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Currywurst: Germany's national hero hits the silver screen
2008-09-15
BERLIN (AFP) - George W. Bush reputedly once turned down Germany's ubiquitous "currywurst", the curried sausage cherished as a national institution, but it's now starring as the hero of a new film -- and even a museum. Nicknamed "the poor man's steak", 800 million currywursts are gobbled up every year in Germany -- that means 10 per person -- with songs sung, books written and plays crafted in honour of what may be the nation's favourite snack. The museum devoted to currywurst is due to open in Berlin next year in tribute to what organisers call a "piece of German cultural and social history". Despite its name, the sausage itself is not curried. The secret of this singular delicacy is the sauce the meat is drenched in: a simple but unforgettable melange of pureed tomatoes sprinkled with curry powder. Most loved in Berlin, Hamburg and the industrial Ruhr region, it is served sliced up at Germany's omnipresent outdoor snack bars any time of the day or night in a cardboard dish with a plastic or wooden fork, accompanied with a bread roll or chips. It is former chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's favourite snack. And automaker Volkswagen's own variety served up in factory canteens is so popular that Volkswagen sells more currywursts than it does Golf cars. But where did the recipe come from? According to Ulla Wagner's new film "Die Entdeckung der Currywurst" ("The Invention of Curried Sausage"), it was a woman named Lena Bruecker who accidentally came up with the recipe in bombed-out Hamburg just after World War II. In a slow-moving film that delves into much more than just sausages, Bruecker (Barbara Sukowa) falls for a young sailor (Alexander Khuon) in 1945 and hides him in her flat so he can avoid going to war. In an echo of the hit 2003 film "Good Bye Lenin!", in which a young man keeps the demise of communist East Germany secret from his ailing mother, Bruecker does not tell her sailor boy that the war is over in order to keep the fun going. But the game, and the affair, soon ends -- though the recipe emerges. About 10 minutes before the film is over, Bruecker, feeling fragile after losing her love, drops a bottle of ketchup and a jar of curry powder. She licks her fingers while cleaning up the mess and suddenly thinks: this tastes good. And presto, currywurst is born. -- Everything has an end, but a sausage has two -- The trouble is, it looks like the whole story may be untrue, not only the love affair but also the bit about the sausage. "As far as I know it's a work of fiction," said a spokeswoman for the publishers of the book behind the film. In truth, or so Berliners insist, a plaque at Stuttgarter Platz in the German capital pays tribute to the currywurst's true inventor, Herta Heuwer, who first made it on a rainy September 4, 1949. Organisers of the planned Deutsches Currywurst Museum in Berlin also insist it was invented in the German capital and that it is as much part of Berlin as is the historic Brandenburg Gate. And the "wurst" of it all, Berliners say, is that Hamburgers believe the story: shortly after Uwe Timm's 1993 book came out, a plaque in Bruecker's memory was erected in the northern German city. But Uwe Timm reportedly claims to have tasted currywurst in Hamburg in 1947 -- two years before its supposed invention in Berlin -- and others also give credence to the Hamburg story. These include Werner Siegert and Michael Moellers, authors of a small book called "Der kleine aber absolut unentbehrliche Currywurst-Knigge" ("The small but absolutely indispensable currywurst etiquette guide"). The Currywurst Club Hamburg even goes so far as to accuse Berlin of re-writing history and claims to have documentary proof that Bruecker was the inventor. It even suggests that "new evidence" from Ghana suggests that the real story may be that Bruecker's lover was not a German, he was an Allied soldier from Africa who brought the recipe with him. Yet another theory says it was invented in Essen, but the rivalry is all good-natured and will never stop Germans from enjoying their currywurst. As a popular saying goes, "It's all sausage to them anyway" -- meaning it matters little.
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