I have been living in Berlin for a few weeks now (doing some boring library work, visiting some archives etc.) The thing I don’t understand about Germany is how a place of such extraordinary high culture can so fundamentally misunderstand cheese. Cheese is not about jogging on a winter’s morning, or feeling spritely and fresh, it’s about getting old, it’s about reminding yourself that the damage and decomposition inside your body can happen outside as well, and then you can eat it. That said, Germans do better songs about getting old:
(that’s Thomas Quasthoff, accompanied by Daniel Barenboim singing Die Krähe from Schubert’s Winterreise.)