Bananasand Pineapples
Nowadays fruits from the Americas are part of the daily diet in Germany. Explorers such as Christopher Columbus brought home descriptions and drawings of an until then unknown variety of edible and colorful fruits.
Although the most popular of them, pineapples and bananas, do not have their botanical origin in the New World, it was American enterprises that made them affordable and available in Germany by commercializing and industrializing production in their homelands. Today more bananas are eaten in Germany than in any other European country. Nearly a fourth of all European banana imports go from Central and South America via U.S. enterprises to Germany. Though bananas have been known in Europe since the late fifteenth century, it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century that fresh bananas from the Americas were regularly imported. The precondition for this change was the development of new cooling technologies, which made it possible to transport the delicate fruit over long distances. Beginning in the 1950s, bananas became one of the most important fruits in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), but, their import to the German Democratic Republic (GDR) was limited. There the banana became a symbol for material wellbeing. The same was true for pineapples, which had been an element of conspicuous consumption since the late eighteenth century. In contrast to bananas, nobles and the wealthy grew pineapples in hothouses or bought the expensive fruit from gardeners. Fresh pineapples had been imported since the beginning of the twentieth century, but they gained popularity only after World War II, when large quantities of canned fruit appeared on the market for modest prices.Bananas are one of the oldest cultivated plants on earth. Since they are very fertile and grow fast in tropical climates, they spread rapidly throughout the New World—so rapidly that European explorers and chroniclers thought that they were an American fruit.
Originally bananas came from Southeast Asia and were brought to the Canary Islands in 1402. The Portuguese missionary and later bishop Tomas de Berlanga planned to make them the people’s food, so he took some plants with him on his travels to the Caribbean Islands in 1512. From there bananas were transplanted to Central America. Alexander von Humboldt saw banana trees on his journeys to the New World and calculated that it would be possible to nourish twenty times as many people with bananas grown on a given piece of land than with wheat. Thus, he prophesied that bananas would gain great importance. He marveled at the enormous fertility of the plant and its sweet fruit; though he was not the first to do so, as the Koran speaks of the “paradise tree.” The famous botanist Carl von Linne thus classified the plant as Musa paradisi- aca, and during the nineteenth century Germans spoke of “Paradiesfeigen” (paradise figs) instead of bananas. German botanists were familiar with banana plants, their numerous varieties, and different purposes as early as 1850. They had grown numerous varieties in botanical gardens. But due to the cold climate of Germany, the plants never produced fruit, and so bananas were almost unknown before being imported.Throughout the nineteenth century, English merchants imported smaller quantities of bananas from the Canary Islands to Germany through the large harbors in Bremen and Hamburg. However, around 1900 bananas were still so uncommon that they rotted on the docks because nobody was interested in buying them. Nevertheless, regular imports began around that time, and in 1907 official statistics on the import of bananas began. They show that the import of the fruit to Hamburg was already at 7 million kilograms (15,400,000 lbs) in 1907 and multiplied to 45 million kilograms in 1913. Most of these bananas came, however, from the Canary Islands. Over the years the market share of the United Fruit Company increased, and Germans bought more and more bananas from Central and South America.
The invention of cooling techniques and the discovery of methods to control the ripening process were preconditions for long-distance mass transport. The first modern cooling ship, named “Venus,” was launched in 1903. From 1910 to 1913 the imports of bananas to Germany nearly doubled, while bananas and banana products were heavily promoted as health foods, especially for children. Pediatricians were eager to advertise their high nutrition content, digestibility,
Bananas ripen in a radio tower, West Berlin, 1956. Today more bananas are eaten in Germany than in any other European country. Nearly a fourth of all European banana imports go from Central and South America via U.S. enterprises to Germany. (Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin)
and sweet taste. Since vitamins had become the new food paradigm in the 1920s, the banana’s content of Vitamins C and D helped to make it even more popular. During the 1920s German imports of bananas from Spain and the Canary Islands fell from 24 percent to 9 percent (1927), whereas the share of imports from Cuba, Jamaica, Honduras, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Panama increased to over 75 percent.
With the Nazi seizure of power, imports of bananas decreased tremendously. Advertisement for bananas was forbidden, and doctors were asked not to promote them anymore. This policy was backed by the nutritional advice that bananas were not as healthy as previously thought. Nevertheless, 146,800 tons were still imported in 1937. World War II brought further restrictions, and bananas disappeared from the German market. But after the end of the war, Germans longed for bananas and welcomed the first import of 900 tons of bananas in 1949 with great enthusiasm. In 1949 around 50,000 tons were imported, and it is worth noting that the relatively modest price of bananas (1.20 to 0.80 DM per kilogram) was part of their success. Bananas became a symbol of West Germany’s new economic power and the first postwar chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, took care that they remained affordable.
In 1957 he pushed through a law negating the European Economic Community (EWG) policy that required Germany, like the other European countries, to pay a 20 percent import tax on bananas.During the 1970s the consumption of bananas was at 10 kilograms per person, the highest consumption rate worldwide. Most of these bananas arrived from South and Central America. The year 1993 marked a milestone in German banana consumption, when the tax exception established under Adenauer was abolished. Since then the European Community has limited the imports of bananas and has subsidized imports from countries bound to the European Community, mostly former colonies of France and Great Britain.
Another landmark in the recent German history of banana consumption is the year 1989. Bananas had been rare in the GDR because the imports, coming mainly from Ecuador, were limited due to lack of convertible currency. Before Christmas and Easter extra contingents were sold, and kindergartens and hospitals were given preference. But per capita consumption amounted to only 3.9 kilograms in 1989, whereas West Germans consumed 13.5 kilograms. Indeed, bananas were a rarity in the former GDR and were sought after as a symbol of economic well-being. In fact, bananas were sold out for months after the fall of the Berlin Wall. East Germans came to West Germany and bought whole boxes because they did not believe that they would be on sale the next day. Consumption rose to 27 kilograms per person in the East immediately after November 1989, whereas West Germans ate only 16 kilograms per person that year. Today the consumption of bananas in East Germany is 20 percent higher than in West Germany.
The pineapple is another fruit that has a special place in the history of the agricultural exchange between the Americas and Germany. According to the diary of Christopher Columbus, pineapples were grown in Guadelupe, on the coast of Panama, and in the delta of the Amazonas River. They were used to provision ships.
The Spaniards spread their cultivation across the Pacific to the Philippines and from there to China and the Portuguese from Brazil to Africa and India. Pineapples became rather well known in Europe and were esteemed as the queen of fruit. Unlike bananas, pineapples were often depicted in paintings, and there was a tradition of sculpting goblets in the shape of pineapples from the seventeenth century onward. In 1711 gardeners supposedly managed to grow the first pineapple in the hothouse of the botanical garden in Leipzig, and in 1715 a doctor from Breslau reportedly harvested a fully mature fruit, which he then sent to the emperor’s court as a present.Like bananas, pineapples are available in numerous botanic variations, but the consumer receives only those that are suited for transport and storage and have certain qualities of taste. Since about
1850, pineapples grown for sale have come from Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Haiti, Malaysia, Honduras, Costa Rica, and the British Indies. There have been attempts to grow them in nontropical areas, such as Florida. Transportation was hazardous because unlike bananas, pineapples do not ripen after harvesting. Before World War II, fresh pineapples were imported only from Portugal. Thus, the widespread consumption of pineapples in modern-day Germany is linked to the improvement of transportation and to the invention of industrial canning, which started around the 1890s. TWo U.S. enterprises, Dole and Del Monte (California Packing Corporation), built a pineapple empire with their own plantations and their own canning factories.
Before World War II, the canning of pineapples was restricted to the colonies. Hawaii served the needs of the United States; Formosa the needs of Japan; and Malaysia the needs of England. But still, pineapples were a luxury, although a fashionable one. In 1911-1913, Germany imported 280,000 kilograms of (fresh) pineapples (in contrast to 37 million kilograms of bananas). By 1928, that number had increased to 9.8 million kilograms, but by 1930, it went down to 6.5 million kilograms.
The Nazis abandoned pineapples for the same reasons they reduced the import of bananas. Directly after World War II the quantity increased again, mainly due to an intensification of commercial relations with the United States and to the improvement of canning. German writers have often described the arrival of the tinned pineapple as a sign of the German Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle), marking the shift toward exotic food, dishes, and preparations, like Toast Hawaii and pineapple Bowle.Ulrike Thoms
See also Americanization; Humboldt, Alexander von; McDonald’s Restaurant
References and Further Reading
Brunner, Ursula, and Rudi Pfeifer. Zum Beispiel Bananen. Gottingen: Lamuv, 1993.
Cadot, Olivier Emmanuel, and Douglas Webber. Banana Splits and Slipping over Banana Skins: The European and Transatlantic Politics of Bananas. San Domenico, FI: European University Institut, 2001.
Reichart, Thomas. Die Ananas: Ein neues Wirtschaftsgut? Nurnberg: Wirtschafts- u. Sozialgeographisches Institut der Friedrich- Alexander-Universitat, 1982.
Ritter, Kurt, and Martin Guttfeld. Weltproduktion und Welthandel an frischen Sudfruchten. Berlin: Parey, 1933.
Toppel, Johannes. Die Banane: Eine wirtschaftsgeographische Monographie, ihre Geschichte, Anbaubedingungen und Verwertung sowie der Produktionslander, des Imports, Handels und Verbrauches. Berlin- Steglitz: Bodenbender, 1934.
Tschoeke, Jutta. “Die Banane—ein neues Volksnahrungsmittel im 20. Jahrhundert.” Industriekultur: Expeditionen ins Alltagliche: Begleitheft zur Ausstellung. Nurnberg, 1982, 98-102.