On Potatoes, Garlic, and the Short Distance Between Guhde and Good

I didn’t know that potato plants grow berries.

That is a slightly embarrassing sentence for someone who, as a child, probably dug more potatoes out of the ground than he could count. My grandfather was a farmer. Potato harvesting meant a family day, although in this particular case “family day” did not mean coffee, cake, and board games. It meant a walk-behind tractor, potato sacks, bent backs, and the unshakable certainty that work was over when the potatoes were out of the ground.

Not when your back decided it had had enough.

Backs did not get a vote in such matters.

I knew potatoes.

Or so I thought.

I knew the potato plants. I certainly knew the tubers underneath. Once, I even put a potato in a flowerpot by the kitchen window, simply to see what would happen. It grew into a surprisingly large and actually rather beautiful plant, until at some point it apparently ran out of strength, enthusiasm, or both. In any case, there was no potato harvest.

But berries?

Never seen them. Never thought about them.

It was only decades later that I learned that potato plants can indeed produce small fruits above ground that look a little like tomatoes. You shouldn’t eat them.

I found that remarkable. As a child, I had dug potatoes, sorted potatoes, carried potatoes, and eaten potatoes. Apparently, the potato had nevertheless decided to keep significant parts of its private life from me.

At the same time, another certainty began to wobble. When I was a child, my mother had told me the story of Frederick the Great having potato fields guarded by soldiers. People distrusted the unfamiliar tuber and wanted nothing to do with it. So Frederick had the fields guarded, whereupon people quite logically concluded: if soldiers are guarding this stuff, it must be valuable. At night, the potatoes were stolen, planted, eaten – problem solved.

A wonderful story.

Unfortunately, the French tell a suspiciously similar one about Antoine Parmentier.

One may be true, the other may be true, neither may be entirely true, or both may have been generously seasoned over the generations. Stories apparently reproduce rather like potatoes: you take a piece from somewhere, plant it somewhere else, and eventually something new grows from it.

You can know potatoes for half a lifetime and still not know everything about potatoes.

People seem to be much the same.

And sometimes so are we ourselves.

For a very long time, I wanted nothing more to do with the farming of my childhood. Too many memories were attached to it that I did not want. Violence, disregard, coercion. From a safe distance, the image of a family day in the potato field sounds more idyllic than it felt at the time. When potatoes had to be dug, potatoes were dug.

The fact that at some point a child might have had enough, or a back might no longer be particularly enthusiastic, did not rank among the relevant agricultural performance indicators.

So I kept my distance.

But in doing so, I had not merely kept my distance from people and violence. Without noticing it, I had also pushed away much of what was connected to them. The farm. The work. The knowledge. As though I could not keep one without letting the other back in.

At first, that was even necessary.

Eventually, though, I discovered that memories have a rather peculiar way of distributing ownership. Things other people taught you eventually belong to you all the same. You do not have to put a halo on someone after the fact simply because you learned from them how to get potatoes out of the ground.

I discovered how much of that knowledge was still there in precisely the place I had never wanted to go.

Pennsylvania.

Tanja wanted to visit her father and suggested flying to the United States for three weeks.

I could understand that. She wanted to see her father. Of course she should see her father.

But me?

What was I supposed to do in the United States for three weeks?

I couldn’t even speak proper English.

Tanja’s father was considerably more relaxed about that.

My English, he said, was better than his German.

He had a point.

And over the course of our conversations, even German words he had not remembered for a long time began to come back to him. So there we were: two people, neither of whom spoke the other’s language perfectly, having conversations anyway.

A positively revolutionary concept in communication.

Before the trip, my mother remarked that no one in our family had ever been so far away.

She was right.

What she could not have known was that at the far end of that distance I would encounter things that felt remarkably familiar.

Tanja’s father lived on a farm. And once I arrived there, one thing seemed perfectly obvious to me: I’m on a farm. I have hands. There is work to be done. So I can help.

Sitting in an armchair watching other people work while I was in possession of two perfectly functional arms did not correspond particularly well with my idea of being a guest.

So I helped.

With the garlic, among other things.

And while I was working, something strange happened.

My hands knew things.

Not necessarily the technical terms for them. My grandfather probably would not have known those either. His knowledge came from experience. You did something a certain way because you knew that way worked. He might not have been able to explain exactly what the plant was doing in botanical terms.

But the processes felt familiar. Observations made sense. Things I had thought I had pushed far away along with my childhood were still there.

Except that suddenly they were no longer connected with coercion.

I helped because I wanted to.

And I enjoyed it.

While harvesting the garlic, I also thought: Pennsylvania does not exactly have an exotic climate. If this works here, surely it ought to work back home too.

Today, garlic grows in my garden.

Not because I had developed some elaborate plan for the transatlantic transfer of agricultural techniques. I had harvested garlic on a farm in Pennsylvania and thought:

I’ll try that too.

It worked.

Sometimes the process of acquiring knowledge really is that simple. The history of science has seen more dignified starting points.

These days, I enjoy gardening. I watch plants grow and flower, some of them bear fruit, animals turn up, insects find food, and somewhere something is almost always happening that I did not plan.

That is precisely what I like about it.

The garden of my childhood looked different. Plants stood where plants were supposed to stand. Preferably in neat rows. The soil between them was expected to be tidy and bare. Anything that grew there without having been explicitly invited had poor prospects.

Today I think: why?

After all, no one walks around in the wild carrying a hoe and informing a plant that its current location has not been approved under the planting plan.

These days, my garden gets a say too.

And so it was the potato, of all things, that brought another part of my past back into the present.

For many years, I had hardly any contacts left in my home village. At some point I helped an acquaintance I knew through the Monday demonstrations against Hartz IV with the garden she was renting. While we were there, we got talking to an organic farmer who had just been harvesting potatoes. A few were still lying around. My acquaintance asked whether she could take them.

She could.

That was how the contact began.

Today I am on his mailing list. Once a year, a message arrives announcing when the potatoes will be harvested. Lots of people gather there, help with the harvest, take potatoes home, and afterwards sit together around a potato fire. People talk, work, and learn from one another.

The organic farmer’s name is Konstantin.

At some point I learned that he had once leased land from my grandfather.

I had no memory of that at all. I knew him only from an old family story. My grandfather was said to have complained that Konstantin would come to pay the rather modest rent, usually bring one of his children along, and then stay to eat.

By my grandfather’s calculations, the meal probably ended up being worth more than the rent.

An economic catastrophe.

They sat down and ate together anyway.

Today I know Konstantin personally, and I know his family as well. He studied agriculture and, while we are harvesting potatoes, can explain things that make me realise how astonishingly little you can still know after half a lifetime, even when you are the grandson of a farmer.

My grandfather had experience. Konstantin has experience too, and can additionally explain to me why certain things work.

And there I am again, standing in a potato field.

Only this time voluntarily.

Afterwards, people sit around the fire.

The potato is the same.

Almost everything else has changed.

The familiar and the foreign have a peculiar relationship anyway. Sometimes you travel thousands of miles in order to recognise something. And sometimes you cannot understand a word at home.

We were curious about the Amish. We knew them mainly from films and documentaries and were therefore prepared to meet people who would seem rather foreign to us.

Then they opened their mouths.

And I understood them.

Not everything, of course. But enough to leave me puzzled.

Shortly before the trip, my mother had remarked that no one in our family had ever travelled so far. I had crossed the Atlantic and travelled thousands of miles from central Hesse.

And there I heard a language in which my Hessian ear recognised something familiar.

Tanja’s father had warned me beforehand that the English spoken in Pennsylvania might have little in common with the English I had learned at school.

Of all people, I should not have been surprised by that.

After all, I speak Hessian better than Standard German myself.

In real life, language only follows textbooks to a limited extent. That is probably one reason textbooks look considerably tidier than real life.

Tanja’s father drove us to an Amish family because he wanted to buy chicken eggs. They also had a shop selling jam and farm products. We went out to the farm for the eggs. While they were being washed, we stood around and looked at everything.

Animals, garden beds, barns, stables. Work clothes and equipment hung from lines.

And one extremely friendly dog had apparently decided that cultural differences were vastly overrated and that being petted followed a universally intelligible order.

I understood him perfectly.

I bought myself a leather hat from the Amish.

A day or two later, we were at a veterans’ hospital with Tanja’s father. We passed a police officer.

“Nice hat, sir!” he said.

I kept walking.

Tanja pointed out that the man had been talking to me.

Of course I had understood every word.

Nice.

Hat.

Sir.

I simply had not realised that he meant me.

Sir?

Me?

Until then, no one had ever called me sir. No one has since, either. In central Hesse, “sir” is not exactly a form of address one encounters in the course of an ordinary day.

So my response came with a slight delay.

And along the way I learned that you can understand every single word in a sentence without understanding that the sentence is addressed to you.

My English really was not particularly good. So I improvised. I looked for synonyms, rebuilt sentences, borrowed words from other languages, used my hands and feet.

And I talked.

In the end, that was the most important lesson.

The biggest mistake is to remain silent for fear of making mistakes.

Of course there were misunderstandings. In that case:

“So what we are talking about?!”

And we started again.

Nobody died. No international treaty collapsed. Usually, it simply turned out that two people had spent five minutes talking about different things.

That could be fixed.

Silence could not.

I had several lovely little conversations in Pennsylvania. Not despite my imperfect English, but because I used it.

Even my Hessian helped.

“Guhde!”

It is a very familiar and friendly Hessian greeting, essentially a dialectal shortening of Guten Tag – “good day.”

Tanja looked slightly puzzled when I greeted people that way at our first Walmart.

But why?

Guhde.

Good.

They are hardly worlds apart. And even if the other person had never heard the word before, a friendly look, a greeting in passing, and the appropriate tone of voice leave relatively little room for interpretation.

Communication is bigger than vocabulary.

I should have known that long before.

As a child, I went to Calabria with my family. Because we were visiting the family of one of my father’s Italian colleagues, I tried to learn some Italian beforehand. I asked for words and sentences and eventually felt sufficiently prepared to go to the bakery by myself in the morning.

I had my sentence.

I had practised it.

I went inside and delivered it.

“Un chilo di panini.” (One kilo of bread rolls.)

About ten rolls.

The woman behind the counter looked at me kindly.

She had understood me.

Triumph.

Then she said something in Italian.

Disaster.

I had not been prepared for this underhanded trick.

I had learned how to say something. The possibility that Italians might then say something back had apparently not been given sufficient consideration in my communication strategy.

My confidence evaporated instantly. Nervously, I reached for the dictionary in my pocket.

The woman started laughing.

Then, in German, she told me not to put myself through all that. They had worked in Dortmund for thirty years.

All she had wanted to know was whether I preferred round or elongated rolls.

That could have taught me a lesson.

Apparently it didn’t.

Years later, Tanja and I travelled to Turkey. Neither of us spoke Turkish.

Not a single word.

I found that unsatisfactory. Surely you ought to be able to say at least hello in the language of a country where you are a guest.

So I looked up the Turkish word.

Merhaba. (Hello.)

I had only ever seen it written down and had never heard a native Turkish speaker say it. So I did what people in such situations have presumably done ever since writing was invented: I looked at the letters and hoped my idea of what they sounded like was not completely absurd.

As a mnemonic, I came up with:

Mehrhaber.

It made sense to my German ear: mehr means “more,” haben means “to have.” Put them together and I had a familiar-sounding German construction that helped me remember the unfamiliar Turkish word.

And off I went.

During our stay near Antalya, I happily used my one Turkish word over and over again. People responded kindly. They greeted me back. The system worked.

Back home, I told Dennis about it.

The word was right, he said.

I had just said it wrong.

Fair enough.

People had understood what I wanted.

I wanted to greet them.

And that had worked.

Had Dennis told me beforehand that he had already been on archaeological digs in Turkey, I could of course have asked him. Especially since he has a pronounced enthusiasm for picking up languages.

But he hadn’t.

So at least “Mehrhaber” got its chance to contribute to international understanding.

In general, communication in Turkey worked better than our knowledge of Turkish would have suggested. The world apparently does not wait for travellers to pass a language exam before allowing them to speak.

Once we walked into a bistro that was not actually open yet. We were served anyway.

Then it turned out that the Turkish owner had lived in Germany for a very long time.

He could not speak Turkish.

He could speak Bavarian.

A Turkish Bavarian.

To communicate with people in Turkey, he in turn relied on a relative to translate for him.

At that point, I really should have abandoned the idea that a person ought to speak a particular language simply because of where they happened to be, where they came from, or whichever other pigeonhole seemed convenient.

I evidently did not abandon it thoroughly enough.

The world is patient. If you fail to understand a lesson the first time, it apparently offers remedial classes.

Our next one took place in Egypt.

Tanja and I were in Hurghada. We did not speak Arabic. At least we learned “La, shukran” (No, thank you), a phrase whose practical value in the face of numerous attempts to sell us things can hardly be overstated.

Fewer tourists did not automatically mean fewer people wanting to sell something. It mainly meant fewer tourists among whom their attention could be distributed.

The man who handled the paperwork for the beach loungers occasionally helped us bring particularly persistent sales conversations to an end.

And he gave us “La, shukran.”

Sometimes international understanding needs only two words.

During a boat trip on the Red Sea, we went scuba diving for the first time. After a short briefing, an Egyptian diving instructor took us down to a coral reef.

We spoke English with him all day.

We did not speak Arabic. He was Egyptian.

English as a common language seemed perfectly obvious.

And it worked.

Only as we were leaving the boat at the end of the day did I hear him talking to another guest.

In German.

He was only in Egypt on holiday himself, he explained. He spent most of the year living in Zurich.

Of course.

We had spent an entire day speaking English in Egypt with a German-speaking Egyptian.

After Calabria and Turkey, I really should have become suspicious whenever a linguistic situation made perfect sense at first glance.

The world clearly did not take my ideas about which language belonged to which person in which place particularly seriously.

And in Hurghada it went one step further and eventually dispensed with language altogether.

We visited a place where Egyptian monuments and works of art were displayed as reproductions.

There stood Nefertiti.

Her posture struck me as peculiar. I looked at her for a while and wondered what that posture expressed.

So I stood the same way.

Not to entertain anyone. I wanted to know what the posture felt like. The body can understand something that merely looking at it cannot reveal.

While I was standing there, an African-American woman approached me.

Could she take a photograph of me?

She could.

Apparently my interpretation of ancient Egyptian body language was convincing enough to be preserved for posterity.

I was not necessarily any closer to understanding Nefertiti, but I had at least achieved the status of a tourist attraction myself.

That counts as progress.

By that point, the word “language” becomes too small for what I mean.

We communicate through words, dialects, and intonation. With hands and feet, glances and postures. We fill in missing words, misunderstand each other, ask questions, and try again. Sometimes we understand every single word and still fail to realise that we are the person being addressed.

Perfection is not required.

Talking is.

The biggest mistake is to remain silent for fear of making mistakes.

Language is not an exam you have to pass before you are allowed to talk to people.

And the world in general seems remarkably unconcerned with whether we have fully understood it before we engage with it.

I thought I knew potatoes.

Then I discovered their berries.

I thought I had left the farming of my childhood behind.

Then my hands remembered in Pennsylvania.

I thought communication depended above all on speaking the right language.

By then I had already learned that you can speak the wrong language and still understand each other – or understand every single word and still fail to realise that someone is talking to you.

You do not have to understand the world completely before you engage with it.

Put a potato in a flowerpot.

Plant garlic in the ground.

Try a foreign word.

Stand like Nefertiti.

Or simply say “Guhde” and see what comes back.

Before our trip to Pennsylvania, my mother had said that no one in our family had ever been so far away.

She was right.

I just had to go there to discover how much of home was already waiting for me.

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