In a scene from the 2007 Pixar movie Ratatouille, which I have watched numerous times with my 5-year-old daughter, the cantankerous food critic Anton Ego orders the dish that gave the film its name. He eyes it suspiciously, makes a note on his pad, then stabs the artfully layered mount of vegetable slices with his fork and eats a mouthful. It is so good that it immediately transports him back to his childhood and the memory of happiness and contentment of having had the dish cooked by his mother.
In less than 15 seconds of screen time, the film manages to express the crucial role food plays in creating a sense of nostalgia for childhood delights. I asked myself what the equivalent of ratatouille might be for me, having grown up in Germany but living in Australia for the best part of my adult life.
The answer is easy, if somewhat embarrassing: Dr Oetker Original Pudding, a custard-like dish made from a packet of powder mixed with hot milk and sugar and set for hours in the fridge. Like a down-market version of Proust’s madeleines, the slightly metallic aroma of the chemically enhanced vanilla flavor unfailingly takes me back to my childhood when my mother would present a glass bowl with the unnaturally yellow substance as the crowning finale to a family lunch, a special treat for my brothers and me.
The Dr Oetker company was founded at the end of the 19th century with the profits from the Backin baking powder invented in 1891 by the pharmacist who gave the company its name, August Oetker. Eight decades later, by the time I was growing up, Dr Oetker had become an ubiquitous brand and its products were plentiful in our kitchen.
In addition to instant pudding (which also came in a less desirable chocolate flavour), there were packets of Backin baking powder, instant yeast, vanilla sugar to add to whipping cream, pectin for making jams, and cardboard boxes of instant cake mixes -- all branded with the distinct logo of the company name, framed by an irregular red oval with an embedded stylised profile of a woman’s head, presumably an idealized depiction of the home cook for whom the products were marketed.
(Wikipedia Commons)
James Baldwin once wrote that “history is literally present in all that we do.” Even quintessentially domestic tasks such as cooking are imbued with resonances of the past. One cannot escape history, even in the privacy of one’s own kitchen. The omnipresent Dr Oetker products in our home embodied not just the promise of modern housekeeping, but also possessed a dark undercurrent that was inevitably entwined with Germany’s violent 20th century history, and which has been kept well under wraps until recently. Remarkably, for a country that prides itself on its “culture of remembrance,” the Nazi entanglement of one of its most recognisable household brands has only come under the spotlight in this millennium.
In the early 2000s, a journalist from the weekly broadsheet Die Zeit, Rüdiger Jungbluth, started researching the Dr Oetker dynasty and other industrialists who flourished during the Third Reich. This in turn triggered a study commissioned by the eight heirs of the Oetker family and undertaken by a consortium of historians. Finally, Bloomberg journalist David de Jong built upon their work and that of others in his 2022 book, Nazi Billionaires.
If the Oetker heirs had been hoping the study might exonerate or at least minimize the involvement of their forebears with Nazism, they must have been disappointed.
The company’s founder, August Oetker, died in 1918, as did his son Rudolf, who fell in the Battle of Verdun in the same year. Rudolf’s widow remarried Richard Kaselowsky, who became CEO of the Dr Oetker Group and, as a committed Nazi, was also an early member of the so-called “circle of friends,” a group of industrialists cultivated by party leaders, Heinrich Himmler and Herrmann Göring, to financially support the regime.
The party connections enabled Kaslowsky to buy up Jewish-owned companies at rock-bottom prices, such as a malt beer factory in Bavaria or a packaging business in Gdansk, as part of the so-called Aryanization of German industry.
By 1942, the Dr Oetker group was booming. It held the baking powder monopoly, and was a prominent supplier of frontline troops, all while anointed heir to the company, Kaslowsky’s stepson, was undergoing training as an SS officer in a facility adjacent to the Dachau concentration camp.
(Photo Credit: Depositphotos.com)
Around the same time, Kaslowsky struck up a friendship with SS General Oswald Pohl who was responsible for managing slave labor from all concentration camps other than those built with the sole purpose of killing the European Jews. It was Pohl who provided the prisoners from the notorious concentration camp Neugamme to build, under extremely harsh conditions, a Dr Oetker joint venture factory for the production of fodder yeast, a nutritional supplement in animal feed.
Kaslowsky was killed in an air raid in 1944 and his stepson, the freshly minted SS Untersturmführer (second lieutenant), took over the reins of the company. Briefly detained after 1945, and initially banned from working, he was exonerated through a bogus de-Nazification committee hearing in 1947 by a tribunal stacked with supporters. He went on to lead the company as a much-revered business patriarch through its postwar expansion until 1981, without ever acknowledging his and his company’s dark history during the Third Reich, crimes which undoubtedly helped to lay the foundations for the Dr Oetker company’s prosperity after 1945.
(Photo Credit: Depositphotos.com)
The fraught de-Nazification process and the wilful amnesia during the German Wirtschaftwunder (economic miracle) had changed Dr Oetker from the “national-socialist model company” it was in 1937 into an esteemed member of the postwar business community.
And yet, what to do with this knowledge? Suppress it, as happened in the second half of the 20th century? Boycott all Dr Oetker products in protest against the company’s past? Or maybe the best way is to accept this history as an integral part of the culinary nostalgia that drives me to buy packets of instant pudding whenever I am in Germany. The term “nostalgia” is a combination of the Greek words for homecoming (nostos) and pain (álgos) and making a bowl of instant pudding is both an act of affection for the times of my childhood, and an acknowledgement that even an artificial approximation of a sweet custard can carry a bitter note of history.
Author Bio:
Andreas Pohl is an Australian writer of German descent. He has coauthored three Vietnamese cookbooks with his wife and chef, Tracey Lister: KOTO a Culinary Journey Through Vietnam (2008), Vietnamese Street Food (2011), Real Vietnamese Cooking (2014), r-issued as Made in Vietnam (2017), all published by Hardie Grant (Melbourne).
His writing has appeared in a range of magazines, most recently Arena and Mekong Review. His memoir, Opi – The Two Lives of my Grandfather, was published by Australian Scholarly Publishing (Arcadia) in 2023.
For Highbrow Magazine