Currywurst Period AOrigin theory BVerified

Currywurst is a German street food of grilled (or boiled) sausage, cut into pieces, doused in a tomato-based sauce, and finished with a scattering of curry powder. It has long been eaten the way it was meant to be: standing at an Imbiss, cheap and quick.

It was born in Berlin after the Second World War. In a city battered by the fighting, people wanted something filling that could be had with little to spare. Grilled sausage was already a familiar food here, and neither the tomato sauce nor the curry that went over it had to be fetched from far away. Tomatoes had long since settled into European kitchens, and the curry powder is said to have come by way of the British soldiers who occupied the city after the war.

Factory workers and passersby ate it on their breaks, and Currywurst spread from one street corner to the next. It remains, to this day, one of the everyday tastes that Berlin is known for.

The beginning most often told for Currywurst is the story of a single stall in postwar Berlin.

On 4 September 1949, at a stall on the corner of Kantstraße and Kaiser-Friedrich-Straße in Berlin-Charlottenburg, a woman named Herta Heuwer is said to have put this dish on sale. She mixed a sauce of tomato paste with Worcestershire sauce, curry powder and other ingredients, and poured it over grilled sausage. Some press accounts say she got those ingredients from the British soldiers occupying the city. The date itself rests on the memorial plaque at the site of the stall and on Heuwer's own account.

Her name enters the official record somewhat later. Heuwer called her sauce Chillup, and on 21 February 1958 she applied to register that name as a trademark. It was registered on 21 January 1959, under number 721319. What the German Patent and Trade Mark Office records is this trademark, not the dish sold at the stall in 1949. Even so, among the competing origin stories, Heuwer's is the best documented. The office itself adds that it does not know who actually invented the sausage with sauce.

The date of that trademark has also circulated in a wrong form: that she registered it in January 1951. The English-language encyclopedia says so too. But the office's own records put the application in 1958 and the registration in 1959, not 1951.

There are, to be sure, rival voices claiming to have come first. One holds that it was served in Hamburg in 1947; another that a Dutch-born man, Peter Hildebrandt, served it in Duisburg in 1936. The Hamburg story comes from Uwe Timm's novel Die Entdeckung der Currywurst (The Discovery of the Currywurst), in which the heroine, Lena Brücker, sells it from a stall. The heroine is fictional, but Timm himself has said that he ate the sausage as a child in Hamburg in 1947. Still, neither story has been shown to rest on any record from the time. Neither carries enough weight to overturn the view that the dish began at Heuwer's stall. Among the origin tales handed down, the one best supported by the record remains the story of one woman standing at a stall in Berlin.