I have never really believed in the Russian soul. First, because it needs to be watered with a litre of vodka before it blossoms (like those Fertiggerichte which say: just add boiling water, and stir). And second because this mysterious source of Russian genius seems only to flourish in conditions of absolute unhappiness in war, in exile, under crushing censorship. What kind of soul is that, so caged by the world?

            I am, on the other hand, a great fan of Kefir, the sour milk that tastes ever so slightly of alcohol. It must be the reason why Russian country women live so long.

            There is, however, a problem. My local Mema which was once charmingly shabby, frayed at the edges like the jacket of a university teacher, has been modernised. This means: brown parquet floors, cheerful red plastic shopping baskets, staff rotated from other shops so that they cannot learn the names of the customers (and thus be found guilty of fraternising with the enemy). The shop is open now until ten o’clock in the evening – meaning you can watch Günther Jauch and still go out later to buy toilet paper – but the people at the cash desk find that the bar-codes no longer work. After five minutes of swiping, they hold up the packet and shout “What do the tampons cost?” Then they have to get up because apart from the bored security guard there is no other employee in the shop. As a result, at five to ten at night, a pointless queue starts to from. The prices have gone up too, of course.

            And products have started to disappear from the shelves. No more dry food for days (the packets take up too much space), no razorblades, no light bulbs, no Weetabix to help the morning digestion and, yes, only one kind of Kefir. Watery stuff from Bavaria that might as well be fed to hamsters.

            Naturally, then, one starts to shop in Charlottenburg, in the Kantstraße. The street has been under temporary Russian occupation for as long as I can remember, starting with the Russian bookshop near the Amtsgericht and moving slowly eastwards, taking in import-export companies and tailors from Sverdlovsk. Now though the Russian food supermarkets are springing up everywhere. The Rossiya fruit shop under the Charlottenburg S-Bahn bridge has been expanded to include a pelmeni and piroggi bar; on Lewishamstraße a … food store, on the Kantstraße, the Prisma is now a Russian outpost and Die Marone on Kaiser-Friedrich/Kant is doing a good trade in live carp. It is as if there is a sign in the middle of Stutti announcing: “You are now leaving the Russian sector.” After Stutti, China begins; the Asian shops take over.

            Where do all the Russian customers come from? Official statistics show that there are barely 15,000 Russians officially registered in Berlin, but there are 300,000 people for whom Russian is the first language. They must include the ethnic Germans and Jews who have been given German citizenship. But 300,000? That is about the number of Russians in Berlin during the 1920s when Maxim Gorki and Vladimir Nabokov lived here, when Berlin was the biggest Russian community between Paris and Moscow. Could it be that a new Berlin-Russian identity is beginning to take shape?

            In Prisma I meet the husband of a friend. His wife has gone to see her mother for a week in St Petersburg, so he is buying survival rations: instant pork noodles (“You don’t have to wash up, that’s why they’re so good – you can relax, eat, relax, no guilt”), some Kasza, a bottle of Stalinskaya vodka, a book by Dr Gennadi Malachov on urine-therapy (a glass a day, that’s all your immune system needs”) and, yes, Kefir. The shop is a strange mixture, of Russian, of the Moscow classic “Liebe, Lust und Frust 2”, a microcosm of émigré needs; the DVDs, the self-help books, the floral oil paintings used to cover up damp patches on rented apartments, Atlantic herring, a notice-board offering the services of Russian divorce lawyers. In the background Russian radio blares out. This is not just Russia; it is provincial Russia, Krasnoyarsk perhaps, circa 1993, and at the same time a shop that is booming in the centre of Berlin 2009.

            “Maybe it’s the Ossis,” I suggest to Dima, for that is the name of the husband of a friend of my friend. “Maybe the only district they feel at home in is Charlottengrad and it’s post-soviet eclecticism.”

            “Don’t kid yourself,” he says, as we pay the Siberian cashier. “The Ossis hate us as much as the others. Russophobia is in Berlin’s DNA.”

            “What about Markus Wolf?” I say, groping around for fans of the steppe.

            “Dead.” And, of course, he had a point.

            “The Germans you see in Prisma,” pants Dima (he is a dentist and they tend to be unfit), “they’re the ones who are convinced that the Russian diet is the healthiest in the world.”

            ”The medicinal glass of urine?”

            “And the fish, and the low-fat cheese, and the melons, and the dark bread. Some Germans think we are a toxic nation, but the clever ones – they can see we are doing things right. Nowadays we’re not so proud of our writers – who reads that stuff – as our rybnyi piroq, the fish piroggi. That’s what will make the world love us again.”

            “Again?” I asked. But at least I had my Kefir. Later it gave me stomach cramps. I will get some more on Monday and try again. That is what Russian history teaches us: never give up.

Dieser Artikel wurde am Donnerstag, 20. August 2009 um 13:55 veröffentlicht und ist abgelegt unter Typisch deutsch. Du kannst die Antworten zu diesem Artikel mit Hilfe des RSS 2.0 Feeds verfolgen. Du kannst eine Antwort hinterlassen oder einen Trackback von deiner Seite aus senden.