Extreme Eating in East Berlin With the Stasi

Travel Blog • Michael Yessis • 10.08.07 | 11:11 AM ET

Bless Tom Perrotta for trying to eat local on the road, but after reading his extraordinary tale from a long-ago visit to East Berlin, I can understand why he’s hesitant to do so anymore. The author of “Election” and “Little Children” recalls that after a few beers with some locals, including two uniformed East German soldiers, he was urged to try Hackepeter, a combination of raw beef, chopped onions and raw egg. The food, he writes in the New York Times Magazine, was “quite tasty.” It was what happened afterwards that scared him.

He writes:

My new friends toasted my courage, and we proceeded to get quite drunk. When the soldiers left, I had a few more beers with Klaus, who grew somber and confessed to me that he was a dissident who’d been jailed several times for his political views. He invited me to return in a couple of days so that he could show me the real East Berlin, the places the government didn’t want people to know about.

This was, of course, exactly what I was hoping for, a chance to experience something real and dangerous. On my second visit, Klaus took me to the wall and instructed me to take some pictures from the Western side that he could use to plan his escape.

Looking back, Perrotta writes, it was obvious that Klaus was a Stasi agent. It was obvious, too, to the American military members he ate with a few days later in West Berlin. The American consulate told Perrotta he was in danger and needed to leave before his “new friends” snatched him for helping plot someone’s escape from the East. Perrotta “slipped out like a spook, missing out on a once-in-a-lifetime chance to experience the amenities of the East German penal system.”

Photo by Nadya Peek, via Flickr (Creative Commons).