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CULTURE

How to discover Berlin through your stomach

It's one thing to tour a city's landmarks, museums and gift shops. But sampling its culinary offerings can sometimes tell you more about its lesser known history and shifting dynamics.

How to discover Berlin through your stomach
File photo: DPA.

On a recent drizzly Friday afternoon, I followed a cobblestone pavement through the graffitied facades of Berlin’s Neukölln district to my destination at a small square, consisting mainly of a public toilet and food stand selling cheap fries and sausages.

It’s not exactly the first place you’d expect to meet a food tour offering a rich culinary experience in a major European metropolis, but that’s perhaps what makes it perfectly Berlin.
 
Food tours here are not aimed so much at Michelin-star-gazers, but towards the more open-minded of tourists, eager to explore offbeat neighbourhoods, as well as for locals looking to discover their own.
 
As international gastronomy rankings attest, Germany – let alone its capital – is not known for its fine dining experience in the same way that France or even Germany’s northern neighbour of Denmark are. Copenhagen, for example, was home to three of the world’s best restaurants rated in 2016, whereas Berlin had just one.
 
And while Paris currently has ten three Michelin-star establishments, Berlin has none.
 
 
But Berlin’s growing food scene is nevertheless the topic of numerous German- and English-language blogs, books and specialized food tours – and they're not just aimed at showcasing the city’s typical döner kebab and currywurst.
 
“Most people never eat at a restaurant with Michelin stars. To the average person they want a good meal at a good value, and Berlin provides that in spades,” Karl Wilder of Secret Food Tours explained.
 
“Because of our lower operating costs, chefs can also experiment and deliver excitement. It does not matter if the critics take notice. The customers take notice. I think the perspective has already changed, and people see Berlin as past it's infancy for food tourism.”
 
House of Small Wonder in Berlin. Photo: DPA
 
Over the past decade, a number of food tours like Wilder’s have cropped up in the capital, often in neighbourhoods outside the city centre and off the radar of most sightseers, like the eat-the-world tour I dropped into in Neukölln.
 
You can also visit the former East German avant garde district of Friedrichshain with Secret Food Tours, get to know the former punk hub of Kreuzberg with eat-the-world, or even wander the streets of ‘up-and-coming’ Moabit with Berlin Food Tour – a central yet still fairly residential neighbourhood that the tour group describes as a “hidden gem”.
 
Our Neukölln tour was focused on an even lesser known part of the neighbourhood which already scarcely sees out-of-towners: Rixdorf. A major goal of these tours is not just to expose participants to new eateries, but also to new aspects of the city’s history and its connection to how people eat.
 
“After the war, there was no money in Berlin and people had to be really inventive about food, about everything,” my eat-the-world guide Adrian Castillo told me.
 
Wilder, a food historian, also explained that the impact of two World Wars in Berlin shaped the city’s culinary scene in a different way than other capitals, limiting its resources.
 
“It did not evolve in the same way as others cities and thus many unique foods are to be found.”
 
Neukölln’s culinary scene is very much shaped as well by the district’s history of immigration. Rixdorf is now spotted with cool new cafes, housed along streets and in buildings once part of a village used as a haven for Czech Bohemian Protestant refugees in the 1700s. In the 20th century, Neukölln became known for its sizable Turkish population, many of whom came through a guest worker programme in the 1960s.
 
But now, with its cheap rents and hip bars, the neighbourhood is also attracting gentrifying hipsters, particularly from English-speaking countries.
 
This mix of cultures was apparent in the selection of stops along the food tour: a cafe called Zuckerbaby run by two German-American sisters and recent Berlin transplants; a vegan cafe and co-working space with the French name of Pêle-Mêle; and a modern Arabic kitchen with an English name: OS’Kitchen.
 
Neukölln alone now seems to have a new hyper buzz-worthy bistro popping up right, left and centre: a vegan “diner” opening along the district’s busy Karl-Marx-Strasse in April caused such a frenzy of hungry hipsters that police were called in to clear the crowds just 20 minutes after it had opened its doors.
 
So the booming food scene in the neighbourhood and in others also reflects the changing nature and gentrification of the city, especially since the fall of the Berlin Wall.
 
“Fifteen years ago, a friend of mine told me that she found a new flat and she said ‘unfortunately it’s in this very ugly district called Neukölln’. Nobody would say that today. Nobody,” Castillo told me with a chuckle.
 
Food tours can therefore give tourists a taste of the ongoing transformation, providing a launch pad for districts in flux to gain more name recognition.
 
But they’re also a gateway for locals into parts of their own city that they might not even know about, like for fellow eat-the-world tour-taker Holly Krueger, a recent American immigrant to Berlin.
 
“I live in Berlin and I was really surprised. You’re thinking a Berlin food tour means just currywurst, but then this is here,” Krueger told me, gesturing around her as we sat at Asian-soul-food bistro Coco Liebe, founded by a Lebanese chef.
 
“There’s a culinary tradition here that’s not so obvious.”
 
 

#sushiburger#sushiburgerinberlin#berlinfood#berlin #neukölln #cocoliebe #glutenfree#glutenfrei

A photo posted by COCOliebe (@cocoliebeberlin) on May 25, 2016 at 5:00am PDT

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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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