Smiling butcher Ramona Dumitru gestures to the pink prickly footlong cow’s tongue when asked what the most popular item at Mix-Markt’s meat counter is.
Pig hearts are also a crowd favourite, she adds, and people flock for the sheep lungs. But, given the rough sinewy texture, she advises that most of what’s sold at East Berlin’s most expansive offal counter is boiled before consuming. That said, some people like to slice up tongue and throw it in a frying pan with a bit of salt.
It might be a freezing Tuesday afternoon, but Ramona rarely has a spare moment in the store buried beneath concrete tower blocks built by the former communist regime. She’s weighing out cow intestines and slicing the finest portions of pig cheek as the women in large overcoats inspect the array of meat forensically.
Mix-Markt’s popularity, Ramona believes, comes from the fact it offers something former citizens of the German Democratic Republic [GDR] crave but can struggle to find: a taste of the past.
Nostalgia, it turns out, isn’t necessarily about luxury and, in the same way World War Two veterans would be struck with a desire to crack open a tin of highly-processed spam, East Berlin’s older residents will buy cows tongue from Mix-Markt for the same price a local supermarket sells steak.
“They like to remember the foods they had the past times during the German Democratic Republic when we had the Soviet occupation,” store manager Daniel Dik tells us, “that’s why most Germans know the products we sell. It’s a type of nostalgia.”
Dik says booze tends to be the item from the communist past the majority of East Berliners pine for with cognac topping the list of of sought after tipples.
“Russians never had the opportunity to get Western products so they had their own lines,” he says.
“French cognac was just in the western part of Europe in the east they only the had Armenian and Georgian [versions].
“Everyone knows the French stuff is better, but it’s also a nostalgia thing. In the same way Georgian wine is the best selling product in its section.”
The east Berlin suburb of Marzahn, where Mix-markt is located, didn’t exist until 1977 when the East German regime built a series of brutalist prefabricated housing estates.
Walking around the neighbourhood feels like stepping back into the Cold War era. On the freezing morning I visit the grey sky and snow-topped concrete looks as bleak as it must have done in 1985.
Yet, there is clearly something of that functional Soviet past that Marzahn residents find comforting.
“There was a German minority in Russia who were all deported during the Second World War by Stalin because they were seen as traitors. Many of them lived in this area and it was they who were most of our customers at the start,” Daniel explains.
“These days [it’s expanded] to residents of the GDR who like to remember the foods they had the past times.”
In addition to East Germans pining for the products of the Cold War era, the store also has a strong contigent of customers from the countries which used to be part of the Soviet Union.
Frequent visitors to the offal counter include Kazakhs to Lithuanians and, of course, Ukrainian and Russians.
As a consequence staff and customers have tended to avoid any discussion of politics since the full-scale invasion was launched by Vladimir Putin in 2022.
And, other than a couple of flare ups in the early days of the war, most people have stuck to this approach.
Daniel adds: “In the first two weeks, we had complications with German-born Ukrainains and German-born Russians coming to our store ranting about something or someone saying that ‘they came from this land.’
“But, actually, they were born in Germany so they don’t have a right to bulls**t. [After the first fortnight] it got quieter.”
“Right now, nobody talks about war or the consequences or politics. Everything is neutral.”
It might be possible to avoid the war on the shop floor, but in the stockroom the conflict must be tackled head on.
A German embargo on goods from Russia as a consequence of the Ukraine invasion has caused havoc for a shop supplying east Germans with a tasted of the Cold War.
Daniel and his colleagues find themselves in a position where they now have to source Russian-imitation products which, ironically, are often derivatives of Western goods.
“Every day I have to look up for new producers and new sellers to see if I can get the items that we had ten years ago from Russia,” he says.
“Condensed milk is something everyone needs and wants, you can just put in coffee or on the bread. In the past this was a Russian product, it’s mostly coming from Lithuania now.
“For something like Russian sweets. The firm making them is not existing anymore. So we had to find a new one.
“When the war started it was really hard. But, right now, it’s getting easier.”
But there is one product in particular where customers crave the Russian version: vodka.
“They’re asking every day: ‘Can we get the proper Russians vodka?’” Daniel adds, “Our ‘Russian Standard’ vodka comes from the EU it is brewed in France somewhere.”
It’s not quite the real deal, but close enough to keep the punters happy.
And it is the vodka aisle which has the biggest array of products in the store. You can even buy a bottle shaped like an AK47 in a gun box with shot glasses and a cognac grenade.
“We still get people coming in complaining about us selling ‘gun products’ because they are peaceful people,” Daniel adds.
“It mostly Germans buying this stuff. Every Russian knows [these products] but for Germans this is unknown [there’s a novelty].”
A one-off visit to Mix-Markt might feel novel, but for most of its customers the appeal lies in the shop offering what was for many years throroughly mundane.
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