My little boy dragged his fingers through the dry soil of the land of his birth. They closed over a small yellow tuber, which he pulled from the dirt and lofted with a curious smile.
It was the sort of crisp September day when, in years past, his older brother and sister had traipsed through Virginia orchards — an autumnal tradition that our family was missing in Germany. But our youngest had never been to America, so we’d found the most German version we could imagine for him, at a farm called Domäne Dahlem.
Kartoffelfest.
“It’s like apple picking,” Lily, my wife, had explained. “But with potatoes.”
It felt like an outing our family needed, for reasons related to the challenges of being a foreign correspondent — and of raising a boy born into a culture that his parents and siblings are only slowly beginning to understand.
Our Berliner baby arrived in the spring of last year, soon after we settled here. We named him Hugo, which seemed both German and American. Much of his childhood has mirrored his older siblings’. He sleeps in his 5-year-old sister Nora’s hand-me-down crib and rides in her old stroller. Like his college-student brother, he listens to Wilco and Taylor Swift. He sometimes watches Dodger games beside me, though they start much deeper into the night here.
But Hugo is also, even with American parents and an American passport, a product of Germany. We’re trying to nurture his ties to it.
This is my — and my family’s — first foreign posting. It’s a big change from Washington, where I reported for 17 years. As I build sources and interview strangers, I’ve tried to decode Germany as a newcomer. And at a time of heightened national concern over immigration, my family has tried to pursue, to the best we can, the sort of assimilation that German voters across the political spectrum say they expect from new arrivals.
That includes learning the language and customs, and trying to adapt our traditions to our new home.
It’s especially true with Hugo. His day care is bilingual. We read him books in English and German. He responds to both languages, though we can’t always tell which he’s speaking.
Harvest season seemed ripe for more cultural communion. But what sort? Hugo had already been to one Oktoberfest, at 6 months old, and a Munich trip wasn’t in the cards this year.
It was a little early for pumpkins, and we were still laughing from last year’s visit to a country farm stand for jack-o’-lantern fodder. We’d piled several onto the counter to pay. The proprietor asked what soup we planned to make. She was bewildered when we told her we planned to carve a jagged smile into a perfect culinary gourd.
You know that saying, as American as apple pie? The German analogue is probably potatoes. People eat about 140 pounds of them per year here, double the global rate. It’s a surprise when a German meal arrives without one, baked or boiled or fried.
So it seemed only right to take Hugo and his sister on a city train to a plot of old farmland in the south of Berlin, for a potato celebration that draws thousands of visitors each year.
There we found stalls of crafts and food: potato pancakes, potatoes in the creamy cheese Germans call quark. Fries, of course. A fire pit to roast spuds like marshmallows on a skewer. A small biergarten, a tractor-themed play area, a horse-drawn carriage giving rides through the fields. Head scarves and trucker hats, children speaking German and Polish and English, a cross-section of the Berlin community, including lots of newcomers like us, trying to fit in.
The main event was in the fields. Hugo loved the real tractor — green, but not John Deere — that lumbered down the rows, churning up dirt and ejecting red, blue and yellow potatoes from a sort of metal grill trailing behind. Children followed from a safe distance, snagging its treasures like candy spilling out of a big-wheeled piñata.
“Whoaaaaaa,” Hugo said.
He helped his sister scoop potatoes into a burlap sack. Maybe too many. We pulled some from the bag and laid them back in the rows, catch-and-release style.
Other children picked them up. One shared our son’s name. A slightly older Hugo, also American, also living in Berlin. He said he didn’t like potatoes, but here he was.
“I had never heard of a Kartoffelfest before,” his mother, Helena Jaramillo, who moved here from Philadelphia, told me. “It seemed German enough to try something new.”
She seemed pleasantly surprised: “Seeing so many people excited about something so ordinary,” she said, “that’s what makes it fun.”
Waiting to weigh our haul, I heard a German couple marvel at how inexpensive it was, compared with similar organic produce at the grocery or farmer’s market. Maybe we wanted those extra potatoes back, after all?
Hugo, strapped to my chest in a toddler carrier, spied the tractor again. “Whoa!” he said.
In another field, I met Germans whose own fall traditions revolved around the potato festival. Vincent Schwalgun, 38, listed the ways his family would cook the many pounds they had gathered, and he told me why he’s come back for several years.
“To see my children happy,” he said, and “all dirty.”
I heard that some hard-core attendees arrive right when the gates open Saturday morning, to pluck the best of the rare varietals from one of the fields. I saw other families dressed like potato pros, in matching rubber boots and gardening gloves, carrying small shovels.
We took notes for next year.
We made our way back to the playground, wading through crowds. Our children climbed on the pretend tractor. My wife and I drank beers. As the sun fell, we carried Hugo home on the train, along with his sister and nearly five pounds of potatoes, surrounded by a chorus of other little Berliners.
I glanced down at our boy. He was dirty, and he was happy.
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