Treffpunkt 8 Uhr J.F. Schwarzlose Berlin 2012

My late father was from Berlin. Born in the middle of the darkest period of the last century, he had to live through the Second World War as a child. A few years later, when he was just old enough, he left Berlin, ended up in another big city several hundred kilometers away and made a life for himself there. He rarely saw Berlin again and so it didn't play a major role in my life either. Nevertheless, I have always felt a special connection to our exciting capital city and so I tested out the fragrances from Schwarzlose Berlin, mainly because of the brand name.

In addition to the authentic, lime-floral 1A-33 (2012) and the wicked Rausch, I was particularly taken with Treffpunkt 8 Uhr: unsweet, green, slightly fruity. Modern with a touch of nostalgia.
I see my father as a very young man in front of me, riding his bike through a balmy summer evening full of anticipation. He has dressed up and set off extra early so as not to be late for his appointment. The wind is warm, the evening sun conjures up reflections of light on the asphalt. The air smells of summer, of freedom, of light-heartedness; a light-heartedness that I would have wished for my father, but which the war took away from him and which he was unfortunately able to allow far too rarely later in life. for me, Treffpunkt 8 Uhr oscillates between lightness and melancholy, because despite its freshness, it is not an overly cheerful fragrance for me, even if the ginger and mango in the top note do allow a little joie de vivre to shine through. The fragrance is fresh, tart, slightly spicy and the vetiver in it is wonderfully light and bright. It is generally a light fragrance, pleasant, not too strong. And yet melancholic, a bright melancholy that makes you look back at the past and yet always draws you back to the present.

My father and I didn't always have it easy together. You could hardly tell from the outside that he could have been my grandfather in terms of age, and yet there was sometimes too much time between us. But apart from all the strictness and stubbornness that sometimes made life difficult for me, he was also a man of pleasure, and so I am sure that I could have infected him with my enthusiasm for perfume. Perhaps we would have tested our way through the various fragrance samples together. And Treffpunkt 8 Uhr would certainly have appealed to him as much as it did to me.