Late Victorian Exercise, the Viktoriapark, Etc.

Earlier today, as part of the Edwardian experiment, I went through an exercise routine that early bodybuilder Eugen Sandow published in 1894. For ladies, he suggests 4 pound weights in one of his later books, but after rummaging around the pantry, I used two 1-kilo bags of sugar instead. His expectations of women's fitness don't seem high by contemporary standards: the first round was pretty easy - except the 10 push-ups with resistance bands, which even without resistance bands rather defeated me because I didn't modify by doing them on my knees. And ladies were exempted from the squat exercise. (Also, I cheered internally when he described sit-ups where one wedges one's feet beneath a weight or piece of furniture; since I'm terrible at these, it's my favourite 'technique.') But of course I could increase the weights, and he has planned out how ladies can increase repetitions over time.

I didn't do this in the Saturday time slot that is usually devoted to all things time-travelling, because it required reading an e-book.

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Yesterday I went to the market hall in Kreuzberg again. It had a ghostlier air about it than ever, probably due to the coronavirus and due to the uncertain weather with the promise of rain and wind to come.

The leafy trees, the blue sky and fluffy clouds and sunshine, and the dandelions (the seedheads already white amongst the lush green grasses and the remaining yellow flowers), however, were quite beautiful. Visitors to the Viktoriapark were photographing the pink tree flower petals that were floating on the dark pools, the waterways were rushing along their landscaped channels — some with coppery-orange beds that showed up brightly against the darker rock, and cottonwood fluff lay in snowy drifts in the grass and tumbled along the path in free-form pillows at one point. The lilacs were blossoming, scentless at midday — the hawthorn trees too... but I felt the scene was uncannily empty.

Earlier, we had our breakfast in which I'd copied an Edwardian menu —

Coffee

Tea

Hot and cold milk

Bread

Toast

Butter

Boiled eggs

Cold ham

Sardine toast

Strawberries or other fresh seasonal fruit

I had done calf raise exercises for 5 minutes while waiting for the food to finish. But I admittedly fudged them after the first minute and a half. This exercising was recommended in an early 1900s ladies' magazine issue, which failed to specify if there should be sets of repetitions with breaks in between or just 5 straight minutes of rising on one's tippy-toes. Either way, to me it seemed like a quick way to get bad muscle cramps, the kind of exercise that leaves you incapable of any other exercise. But although I did feel it today, it wasn't as bad as I'd feared - maybe because I had fudged it.

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For dinner the menu was Irish-influenced. I baked dark soda bread from a mixture of whole grain and plain flour, Ge. brewed black tea to drink with it, and I boiled cauliflower with carrots, made 'champ' from mashed potatoes and milk and green onion, and cut up fennel bulb and made a vinaigrette for a salad. Of course I regretted not tracking down a few bottles of Guinness beer.

Teatime was similar to all the other teatimes we've had the past few weeks: Scones, blueberries, lemon curd, whipped cream, and nettle-and-fennel tea. This time I added brown sugar cookies that I'd made earlier in the week and saved up for Saturday in a cookie tin.

Supper I didn't get around to at all — and richer Edwardian food does tend to make it harder to sleep if eaten too late in the day anyway.

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Afterward I spent 20 minutes on a contour drawing of a flower pot, per the instructions from The Natural Way to Draw. And in the afternoon I'd played the piano — Edvard Grieg died toward the end of the first decade of the 20th century, and so I played the morning part of the Peer Gynt Suite in his honour. Besides, the Beethoven sonata project has resumed, and I've reached "Les Adieux." Besides I'd read Beatrix Potter's Tale of two Bad Mice.

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Altogether the experiment felt too trivial this week, however, and that was why I stopped early. Uncle Pu telephoned us during our breakfast, telling us that our aunt K. had died. I was thinking about them both while I was walking around in Kreuzberg, because that neighbourhood is where they started out their lives together.

Dining in May/1907

Before moving on to the Edwardian Age, I wanted to add an anecdote I remembered yesterday about Angi. I was housesitting in the countryside, feeling intimidated not just because I was far away from my family and other comforts of the Berlin apartment, but also because at different times I was told e.g. about organized house burglars roaming the neighbourhood and preying on large houses, a ferret that might run around on the floor above and making creepy noises, etc. She happened to telephone and was sympathetic when I mentioned that it was a little lonely; and after a moment's thought added (in German, and I'm paraphrasing), 'Well, there's always alcohol.' It was quite funny, especially since I didn't expect the joke, and cheered me up.

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Last week at work left me squeezed out of energy like last season's orange, and I was writing about it late into the night so that I went to sleep too late and too unhappy. To be annoyingly vague and self-righteous-sounding: I've been reminding myself that if I rely on my surroundings to stay morally pure, I'm never really going to learn to stand up for what feels right to me. And if I stand up for it to the best of my ability, it is no reflection on me if the opposite still happens. I did my duty toward the other person by showing what might be a better course, honestly and directly; and it is not up to me to dictate their actions.

It was nearly noon when I woke up and went to the kitchen. The others had eaten breakfast and I decided to begin cleaning. There has to be a quicker way to scrub the floor; it ended up taking over twenty minutes. But it did look cleaner! And, unwisely, I forgot to eat breakfast. A croissant with my name on it was languishing in the bag uneaten, while my nerves figuratively pulled thinner and thinner.

Then I went to the market, and remembered belatedly a Greek colleague's sage advice to beware the fact that two-thirds of Berlin might be in the streets today to enjoy the return of sunny weather. The shopping streets and the market itself were crowded, and a few market stalls were wiped almost clean, harassed-looking attendants surveying their largely empty bins. It was also a little warmer than I'd like. Another argument for going to the market earlier in the morning.

It looks like asparagus season is beginning: white asparagus and green asparagus; 'local' Beelitz asparagus from Brandenburg and other asparagus from further afield. But they were well balanced by the usual produce instead of forming a massive, uniform wall.

Returning home, I picked up a bunch of orange tulips from the flower shop. And then before lunch, I took the unfortunately uncharacteristic step of taking out our empty jars and a big bag of compost to dispose of them in the courtyard. I feel a little less than intellectually brilliant for being so enthralled by the holes with black flexible flaps that were sunk on two sides of the dumpster lids, to make it easier to dispose of glass jars.

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Dinner (a little pretentious this week, maybe?):

Mushroom soup

With Kräutersaitling mushrooms and a roux with beef bouillon

Boiled potatoes

Seasonal salad

Spinach, red-and-white icicle radishes, frisée salad, cucumber, and fresh dill,

with simple vinaigrette

Eggs, garnished

Egg halves filled with an egg yolk, cream cheese, crème fraîche and paprika mixture

Bread

*

I had a nap right after this. My brain was still spinning with workplace thoughts as they had during my walks to and from the market. But I felt a whole lot better later, and the traces of tension and the budding headache melted away.

Teatime was scones, lemon curd, blueberries from the market, nettle tea flavoured with fennel, and substitute coffee; brown bread sandwiches made from the leftover egg filling and cucumber slices and dill; and leftover salad.

Afterward I spent most of the evening finishing last month's Elle Germany. The recommendation of a 3,000 Euro leather powder-blush carrying-case shocked me, but I managed to surmount the rage. I was mostly reading it because a new issue arrived today. I thought about doing more art and sketching something instead, but ... Anyway, after that was done, and I'd read more of an essay in Apartheid, I returned to the 21st century before midnight.

Hopefully next week the trip to 1908 will be more experimental. 1906 was nice but 'nothing to write home about'; and I feel like my imagination is letting me down.

Farewell to Angi

It feels irresponsible to write about a woman I barely knew, in a way. But last week one of my father's cousins was buried, and I'd like to pay tribute.

The first time I remember meeting her at length was at her and her husband's apartment in western Berlin. On a quiet street off one of the main thoroughfares of the city during the Cold War, they were on the first floor above ground level, in an 'Altbau' that predated the Second World War and likely the 20th century altogether. It had a little balcony off the dining room, and indoors older wooden furniture, glass, and china sets. My uncle Pu and I sat together with Angi and her husband, in a living room set away from the street.

Angi tended to the family legacy in part (the legacy being for example a social role in the pre-1930s Berlin, and devotion to music). But it felt to me like there was little 'chauvinism' or clannishness about her approach; it was a responsibility like others, and one that fell to her also by default as an eldest daughter. Altogether I did not feel evaluated as a member of the clan. And I also felt that if I went to a restaurant with her, she would not ignore or be rude to the waiters out of a sense of her social status.

At any rate, during this meeting, as far as I remember, we discussed the new German spelling rules introduced in the 1990s, family gossip, and so on and so forth. And at the end Angi took me into a room beside the entrance, with books neatly shelved from floor to ceiling, to try to figure out which German author she could recommend for me to read who'd write in a fairly contemporary style. When I said that I tended to avoid depressing books because life was depressing enough, she didn't insinuate that I was overdramatic or fail to understand, and instead agreed wholeheartedly. In the end she recommended Max Frisch.

In 2006 and later, I felt that our family fit in awkwardly to my grandparents' and parents' circles from the 1980s or earlier. (We were pretty bohemian. Relatives would tentatively ring our doorbell around midnight, then come in and stay to chat, knowing that we were bound to be awake, for example...)

But she and her husband were, in their dry but friendly way, accepting. And when my father died, one of the things that comforted me was remembering how they and others had shown up unexpectedly at our apartment to help celebrate in honour of his 60th birthday.