feral child

A bit on the brown side, but all the same, a real Kaesekuchen.

Languages are ghosts, I think. They get under our skin and haunt us, even when we forget them, to this or that degree. It would be overly dramatic and highly inaccurate to say that I am forgetting German, but it’s also true that I have never, despite living in the country for the past six years, obtained the degree of fluency I had in my early twenties when German was my dominant language. For over two years, most of what I spoke, read, dreamt, and heard was German. To the point that English sometimes felt rusty in my mouth and it became difficult to write poetry. Fiction, impossible. That being said, to be fair to myself, my German is quite good. I have achieved level C1, which is considered one level below native speaker. And though it’s true that there are certain emotional situations in which I have trouble expressing myself, for example if the person I am communicating with is a native speaker who is displaying impatience or disapproval, I am articulate and often even grammatically correct when I speak. That being said, German is a gendered language with a case system, so I am always going to make mistakes. The mistakes do not trouble me. What does trouble me is that I might be chasing ghosts.

I am four or five, staring at myself in the bathroom mirror, enamored of my new ability to say guten Morgen, Mutti, fascinated by my growing comprehension that there exist in other places entire systems of communication that are separate from my own. For everything I can say, there is another way to say it. A way that is strange to me, but could, theoretically, be learned. There are even people like my mother and her parents who can communicate in more than one language. My mind is blowing up with this thought. My mind is overcome. One person is like two people saying this word guten and this word good. For the next ten years, my knowledge of German remains hopelessly rudimentary, but then I start high school and choose German as my foreign language, and my level of ability transforms into rudimentary with the promise of more. More turns into true fluency gained during a college semester abroad and then a lifeline in a several year stay in the country after college during which I work a variety of jobs, but, importantly, have a German boyfriend. Pillow talk is the best teacher.

The ghost I am chasing is the emotional life I once lived, but I don’t know why I’m chasing that, because what I feel about this or that, that or this, has changed an awful lot since I was in my early twenties. Then I was full of wonder, but that wonder somehow got baked into the German I spoke, and I suppose I assumed I would live here forever, but the boyfriend situation blew up in my face and I fled. Now I am married to an American who, though conversationally fluent in German at this point, mostly relates to the language of our adapted homeland with a sense of frustration, and so the ghost of wonder, and related to that, the ghost of life starting out, full of possibilities, are feelings that live in my blood alone. That’s lonely sometimes, to be the subject of a solitary haunting, so one night I convince him to watch Tatort with me, and it feels good, to be existing in German with him, but then it turns out that he hates watching TV in German, because he’s sick and tired of German from his work week, so I’m back where I started. I have an entire emotional life and identity in German, one I’m not really sharing with anyone right now, my social interactions having shrank so much in the past year due to pandemic-related lockdowns, that sometimes I think I might also always be a secret person. I don’t want to be a secret person, though, which is why I end up looking around online for a German cookbook to order, preferably one that is mostly desserts. Traditional German cooking is nothing to write home about, especially if you enjoy flavorful food, but on the other hand, Germany has a strong baking tradition and my spouse and I are both of the opinion that German desserts can be downright extraordinary. This, I decide, is something German we can share. I settle on Classic German Baking by Luisa Weiss because it includes a few savory items, for example the German version of a leek quiche, which actually is pretty good, and recipes for different types of Brötchen, which may come in handy if we ever move back to the US and they aren’t so readily available.

The first thing I make is a traditional bottomless cheese cake, Käsekuchen, which in Germany is made with neither Philadelphia nor ricotta, but with quark. Quark, at least the kind that is forty percent fat, is wonderfully thick and tastes and looks a lot like sour cream. I have never so much as tasted a real German Käsekuchen before, so maybe it’s strange that this exact thing would be what I start with, but I choose the recipe because it, being bottomless, does not involve in any way shape or form what I often refer to as dough sports and more generally, looks pretty easy to make. (My dough game has actually gotten a lot better since I started mucking around with flour, in that I make great tortillas and pita, and once even naan, but the ability to produce a passable desert crust eludes me. Batter, on the other hand, is not something I’ve ever had a problem with.) As it turns out, the cheesecake is easy to make, and fun, and doesn’t create any kind of volcanic explosions in the kitchen, making clean-up a complete non-headache. One disaster comes close to occurring nonetheless, in that I almost forget to mix the semolina-baking powder mixture into the wet ingredients, but in the end I remember. I taste the results and am pleased. Light, sweet, lemony as the result of both zest and juice, and the batter also includes raisins, which I learn from the recipe, are controversial in terms of what the average German thinks belongs in a cheesecake. I like raisins though. I put the raisins in. As it happens, my first Käsekuchen ends up being delicious. In terms of where it fits on the international cheesecake scale, it is probably not too far away from a traditional Sicilian ricotta cheesecake. One thing it is for sure is blessedly nothing like a New York cheesecake. I do not like New York cheesecakes, but agree that the first bite is always absolutely decadent and delicious. The problem comes more in finishing the piece, something I never fail to regret because of how awfully over-full I usually feel afterwards.

The food we eat, like the languages we speak, also takes on an emotional life, though because of the term ‘emotional eating’ or the phrase ‘eat my emotions’ this can bear negative connotations. But of course it need not. This will naturally come as no surprise to anyone who has ever straddled multiple cultures. The way I look at is is: If I am to be a secret person, I will be the kind of person who bakes cakes that are not secret. In that in every bite of finished cake, or before that, in the thick fluidity of the batter I mix in the bowl, I will let a little bit of my secret out. To share. I am always, also, this other person. Fork, digging in. I exist in always two strata at once. Crumbs picked from the plate. When it comes down to it, cake itself, the act of eating it, is quite a German thing. Just think of Kaffee und Kuchen, or of those recurring vintage Mike Myers SNL Kaffeeklatsch skits. Before the pandemic, when we used to go outside and visit cafes on weekend afternoons, coffee and a shared piece of cake or tort were something that my spouse and I would occasionally indulge in. The pandemic has changed so much. I almost never speak German anymore, though I read as much as I ever have, and sometimes write creatively in it, and listen to podcasts. I wonder if a language, once in our blood, can ever become a curse, in that it consigns us to always be looking for home. It is just this morning when I am mulling this all over that I learn that I have been mixing up two very similar sounding words for years. What strikes me as a result is that perhaps, at the very least, a language, like a home, is a project that can not always be finished.