1981 and 1700: Two Historical Experiments

Friday and today I took the day off from work, although at least from the most selfish perspective perhaps two weeks would have been better.

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On Friday I 'celebrated' the year 1981. After I went to the supermarket for an unconscientious shopping trip, we prepared grilled cheese sandwiches using our panini grill in honour of toasties.

In the evening, I cooked a Canadian Thanksgiving meal belatedly: roast chicken with bread stuffing, potatoes mashed with celeriac, cranberry sauce, apple sauce, and steamed Brussels sprouts. T. joined us for the meal, although Gi. stayed in Brandenburg.

The apple sauce was likely the worst I've made. But it used fresh apples from the allotment gardens, as well as a quince wrapped in a cloth separately so that the stones in the flesh wouldn't end up in the sauce.

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On Saturday, because I've grown a little bored of reenacting modern times, I inaugurated a new 1700 to 1900 historical experiment that will run in parallel with the end of the 1900 to 2022 experiment.

The biggest challenge for me was avoiding looking at anachronistic electric clocks. But attempting to hear church bells over the city traffic to tell time on a Saturday, when there's still a lot of traffic, would probably only work when I'm outdoors. Perhaps I need to set up a sundial on my windowsill. (But I'd also like an excuse to visit old churches in Berlin that predate the modern period.)

For hygiene I'm substituting modern practices. There is a public water pump from the early 20th or late 19th century in a side street near the family apartment, fancy and operational, but the warning sign on it clearly indicates that the water isn't for drinking. I definitely won't recreate bathroom amenities that predate the late 19th/20th centuries.

Also I knew that it would make me cranky during the following work week if I woke up as early as people generally did in 1700, so I woke up past 9 a.m.

The period-appropriate breakfast was quite dreadful. That might be due to my misunderstanding the recipe, which was adapted from a Swabian recipe in the Baroque period. It was a soup of toasted wheat kernels, — which were supposed to be shredded but I just pounded them with the stem end of the spoon — scattered into salted water, left to swell, and then topped with onions that had been fried in drippings. It tasted like oily water from the bottom of a pot of burned popcorn. It felt indigestible. (Confession time: rather than fire up that old wood-burning stove that is so easy to find in Berlin, I went with a modern gas oven instead.)

For lunch, I invited out the family to a real Swabian restaurant in the neighbourhood. We ate spätzle and drank beer from the tap, and had two large Kaiserschmarren pancakes for dessert. Eating al fresco in the warm autumn air with sunshine around us was lovely.

Afterward I went shopping for Sauerkraut, beer and butter, but didn't have the patience to go to the market.

I played a few pieces (17th-century hymns and Purcell) on the harpsichord that was loaned to us years ago from a family friend; read another two pages of Cervantes's Don Quixote; read the introduction to an anthology of post-Civil-War English literature; and read two medieval poems in Latin with a German verse translation opposite. Technically I could have also done needlework.

Altogether, through research and imagination, I am getting a feeling for how my part of the city might have been like 300 years ago.

But many things are driving me crazy about the time period and the 1980s are pure luxury in comparison. For example:

1. The stronger role of religion in daily life.

2. The lack of modern bathroom amenities and laundry facilities.

3. Low literacy levels?

4. High poverty rates — according to one secondary source I read, a town in Swabia might consist 30% of people who were too poor to survive without food handouts from their local aristocrat.

5. Even Bach and Scarlatti were young in 1700 — too young to have published any music yet. Not only is the musical scene a comparative wasteland, but the harpsichord also doesn't have the same richness and variety of sound as a modern grand piano. (Although I can learn to play the recorder, guitar, or flute on this occasion.) Also, the harpsichord had a key that is wildly out of tune, but I decided to keep it out of tune for the sake of authenticity...

What I do like is that 1700 feels more sociable. For example, if I understand correctly, one would actually need to go to a coffee house, surrounded by people, to lay hands on a newspaper or on coffee: no anti-social consumption in solitude at home except perhaps for the very rich.

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Yesterday the siblings and I cycled to Tempelhofer Feld. It's definitely the decline of autumn, the leaves on the trees very deeply yellow and red and brown, leaning toward the latter end of the spectrum. But the field was well visited, having much the air of a 19th-century impressionist urban people-scape, and a smattering of kites flew in the sky.

In general, at home, I've been playing more music. Beethoven's piano concerto No. 3, Schumann's famous quintet (piano part), etc. — I'm exploring longer works again and I guess putting to good use the impulse I've had lately: to return to familiar things for comfort as work seems to bring nothing but grief, and I feel too emotionally fragile to put more pressure on my brain by reading modern literary fiction or non-fiction. I suspect that the moral pressure to save gas is also quenching the joy I'd take in cooking.