking and ageing German population and an image problem over the early start to the workday.

“We found each other via Facebook. He wanted to become a baker and we were looking for an apprentice,” Plentz said of Spanish trainee Guellem Xanxo, 24,

who begins a two-year apprenticeship in August.

Family tradition

With a son and four daughters, Plentz does not know yet to whom he will hand over the reigns of the business he joined from school. It now employs about 100 people and counts five branches in the region around the town of Oranienburg, about 35 kilometres (22 miles) from Berlin.

He used to help out as a boy and went into the business after leaving school when the East German regime clipped his ambitions to study due to his Christian beliefs and failure to join communist youth groups.

But he says he has no regrets.

He proudly mentions “passion” and “creativity” when describing his work, adorning his bakery with bygone tools of the trade for myriad breads, some of whose intriguing names even he is at a loss to explain.

“Kaviarbrot”, it seems, has nothing to do with fish.

For Plentz, UNESCO recognition would be a stamp of approval and a celebration of age-old methods such as the wood-burning oven where he bakes on market days on the village square opposite his bakery.

But he also embraces change — as long as quality is maintained.

“I tried using a machine (to roll out the potato loaves), but I’m convinced of the craftsmanship and there was a difference in quality,” he said.

“So we do it like my grandfather did.”

AFP/kkf

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DISCOVER GERMANY

Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

With thousands of years of history in Germany to explore, you’re never going to run out of museums to scratch the itch to learn about and fully experience the world of the past.

Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

Here are eight of our favourite museums across Germany’s 16 states for you to discover for yourself. 

Arche Nebra

Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt

One day, around 1600 BCE, local Bronze Age peoples buried one of their most precious objects – the Nebra Sky Disk, a copper, gold, and bronze disk that acted as a calendar to help them plant crops. This was a matter of life and death at the time. 

Over three thousand years later, in 1999, it was uncovered by black market treasure hunters, becoming Germany’s most significant archaeological find. 

While the Sky Disk itself is kept in the (really very good)  State Museum of Pre- and Early History in nearby Halle, the site of the discovery is marked by the Arche Nebra, a museum explaining prehistoric astronomy and the cultural practices of the people who made it. 

Kids will love the planetarium, explaining how the disk was used. 

Atomkeller Museum

Halgerloch, Baden-Württemberg

From the distant to the very recent past – in this case, the Nazi atomic weapons programme. Even as defeat loomed, Nazi scientists such as Werner Heisenberg were trying to develop a nuclear bomb. 

While this mainly took place in Berlin, an old beer cellar under the town of Halgerloch, south of Stuttgart, was commandeered as the site of a prototype fission reactor. 

A squad of American soldiers captured and dismantled the reactor as the war ended. Still, the site was later turned into a museum documenting German efforts to create a working reactor – one that they could use to develop a bomb.

It’s important to note that you don’t need to be a physicist to understand what they were trying to do here, as the explanatory materials describe the scientist’s efforts in a manner that is easy to understand. 

German National Museum

Nuremberg, Bavaria

Remember that scene at the end of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, where an unnamed government official wheels the Ark of the Covenant into an anonymous government warehouse? This could possibly be the German equivalent – albeit far better presented. 

The German National Museum was created in 1852 as a repository for the cultural history of the German nation – even before the country’s founding. In the intervening 170 years, it’s grown to swallow an entire city block of Nuremberg, covering 60,000 years of history and hundreds of thousands of objects. 

If it relates to the history of Germany since prehistoric times, you’re likely to find it here.

Highlights include several original paintings and etchings by Albrecht Dürer, the mysterious Bronze Age ‘Gold Hats’, one of Europe’s most significant collections of costuming and musical instruments, and a vast display of weapons, armour and firearms. 

European Hansemuseum

Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein

In the late Middle Ages, the political and economic centre of the world was focused on the North Sea and the Baltic German coasts. 

This was the domain of the Hanseatic League, one of the most powerful trading alliances in human history. Centuries before the Dutch and British East India Companies, they made in-roads to far-flung corners.

The European Hansemuseum in the former Hanseatic city of Lübeck tells the story of the league’s rise and eventual fall, its day-to-day operations, and its enduring legacy.

This museum is fascinating for adults and kids. It uses original artefacts and high-tech interactive elements to tell tales of maritime adventure. Younger visitors will also be enchanted by the museum’s augmented reality phone app that asks them to help solve mysteries. 

Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum

Augsburg, Germany

The Hanseatic League was not the only economic power in the late Middle Ages. The Fugger and Welser families of Augsburg may have been the richest in the world until the 20th century.

From humble beginnings, both families grew to become incredibly powerful moneylenders, funding many of the wars of the 16th century and the conquest of the New World.

The Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum not only explains the rise of both patrician families but also the practices that led to their inconceivable wealth—including, sadly, the start of the Transatlantic slave trade. 

The museum also documents the short-lived Welser colony in Venezuela, which, if it had survived, could have resulted in a very different world history.

This museum has many high tech displays, making it a very exciting experience for moguls of any age.

Teutoburg Forest Museum

Kalkriese, Lower Saxony

Every German child learns this story at some point: One day at the end of summer 9 AD, three legions of the Roman army marched into the Teutoburg forest… and never came out. 

Soldiers sent after the vanished legions discovered that they had been slaughtered to a man.

Arminius, a German who had been raised as a Roman commander, had betrayed the three legions to local Germanic tribes, who ambushed them while marching through the forest. 

Today, the probable site of the battle – we can’t entirely be sure – is marked by a museum called the Varusschlacht Museum (Literally ‘Varus Battle Museum’, named after the loyal Roman commander). 

The highlights here are the finds – made all the more eerie by the knowledge that they were looted and discarded from the legionaries in the hours following the ambush. 

German Romanticism Museum

Frankfurt, Hesse

The Romantic era of art, music and literature is one of Germany’s greatest cultural gifts to the world, encompassing the work of poets such as Goethe and Schiller, composers like Beethoven and artists in the vein of Caspar David Friedrich.

Established in 2021 next to the house where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born, the German Romanticism Museum is the world’s largest collection of objects related to the Romantic movement. 

In addition to artefacts from some of the greatest names in German romanticism, in 2024, you’ll find a major exhibition exploring Goethe’s controversial 1774 novel, ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’, and another on the forest as depicted as dark and dramatic in the art of the period. 

Gutenberg Castle

Haßmersheim, Baden-Württemberg

Sometimes being a smaller castle is a good thing. The relatively small size and location of Guttenburg Castle, above the River Neckar near Heilbronn, protected it from war and damage over eight hundred years – it’s now the best preserved Staufer-era castle in the country.

While the castle is still occupied by the Barons of Gemmingen-Guttenberg, the castle now also contains a museum, that uses the remarkably well-preserved castle interiors to explore centuries of its history – and the individuals that passed through it.

After you’ve explored the museum—and the current exhibition that uses Lego to document life in the Middle Ages —it’s also possible to eat at the castle’s tavern and stay overnight!

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