The
Invention of Curried Sausage (Die
Entdeckung der Currywurst)
by Uwe Timm
‘Today it is hard to form an even partly adequate idea of the extent
of the devastation suffered by the cities of Germany in the last years of the
Second World War,” laments Austrian writer W. G. Sebald—certainly no apologist
for German atrocities—in a lecture he gave in Zurich called ‘Air War and
Literature’, “still harder to think about the horrors involved in that
devastation.” Indeed, from the spring of
1942 through the end of the war, the Allied Forces—most notably the
English and Americans—carried out a veritable carpet bombing of German cities,
destroying military and industrial targets in Hamburg, Cologne, and Wilhelmshaven
before the English, under Churchill’s direction, expanded their campaign to
include the total destruction of key German cities through the ‘terror bombing’
of their city centers and predominantly civilian populations, a nearly unprecedented
tactic (see the German and Italian bombing of Guernica) that included the
relentless fire-bombing of Bremen, Darmstadt, Berlin, Dresden, and
Hamburg. By the end of the war,
more than two million tons of bombs had fallen on 131 German cities, some
600,00 Germans were dead, and a half a million left homeless. According to
Sebald, the destruction was so extensive that “there were 31.1 cubic meters of
rubble for every person in Cologne and 42.8 cubic meters for every inhabitant
of Dresden.”
It is from out of the ruins of that same Germany that German author Uwe
Timm has fashioned his charming and unlikely tale, The Invention of Curried Sausage. Currywurst, a
proletarian snack of sliced pork sausage in a curried tomato sauce, has been a staple of German fast food
since World War II. As of 2009, it
even has its own museum: the Deutsches Currywurst Museum in Berlin, “a sausage shrine
dedicated to all things currywurst, including sausage sofas…”* The premise of The Invention of Curried Sausage is
simple--and anything but tragic: not convinced that the popular dish was invented in Berlin by the housewife
and “rubble woman,” Herta Charlotte Heuwer, on September 4, 1949, when she mixed together catsup,
Worcestershire sauce, and some curry powder given her by a British soldier, author/narrator
Uwe Timm sets out to track down what he believes are the dish’s true origins in
his hometown of Hamburg. There he finds Lena Brücker, a food vendor he knew from childhood, now an old woman living out her final days in
a retirement home. Through a series of tea-time visits, Timm patiently endures the
old woman’s poignant, if sometimes meandering recollections of the war—some
funny, some bittersweet—and finally manages to tease out the details of her
miraculous invention.
Defined by the author as a novella in the original sense of the word,
meaning “ a little piece of news,” The
Invention of Curried Sausage is more than that. It is also a story about war and memory, about loneliness
and compassion, and about the sometimes magical role of happenstance in
life.
Uwe Timm was born in Hamburg in 1940. He
trained to be a furrier and went to college in Braunschweig. He graduated from
high school in 1963, and went on to study Philosophy and German Literature in
Munich and Paris. He was awarded his doctorate in philosophy in 1971. One of
Germany's greatest contemporary writers and novelists, he now works in Munich
and Berlin.** He is perhaps best
known in the States for his 1989 novel The
Snake Tree. The Invention of Curried
Sausage is published by New Directions http://ndbooks.com/
.
* “The Craze Over Currywurst” The
Wall Street Journal, August 27th, 2009
**Bloomsbury Publishing
Peter Adam Nash
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