Who invented currywurst?
Herta Heuwer first sold it on 4 September 1949 at her snack stand in Charlottenburg, West Berlin. Hamburg and the Ruhr have their own claims, but her story is the best documented.
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A quiet day at a Berlin stand
Berlin in 1949 was a city of rubble and ration cards. Herta Heuwer ran a snack stand on the corner of Kantstrasse and Kaiser-Friedrich-Strasse in Charlottenburg. On 4 September that year, business was slow. One version says it was a rainy Sunday and she had run out of mustard. Either way, she started playing with what she had. She mixed tomato paste, curry powder and Worcestershire sauce, and poured it over a grilled pork sausage cut into pieces.
Help from the British
Charlottenburg was in the British sector of the divided city. Curry powder was not something a German kitchen had in 1949, and the usual story is that Heuwer traded with British soldiers for the key ingredients. Some tellings say she got ketchup from them, others Worcestershire sauce. The Local adds that the taste for ketchup came from the Americans. So the snack Berlin calls its own is a mix of an Indian spice blend, a British sauce and a German sausage.
The patent that was not a patent
Heuwer liked to say she held the patent. She did not. A patent would have meant writing the recipe down for anyone to read. Instead, in February 1958 she applied to protect a name, Chillup, probably a mix of chilli and ketchup. The German patent office registered it as a trade mark for a special sauce on 21 January 1959, number 721319. She kept the recipe to herself all her life and took it to her grave when she died in 1999.
Hamburg says it was first
Not everyone agrees Berlin got there first. In 1993 the writer Uwe Timm published a novel, The Discovery of Curried Sausage, in which a woman in Hamburg invents the dish just after the war. Timm said he ate currywurst in Hamburg in 1947, two years before Heuwer's date. The Ruhr region claims it too. The old Currywurst Museum in Berlin took Heuwer's side, calling her account the best documented one. The book is fiction, and no record proves the Hamburg version.
What it is today
Her stand became famous with building workers and at its peak sold about 10,000 portions a week before it closed in 1974. Germans now eat around 800 million currywursts a year, and Volkswagen makes its own for staff at the Wolfsburg plant. A typical portion is one sausage, sliced, covered in curry ketchup and dusted with more curry powder. It comes on a paper tray with a small fork, often with fries or a bread roll on the side.