Part of the joy of traveling to a new country is immersing yourself in the everyday life of a different culture: discovering that the grocery store bakery churns out delicious fresh bread, mastering a new subway system, watching the locals sit in parks and plazas and doing your best to blend in with them. There are all the differences to uncover: You don’t know how much to tip your waiter. You forget whether you need to look left or right when crossing the road. You raise your eyebrows at some “American style” restaurant or a not-quite-right menu translation.
And sometimes, you discover something that is downright strange. You don’t know if it’s widespread in the culture. You don’t speak the language well enough to get the joke. It doesn’t matter. Sometimes weirdness can transcend language.
Today, I’d like to introduce you to one such cultural oddity. Meet Bernd das Brot.
Alex and I had flipped through the channels at our hotels in Munich and Salzburg. Alex was, of course, looking to see what soccer was on. We also watched a little of “Let the Music Play - Das Hit Quiz,” which seems to be a German version of “Name That Tune.” Interestingly, there were several Russian (propaganda) stations on air. In terms of English language channels, we found the BBC, CNN, a Korean channel, and a French channel available in both French and English.
Despite our hotel channel surfing, we had missed Bernd. Alex only discovered him (it?) while flipping through TV channels in our apartment last week. We were very, very confused—if not horrified—by the strange cartoon (actually a puppet, we’d learn later) on our TV. I could only pick out a few German words here and there, and we couldn’t even identify him as being a loaf of bread. What was this weird brown thing with floppy hands and a deep voice? Of course, we immediately read all about him.
While I wouldn’t normally copy and paste a whole paragraph from Wikipedia, the first main paragraph of the Bernd das Brot Wikipedia page is so hilarious that I have put it below in all its glory:
Bernd is a depressed, grumpy, curmudgeonly,[3] constantly bad-tempered,[5] surly, fatalistic,[6] melancholic[7] loaf of pullman bread speaking in a deep, gloomy baritone.[1] He is small, rectangular and golden brown[3] with hands directly attached to his body,[8] rings around his eyes and a thin-lipped mouth.[9] According to himself, he belongs to the species "Homo Brotus (= 'Breadus') Depressivus".[8] His favourite activities include staring at his south wall at home,[3] learning the pattern of his woodchip wallpaper by heart, reading his favourite magazine The Desert and You, and enlarging his collection of the most boring railway tracks on video. Bernd sympathizes firstly with himself.[4] His favorite expression is Mist!, used in much the same way as the English "crap".[6][9] His other catchphrases are: "I would like to be left alone," "I would like to leave this show," and "My life is hell."[1][9]
Bernd das Brot is part of German channel KIKA’s regular children’s programming. German-speaking countries share some TV programming, so we have many of the same German channels here in Austria. Bernd became more widely known when they added him to the nightly loop that plays during non-broadcasting hours (9 pm to 6 am), which is how we discovered him. If you’d like to fully experience Bernd, someone has kindly uploaded a video on YouTube of one of those evening loops with English subtitles. I dare you not to laugh.
Most of the shows I enjoyed as a young kid—Barney, Sesame Street, Winnie the Pooh—feature kind and optimistic characters. Sure, there’s Eeeyor, who is always sad, perhaps even depressed, and Oscar the Grouch, who is, well, grouchy. But neither are the primary characters of their respective shows, and they aren’t quite as caustic toward their audiences as Bernd das Brot. He feels markedly unlike American children’s shows.
I don’t know enough about German culture to know what exactly Bernd encapsulates about the modern German zeitgeist. Perhaps he is a manifestation—er, breadifestation?—of the average German’s pessimism, as one American wrote in the international edition of Der Spiegel many years ago, after also discovering Bernd while channel surfing one evening. This writer suggests that Bernd is the “German soul anthropomorphized as a bakery item” who represents “the fundamental pessimism felt by many, if not most, Germans about, well, almost everything.”
In a more recent piece in Taz (short for Die Tageszeitung, meaning “the daily newspaper”) reflecting on Bernd’s 20th anniversary on air, another writer observes that Bernd is “the embodiment of the antisocial in the television age.” Although Bernd began airing before social media took hold, Bernd’s antisocialism seems even more ironic in an economy built around attention-seeking and amplifying your brand via social media. We have to be always on, always online, always broadcasting ourselves. Bernd rejects that. He wants to go home (to gaze at his wall, a favorite activity), he wants us to stop looking at him, he wants to be alone, he does not want to be famous.
Another Bernd clip addresses social media directly. In this clip, Bernd unwillingly joins a social media site (despite telling the omniscient voice he doesn’t want any friends) and is misunderstood when he keeps saying “I don’t want to be online” as “I don’t want to be alone.” (The German word for alone is pronounced like uh-line.) There’s something darkly funny about poor, grumpy Bernd wanting to be left alone in a world where that can feel impossible. Don’t we all sometimes want to be left alone to stare at a wall and have some flour soup?
That's amazing. In Japan there is a cartoon world of characters who are also bread-based: Anpanman is a bun of some type who can be revitalized by being re-baked (in case he loses strength in combat), and a nemesis named Baikinman who is basically germy. I'm not a Christian type but it's interesting that bread "embodies" these characters as the eucharist purports to provide the body of Christ in bread form too!
Well, off to stare at the south wall...