Going Dutch with German Writers (12): The Comedy Placebo

Who?

Jacinta Nandi is a writer, blogger and slammer originally from London. She’s been in Berlin for thirteen years. She has a book and CD out called Deutsch werden – Why German people love playing frisbee with their nana naked.

Jakob Hein has lived in Berlin almost all his life, and has published fourteen different books, the most recent being Deutsche und Humor. Geschichte einer Feindschaft (with Jürgen Witte).

Jacinta and Jakob wrote a book together, Fish ‘n’ Chips & Spreewaldgurken. It’s about how Jacinta imagines the GDR was and how Jakob used to imagine London was while living in the GDR.

Where?

We start off at the rather nice venue where they’re reading, Seebad Friedrichshagen. Then we go to Heiner’s Bar in Neukölln.

What?

Jacinta and I drink white wine, Jakob drinks beer.

What did we talk about?

The first thing we talk about, during the break at the reading in Friedrichshagen, is that I arrived late because I got lost and also because the trains aren’t running properly. Jakob says they were rather worried but he told the whole audience I’d be coming. I find this acutely embarrassing, which I suspect he notices because he talks about the blog again during the second half. Twice. Both times, he calls it “Drinking with German authors” and he and Jacinta have fun mispronouncing the word authors in different ways. The second time, I tell him from my seat halfway back that it’s called “Drinking with German writers”. He looks disappointed.

I’m a bit shy about meeting Jacinta. She seems like one of those small, self-possessed women who make me feel gangly and boring. Her writing is great – funny and angry – but on stage she seems less assertive, flashing the audience a lot of very sweet smiles, especially when Jakob complains that she writes about sex all the time. She does write about sex quite a lot. Jakob doesn’t so much. The audience likes it, laughing loudly and buying a decent amount of books afterwards. That’s good because Jakob has to carry them around in his rucksack for the rest of the night.

So they’ve finished by about ten and we decide to go to Neukölln, where Jacinta lives, rather than running the risk of getting stuck in Friedrichshagen where the bloody trains aren’t running properly. They want to go to Heiner’s because they met a lovely woman who works there once, in Leipzig when the last train was cancelled. They ended up sharing a taxi to Berlin, which I think sounds great because I love taxis. Jakob says it wasn’t because Jacinta had eaten a curry and was sweating profusely because the audience at their reading hadn’t been terribly friendly. Jacinta smiles sweetly. Apparently you can actually get good Indian food in Leipzig, which is great news for me. I hate the piss-poor excuse for Indian food you get in Berlin.

On the tram and the train to Neukölln, we talk about various things I don’t want to write about here. Relationships and family matters and genital flora. Jakob is a psychotherapist and has to give a talk somewhere the next day, about ADD in adults. Jacinta is one of those people who look up syndromes they might have on the internet, but Jakob seems quite good at calming her down. She asks him about bad science and he says, well, just because something hasn’t been proved to be true, that doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t true. I am still being polite at this stage, so I don’t make any cynical comments. He says doctors value the placebo effect too, and most medicine wouldn’t work at all if the doctor said, well, we can give it a try but it’s a very tiny pill for such a large body. He tells a story about when he worked in the hospital and people came in who couldn’t sleep at all, and he’d say to the nurse, do you think it’d be OK to give him the special pill from Switzerland, just as an exception? I’ll take full responsibility for it, I’ll get the boss’s signature for it tomorrow. And then the patient would be out like a light. Maybe I shouldn’t have written that. Maybe the kind of people who look up syndromes on the internet will now be immune to that particular comedy placebo effect.

I'm still being polite

Women’s magazines. Jakob thinks they’re sexist and Jacinta doesn’t. She thinks it’s sexist to say women’s magazines are sexist just because they have recipes and knitting patterns in them. Knitting is an art. I’m still being polite but none of us care enough about women’s magazines to get into an argument over them. So we all agree that it was a total swizz when Brigitte magazine stopped using professional models but still used really thin “real” women.

We make it to the bar, with a short and lovely taxi trip in between. I love taxis. Jacinta says she bet her son €2 she’d find ten books in Hugeldubel – “Hugendubel” – Hugeldubel by writers she knows. She did. Jakob says he’s read all Christoph Hein’s books. This is very sweet. I deliberately don’t ask him about his dad the very famous and distinguished writer, but anyway Jakob is very much in command of what he talks about. Very few personal details slip out – he has a wife, and children in the plural, and he is nearly forty-two. He went to a special school for maths and physics in the GDR and he spent a year “at a large north-eastern university” in America. Jacinta and I exchange puzzled looks. You’re not supposed to mention the name, apparently, but Jacinta and I are from London and we have no idea of the etiquette of voicing the names of ivy-league universities. “So was it Harvard or Yale?” she asks. “Harvard.” Jacinta, unlike Jakob, is blabbing all sorts of stuff I can’t possibly write about here.

The bar turns out to be rather dingily lit and full of hipsters. We corral three seats at a table with an English-speaking couple. Jakob gives the barman a tip at the very beginning, ensuring he gets served very quickly indeed for the rest of the night. He then proceeds to ply us with alcohol at a rapid pace. My glass is never empty before he gets a new round of drinks. We lightly mock one of the hipsters, whose cloth bag is from the Kaiser’s supermarket and therefore not sufficiently cool. Jacinta says actually, all cloth bags are cool, no matter what they say on them. I think now it might be the epitome of cool if you’re cool enough to walk around with a Kaiser’s bag. I shall re-assess my use of that Primark bag I put my shopping in. Nothing says “fuck you I’m cool” like an ironically uncool tote bag.

My memory of almost everything we talked about in the bar is hazy at best. But there was this: Jakob told us about his encounter with the Stasi. Two officers came to his school and held a talk about youth cultures, and all the cool kids went along so they could take the piss later on. (Evidently, Jakob is one of those enviable people who consider they were among the cool kids at school.) Then a few weeks later, Jakob was summoned to the head teacher’s office, worryingly, but the head teacher was standing outside and just told him to go on in. And in the office were the two Stasi officers. They start chatting, what do you like doing in your free time, that kind of thing. So Jakob tells them what they know anyway, which is that he goes to the Umweltbibliothek, the environmental library in the basement of the church on Zionskirchplatz, a hub of youth resistance in the GDR. Oh, they say, well you could keep going there and tell us about what happens there, because we can’t very well go there ourselves, can we? OK, says young Jakob, and then he goes back to his classroom and tells all his friends about it. They arranged to meet up a few weeks later, at the bar in the SEZ sports centre, and the agents were pissed off with him and he managed not to become a Stasi informer. It’s a strange story, no? A bit of an anti-climax but that probably means it’s true, because Jakob Hein is an excellent storyteller when he puts his mind to it. Or maybe I’ve forgotten some of it.

Oh, I’ve remembered something else we talked about in the bar! Their day jobs. How it’s hard to be polite to people all day long when you’re in a bad mood. Jacinta teaches English to unemployed people – she says she’s very good at it, and I can imagine she is. I rather envy them for having the kind of jobs where you get to talk to people, but I don’t think I tell them that. Also, Jacinta says she recently fancied a Chinese man, which means she has now fancied someone from everywhere in the whole world. We congratulate her. She doesn’t fancy Indian men, though. I do fancy some Indian men, I say, but I keep meeting gay ones. Oh, and we talk about the piss-poor excuse for Indian food in Berlin. Jacinta thought they’d given her a children’s version without the spices, the first time she tried palak paneer here. But there’s a great Indian restaurant in Leipzig, apparently. We proselytize about Indian food in London for a while but Jakob remains unmoved. Of course, the Indians laugh at Indian food in London too, Jacinta says. But still, it’s what we know.

Locked in some kind of argument

© Naomi Christie

Oh, and Jakob tells us he doesn’t drink much because alcohol makes him puke, which is not nice and he doesn’t like to lose control over his body like that. He does seem very much in control of himself, which I find reassuring because it means I don’t have to worry about myself. He just keeps on providing drinks and we keep on drinking them, and I don’t even think about whether it might be a good idea to stop drinking and how I’m going to get home. I might well have sat there pouring wine down my throat until dawn and then Jakob could have taken me to hospital. As it is, I have reached that point when I feel the need to announce that I’m drunk (have I written about this before?), which means I am very drunk indeed. I tell Jacinta how nervous I was about meeting her because she always seemed so confident, and she stares at me like I’m crazy. Also, I tell them about all my uncles, which is very dull but always seems fascinating to me when I’ve had too much to drink. They smile and nod. I have a feeling we’ve switched entirely to English by this point.

I go to the toilet, which I seem to remember being quite a long walk along dingy wood-panelled corridors. When I get back, Jakob and Jacinta are locked in some kind of argument. I don’t think there was any actual shouting but I know I had no idea what they were talking about. Jakob wants to leave so I give Jacinta a quick confused hug and Jakob hails a taxi for the two of us to share. I find us continuing their argument in the taxi, with me in the role of Jacinta, even though I’m really not sure what we’re arguing about. I think it’s about woman comedians. I think I say that women can be good comedians, and I think maybe Jakob does too but perhaps he also says that there aren’t as many funny women as men. I have trouble dredging up names of funny women – Evelyn Hamann, and that one from the East – no, she wasn’t funny – and French and Saunders, and… and Jacinta and me. I think Jacinta and I can be funny when we want to be.

Jakob gets out of the taxi first and hands the driver a banknote, hiding the denomination from me. I don’t know why he did that but he paid enough to cover the entire journey, plus a tip, the driver tells me. He seems rather happy about it. Wasn’t that friendly of him, I slur at the driver. I do love a nice taxi ride. But I’m still a bit agitated when I get up to my flat and I write an email to Jacinta and Jakob, telling them I had a lovely evening. I think that’s what I wrote but what I meant was, I had a lovely evening and I hope you make it up again. I hate it when people argue. Let’s all be friends for ever.

I forgot to take photos, yet again.

Hangover?

Oh yes, all day long. I still feel like someone lit a bonfire inside my skull several hours ago and the embers are cooling off, and they also left some baked potatoes in there, wrapped in foil and forgotten about and probably too tough to eat by now.