Of cabbages and Old King Kohl

Old King Kohl

This video shows the coastal landscapes of the Dithmarschen, including the largest exclusively cabbage-growing region in Europe producing more than 80 million heads of cabbage annually from farms covering more than 3,000 hectares.

This poster advertises the Dithmarschen Kohltage festival that celebrates the "King" of agricultural production in this part of North Germany, the not so humble white cabbage, or kohl, with all its cultural and gastronomic dimensions.

Each autumn these festivals celebrate the harvest of this staple element of German food culture. This is the website for the Stadt Heide to publicise events in the Dithmarscher Kohltage: Kohl, Kultur, Kulinarisches. 

This article/post Cabbage Days Are Here Again, published by David May gives an enthusiastic account of these cultural events.

David May writes:

Among the dazzling dress circle of exotic vegetables on display these days, the common old cabbage tends to languish on the backbench with the turnips, rutabagas and chayotes.  

Not so in Germany where those big balls of brassica have been a national culinary fetish since they were first cultivated in the 1st century AD. What is it that seduced the Germans to become so infatuated with these flatulent leaves?

The health-promoting properties of cabbages were discovered by the Romans. Our great grandmothers knew a half-cut cabbage was the most sensible way to clean carpets and opera singers once insisted that munching cabbage leaves helped cleanse their throats to improve purity of voice.

But in Germany, Kohl (or Kraut) is the cornerstone of the national cuisine – red cabbage, white cabbage, green cabbage and the famous fermented sauerkraut, together with spuds and dumplings, are staples on every creditable German dinner table.

An indication of the significance of the cabbage at all levels of German life is the traditional and apparently effective threat hurled at mischievous kids, “you shall have water in your cabbage and go barefoot to bed”.

At the other end of the social spectrum, former chancellor Helmut Kohl set a post-war record staying in the job for 16 years. Who else but the Germans would consistently re-elect someone called Helmut Cabbage?

So where in Germany do cabbages reach their peak of reverence? Dithmarschen, that’s where.

Dithmarschen is a region of lush, flat, marshy agricultural land in the northern state of Schleswig-Holstein facing the North Sea between Hamburg and the Danish border where rural life still rules.

This is said to be the largest exclusively cabbage-growing region in Europe producing more than 80 million heads of cabbage annually on more than 3,000 hectares, that’s one cabbage for every member of the population.

In January 2014, white and red cabbage from Dithmarschen were added to the EU register for agricultural products bearing the ‘g.g.A.’ (Protected Geographical Origin) seal of quality.

The biggest event on Germany’s cabbage calendar is the beginning of the Dithmarschen cabbage harvest in late September when the region hosts the great Kohltage (Cabbage Days) Festival, the most popular fun event on the North Sea Coast, when thousands turn up to pay homage to old king Kohl.

The festival has its roots in the 13th century when local farmers booted out the nobility and proclaimed the ‘Free Farmers’ Republic of Dithmarschen’.

The centre of festivities is the historic 4.7-hectare Heider Marktplatz in the regional capital, Heide, one of Germany’s largest market squares, where the Saturday market has been a fixture for more than half a millennium.

Throughout the six-day Kohltage, the market fills with kiosks, stalls, jugglers, cabbages, musicians, lots of people drinking lots of Beugelbuddelbier, one of the very pleasant local beers, and more cabbages.

The revelry begins after the first head of cabbage is ceremonially harvested by a senior local politician and is usually followed by an open day at whichever lucky farm is selected together with a cabbage feast, music and folk dancing.

Farmers’ markets around Dithmarschen, where many vendors are known to cover their heads with big green cabbage leaves, are dominated by mountains of cabbages; everything the Dithmarschen farmers produce is on show and for six days, cabbages assume pride of place on almost every menu in the region.

There are endless supplies of cabbage liquor, cabbage bread and five-course gourmet cabbage dinners as Hausfrauen, hobby cooks and top restaurant chefs engage in fierce competition to invent ever more audacious cabbage dishes.

To help ease visitors into the bucolic spirit of the occasion, tour operators lay on excursions to the Dithmarschen cabbage fields that include tours through the cabbage farmers’ storehouses and visits to the ever-popular sauerkraut factory in nearby Wesselburen, the KOHLosseum.

(Fact: Captain Cook was a sauerkraut fan; to protect himself and his crews against the dreaded scurvy, his expedition ships’ larders would be stocked pre-voyage with sauerkraut and lemon.)

The Kohltage highlight comes when a giant cabbage pyramid is erected in the Heider Marktplatz, so large it needs a crane to complete the operation and, when it’s done and if it doesn’t collapse, young women dance around its base in traditional costumes before they square off for the big prize.

Unlike other festivals that crown queens and princesses, Dithmarschen’s republicans have inherited a tradition of appointing two cabbage regents, worthy local girls whose primary qualification must be a proficient knowledge of cabbages and whose primary task is to steer visitors around all the Kohltage fun.

When it all gets too much, cabbaged-out revellers can more or less escape to Heide’s local nightlife district, Shoemaker’s Place, named for its earlier role as a craftsman’s street where 158 cobblers once plied their trade alongside a bunch of smelly tanneries.

Now on the ground floors of these cute little houses that line the street and its adjoining alleys there are cocktail bars, music cafes, restaurants and cosy bars where the Beugelbuddelbier flows freely and the autumn pub grub is, well, essentially cabbage.

Of Cabbages and Kings?

When it comes to talking of cabbages and kings in this part of northern Germany, then it is cabbage that is king and, as regards the history of the Dithmarschen, it is appropriate to be reminded that in the 15th century the Ditmarsians confederated in a peasant republic. Throughout the period of the peasant republic's existence on several occasions neighbouring princely rulers, accompanied by their knights and mercenaries, attempted to subjugate the independent peasants to feudalism, they were unsuccessful. Lots of cabbages but NO aristocracy, be they kings, princes or knights.

In this montage of clips from the Danger Man episode "The Black Book", John Drake (Patrick McGoohan) quotes this line from the poem "The time has come," the walrus said, "to talk of many things: Of shoes and ships - and sealing wax - of cabbages and kings" in a confrontation with a mysterious femme fatale. 

And while Re:LODE makes a connection between cabbages and kings it is only because such a connection is present in the canons of English literature as a curious, and curiouser poetic cliché. And this all thanks to Charles Dodgson, also known by his pen-name Lewis Carroll, and the line in his poem "The Walrus and the Carpenter" that runs; "to talk of many things: Of shoes and ships - and sealing wax - of cabbages and kings". 

This narrative poem by Lewis Carroll that appeared in his book Through the Looking-Glass, published in December 1871, and is recited by characters Tweedledum and Tweedledee to Alice in chapter four.

This clip includes a reading of the poem by Iain McGilchrist to accompany an edit of the Disney version of the poem in Alice in Wonderland, the 1951 American animated musical fantasy comedy film produced by Walt Disney Productions and based on the Alice books by Lewis Carroll.

For LODE A Cargo of Questions the Other depictions section of the Wikipedia article reference on these annoyingly argumentative and yet mutually complementary twins is curious and becomes even curiouser, mentioning as it does, the oft quoted writer on these pages, James Joyce. For Joyce, in a 1921 letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver, the twins "Tweedledum and Tweedledee" are used to characterise Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung and their conflict. Also mentioned in this section is Helen Keller's view of democracy in the US: "Our democracy is but a name. We vote? What does that mean? It means that we choose between two bodies of real, though not avowed, autocrats. We choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee."

After listening to Tweedledum and Tweedledee's recitation of the poem, the good-natured Alice attempts to determine which of the two leading characters might be the more sympathetic, but is thwarted by the twins' further interpretation:

"I like the Walrus best," said Alice: "because you see he was a little sorry for the poor oysters."

"He ate more than the Carpenter, though," said Tweedledee. "You see he held his handkerchief in front, so that the Carpenter couldn't count how many he took: contrariwise."

"That was mean!" Alice said indignantly. "Then I like the Carpenter best—if he didn't eat so many as the Walrus."

"But he ate as many as he could get," said Tweedledum.

This was a puzzler. After a pause, Alice began, "Well! They were both very unpleasant characters—"

British essayist J. B. Priestley argued that the figures were political, as does Walter Russell Mead, who utilises the Walrus and the Carpenter as an allegory for the United Kingdom and the United States respectively. However, in The Annotated Alice, Martin Gardner notes that, when Carroll gave the manuscript for Looking Glass to illustrator John Tenniel, he gave him the choice of drawing a carpenter, a butterfly, or a baronet, since each word would fit the poem's metre. Because Tenniel rather than Carroll chose the carpenter, the character's significance in the poem is probably not in his profession, and interpretations of the poem as a commentary on religion are likely false. Gardner cautions the reader that there is not always intended symbolism in the Alice books, which were made for the imagination of children and not the analysis of "mad people". 

In the Beatles 1967 song "I Am the Walrus", the title character refers to the Carroll poem. John Lennon later expressed some regret when belatedly realising that the walrus was a villain in the poem. Lennon joked in retrospect, perhaps he should have titled the song, "I Am The Carpenter." 

There is a Re:LODE Radio article on the line in this Beatles song:  

I am the egg man . . .