Tasteful Vintage Advertisements Hanging In My Pre-Furnished Berlin Apartment

A folio detailing my adventures as a house renter in Berlin would be filled with the most curious illustrations of art I have encountered in the pre-furnished tenants I have sublet. You are all, of course, familiar with the giant vagina hanging on the wall of my last apartment in Kreuzberg (the picture’s bad; it does not detail the lurid pinkness of the horizontal slit very well, nor does it show it’s horrifying depth. Trust me on this: skeptical house guests have all agreed with me it is, and only could be, a vagina). This same apartment had a very curious picture of two giant blue extraterrestrials, leaning in for a homoerotic kiss; this proved to be a theme, as the bathroom of another penthouse I inhabited for two weeks in Kreuzberg was decorated with a photograph of the pudendum of another cerule-colored alien, this one a woman, which afforded me many opportunities for excretionary contemplation on the divine nature of Neptunian motherhood.

I have just moved into yet another apartment in Prenzlauer Berg, and I thought you might all like to see the culturally sensitive vintage advertisements and magazine covers which tastefully adorn the kitchen walls.

In one, zombie Jemima bites into a watermelon as if it were a delicious hunk of cottage cheese textured fat she just clawed out of the abdomen of her plantation boss. Above my walnut bowl hangs another cheery young African-American girl, enjoying a watermelon: this time, she is a nude, mud-black kewpie doll, her horrible rictus every bit as blood red as the watermelon she so ravishly devours. Finally, above the kitchen table, Mr. Banania, enjoying a nice tin can full of banana custard. He, at least, is redeemed by the dapper fez perched upon his gleaming chocolate head.

The couple who owns this apartment are a very nice German girl and her Peruvian boyfriend. When I first came to see it, they were leading out a very angry looking black American guy, who I needed to “act quick” against, since he was my competition for the lease. Somehow, I didn’t even notice any of these prints hanging up before I actually moved in: if I had, I would have realized that my fellow American was, perhaps, less eager to take the apartment than I thought, and I would have negotiated harder with them over the rent.