Experiencing everyday life in another culture places your own in stark relief. Assumptions stand revealed, often by utterly minor objects and events. Consider, for instance, bananas. Bananas? We Americans take them for granted, we even trivialize them—playing second banana, being driven bananas, going bananas, and on and on. But not so in Germany. To Germans, bananas are not such a light-hearted matter. As one well-known Cologne artist who has stenciled his Andy Warhol–style, Day- Glo bananas on the outer walls of hundreds of art galleries has proclaimed: “Bananas are almost a holy object in Germany.” Banana-crazed Germans, joked Der Stern in 1992, are “the apes of the EC.” These exaggerations warrant our attention. For bananas are an impossibly overdetermined symbol in Germany, signifying justice, national self-determination, cultural pride, deprivation, prosperity, communist tyranny, capitalist luxury, unity, and economic and even sexual freedom. The banana occupies a special place in Germany’s national psyche and in the history of German re-education, given its role in both early postwar reconstruction and recent reunification. Let us therefore examine that role at some length here, for it turns out that “banana politics” bears revealingly, if unexpectedly and often amusingly, on the issues of German identity and German re-education—and reflects Teutonic tensions both within and outside reunited Germany. Ever since hunger overtook war-torn, occupied Germany in the mid-1940s, when even basic foodstuffs were unobtainable, bananas have symbolized Plenty to both western and eastern Germans—the plenty western Germans eventually obtained, the plenty eastern Germans always lacked. In West Germany, the early postwar generation endured rationing and shortages until mid-century. As children, many of them knew of bananas only through the reminiscences of their elders. For them the fruit still evokes childhood memories of humiliation, dispossession, and hunger. All this began to change in West Germany with the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) of the 1950s. West German parents delightedly weaned their infants on “Banana Salad” baby food, the leading seller of Hipp, the Gerber’s of West Germany.
International Baby Food Action Network (IBFAN)
