The “my first banana” cover of German satire magazine Titanic’s November 1989 issue is easily its most famous. The Berlin Wall had just fallen and East Germans coming into the West were buying bananas like crazy, like the exotic unknown fruit of freedom it was. The cover shows Gaby (upper right), fresh from the East, (”happy in the Federal Republic of Germany”), in a Western jean jacket, proudly holding her first banana—actually a peeled cucumber. Mean but genius. Meanius?
Yesterday, Berlin’s left-guard newspaper tagezeitung spoofed the famous spoof (upper left) with Angela Merkel’s visit to the United States as eating her “first Amerikaner”—a reference so multi-layered that I scarcely know where to start, but suffice it to say that the Amerikaner is actually a white-frosted cookie (ironically one I’ve never seen outside of German bakeries) and not the jelly donut—or Berliner—that she is in fact eating. This month’s Titanic goes one further and revives the Gaby issue exactly twenty years later with an OMG offensive (the magazine’s speciality) and mildly funny (ok, I chuckled and then felt ashamed) reference to Germany’s new and openly gay foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, by mentioning in parentheses that his first banana is “not in photo.” Ouch. Is it ok because he’s a fiscal conservative with the FDP? This does make me wonder if Germany has any defamation laws at all, because I think Titanic would be getting all kinds of sued if this were in the States. But I could be wrong. For one thing we don’t have any high profile gay politicians in the U.S., so this is very much a hypothetical. Maybe Germany couldn’t have an Obama, but I don’t think the U.S. could have a Westerwelle* either.
*Update: well, except for Representative Barney Frank (D), America’s most powerful LGBT person. Thanks, Ed.
Stumble it!
No high-profile gay politicians in the U.S.? Hello? Barney Frank?
Ach! Barney Frank, of course.
In New England they have something called black-and-white cookies. They are really similar to Amerikaner!
Yes, I was just going to say that Gridskipper once did a feature on the best places to buy black-and-white cookies in New York, and they looked remarkably like Amerikaner.
Bleistfterin told me that they are called Amerikaner because of some additive to the flour (as they’re sort of cakey rather than biscuity, I’d guess it’s a raising agent).
Ach, the raising agent story is interesting and somewhat credible. According to Prof. Blumes Bildungsserver, the special baking powder required for an Amerikaner cookie is ammonium hydrogen bicarbonate (Ammoniumhydrogencarbonat), which as the defining ingredient got slanged down to ammonia (Ammoniak). So the cookies were called Ammoniakaner—and then eventually Amerikaner.