Dialect & delicacies from Saxony
Kristina vom Dorf and Marisa Endrejat inspire people for their region in very different ways.
What exactly is a Kließlheber? The trade fair visitors in the Sachsenhalle look at each other, perplexed. A dumpling lifter? A skimmer? The young man from the Ore Mountains, who was just able to explain what ‘rumhutzen’ means, namely sitting together in a cosy atmosphere, also shrugs his shoulders. ‘You're looking in the wrong room. The Kießlheber doesn't belong in the kitchen, but in the bedroom. It's a brassiere,’ explains Kristina from the village. The audience laughs.
The author, blogger and presenter, whose real name is Kristina Zorniger, entertains the trade fair guests on the Sachsenbühne stage with a lesson in dialect. She repeatedly holds up colourful posters written in felt-tip pen with words such as ‘Schnudentunker’, ‘Schmäre’, ‘Muzel’, ‘Ufentopp’ or ‘Einbrenne’ to explain them to the ‘uhiessch’, the people who are not from Saxony.
Courage to use dialect
Kristina vom Dorf, who grew up in Langenreinsdorf in the district of Zwickau, sees herself as a fighter for the dialect. In her book ‘Made in Saxony. Meine sächsischen Wurzeln, meine Landsleute und ich’, she addresses prejudices and encourages people to speak dialect. ‘There are hardly any young Saxons who go out with their dialect. Bavarians have a completely different pride,’ she says. With her Instagram account sachsen_muddi, on which she juxtaposes dialogues in High German and Saxon in funny reels, she has hit a nerve. The account, which was actually only intended for research for her book, had 60,000 followers within two months, and the videos are now also clicked hundreds of thousands of times on TikTok.
Fermented & sustainable
Marisa Endrejat lives her regional pride in a different way. Together with her partner Felix Lehmann, she founded Elb-Ferment (Hall 21/235) in 2019, a sustainable manufactory that specialises in fermented foods such as kombucha, kefir and kimchi and integrates upcycling, less-waste, regionality and organic into all areas of the company. The hemp comes from Müritz, the sugar from the Bioland Rübenzucker Genossenschaft, the garlic from Bautzen and the milk from Vorwerk Podemos in Dresden. The website is Co2-neutral. ‘We wanted a cool product that doesn't deceive customers,’ says Marisa.
She pours a hemp kombucha. The drink tingles on the tongue. It doesn't taste as acidic as the usual kombucha available in supermarkets, but rather sweet. ‘You control that with sugar. Too much sugar leads to too much acidity,’ explains Marisa Endrejat. With a great deal of enthusiasm for microbiology, she experiments on the perfect flavour and is also active in the Dresden Nutrition Council. Marisa is passionate about her work, you can feel it and it colours her work. Her son, four-year-old Bruno, also wants to join the company. ‘He loves kimchi and is offended every day when he has to go to kindergarten. But he would much rather operate the kombucha machine,’ says Marisa.
