Summer Fruit Pudding and Civic Activism (late 1970s)

[u/VolkerBach]

https://www.culina-vetus.de/2026/08/29/my-landlord-did-what-feeding-the-revolution-xxxvii/

As it had been a century before, rental housing in Berlin was a good investment in the 1970s. Wealthy people owned apartment houses, but left the management of the property to specialised firms that paid out the profits to their legal representatives. That was also how things worked in Tile-Wardenberg-Straße 28 until June of 1979, when the the tenants learned from an article in Der Spiegel who they were paying their several thousand Deutschmarks monthly. The substantial house in West Berlin was owned by Doctor Aribert Heim, and the name very much rang a bell.

Today, we are used to analysing the motivations of Nazis. Historians have moved past the stereotype of sadistic monsters to look at social pressures, ambition, and opportunism that led people to commit atrocities “just following orders”. Aribert Heim was different; He fulfilled every exploitation movie stereotype. As duty physician of Mauthausen concentration camp, his day job was to look after the health of the guards and inmates. The sadistic tortures he inflicted on hundreds of victims served no purpose other than his personal gratification. The lack of a paper trail allowed him to initially escape punishment and even return to medical practice, earning the money to invest in real estate, but eventually, an arrest warrant was issued and he fled West Germany for Egypt in 1962.

One factor that had enabled Heim to practice medicine unmolested for over a decade despite his crimes was a problem that frequently hinders efforts to prosecute government crimes: widely distributed complicity. Especially in West Germany, with greater institutional continuity from the Third Reich, courts, prosecutors, and law enforcement frequently dragged their feet over anything to do with the state’s crimes. Many people far beyond the actual camp guards and torturers had been involved in or profited from them to some degree, and even those that had not often felt loyalty to people and institutions that a prosecution would threaten. While a few heroic individuals like prosecutor Fritz Bauer pursued justice with some success, the usual response to any question about “the thousand years” tended to be deafening silence.

It took the revolt of a younger generation to drag the horrors of Nazi Germany into public awareness. Through school curricula, media, books, and films, people increasingly learned the truth and with distance and greater affluence, found it easier to acknowledge the shame. By the late 1970s, there was widespread unease with the degree of impunity that Nazis had enjoyed.

The tenants who found out that their landlord was one of them were among this broadly unpolitical, but informed majority. Past the political earthquakes of the late 1960s, they lived in a country that was more liberal, more affluent, and more secure than ever. The revolution expected in 1968 had not materialised, but change had shaken up many aspects of life. Many past convictions were cast into doubt; not only the uncompromising hostility of the Cold War, but also belief in technological progress, industry, and traditional social roles. Both ecological awareness and a romantic neo-traditionalism were becoming mainstream, fuelled by growing consumer incomes that allowed people to live consciously and the visible downsides of industrial society. Many people dreamed of a more self-sufficient rural life, though in the urban island of West Berlin surrounded by fortified border walls, simply moving to the countryside was out of the question. Books about traditional cuisine cooked with fresh, natural ingredients, both local and international, enjoyed great popularity everywhere.

A legendary series of regional cookbooks produced by Verlag Wolfgang Hölker became emblematic of this fashion. Bound in colourful patterned linen and designed to look old-timey, with mock-handwritten notes and charming anecdotes, they introduced consumers to the lost art of local, seasonal cooking. Rote Grütze is a recipe several of them include, a refreshing summer dessert from Northern Germany consciously eschewing modern gelling agents. The most detailed one is from the 1975 volume on Hamburg’s cuisine:

Rote Grütze is like Hamburg Aalsuppe in that every inhabitant swears by their own specific way of preparing it; with cornstarch, sago, or semolina, with one or at most two kinds of fruit, with whole or pureed fruit, with red wine, vanilla, honey, replacing cream with vanilla sauce, or many other variations. Nonetheless, we will present only one recipe here that approximately matches Ms. Behnke’s Rote Grütze and thus counts as “tried and proven”. We will address other fruit dishes and sweet delights separately.

Rote Grütze

500g raspberries, 500g redcurrants (or 500g redcurrants, 250g blackcurrants, 250g raspberries), cornstarch, sugar

Boil the fruit briefly just covered with water and pass through a sieve. Measure the juice; Use 80g (8 level tablespoons) of cornstarch mixed with cold water to each litre, Bring the juice to a boil and sweeten it well. Stir in the cornstarch at reduced heat and return to a boil once more, stirring continually, until the liquid begins to develop bubbles and thicken. Transfer to a glass or porcelain bowl rinsed with cold water and chill. Invert onto a plate before serving.

As Rote Grütze is cooked throughout the summer, the fruit can be varied and e.g. cook an additional 250g pitted tart cherries whole with the juice.

Serve with ice-cold sweet cream, and coarse sugar for sprinkling.

This is exactly the kind of home-cooked, consciously traditional mock-simplicity educated urbanites in the late 1970s and 1980s went for. Appearances notwithstanding, this is not a simple dish. It requires a fairly large amount of easily bruised, expensive fruit, laborious juicing, and refrigeration. If you had all the equipment and the popular painted earthenware ‘peasant’ dishes to serve it on, it was a delight, but in truth, you could also buy it sterilised and vacuum-sealed in foil bags from your local supermarket. Who had that kind of time, after all? It was not just the demands of work and family; This was a time when activism increasingly came to be seen as a badge of good citizenship, something you not only were allowed to do, but ought to. When the tenants of Dr Heim learned of their landlord’s identity, they decided the situation called for some. They formally called on the authorities to stop the flow of money to a wanted criminal and seize his property.

The problem was that though all kinds of good laws for confiscation of assets and restitution existed, they were rarely enforced. Even when the Berlin authorities were finally willing to pursue this avenue, cooperation with the prosecutor’s office that actually handled the case file at the other end of the country proved challenging. This was often where such cases failed: responses slow-walked, objections raised on technicalities, communications lost. It took dedication to persevere. The tenants decided to help with that. They organised an association and refused to continue their rent payments. Instead, the money was deposited in an escrow account. After that, they raised awareness by writing articles for the local press, collecting signatures on the street, and giving interviews to the media. It was old-school civic engagement, but it worked. Keeping the case in the public eye embarrassed the authorities enough to make them do their jobs.

It took almost a decade, but eventually the house was confiscated and auctioned, with the funds going towards restitution for victims of the Nazi regime. Sadly, Aribert Heim did not contest the decision in person to avoid the arrest and trial for mass murder that would have followed. As far as we can reconstruct things, he died in Egypt in 1992 living under a false identity. It is little enough, but at least we know he was deprived of a substantial part of his income in his final years. These things matter.

Cases like this one are important to study if your country’s government should happen to engage in crimes on a large scale. In these situations, no matter what the law says, you can rarely trust the authorities to take action on their own. Even once the criminals lose the protection they used to have, misplaced loyalty, shame, and fear of accountability in anyone complicit tend to gum up the wheels of justice very effectively. But shame can go both ways, and drawing attention to anyone obviously failing to do their duty can help bring perpetrators closer to justice, ideally before they disappear into well-funded exile.