Difficult relationships, simple recipes

An afternoon with SINN UND FORM magazine about cooking and eating

“The food is really good and very plentiful, you can't argue with that. There's also poultry and lots of vegetables and salads, a paradise for Paul Dessau. I drink half a liter of milk every day.” The young actress Käthe Reichel, who provides such precise information about culinary processes and encounters here, is on a convalescent cure at Schloss Wiepersdorf in 1951. She writes to Bertolt Brecht, her much older, secret lover, who wants to be informed about everything in Berlin. The correspondence, which lasted until Brecht's death in 1956, was published for the first time in issue 2/2024 of the journal SINN UND FORM. It documents the difficult relationship between the two unequal partners, but also contains interesting passages on theater life in the 1950s and on being an artist in the early GDR.

Erhard Weinholz has reformulated most of the article Simple recipes published in SINN UND FORM 4/2023 especially for the event. His culinary and political family and local history is based on notes from his time in the GDR; he spent weeks writing down what his parents, and later him, had for lunch. This cuisine was by no means poor and very German: bratwurst with kohlrabi, pork chops with cauliflower, deviled eggs in parsley sauce... When he visited his former hometown many years later, after the death of his parents, he ate lunch in the former Konsum. What was eaten there showed him, as he sums up, “once again the patience and capacity for suffering of the people; a lot has to happen for them to rise up in mass protest - as they did in the fall of '89.”

Reading and discussion with Helene Herold, editor of the Brecht-Reichel correspondence and employee of the Akademie der Künste's Archive for the Performing Arts, and Erhard Weinholz, former employee of the Academy of Sciences, editor of the magazine Horch und Guck and author.

Matthias Weichelt, editor-in-chief of the literary magazine SINN UND FORM, which is published by the Akademie der Künste and celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, will moderate.