What is basically essential? What touches us right now – and won’t go away tomorrow? It is the issues which have moved us since human existence: happiness, love, household, partnership, time, stress, loneliness, farewell, grief.
BILD columnist Louis Hagen, coming from a German-Jewish household, sought solutions to the everlasting questions of mankind from poets, thinkers and researchers. And located a number of solutions which might be amazingly easy – and but can enrich our lives.
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The phrase has an ideal, conventional sound: supper. The household gathers across the desk, slices of cheese, chilly cuts, arduous-boiled eggs, pickles. And above all: the nice previous sandwich.
It was the idea of vitamin for an entire era. In Bavaria we name dinner “Brotzeit”, with our Austrian neighbors it’s known as Brettljausen. An Allensbach examine has now discovered that increasingly Germans want to eat heat within the night and fewer sandwiches. Lunch is just the principle meal for solely 39 p.c of all respondents.
I actually belong to the era through which bread, butter, cheese and sausage had been on the household desk within the evenings – and there was tea as properly.
Dinner had a set time: all the time precisely 6 p.m. It was a every day ritual that did not change. Solely the meals modified generally. Occasionally there have been contemporary tomatoes, cucumbers, generally even radishes. We did not all the time have butter, within the Fifties margarine was usually nonetheless on the desk. The daddy drank a glass of beer within the night.
Sunday lunchtime there was roast, rooster or duck. Within the night, the bones had been gnawed off, and we put the meat, which we felt as one thing particular, on our sandwiches. I can not keep in mind a heat dinner once I was a baby.
BILD columnist Louis Hagen
And our neighboring nations? For a very long time, the Germans had been the one ones with this in some way strict consuming custom. The chilly dinner might be a relic of the industrialization of the Nineteen Twenties. Women and men labored full-time. At noon we ate heat meals within the canteen, and within the night there was no time to prepare dinner.
Right now the principle meal is within the night – however largely heat. It’s the solely hour when the household comes collectively and has time for one another. Folks drink wine, take a look at cell phones, make telephone calls, speak at one another – and eat. Completely different, however in some way additionally beautiful.
Once I evaluate that to my childhood, I believe: the nice previous days weren’t all the time so good. Right now you can say in household or amongst mates: I eat once I’m hungry, so right now I do not eat in any respect. Or I eat at night time. It is virtually like being on trip when you’re sitting in a piazza in Italy. Mild breeze, gentle summer season air, it is 9 p.m. The waiter is amazed that you order so early!
My conclusion: The nice previous sandwich within the night is not going to die out utterly. However we stated goodbye to her – a little bit wistfully.
Louis Hagen (75) was a member of the BILD editor-in-chief for 13 years and is now a marketing consultant on the communications company WMP. His texts can be found as a ebook at koehler-mittel-store.de.
