It simply tastes good

OK, it doesn’t quite look too tasty lying on the soggy cardboard plate cut into pieces and drowned in that brownish-red sauce, but don’t be deceived. This is an item that just cannot be missing from any fairground, service station, student restaurant, swimming pool, football stadium or canteen menu, anywhere in the country. It is the most popular fast-food dish in Germany, 
a veritable institution, close to people’s hearts: Currywurst, or curry sausage. Guaranteed vitamin-free, quick to cook, easy to buy. It is a metaphor for the real, the earthbound, the pragmatic, and of course it was invented in Berlin. It was there that the then 36-year-old Herta Heuwer, born in Königsberg in Eastern Prussian, made that famous mix of tomato paste, water and spice that she poured over a sausage. She did it out of pure boredom in her snack stall at the corner of Kant- and Kaiser-Friedrich-Strasse. Since then, the curried sausage is to be found wherever there are people, 
and people wherever a currywurst can be had. Which brings us to the actual charm 
of the sausage: it is considered to be the 
favourite food of ordinary citizens, who 
eschew neither its catastrophic nutritional value, nor the usually rather uncomfortable conditions under which it is eaten in order to be among people like themselves. After all, you gain a much clearer view of things at a snack stall than you would eating 
scallops on spinach or salmon morsels in cream of dill sauce. Among other things, that is because you have to be brief and to the point; there’s less time to waste at a draughty outdoor snack bar than during the endless hours at a restaurant table. In a 
nutshell: currywurst is grassroots democracy incarnate, a confidence-building measure. Not just here, in other countries too, and for some time now, at the sausage stands in the street canyons of Manhattan, for example, or in London, where two Germans are so successful with their grilled and curry sausages, under the Teutonic label Herman de German, that they are 
already running three branches of their shop.

The sausage is something you can really rely on – or as it was once put at a conference: In Wurst we trust. So it’s no wonder that a 
currywurst is a must if one wishes to demonstrate being down to earth. The story goes that former chancellor Gerhard Schröder hit the headlines for weeks because he would not allow his nutrition-conscious wife to stop him going to snack stalls, thus again supporting the claim that “Currywurst is SPD”. And even if 
kebabs, pizza or even falafel have long since conquered a place in the German fast-food cosmos, nothing achieves the symbolic force of the currywurst. Meantime, it has even chewed its way up into higher cultural spheres. The author Uwe Timm, for example, dedicated a whole novel to it, Die Entdeckung der Currywurst (Die invention of Curried Sausage), while successful rock-bard Herbert Grönemeyer sang the praises of its therapeutic effect 
as comfort food: Biste richtig down, brauchste was zu kau’, ‘ne Currywurst (If you’re really down, you need something to chew, 
a currywurst). There is even a museum 
dedicated to it in Berlin (www.currywurstmuseum.com).

You could almost be afraid that it might lose its down-to-earthness in the face of all these celebrities. What is more, repeated attempts are being made to transform the currywurst into the Eliza Doolittle of snacks by means of saffron, organic variants, gourmet sauces, even gold leaf. However, with only minor success. The good thing about the sausage is, after all, that it is so totally normal and definitely not chic. Which is also why the one thing that is really causing problems for the sausage is the fact that increasingly it is losing its traditional position, outdoors. More and more snack stalls are disappearing from increasingly expensive inner city locations. And the supermarket currywurst for the microwave at home is really no consolation. The pleasure is after all only genuine when you meet the likes of yourself at the snack stand. People who appreciate the fact that in this complex life of ours we can at least still find a modicum of stability eating a currywurst. ▪

CONSTANZE KLEIS lives and works 
as a successful book author and columnist 
in Frankfurt am Main.