Notes on Culinarism
I. Beating (Dickinson, 1883)
Black Cake
2 Pounds Flour-
2 Sugar-
2 Butter-
19 Eggs.
5 Pounds Raisins.
1 ½ Currants.
1 ½ Citron.
½ Pint Brandy.
½ – Molasses -
2 Nutmegs.
5 Teaspoons
Cloves – Mace -
Cinnamon.
2 teaspoons Soda.
Beat Butter
and Sugar
together.
Add Eggs
without beating-
and beat the
mixture again.
Bake 2 ½ or
three hours, in
Cake pans, or
5 to 6 hours
in milk pan,
if full –
II. Spilling (Munch, 1898)
Bei Neurasthenie entsteht eine ganz ähnliche Verarmung dadurch, daß die Erregung gleichsam wie durch ein Loch ausrinnt, aber hier wird die somatische Sexualerregung leer gepumpt, bei Melancholie ist das Loch im Psychischen. (Sigmund Freud, “Manuskript über die Melancholie”)
III. Inverting (Tatin, 1880s)
La légende situe l’événement culinaire un dimanche d’ouverture de la chasse. Jour d’affluence au restaurant. Caroline s’affaire en salle. En cuisine, Stéphanie prépare son dessert fétiche. Mais dans la précipitation, elle oublie de déposer la pâte au fond du moule. Ayant réalisé son erreur, la cuisinière improvise : elle recouvre les pommes caramélisées de la pâte et enfourne. On raconte aussi que dans l’effervescence, Stéphanie fit tomber la tarte avant de la mettre au four à l’envers.
[…] und damit wurde die Hegelsche Dialektik auf den Kopf, oder vielmehr vom Kopf, auf dem sie stand, wieder auf die Füße gestellt. (Friedrich Engels, “Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie”)
IV. Devouring (Döblin, 1920)
Arguably even more so than his Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), it is Alfred Döblin’s Wallenstein (1920) that marks the most extensive, obstinate, and arduous attempt at fitting Expressionism into the novel-form (or vice versa). Expressionism had flourished in poetry and screenwriting – take Ivan Goll and Carl Mayer as representative examples for each – but it faltered when it came to the novel, as if the characteristic electricity and intensity would, when attempted on marathon length, inevitably turn out to have been empty gesturing all along. And really, the novel form wasn’t suited for the hectic, pre-WWI cities of Berlin and Dresden, swarming with literary soirées and magazines, all striving to out-contemporarize each other, to be there first, to be the first to do x or y or z. Scribbling and scratching work, planning and composing less so. Expressionism is so addicted to deadlines that it can hardly do with forms where the deadlines are too far apart from each other (two deadlines per year is far too little; who takes two shots of heroin per year? Two deadlines per day, that’s more like it).
But in the latter half of the 1910s, Döblin, a medical doctor himself, is unwell: gastrointestinal troubles. Perfect conditions to conceive of action as devouring, of history as a matter of digestion, and of writing as a technique of reflux, as Reiner Niehoff has argued. Feasting on whatever he can find about the Thirty Years War, Döblin turns Baroque Bohemia into a field of gastro-libidinal strategy:
Nachdem die Böhmen besiegt waren, war niemand darüber so froh wie der Kaiser. Noch niemals hatte er mit rascheren Zähnen hinter den Fasanen gesessen, waren seine fältchenumrahmten Äuglein so lüstern zwischen Kredenz und Teller, Teller Kredenz gewandert.
Schand und Schmach, daß einer Graf, Fürst, Erzherzog, Römischer Kaiser werden kann und der Magen wächst nicht mit; die Gurgel kann nicht mehr schlucken, als sie faßt.
Wallenstein werde sich rächen an Böhmen, indem er es verschlinge, er hat einen grossen Rachen, zweitausend Meilen haben noch Platz. Verschlingen.
[Ferdinand II. sei nichts als] ein gierig weites Maul und das sündhafte Restitutionsedikt das Tranchierbesteck, mit dem er sich den Braten zurecht machen wolle.
Hunger – as the need and will to devour – turns into both cause and effect of war: Gustav II. Adolf of Sweden has no rational reason for invading except an incredible hunger which is just an absence (an empty stomach; and it is not even any clear-cut metaphorical hunger (for power, for more territory), rather, he is but the manifestation of an incessant devouring desire for a more simultaneously completely abstract and perfectly corporeal. Thus turning into a kind of bogeyman (que viene el coco y te comerá), he welcomes the French ambassadors as follows:
Ja er wüßte, daß sie ihn fürchteten, sei wohl der Gottseibeiuns für sie, fräße und verschlucke sie, es sei ein Spaß.
Rudolf Maximilian of Saxon, preparing for battle with the Gustav II., knows perfectly well what the actual battlefield is, the realm where to encounter the Swede:
Er war eine Röhre, ein Rinnsal, ein Kanal, Wein und Biere flossen von Morgen bis Abend über ihn […] [E]r stopfte, was man ihm gab, ohne zu danken, behielt den Hunger.
Maximilian I. of Bavaria, in turn, is a culinary masochist, prone to associate eating not with accumulating but with a (punishing) diminishment (and vice versa, punishments diminish as well as diminishment punishes), his diet haunted by a guilt-tripping Catholicism full of self-deconstructing rules; in one of the novel’s most bizarre scenes, Maximilian I., upon losing a battle, forces his court jester, a dwarf with an endless appetite, to fight and devour a live stork. A grotesque bloodbath with which the Bavarian king apparently tries to punish himself – and everyone around him – for losing.
As they and the rest of the leaders – Wallenstein with his fetish of Schöpferische Zerstörung, Tilly with his infatuation with sacrifice, Mansfeld with his mindless droning violence, etc. – turn Middle Europe into a huge banquet for continental-scale hunger, they plunge whole populations into famine. The net of hunger is woven everywhere, as widespread death turns people full of hungry emptiness back into heaps and heaps of meat.
And of course, there is Ferdinand II., the Holy Roman Emperor, simply called Ferdinand der Andere (Ferdinand the Other, because he is not the I.) throughout the novel, who is also a hunger, but simultaneously a massive haemorrhage of a person, a melancholic spilling out; living in dark and barren rooms, he is not a moving expansive hunger like Gustav II. Adolf, not something full of emptiness, but rather an emptiness that overflows, something that spills out by sucking in. An abundant vortex. Prone to ever more feverish fantasies, bathed in a craziness increasingly incomprehensible to even his closest allies, he ends his life – and the novel – by following some sort of forest goblin deep into the woods, only to be murdered by the strange and savage creature. The last sentences describe the rain falling over the emperor’s body and the goblin, crouched beneath some leaves, the water seeping into the endless green, and then cut to the Welsh armies preparing for the next battle.
Une armée marche avec son estomac. (Napoleon, allegedly)
V. Sucking (Nosferatu, 1922)
Against Döblin’s psychotropic feast, the 1910s could pitch Ricarda Huch’s calm and precise Der große Krieg in Deutschland, the decade’s other great historio-literary treatment of the Thirty Years War. Döblin opens his account with a spectacular banquet, Huch starts with a series of short, but foreboding episodes full of a subdued menace. People behave strangely. Small armies unite, and then disband, seemingly at random. Movements in Spain, and in France, incomprehensible to the Holy Roman Empire. Some irritation in Bohemia. Johannes Kepler discovers a new star and then has to spend some time convincing Ferdinand II. that this does not necessarily mean political turmoil, that it has, in fact, most likely nothing at all to do with terrestrial order. Just like food is only a fact and a metaphor.
Kepler, der es nicht vertragen konnte, in der Arbeit gestört zu werden, war ungehalten; er sei nicht des Kaisers Narr, murrte er, indem er seine Mappe zurückstieß, daß die beschriebenen Blätter im Zimmer umherflogen. Da sich seine Frau unter Seufzen anschickte sie aufzulesen, rief er ihr zu, sie solle das lassen. »Wenn ich meinen Brei verbrannt habe, werde ich ihn auch selbst auslöffeln«, sagte er ärgerlich.
Everything feels like a long, long evening. Everyone is anxious, nervous, quickly irritated, but nobody knows that it is the eve of an immense war. Huch’s book is published in three tomes, two in 1912, one in 1913. While it begins with uncanny premonitions, it ends with incredible, disturbing violence and cruelty, and then, in some ways similar to Döblin’s Wallenstein, on a note of the slightly fantastical, and, again, dark premonition. It describes a mass after a massacre:
Es war inzwischen Abend geworden, und der weiche Himmel bog sich über das dämmernde Hügelland, wie ein Strauch voll weißer Rosen über ein Grab. Der Tisch wurde wieder hergerichtet, und für den verschütteten Wein wurde Wasser gebracht. Dergleichen Abendmahl habe er noch nicht gesehen, fuhr es dem Obersten heraus, der den Vorbereitungen staunend zusah; es scheine mehr für Vieh als für Christenmenschen zu passen.
»Als Christus auferstanden war,« sagte der Pfarrer, während er das Brot sorgsam von Erde reinigte, »hatte er ein fremdes Antlitz, und seine Jünger erkannten ihn nicht.« Der Oberst verstand nicht, schwieg aber, und als alle versammelt waren, nahm er seinen Federhut ab, richtete einen befehlenden Blick auf seine Soldaten und kniete nieder, worauf alle seinem Beispiel folgten. Das Stückchen Brot, das der Pfarrer ihm, als dem ersten, reichte, würgte er folgsam, wenn auch nicht ohne Widerwillen hinunter.
What’s the reason for the colonel’s trouble with swallowing the bread? Maybe the aftermath of violence, maybe the fact that the bread has laid on the floor for considerable time (no five-second-rule in the 1600s); or maybe it’s because he is already occupied with trying to swallow the priest’s enigmatic sentence on the resurrection of a (at first) unrecognizable Christ, of the redeemer with a strange face. Of course, he’s missed the first, pre-murder part of the sermon:
Auch unser geliebtes deutsches Vaterland ist verhöhnt, gegeißelt und ans Kreuz geschlagen worden und liegt nun begraben; möge es unten im Krater der Gruft still sich mischen und kochen und einst, das Gehäuse zerbrechend, wie eine verwandelte Raupe geflügelt in das eroberte Element steigen.
The priest’s sentence summarizes the main punch and problem of Huch’s book: The resurrection of the Thirty Years War, but with an unrecognizable face, is a source of anxiety, but it is unclear how it is different from (or identical to) the nationalist thought – is the resurrection of geliebtes deutsches Vaterland (after it’s been well mixed and cooked) identical to a re-outbreak of the große Krieg in Deutschland, which, like the buried redeemer, is not simply an event, but a tendency, something that lies dormant for centuries, only to break out again, after some cooking, some mixing, maybe some baking?
Like Döblin’s acid reflux – Eine Zeit ist [...] durch große Abschnitte hindurch undurchgoren, schlecht gebacken, he theorizes elsewhere – Huch’s book is not simply about the title-providing große Krieg in Deutschland of the 1600s, but also about its possible resurrection. It could come back up. The undigested is the undead.
But she leaves it open whether there is a recipe to this meal, which goes something like the priest’s sermon (and indeed, the sermon is immediately followed – interrupted, even – by the murder of his daughter by the hands of passing soldiers): take a pinch of deutsches Vaterland, and add it to what’s already cooking, and watch it develop into something altogether indigestible.
Parts of the 19th century had seen this a lot more simply. Marshalling a supposed national trauma, right-wing historians and propagandists used the Thirty Years War to advocate for a unified ‘Germany’ (although, of course, no such thing existed in the 17thcentury) modelled as a German Reich – framing the Thirty Years War as a result of fraction and strife between what should be united, pitching geliebtes Vaterland. The rest is history, that is to say, silence.
If the undigested is the undead, it might be wise neither to invite nor to employ it.
It might be wise not to do business with it.
VI. Cooking (Mann, 1933)
Die Eri muß die Suppe salzen!
If Golo Mann is to be trusted, this sentence was something of a slogan in the Mann family. It characterized the special role of Katia’s and Thomas’ eldest daughter, Erika, in the household: Although Thomas, pompous as always, had expressed disappointment in not having a male first child (winning him the peak bourgeois prize), Erika quickly achieved a sort of authority, a trust symbolized in her role of salting probably the literal, certainly the metaphorical soup. Her judgment mattered.
And indeed it does. Famously, the Manns were a bit like the Roys of Succession: a comically complicated family too overtly occupied with the large-scale manufacturing of cringe, but then Erika is pretty much that one character Succession does not feature: the person who gets out of all that with decency, because her notion of succeedingis not completely stupid.
An allegedly unruly child, Erika turns to theatre in her teenage years, studying acting for a bit, then dropping out in favour of simply practicing it. Her first production of note is Anja und Esther, written by her brother Klaus and directed by Gustaf Gründgens, and sees her starring opposite Pamela Wedekind in the role of a homosexual couple. The play tours for some weeks, then she travels with Klaus to Hollywood, tries to become a screenwriter, fails, doesn’t care.
Klaus says she should try writing. There are already too many writers in the family, she answers.
And collaborates with him on a travelogue.
Back in Germany, she continues to perform, on stage and on film, experiments with cannabis, participates in a rally race through Europe (and wins), writes short plays, short literary texts, a children’s book – which includes everything a children’s book should include, namely (1) a zeppelin and (2) the world economic crisis of 1929 –, some newspaper articles, and a Christmas play for children. (Both the children’s book and the play are also meant to provide jobs to a terminally depressed illustrator friend of hers).
On the first of January 1933, and together with Therese Giehse, with whom she is romantically involved at the time, she founds a political cabaret in Munich.
It is called Die Pfeffermühle.
It is a quite large collaborative effort, with many prominent contributors, but Erika Mann pens most of the texts. One is more scathing, witty, and beautiful than the next.
The biting political satire, soon to become a hallmark of theirs, is tolerated for about four weeks. Then the National Socialists come into power in Bavaria, and everyone knows that their sense of humour is morbidly underdeveloped. The group goes into hiding, and then into exile in Zurich.
By summer 1933, Thomas is indulging in what he considers deep thought. Aren’t both sides bad, really? Isn’t the political spectrum a bit like a horseshoe? What about inner exile?
Uns ist bei unserer Jugend eine große Verantwortung aufgeladen in Gestalt unseres unmündigen Vaters, Erika writes to her brother.
1937, the Peppermill premieres in New York. It is not very successful.
By the late 1930s, she has received so much pro-Nazi hate mail that she writes to the FBI. Not to complain, but to make an offer: she would be willing to help them identify and find fascist activists in the US. The FBI immediately puts her under surveillance, suspecting she might be a communist. Among other things, her dossier classifies her as a sexual pervert, which echoes pretty exactly, in ways the FBI might or might not appreciate, what NSDAP mouthpieces drop about her at about the same time.
Anyway, let’s go back to 1933, to Munich and to the Pfeffermühle. In this context, Erika Mann writes one of the most disturbing poems in the German language. It achieves its disturbing effect, it seems to me, first because it is exceedingly well done on a formal level – that helps, of course. Second, it marks one of these extremely rare instances – rare at least in the literature of the languages I know well enough to read them – in which the speaker of a poem is in a position of absolute ruthless power. For different reasons, literature is quick to ally itself with positions of the weak and/or the concerned, maybe not at last because it mistakes this gesture for leftism or, even more generally, for a concern for the weak (which it is not necessarily). Or because it tries to, continuously and rather annoyingly, stress the weak social position of literature. Or whatever.
Be it as it may, when it comes to the question of power, poetry loves to return to the logic of medieval minne: powerful is what the other is. The addressee can be powerful (even a superpower, or almighty), the speaker almost never is. In lyrical drama, the situation is not as clear-cut – because, I’d argue, the I shifts between different speakers who all use the same pronoun to refer to themselves, thereby diluting the power-expression of the individual I – but even there, ruthless power is almost always limited in some way: Even Mephisto from Faust or Iago from Othelloare, albeit extremely ruthless and very powerful, subject to limits, bound to some superior. It is true that cabaret-oriented poetry – which is, of course, the natural vicinity of the literary production around the Pfeffermühle – knows absolutely ruthless speakers, but then they’re not very powerful at all, rather, they’re indulging in petty evil: they kind of people who like to poison the pigeons in the park, for example.
But Mann’s poem is an altogether different beast. Its speaker is absolutely powerful, and absolutely ruthless. The poem is not about power.
When performed in the beginning of 1933, it was read by Max Schreck, the German actor most famous for his portrayal of the title character in Murnau’s Nosferatu. Eine Symphonie des Grauens(1922).
The poem is called Der Koch. It goes like this:
Der Koch
Mich kennt man doch, ich bin der Koch
Der Küchenchef der Mächtige,
der alles kann, der alles weiss,
von Parmesan bis Trüffelspeis
und bis zum Schokoladeneis –
Bin ich der Koch.
Zu allererst krieg ich mein Geld,
Ich bin schon reich –
Wenn man mich nicht bei Laune halt,
Da koch ich gleich vor Wut
Nur grauenhaftes Zeug –
Ich pfeffere die Suppen Euch,
Dass Euch die Augen übergehn,
Ich salz die Mehlspeis aus Versehn–
Das kann ich doch –
Ich bin der Koch.
Ich schrei die Küchenjungen an –
Ich bin vergnügt –
Wenn einer selber kochen kann
wsst –– der fliegt.
Die dürfen spühlen, putzen, schälen –
Der Koch bin ich.
Ich könnte Ihnen viel erzählen,
Mit manchem könnte ich Sie quälen
Und brüsten mich.
Als ich die Katze totgeschlagen,
Weil sie so naschhaft war und dreist,
Hab ich sie gar nicht lang begraben –
Sie ward verspeist.
Ich klopfte sie und salzte sie
und würzte sie und walzte sie –
Die Küchenkatze ward serviert
Als feinstes Côte d’agneau –
Der Gast der nach dem Braten giert
Genoss sie so!
Er schmatzte froh –
Wie heisst er doch
Der Küchenchef der Meisterkoch –
Ich bin der Koch!
Am liebsten koche ich Pasteten
Und delikat.
Da ist viel Raffinement vonnöten
Und keiner weiss bei den Pasteten,
Was er da hat.
Ich lasse alle Speisen stehen
Bis Schimmelpilze drauf zu sehen,
Dann schneide ich sie kurz und klein
Und rühre sie und spuck hinein
Und mach noch dies und das hinein
Damit die Speisen würzig seien.
Ich hacke sie und backe sie
Garniere sie, verziere sie –
„Pasteten à la Wilhelm Zwo“
Verzehrt der Gast und freut sich so,
Dass sie von höchstem Raffinement
Ein Labsal sind für den Gourment –
Er preist ihn für und für und noch
Den Küchenchef den Meisterkoch –
Ich bin der Koch!
Manch Gast bestellt beim Ober sich,
Recht sorgsam und recht ausführlich
Ein Irishstew auf Führerweis
Und freut sich kindisch auf die Speis.
Wenn ich grad schlechter Laune bin,
Dann schick ich folgendes ihm hin –
Spaghettirest und russisch Borsch
Schütt ich zusammen frank und forsch,
Ein wenig deutsches Lamm hinein
Wird dem Gerichte dienlich sein –
Der Paprika wird nicht gespart
Beim Irishstew auf Führerart –
Der Gast weint leis weil es so scharf
Und er es nicht bemäkeln darf.
Serviert von oben frisst ers doch ––
Ich bin der Koch.
VII. Dicing (Jean-Pierre, 2010s)
VIII. Stirring (Maloof, 2019)
