Ancient Bretzel
And khubz and pita and markouk and taboon
The Church of the Holy Spirit is the biggest church in Heidelberg, Germany. You can see it from the Philosophers’ Walk, a path on the opposite banks of the river up a hill, sticking up from the middle of the old town.
The church is 625 years old. It was originally Roman Catholic and is now Protestant, but it has changed denominations more than ten times. For a while, it was also divided so that Catholics and Protestants shared it for worship.
It stands in the market place of the old town.
‘Come, I want to show you something,’ said my friend Anne, heading towards the church.
Just after I arrived in Berlin, someone showed me a cannonball stuck halfway in a church wall about three meters off the ground, a reminder of a siege of the town in 1813.
I was expecting Anne to show me something similar, standing a few meters off and pointing up at something. Instead, she walked right up to the outer walls and started inspecting them close up.
‘Ah, here! Come. Look!’
She pointed at eye-level gouges on the pinkish walls that were in the unmistakable shape of…
…a pretzel.
Not just one. Many. Of different sizes.
This weird vandalism turns out to have been of a commercial nature. The size of Germany’s famous doughy twist would change from time to time, depending, I suppose on harvest success. Officials carved the current standard size (and the year) into the walls around which the market stalls were placed so that customers could hold up their potential purchases to make sure they weren’t being cheated.
As a South African, the word ‘pretzel’ conjures tiny, crunchy bar snacks served the way crisps or nuts are. Apart from their shape, those things (mostly bought in foil bags) have nothing in common with fresh German Bretzels that are dipped in lye before baking to give them that nutty colour.
A fresh Brezel, like most fresh bread, is a thing of simple wonder. The hardness of the crust is exactly right for the proportion of ‘inside’ you get. The few sprinkles of coarse salt stuck to the outside send a little zing through the body when you get to one. Bretzels are an unfussy breakfast with a coffee and a perfect accompaniment to a good beer.
My year of bread
This is my last week of vagabonding* for 2023 and I am counting ‘lasts’ in dough products.
Soon, I will get up and go to the market two blocks away, and buy us our last Bretzels. I had my last börek when we left Croatia in August. My last pierogi was in Warsaw two weeks ago. I had my (first and) last homemade Klöse at my aunt’s house last night. On Sunday we had our (first and) last Kaiserschmarrn, a broken-up pancake with plum compote. Next Monday, before we leave for the airport, I will have my last seeded Kartoffelbrötchen for breakfast.
I seldom eat bread back home because what’s easily available is just not very nice. And, let’s be honest, I have absorbed all the messages about the evils of bread that diet culture has inculcated in me.
This year has restored me to the most ancient staple since agriculture became how we feed ourselves.
Bread is a thing we share across centuries and oceans and cultures and ways of life.
Bread is in prayer. Bread is sometimes god. Bread is hospitality. Bread is alms.
All Bread
Margaret Atwood
All bread is made of wood,
cow dung, packed brown moss,
the bodies of dead animals, the teeth
and backbones, what is left
after the ravens. This dirt
flows through the stems into the grain,
into the arm, nine strokes
of the axe, skin from a tree,
good water which is the first
gift, four hours.
Live burial under a moist cloth,
a silver dish, the row
of white famine bellies
swollen and taut in the oven,
lungfuls of warm breath stopped
in the heat from an old sun.
Good bread has the salt taste
of your hands after nine
strokes of the axe, the salt
taste of your mouth, it smells
of its own small death, of the deaths
before and after.
Lift these ashes
into your mouth, your blood;
to know what you devour
is to consecrate it,
almost. All bread must be broken
so it can be shared. Together
we eat this earth.(You can listen to this poem being read here.)
Except for the pause words give when they hit home, I do not pray. But when I think of Gaza, I think of the prayer that asks in its first line: ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ and asks in its second line 'and deliver us from evil’.
::::: News flash :::::
Every year in January, I do a Reset to focus myself for the new year.
It’s not goal-setting. It’s orientation. Where am I now? Is what I wanted lasted year the same as what I want now?
Founder members of Love Letter are invited to do the 30-day January Self-Reset with me for free.
If you’re already a Founder members, you’re welcome to join in again – or for the first time if you weren’t able to in January this year.
To find out more about January Reset, read Unfrazzle Yourself.
To upgrade to Founder Membership, follow this link or click here:
Wamkelekile! Ndewo! Walang anuman! Wilkommen! Welcome!
I have a whack of new subscribers to Love Letter. You are all so very welcome here.
If you are so inclined, let me know who you are and what you’re reading or listening to right now.
Here are a few things I’ve been doing:
Re-reading some of Sven Nordqvist’s illustrated books about a farmer and his cat. (Don’t use the excuse of not having children in your life to deprive yourself of children’s literature!)
Watching Nyad, in which Annette Bening plays an insufferable woman hellbent on doing something that almost kills her several times. I liked the placid swimming scenes and seeing Jodi Foster acting again. And seeing and hearing older women in hyped movies. Older women are the most interesting people in the world. (It’s a secret you’re let into late in life.)
Watching the movie Tetris about the game I load on my browser when someone calls who I know speaks for long. I enjoyed the movie. Great reminder of how oppressive communism was in Russia.
Reading Free by Lea Ypi. Another reminder of how un-free communism made people. (Yes, I know I recommended it in previous letters, but some people might not have seen it, and it’s worth a third and even fourth punt.)
Reading The Friend by Sigrid Nunez, which is taking long because a) it’s kind of about writers b) it’s kind of about a dog c) it’s kind of about a friendship with a navel-gazing, self-involved man and d) it’s in German, so I keep translating it backwards into English to try to imagine the original words. I get exasperated with the book, mostly for the first three reasons, and then becoming absorbed again.
Sending you love, bread and peace,
K.
PS: Litnet did an interview with me recently about my vagabonding* year. You can read it here.
My love for bread feels so validated, you make my carb intake sound poetic
Oh I'm so glad you've rekindled your love for bread... the European bread nations have bread bred (haha) into the soul of their cuisine. I've been on all the diets that say no grain, no bread. And ultimately I always return to it. For me, good bread is so intrinsically human and yet biblical, it has God baked into it. And how can that be bad for you?