Gemüsings; or, why root vegetables rule history

(Gemüse, das: [noun, neutral] Plants whose various parts can be eaten either raw or cooked. See also junges Gemüse, lit. "young vegetables": young people with no experience of life)

The Teltow Turnip - washed (Source: Wikipedia)

The Teltow Turnip - unwashed

I love new things, new people, new places, new ideas in particular. But Mel and I also love everyday life. Especially the daily celebrations of life that arise in the strangest places and amongst the strangest things or are simply planned to be enjoyable.  Like boat trips for example. Or returning again and again to one's favourite cafe. Or visiting Ikea. Or vegetable festivals...

This autumn has been an eye-opener. Alongside art festivals and photography exhibitions, new books and new music, we've realised that in and around Berlin, people are nursing a secret passion. Wherever we've looked, we've been confronted with advertisements for vegetables. Pumpkin festivals (with a Champion Pumpkin Carver from America and a giant eagle made of pumpkins). Apple days. Harvest Festival Fruit and Vegetable Celebration days. And our favourite so far: the Teltow Turnip Festival. Yes, Teltow, the unassuming town that lies to the south of our canal, was once singled out by cultural luminaries like Goethe and Kant to provide them with their favourite delicacy, the Teltow Turnip, or '"Teltower Rübchen".

But what is it? From the pictures we saw in the Tourist Information Office, we couldn't make out exactly what vegetable this was referring to. We'd already encountered the local fascination with root veg in our previous incarnation in Berlin, with Mel excitedly returning from a shopping trip to say she had bought "Wurzelbrot" – bread made of carrots, turnips and potatoes. Mel's upbringing in Lincolnshire and family obsession with Worzel Gummidge suddenly clicked in her mind: "That's why we have mangelwurzels!" But I don't think we'd ever come across a King and Queen of the Turnips before...

I have now learned that the Teltow Turnip (Brassica rapa L. subsp. rapa f. teltowiensis, according to Wikipedia; see also http://www.teltower-ruebchen.com/de/teltower_ruebchen ) has a special history all of its own. Introduced by Frederick the Great to Brandenburg in the eighteenth century, after he had learned of them from an English farmer, they were grown and sent abroad in barrels of sand (for Brandenburg and Berlin are built on sand – I can't help feeling this is appropriate...). They were also eaten en masse by the peasants, a poor people's food, easy and cheap to produce. DDR officials, however, insisted on mass-production along Soviet lines, and the Teltow Turnip could not keep up. Since reunification, therefore, it's become a symbol, to Teltowers, of a way of life - more regional, more local - that they perhaps wish they could have kept. The name of the turnip was patented in 1994, an Appreciation Society founded in 1998, and smallholdings and farms have been producing them again for local restaurants, while the Tourist Board has produced a whole array of merchandise to go with them, which Mel eagerly pounces upon: "I've got to have a turnip keyring!"

So a Turnip Festival seems only logical in the general regenerative mood of things around here, and the Teltowers have entered into it with gusto. We decide to join them, and on a stiflingly hot Sunday afternoon, we make our way through post-industrial landscapes of abandoned factories and mysterious concrete estates behind wire fencing – and one refugee home, set down in the middle of this alienating world – to eventually join the troops of people wandering down towards the Ruhlsdorfer Pond, which is where the festival is being held. The crowd is buzzing and a market has been set up that reaches all the way around the park; at the end of the market is a large stage with the empty carriage of the Turnip Royal Couple, in the shape of a giant turnip. Sadly we have missed their entrance, but there is still lots to see: award-winning cheesecake, a man who farms bees so that children can learn about honey-making (he had brought a selection of bees), a children's dance about harvesting the turnips, and of course, the turnips themselves. A huge queue stretches out from the vegetable stall. The woman who represents the Appreciation Society hands me a leaflet and urges me not to delay: "There aren't many turnips this year, the weather's been too dry." So I queue up too, and am rewarded by a bag of very muddy, very dusty small vegetables that do in fact resemble the one on Mel's keyring....Once home, and after about six washings to remove the mud – which sticks darkly to the bottom of the sink, refusing to be washed away – the cooked turnips turn out to be sweet, warming and faintly tart, more like radishes than parsnips or potatoes, and we agree that Goethe and Kant were not wrong.

How to get around without a car in Teltow

Vegetables and history: two things in life that cannot be avoided. I can't possibly tell my hip friends in Berlin that we have been visiting the local turnip festival, I think. "Isn't it run by neonazis?" they would say. Possibly, this is true, but I think not; at least not entirely. History here is complicated, politics even more so. Not everyone in Brandenburg votes for the right-wing, worse-than-UKIP Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), while quite a few people in Neukölln have just done so.

I think my friends mean that it's a typically fascist thing to want to resurrect local traditions - to revert to a nebulous German "identity" - in the attempt to ward off the big bad world outside. But I wonder if there is more to it than this. I too distrust the word "identity", and anyway, no-one, whether from Teltow or Torremolinos, should base their identity on a turnip. But maybe a less harmful word is local. Everyone is local to somewhere; and only people who are actually there, wherever they come from originally, can be local and contribute to a place. Local things so often go under, disappear; the signs of history can be covered over and hidden under a vast garden centre or a billboard. Competing ideologies, dictatorships and money can make it hard to keep track of your history. So while in Somerset, I might well have distrusted a celebration of root vegetables, here history is  somewhat more complicated. As even a turnip will tell you.

Me and my turnip