There is a whisky festival in Berlin, and Jan Hinrichsen and I drove the six hours to get there from Fohr Island.
Up at 5:00 am, through the dark back roads on the island to the ferry, which is a rather bright, cheerful place. Half the main passenger deck was a huge café with booths looking out at the passing sea.
The ferry ride would be much shorter except for the serpentine route they take to avoid the low sand banks.
Then, almost five hours through the northern German countryside.
When an American thinks about Germany, they probably don’t think about farmlands.
Lots of farms.
Lots of corn.
It’s got that Iowa vibe, but a bit more rolling.
So Berlin.
East Berlin, to be exact.
The whisky festival is in the Kopenicker section of East Berlin, and this is my first time in East Berlin.
The last time I was in Germany, the Berlin Wall was still standing, and this place would have been in another universe.
When we arrived, we found the festival grounds and walked a few blocks to meet Jan’s friends at an Italian restaurant.
When you walk around Berlin, you see a mix of old and new.
The old got lucky.
The new, not so much.
If you look at photos of Berlin circa 1945, much of it is rubble. It was a shining jewel of a city until the Allies made their way to exact revenge for a brutal war.
Berlin took the hit and came crumbling down.
Now, almost 80 years later, if you just landed here from another planet, you’d never realize what happened here.
But… There are hints.
On the walk to the restaurant, a corner was fenced off, once home to a building, but now it was just rough stone and brick fragments and big weeds.
Pretty safe to assume it was blown to rubble and just never got rebuilt.
Further down the street was an astounding building. It was a Florentine monumental Doge palace or possibly a cathedral or who-knows-what.
The architecture was perplexing, but it was a whole city block with a grand entrance opening diagonally onto the corner.
And there was a bride and groom, along with a gaggle of well-wishers, on the steps, taking photos in that grand entrance.
My companions explained to me that it was basically a city hall, and you could get married, justice of the peace style.
There was a bronze statue standing on the sidewalk next to the steps in a WWI uniform and a huge mustache, and Thomas explained that it was a real shoemaker who bought a high-ranking military uniform and pretended to be an officer to pull himself out of poverty. The story was turned into a popular play and led to his likeness with a grand mustache standing there on the sidewalk, watching newlywed couples pose for pictures.
So, happening upon a wedding is always a bit of fresh sunshine.
Weddings are one of those rare, life-affirming moments that give you hope for humanity.
The Italian restaurant was across the street and our companions were already eating. We joined them.
Restaurants are one of the great mysteries on this planet.
You can walk in and feel instantly at home or hate the place.
It’s not about the food.
It’s about the place.
Sure, the food helps, but the place, at least for me, has to be right.
This place was right. Tall ceilings, maybe 15 ft. Not a huge space, but an open space. Tall windows full of plants, the floor and walls were all tile in patterns, maybe a dozen tables with outside tables looking across the street to the Florentine Chapel/City Hall lucky building.
I felt at home right away.
It had history.
Gravitas. The one server/waiter/owner made you feel like he’s known you all your life and used to take your father out for beers.
He was full of joy and was happy you’d come into his world for a meal.
I had a beer, a foot tall. Why not. And even though it was an “authentic” Italian restaurant, I had the pork schnitzel with mushroom sauce and microwaved, frozen vegetables and fries.
It sounds like I’m whining about the vegetables, but I’m not. The rest of the meal was steaming hot and delicious.
The place.
The tall beer.
The hot food.
And then the wedding party.
They all came in and sat at a long table next to us.
The bride still had a white veil over her eyes.
The groom was wet. It’d just started to rain as we sat outside, so we scooted to our table inside.
His rayon rental suit was wrinkling on the back from the raindrops.
The bride was full of life.
They were both maybe early thirties and probably a first marriage, and were happy to find someone to spend a life with.
The rest of the friends and family, maybe a dozen people, were talkative and happy to be part of a celebration.
It occurred to me that this was one of those memorable human kismet moments that one has to remember. I started writing this in my head just then, taking mental notes of the counter and the waiter and the wood paneling between the tile walls and the happy plants in the tall windows and the rec and white checked tablecloths with diagonal white plastic inserts so the waiter could use a hand broom to sweep off crumbs for the next diner.
This moment of a great meal, a tall beer, a time-patinaed Italian restaurant with a great German schnitzel and a happy, freshly married couple coupled with an upcoming whisky festival was a joy.
To somehow end up in East Germany forty years after a brutal experiment in human control came to a crashing end, and to accidentally fall into a random bit of joy gives you reason to get up every day.
The news is always bad and daily getting worse for no actual reason. Every so often in our existence, lousy people convince good people to join them in their lousiness.
Now is one of those times, and they can be brutal and long but they always end at some point. Being in East Berlin is a modern Ground Zero example of that. Lousy people convinced good people to either become lousy or convince them it’s too late to stop too many lousy people from taking over.
But this moment. This exact moment washed all that lousy away.
A happy bride in a white dress, a bit too tight. A wet and wrinkled groom. Hot schnitzel. Cold, crisp German beer. Frolicking plants in tall windows. A waiter who has known you all your life.
These things matter, so that’s why you get up off the couch and go places and hope you stumble into something like this and take the time to paint a picture of it for later.
