Customer Reviews

The Invention of Curried Sausage

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I read this book in its English translation, and I must congratulate the translator, because the imagery and themes shine through the language differences with quite possibly all of the original intent of Mr. Timm. To suggest that somebody could "invent" curried sausage is nearly as ridiculous a premise as suggesting that somebody could "invent" sex, but I believe that's what the author wants us to see here. The magic of inventing the ridiculous, with a farcical sprinkling of the dangerous, is an elixir that in the end helps the protagonists forget that war is hell.

Traveling back to his childhood neighborhood, the narrator meets with one of his mother's neighbors, who lived through WWII in Hamburg, one of the most devastated cities in Germany. Already as a child he bought curried sausage (Currywurst) from her - and by trying to unravel how this strange dish came to be, he discovers how one's woman life was changed... A small, poignant novella about love and loss, war and destruction, and the power of human connections...

Uwe Timm is a German novelist and well-known children's book author. With a seemingly simple, but convincing style, he opens a small (fictive?) chapter about German lives at the end of WWII.

This is a melancholy read of friendship and coincidence. The novel's object is the discoverer of veal sausage with curried ketchup - still one of the most popular burger van menu items in Germany. The circumstances of the discovery, and the narrator's recollections in connection with it, form the frame for a tale of wartime romance against a backdrop of defeat and regeneration at the end of World War II.

Currywurst -- curried sausage -- is not as universally popular in Germany today as it was when I first traveled there in 1966. The competition from 'shashlik' was already intense in '67, and today there are dönner, pizza, burgers, even 'wraps' at the fast-food stands to choose from. Uwe Timm, born in Hamburg in 1940, plainly has the same 'comfort food' nostalgia for currywurst that an American born that year might have for 'sloppy joes' or BLTs. But his literary search for the origin of the currywurst is more than a culinary quirk. The currywurst, at least, so it seems to this reader, is a metaphor for his post-war identity, and his search is for the inner substance of a childhood that has perished beyond any autopsy but his own memory. I think I understand his mood. I was born in 1941, and like Uwe my childhood memories begin post-war. My years from '45 to '55 were not spent amid the rubble of fire-bombed Hamburg or Marshall-Planned Germany, of course, but I share Timm's sense of a "Rip van Winkle" awakening, a transformation of ordinary life that makes the world of my childhood seem more archaeological than ancient Sparta.

"The Invention of Curried Sausage" is narrated by a journalist, ostensibly Uwe Timm himeslf, who returns to his childhood neighborhood in Hamburg to find evidence for his claim that currywurst was 'invented' by a specific woman, Mrs. Brücker, at a specific moment in German history, and taht what's more, he was there, among her primeval customers as a child. With a bit of sleuthing, the narrator finds Mrs. Brücker in a municipal old-age home in Harburg, a suburb of Hamburg. Mrs. Brücker is blind and feeble but cognitively intact; with a modicum of flattery and regular bribes of sweets, the narrator coaxes her to tell her life story while she knits, a tale that stretches over several weeks of visits. Mrs. Brücker's tale of strange passion is really the plot line of the novella, though the author keeps "us" waiting for the secret of the first currywurst until the final pages of the book. Lena Brücker, a lonely woman already in her forties whose sharper husband has vanished, conceals a German soldier -- seduces him into desertion -- in the final days of the War, thus perhaps saving his life. She feeds him, regales him with the 'warmth' of her bed, and eventually deceives him into believing that the War is not lost, that the English and Americans have now sided with the Germans to confront the Red menace of Russia, but that his only safety lies in remaining utterly concealed in her apartment, lest he be arrested by German or British MPs. The deserter, Bremer, is a man barely half her age. Their weeks of secrecy are, in Mrs. Brücker's aged memory, the happiest of her life.

So, why currywurst as a subject? An improbable contingency of a food, a blend of 'echt Deutsch" (pure German) with the most ersatz outlandish substance imaginable: curry powder, a culinary joke perpetrated by the British Raj on its own tastebuds! And thus a symbol of post-war Germany's de-Germanification of itself? Its surrender of its cherished unique cultural identity to a world of mutual influences? Or else a symbol of 'fast food' cheapening of community values during the "economic miracle"? Go ahead, dear reader! Choose your own over-interpretation! It's just an amusing little novella after all, a literary bagatelle from a coy pop writer. Post-War Lite? Certainly Timm is less traumatic than other German writers of his era, the older Koeppen or the younger Erpenbeck for instance.

Structurally and stylistically, Uwe Timm reminds me of Josef Roth, the pre-war Austrian journalist whose works were chiefly novellas in which a first-person narrator tells someone's else remarkable story. Like Roth, Timm keeps his syntax simple and terse -- smooth anecdotal language that occasionally wrinkles into a startling image or a shocking aphorism. I doubt that there was a direct influence, but I'd defend the comparison even from native German readers.

"Entdeckung der Currywurst" was and is a "bestseller" in Germany. I can easily imagine that its "lightness of being" would be more comfortable and entertaining for German readers than the ferocity of Wolfgang Koeppen or the precise intellectualism of WG Sebald. And it's a charming tale for English readers, full of wit and wackiness, and gently forgiving of humanity's sad weaknesses.

This is a believable end of WW II fairy tale, with an unexpectedly feminist twist. It's also a very fast read. Good work.

It is a novella, so it is short, but it is a lovely story. It reminded me of The English Patient. Well written, sexy in places, and evocative.

Uwe Timm, the author, accurately assesses this work as a novella. On the personal level, it is limited in scope: the only two characters whom the reader gets to know are the narrator and his interlocutor, a blind old woman in a Hamburg retirement home. We hear of other important characters (her wartime lover, her husband) only from her account of them. The background, however, is a richly detailed description of the home front in Germany in the closing days of World War II. Especially for anglophone readers it offers a fascinating, fresh perspective on ordinary Germans under National Socialism and in wartime. The "hook"--a local dispute about the origin of kurrywurst, a popular type of German street food--may lack appeal for non-Germans, but its insights into women and men, young, old and middle-aged, are universal and endearing. The English translation is easy to read.

This was a touching and funny story. It was a fresh look at post-war Germany. I've had all my family and friends read it.

Great story that brings the end of WW II into perspective from a German's point of view.
If you have ever eaten Curry Wurst in Berlin (or other German city) you will get a real kick out how the author uses it as a basis for a very charming story.

good for beginning German. read for my 200 level German class. Enjoyed it