Indecision in the Land of Overabundance

By Heidi Noroozy

Tram drivers in Gotha, GDR
Photo by Felix O (CC BY-SA 2.0)

It’s 1981 and I’m on my way to Marxism class in the tooth-shaped University Tower on Leipzig’s Karl Marx Square. The tram is an old rattletrap from a bygone era, with its hard wooden seats and worn-out shock absorbers, and it’s packed with students and early bird shoppers. Outside the window, Soviet-style slab buildings rub shoulders with once elegant stone mansions, filling gaps left by long-ago bombs. The war has been over for 36 years, but wounds heal slowly in the East German heartland.

In this drab landscape, a spot of color bobs along the sidewalk, a bright yellow object poking out of a woman’s bulging shopping bag. Bananas. My mouth waters, and I don’t even like bananas. But it’s been months since my neighborhood supermarket has offered any produce more exotic than onions, potatoes, cabbages, and those dessicated oranges from Cuba that the locals call “Castro’s Revenge.”

The tram shudders to a stop and in seconds I’m the only person left on board. The crowd surges toward the banana lady. Someone must have asked where she bought the coveted fruit because she points down a side street and soon even the sidewalk is bare. I’m still such a novice at this socialist shopping gig, I don’t bother to follow the crowd. By the time I reach the shop, there won’t be as much as a yellow peel left.

In the decade before the Berlin Wall came down and the two German nations reunified, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) suffered a serious shortage of exchangeable currency. The burden this placed on international trade meant that many items began disappearing from the stores.

Bananas: once a coveted luxury
item in the GDR

A supermarket run could turn into guessing game. Would the shelves be well stocked or half empty? Would they have real coffee that day or only the cheap stuff, mixed with chicory to make it go further? Maybe there’d be a note taped to the dairy case warning customers that they were allowed only one package of butter per shopper. Hoarding was verboten.

“Mangelware,” the shopkeeper would say with a disinterested shrug when I asked after a newly missing item I’d seen only the previous week. The word means “scarce commodity” and explained everything from an empty meat counter at the butcher’s shop to the absence of ethnic specialties on the menu of my favorite Hungarian restaurant.

Sometimes the problem wasn’t Mangelware but a scarcity of labels. At my neighborhood grocery store, certain non-branded food staples came in plain white paper sacks with their contents printed on the front in purple ink: rice, flour, and sugar. Occasionally, the factory would run out of ink, and you had to feel the package to figure out what it contained. A lumpy bag was rice, a grainy one held sugar, and the soft, squishy one was most likely flour. More than once, I bought a grainy-feeling bag only to discover it held cornmeal and not the sugar I’d expected.

Early on, I realized I had to develop some new shopping strategies. Back home in the States, if I ran out of milk or bread, a quick drive to the supermarket quickly remedied the situation. It would never have occurred to me that, on arriving at the store, I’d discover the items I needed had vanished from the shelves.

In the GDR, I learned to shop like the locals. Whenever I saw an item that was in potentially short supply—toilet paper, packing tape, or those elusive bananas—I’d buy it on the spot. Who knew when I’d see it again? Over time, such “opportunity shopping” became so ingrained in me, I forgot how to do it any other way.

When I left the GDR at the end of my two year stay, I spent the flight home dreaming about all the long missed food I’d get to enjoy. I planned to make thick peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and suck the sweet juice out of California oranges. And I’d buy ten packages of butter if I felt like it. It would be a year before I could face cabbage and potatoes.

Too many brands!
Photo by Tara Whitsitt (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

But the first time I entered an American supermarket, my enthusiasm evaporated into a cloud of anxiety. I wandered about the air-conditioned space, feeling a bit shell-shocked—such abundance, so many choices, way too many brands. How to decide? I knew there had to be some strategy to help me find my way through this confusing maze of brands, but I couldn’t bring it to mind. The cereal aisle was the worst, with its bright colors and loud labels. What I would have given for a plain white sack that I could poke with my fingers and decide whether it held cornflakes or Rice Crispies. I fled the supermarket without making a purchase, too overwhelmed to figure out this simple dilemma.

My shopping amnesia turned out to be short-lived and days later I was picking items off the shelves and tossing them into my basket without a second thought. And yet, I don’t really want to forget those moments of utter helplessness when I entered the supermarket and didn’t know what to do. The echo of that reverse culture shock reminds me that not every place is blessed with such riches, and many people around the world have to make do with far less.

Drinking With the Devil

By Heidi Noroozy

Credit: Morn the Gorn

Gastronomical delight is not something I associate with Leipzig, Germany. At least not when I lived there 30 years ago. Much has changed since then, but in the 1980s, the German Democratic Republic suffered a chronic shortage of exchangeable currency, which meant chronic shortages of nearly everything else. A restaurant meal often began by checking off menu items in conference with the waiter until we hit upon one whose ingredients were available.

But Leipzig also had the Auerbachs Keller, which made up for any hardship. Like Leipzig itself, this underground wine bar is not only steeped in history but positively drenched with it. And much of that history is literary.

The historic tavern opened in 1525 on Grimmaische Straße, just off Leipzig’s marketplace. Its first proprietor was a professor of medicine named Dr. Heinrich Stromer, also known as Dr. Auerbach, a reference to his birthplace in Germany’s Upper Palatinate region. In addition to his academic duties (he was also the rector of Leipzig University), Dr. Auerbach was the personal physician of the Elector of Saxony, a title granted to the German princes who elected the emperor. In gratitude for the doctor’s excellent work, the Elector granted him a license to operate the wine bar.

Almost immediately, a legend became associated with the Auerbachs Keller. A scholar named Dr. Johannes Faust, who had grown bored with life, made a pact with the Devil through the Horned One’s representative, Mephistopheles (aka Mephisto). The Devil agreed to give Dr. Faust access to unlimited knowledge and worldly pleasures—but only for the next 24 years (one year for every hour in the day). At the end of the contract term, the scholar would be required to hand over his soul to the Devil.

Faust riding out of the Auerbachs Keller
Credit: Deutsche Fotothek

To convince Dr. Faust of the plan’s merit, Mephisto invited him to an evening of revelry in the underground wine bar of the Auerbachs Keller. At the end of the night, the scholar rode up the stairs on the back of a barrel in a gravity-defying feat of devilish fun.

On the tavern’s 100^th anniversary in 1625, two paintings were mounted on the wall, one depicting Faust and Mephisto drinking with students and the other showing Faust riding the barrel.

By the 18^th century, the Auerbachs Keller had become a well established hangout for Leipzig University students, and one regular patron went on to become one of Germany’s leading literary figures: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Inspired by the legend during his student days—and perhaps after staring at the paintings of Faust and Mephisto through a wine-induced haze—Goethe later wrote a tragic play titled Faust. He set one scene in his old hangout, where Mephisto and Faust join a group of students in a night of drinking until the revelry turns violent. The Devil’s agent casts a spell on the students, who watch Faust riding out of the tavern on his legendary barrel.

Fasskeller of the Auerbachs Keller
Credit: Bundesarchiv,
Bild 183-1988-0908-307 / CC-BY-SA

Germany is a land of long traditions, so when I arrived in Leipzig over 200 years later, the Auerbachs Keller was still a popular student hangout. It had expanded to include five rooms, each with a distinctive name: Fasskeller (Barrel Cellar), Lutherzimmer (Luther Room), Goethezimmer (Goethe Room), Alt-Leipzig (Old Leipzig), and Großer Keller (Big Cellar). A sixth room, the Mephisto Bar, was added in 1989. There was even a tribute to Goethe’s version of the legend in the form of two bronze sculptures at the entrance, one of Mephisto and Faust and the other of the bewitched students.

My friends and I usually sipped our drinks in the Fasskeller, with its plain wooden tables and paintings of the Faust legend along the walls and ceilings. To my great disappointment, and likely good fortune, I never spotted Mephisto in the flesh. On occasion, however, I did order a glass of Tokaji, the topaz-colored wine from Hungary, which is mentioned in Goethe’s play. After all, when you live in a city so steeped in literary history, it doesn’t hurt to raise a glass to tradition.

Lost In Leipzig

By Heidi Noroozy

City Tower, Leipzig
Photo by Dundak

Everyone should get lost in a foreign country at least once in life. It’s the best way to discover the heart of a place, the cultural gems that don’t make it into the guide books: a tiny restaurant without a menu in English translation, a roadside shrine to a local saint, a pretty park where you can watch the life of the city ebb and flow around you. I’ve gotten lost like this more times than I can count, but one experience stands out from all the rest – the cold day in February when I discovered a rare private bakery in the heart of Communist Leipzig.

I wasn’t a tourist but a student living in a city steeped in history. Leipzig once was home to the likes of Bach and Mendelsohn, and it inspired Goethe to write his masterpiece, Faust. By the time I lived there, though, Leipzig had lost its mojo. The Auerbachskeller, which Goethe used as a setting in Faust, still existed and so did the St. Thomas Church where Bach worked as musical director. But for the most part, Leipzig had become a city of soot-stained buildings and filthy air, polluted by the coal refineries just outside town.

Every chance I got, I’d go exploring and try to find a hint of the grand old days. Usually, I managed to find my way around with a good map and directions from the locals. But one day, I got completely lost. It was the dead of winter, the sideways slick with gray slush, the chill air freezing my breath into clouds of steam. I wandered through streets that all seemed to have the same small grocery stores with half empty shelves, the same stout matrons sweeping debris off their stoops, the same ethnic restaurants where all you could get was German food, due to the scarcity of imported ingredients.

Factory Bakery in Leipzig, GDR
Photo by Deutsche Fotothek

Then I rounded a corner and smelled a rare scent: freshly baked bread. In a country whose bakers are famous for their bread, the smell of baking shouldn’t be unusual in the least. But in East Germany, bread, like most products, was usually manufactured in state-run factories. The shop on the street where I lived carried two kinds – oval rye loaves the locals called Graubrot (gray bread, on account of the color) and occasional rectangular bricks of a heavy, multigrain variety. In both cases, the loaves arrived from the state-run bakery wrapped in brown paper and were usually well past their peak freshness. A private bakeshop, with its wares baked right on the premises, was a discovery worth getting excited about.

On that wintry day, I followed my nose until I saw a line of people snaking down the sidewalk. It was eleven in the morning, only an hour until every shop closed their doors for the obligatory midday break. But nothing ventured, nothing gained, so I took my place at the end of the line.

Forty minutes later, I made it through the door into the warm, delicious-smelling bakery. The shelves were alarmingly bare. But my hopes sprung eternal as I inched ever closer to the counter. Only to be dashed when the baker sold her last loaf to a customer just ahead of me in line. The rest of us were told to come back the next day.

The bakery opened at six in the morning. I arrived shortly after five (yes, I was desperate). A line had already started to form, but this time I was in luck and left the shop with a rye loaf under my arm, still warm from the oven.

Photo by Rainer Zenz

Later, I learned an interesting fact about the GDR’s private economy. Although the state owned most businesses, anyone could open a private company as long as it employed fewer than fifteen people. With fresh bread such an important element of German culture, it still amazes me that there weren’t private bakeries on every street corner. Leipzig, a city of around 50,000 inhabitants, had only three.

It’s been thirty years since I found my private bakery, but I still remember the taste of that fresh, loaf with its firm texture and chewy crust, just like a good German rye bread should be. So I’m not at all sorry I got lost on that cold day in Leipzig.