A SOUP BOWL OF CONFLICTS

"Sie brauchen nur ein wenig Salz und Pfeffer."

("You just need a little salt n' peppah.") — Chef Tell

On November 5, 1943, the tree-lined ridges around Stuttgart, Germany, resembled the nearby Black Forest. They edged and defined the steep-valley makeup of the sweep of the city. Past nightfall, searchlights silhouetted the skyline, and air-raid sirens clarioned.

As they had done for three years, thousands of stoic men, frightened women, and bewildered children spilled out from their residences onto darkened, foggy streets and sought shelter inside large caves dug into the hillsides. There they waited for death or another peaceful respite. The safety of the dugouts assuaged little of their fear as earth-shaking, two-ton bombs exploded above and around them for hours.

A mother's hoarse screams of labor could not be heard over the constant din and the drone of 165 laded Allied bombers. The staccato pops of 49 heavy and light German anti-aircraft gunneries and the percussions of hundreds of detonations echoed loudly up and down the damaged hills and valleys and drowned her cries. Just as surely as Germans gasped their last breaths somewhere in that terrain, her newborn drew its first gulp of life-giving oxygen. It was a wonder that her baby boy survived the night.

Like clockwork, night after terrifying night, Stuttgart skies resounded with the recurrent screams of low-altitude bomber squadron payloads after their release. "Pink Pansy" flares lit up blackened ground sites and guided R.A.F. de Havilland "Mosquitoes" along marked pathways to their intended targets — Stuttgart's fighter-plane manufacturing factories. In time, new "Oboe" radar enabled the "Mossies" to operate without direct eyesight just as effectively as on clear nights, despite the fog and rain, and the bombing runs multiplied.

Between the air raid of October 8, when 342 Lancaster bombers of the Royal Air Force flew overhead, and the last large raid of 162 aircraft on November 26, more than 2,000 aircraft dropped over 3,000 tons of bombs on Stuttgart.

The cacophony of the Allies' horrific lullaby pierced Friedemann Paul Erhardt's ears for the first fortnight of his life. He lived below the eerie glow of searchlights that dappled the smoky sky like Manet's brush strokes.

Decades later, the glow of restaurant gas burners on professional stoves would remind Erhardt of those early months, and of his mother's fears of the swastika and the Nazi party that reigned at the time of his birth.

Nazi leaders prided themselves on the willful creation and maintenance of Aryan-blood purity and committed upwards of forty million people to their deaths for the sake of their aim. Their idea of racial pureness emerged from laboratories and spliced genes slid under scientific microscopes by psychiatric eugenicists, which held the belief that Man was only flesh and bone. Earlier, German and Austrian philosophers speculated that human behavior was a product of the environment, not the other way around. They, too, denied Life's spirituality.

Oddly, the worst of the fascist Nazis abhorred both communist bolshevism and liberalism alike. They assigned "cause" for the existence of these curses to a quasi-race (as they saw it), the Jews. They also sought suppression of the Catholic Church, whose teachings influenced humanity toward spirituality. The Church's position that the soul is the ultimate arbiter of how cultures live, evolve, and move forward took hold and was embraced around the globe, but godless Nazi eugenicists abhorred its expansion and moved to strike a death blow.

Into this soup bowl of conflicting activities and notions, boiled over into a full-fledged world war, the youngest Erhardt arrived. He would grind out his meager childhood among the latest ruins of this centuries-old battle for minds, bodies, and souls. Survival would not come easily for his family or his nation as each struggled to rebuild itself and its identity.

LIKE SON NOT LIKE FATHER

"Ich wusste, ich wollte nicht in das Zeitungsgeschäft gehen."

("I knew I didn't want to go into the newspaper business.")

— Chef Tell

Hitler considered Maximillian Erhardt's local newspaper, Stuttgarter Nachrichten, important enough to grant oversight of it to his Number Two henchman Heinrich Himmler, head of the Schutzstaffel — the feared "SS" secret service police formed in 1925 to provide for his personal protection. After Max was pressed into service along with the others at the paper, Himmler became their senior officer. Max's schriftsetzer (typesetter)position forced him to (at least appear to) step in line with Himmler. Though his personal, political, or cultural proclivities were not the same as those of the Nazi leadership, he dutifully published what was expected of him. More than 80 percent of national press "news" was Nazi-controlled anti-Semitism by the time he became a father in 1943.

The pragmatic Max was a handsome man of Aryan stock born into a family of lawyers and doctors on January 25, 1912. He married the upper-class Gisela Gerber, who, according to Max's statement to a family member in later years, was one-sixteenth Jewish and a licensed, pediatric nurse — pediatrics was a marked profession, since more than a third of the fourteen-hundred-plus pediatric doctors were Jewish.

Gisela gave him his first son and would give him another five years after the war. War-torn Germany, however, offered no guarantee that his first boy would reach a ripe old age. In fact, as the fate of the Nazi regime soured, his odds of surviving at all ran long.

By 1944, the tattered remnants of the German army retreated in the face of the advancing rifles and artillery of Russian forces along the eastern front. The easterly push of the Allied command forces from the west, and the southern line crumbling in the face of American tank brigades from Italy, trapped the Erhardt family in the midst of a pincers movement late in the year. By early 1945 the threat had escalated. The apathetic mental states of local Nazi officers and complicit local officials included taking out anyone who even hinted betrayal before they committed their suicides.

During war operations, Allied bombers prevented Max from planning and developing a long-term future. Eventually, French troops liberated his city. Later, when the Americans arrived, he welcomed them and shared his fourth-floor flat with some of them. However, the Allies took precautionary measures because of his media position and extradited Max to a military intelligence camp in Texas for debriefing before repatriation without incident.

After the cessation of World War II hostilities, the number of SS members from southwestern Germany that were charged with war crimes ranked low on the list. Most Stuttgarters lived a postwar civilian life without restriction.

Max received an open pass dated April 30, 1945, for freedom of movement within Esslingen, a town outside of Center City by about eight miles. The pass, listing him as a homecomer, enabled his receipt of food rations. By August 23, 1946, he was free to move about within the greater district of Stuttgart. He took pride that he was able to help his family and keep his position at the newspaper, for in his mind he would one day transfer his domain to his eldest son in the tradition of his own father.

The years that followed were hardly the time for the heir to a newspaper position to contemplate a career in hairdressing or cooking, but Friedemann Paul Erhardt did just that. One of a postwar generation of Germans with youthful hopes, this young boy, surrounded by the remnants of war and the constant specter of starvation, set his sight on a different kind of future and harbored a dream that he would never relinquish.

STRUGGLING TO SURVIVE

"Altes Brot ist nicht hart, kein Brot, das ist hart." ("Old bread isn't hard ... no bread, that is hard.")

— German proverb

In the early 1940s, Hitler offered no rationing plan for the German people. He opined that Germany's World War I loss came due to a severe rationing program, which demoralized its people. Nonetheless, when the war fortunes of his Nazi regime declined near the mid-1940s, he implemented rationing. Ethnic groups deemed more "pure" received higher daily caloric count allotments than others less fortunate, like the Poles or the lowly Jews. Food, though, was not the only problem that faced the populace at the time.

Max Erhardt did his part to provide warmth for his family during winter's coldest months. His miraculous deal for two hundred pounds of coal, when his boy was only four, helped his brood to survive the harshest hours of the hard winter of 1947–48. Milder winters followed, but Gisela's desire for cooked meals, though meager, drove her and her boy to filch wood wherever they could find suitable pieces to burn; having none would mean frigid nights and hungry stomachs. An enforced 2:00 p.m. daily curfew limited their scavenger hunts to midday hours. Those found on the streets beyond the curfew risked death.

Actual conditions were much harder for the German survivors than the rest of the postwar world imagined. With food in short supply, most of the German population faced starvation. Lack of distribution and delivery means exacerbated the shortage problem. The whole German nation sorely needed a clean infrastructure of roads and an adequate supply of suitable vehicles, but not many other countries cared. Germany, after all, had instigated hostilities — wasn't she now deserving of her awful conditions?

Mother and son braved brutal weather and encountered other desperate housewives and their offspring as they stood in long lines and waited for their turn to pick from meager piles of greenish potatoes dumped on street corners by local farmers. Garden vegetables grown at home could be cobbled up with other indefinable scraps into potato-based soups.

Picking garden raspberries that belonged to someone else, however, was hazardous. "My mother and I had to go to a farmer to pick up some eggs. I was maybe five years old then, or four ... a small kid. During the two-mile hike back home, we stopped to pick some wild raspberries. Suddenly we hear the sound of a shotgun blast and we stop picking. The farmer shot at us, because we were picking the berries," Tell related years later.

Real coffee — long supplanted by grain drinks — and fresh meats and rich dessert creams, cakes, and other delicacies were definitely off the menu. To make do, some young boys tended rabbit warrens for meals and for bartered exchanges. Erhardt didn't have that luxury. Instead, too many nights left him hungry and afraid in the dark. "Sometimes I only had a slice of bread in a day," he remembered.

From Friedemann Erhardt's constant hunger grew a desire to cook for others. From the age of six, this gastronomic purpose spilled out of the recesses of his creative mind filled with copious images of food, drink, and peoples' camaraderie. Perhaps unintended, his daydreams mocked der Führer's nostrum that one was merely a product of gene-pool struggles. Given the combination of a typesetter father with a pediatric nurse mother, even the Third Reich's mathematics of superiority could not have added up to a cook or a chef.

Self-doubts, however, tugged at the young boy's mind: Why are we hungry? What life is this? What's my place in this world? Where will I find love?

Erhardt would struggle for a lifetime to answer such questions. He would search, like the rest of us, for an understanding of the origin of Life — what we like to think and maybe already know is our soul (our self).

As the years would add up, he would follow — pursue most vigorously — his appetite for physical, mental, and spiritual satiety through cooking, food, teaching, wine; all kinds of relationships, classical and country music, fast cars, motorcycles, fatherhood, and scuba diving. He would read historical biographies and history books; write recipe books; appear on television shows; make cooking and product demonstrations and do volunteer church work with children just to have a full cup of personal peace and understanding. Believe it or not, he would even cultivate herb gardens from childhood to grave — a necessary salve for his emotional wounds.

For now, though, Erhardt was simply a small German boy growing up under difficult circumstances.

THE SEARCH FOR SELF BEGINS

"Ich wusste, auf sechs, was ich tun wollte. Ich wollte zu kochen." ("I knew at six what I wanted to do. I wanted to cook.")

— Chef Tell

His mother Gisela often cast the well-being of her family ahead of her own — she might have wished for him to become a doctor or other professional like herself. Instead, she pushed Friedemann toward the German cooking apprenticeship system whenever she could talk with her boy outside the influence of her husband. She feared his attempts to steer their son toward a newsprint career not suited to his sensibilities. Have I not watched my husband work as a typesetter? To what end? she thought as she inspected her surroundings. Her vision for her son was much larger than Max's.

Starving and tired, at times, she also spoke erratically and exhibited deranged behavior. More than once others misdiagnosed her symptoms of malnutrition and tiredness and committed her to "mental health" facilities. Given — or despite — this profound and ongoing situation, Gisela shared both her worries and her food knowledge with Friedemann at every opportunity, including one datum that she knew would serve him well for a lifetime: "Du wirst nie mehr hungern, wenn Sie einen Koch zu werden." ("You will never go hungry if you become a chef.")

From a mother who, despite her inconsistent behavior, saw real pitfalls around her son, those were wise words. She desperately wished for his escape to a clean start, if only to project upon him her own desire to stop the clattering, leftover images and emotional tugs of the past war, which she suffered in her mind. War had dealt Gisela a kind of post-partum that wouldn't go away as long as she remained in that environment.

For his part, the young Friedemann was impressed by his mother's skills. "I was always amazed what my mother could do. She made dishes out of nothing. That fascinated me. It was magic what she could do," he would tell a reporter much later.

Friedemann's final enticement to learn cooking appeared through an unforgettable advertisement that he found and read on a posterboard that announced available apprenticeships. The illustrated image of a chef selecting fruits aboard a cruise liner moored off the coast of an exotic island offered the promise of an abundant future. The colorful foods, tropical locale, and smiling face impressed the famished boy who, vowing that one day he would be that chef, tore the ad from the board and stashed it inside his pocket.

His road to that future would be a long and winding one.

AMERICA ON THE DOORSTEP

"Meine Mutter hat mich in der Küche beschäftigt." ("My mother employed me in the kitchen.")

— Chef Tell

America lifted its ban on assistance packages to Germany on June 5, 1946. By the following year, America arrived at the Erhardts' doorstep. C.A.R.E. (Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe, later known as the Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere), thanks to Arthur Ringland, Dr. Lincoln Clark, a consortium of twenty-two American charities, and the generosity of thousands of American individuals and families including President Harry Truman, would be a life-saving label on cartons that Friedemann would never forget.

The Erhardts were eligible to participate in C.A.R.E. because Max allowed their flat to be occupied by American officers. More than one hundred million such packages arrived at other doorsteps over the course of the next few years, most shipped from the port city of Philadelphia. C.A.R.E. Packages consisted of "10-in-1" food parcels — food for one person for ten days. They had been designed for an invasion of Japan that never materialized. They became a reliable means of food relief to European survivors facing starvation in the war's aftermath.

A typical C.A.R.E. carton — 1.2 cubic feet, weighing 29.5 pounds — contained a pound of beef in broth along with one pound of steak and kidneys; 8 ounces of liver loaf; 8 ounces of corned beef; 12 ounces of luncheon loaf (like Spam); 8 ounces of bacon; 2 pounds of margarine; one pound of lard; one pound of fruit preserves; one pound of honey; one pound of raisins; one pound of Hershey's chocolate; 2 pounds of sugar; 8 ounces of egg powder; 2 pounds of whole milk powder; and 2 pounds of coffee — about 17 to 22 pounds of foodstuffs in all. Not enough to supply the whole family with three squares every day for a month, but something to look forward to on days of little to nothing.