A Sausage's Tale: A Short History of the Currywurst
Updated: 6 days ago
Berlin has never been famous for its cuisine. But one dish made it into the canon of German food, and it was born on a street corner in Charlottenburg in 1949.
Creativity, a wide range of ingredients, rich flavours: none of these have ever been strengths of the Berlin kitchen. For generations, Berlin left the culinary spotlight to its southern sisters: the Austrian kitchen, which reflects the country's grand imperial past, and the Bavarian one. Both enjoyed more wealth and better access to ingredients, and you can taste it.
As the capital of Prussia, Berlin spent the past centuries busy building an army, not refining the fine arts or the pleasures of the table.
And yet, there is one dish Berlin managed to add to the list of Germany's national favourites: the currywurst. So what does curry have to do with Germany, or with sausages? Good question.
The saleswoman who changed Berlin street food
It all started after the Second World War, when Berlin was slowly shaking off the ruins. The years after the war were about shortages, rationing and a lot of soldiers in the streets. The defeated city was divided between four armies: Soviet, American, British and French.
The neighbourhood that matters for our story is Charlottenburg, today one of West Berlin's best-known districts (mostly thanks to the Ku'damm), which was under British control.
One of its residents, Herta Heuwer, had worked as a saleswoman at KaDeWe, West Berlin's famous department store, before the war, and afterwards joined the women who cleared the rubble of the city. In 1949 she decided to open a sausage stand on Kantstraße, at the corner of Kaiser-Friedrich-Straße.
Until then, German sausages were served with mustard. And despite the huge variety (at KaDeWe you can still see and buy sausages from every region of Germany, and we're talking hundreds), the Berlin sausage is a very simple one: a pork sausage, no special seasoning, standard size.
The stand opened on 4 September 1949 and served Heuwer's own version for the first time: a sausage with a sauce mixed from ketchup, Worcestershire sauce and curry powder. A strange and very un-local combination. So why?
Years later, Heuwer explained that boredom, together with her customers' lack of enthusiasm for potato pancakes (another Berlin classic), led to the experiment. But the historical context matters too. Until May 1949, West Berlin had been under the Soviet blockade, cut off from supplies and fed by the Allied airlift. The British soldiers stationed in Charlottenburg brought the finest products of British cuisine with them (matched, of course, only by Berlin's), and ketchup and curry powder were easier to find in the area than traditional mustard.
It was an instant success. At its peak, the stand employed 19 saleswomen, was open 24 hours a day and sold more than 10,000 portions a week. Ten years later, in January 1959, Heuwer patented her secret sauce under the name Chillup. As you can guess, the patent didn't help much: other stands mixed their own versions from similar ingredients in different amounts. The name didn't catch on either. It was simply called currywurst.
Heuwer died in 1999. In 2003, on what would have been her 90th birthday, a memorial plaque was unveiled at the corner of Kantstraße and Kaiser-Friedrich-Straße, where her stand used to be. It says that here, on 4 September 1949, Herta Heuwer (born 30 June 1913 in Königsberg, died 3 July 1999 in Berlin) invented the "pikante Chillup sauce" for the currywurst that is now known all over the world. It ends with a line only a German plaque could write: "Ihre Idee ist Tradition und ewiger Genuss!" (Her idea is tradition and eternal pleasure.)
When I wrote the first version of this article, a Chinese supermarket stood on the spot: an ironic symbol of how tastes change.
Hamburg: the alternative version
Another story says that, with all due respect to Herta Heuwer and Berlin, currywurst was served in Hamburg two years earlier, and some people there will swear by it.
The Hamburg story, however, comes from fiction: Uwe Timm's 1993 novella Die Entdeckung der Currywurst (The Invention of Curried Sausage), in which a woman named Lena Brücker invents the sauce at the end of the war. Lena Brücker is a fictional character, and there is no evidence that she, or anyone else, served currywurst in Hamburg at that time.
East and West
Currywurst was born in West Berlin, but it made its way east very quickly. Heuwer's stand closed in the 1970s, but the first place to serve currywurst in East Berlin is still open today: Konnopke's Imbiss, under the elevated U-Bahn tracks on Schönhauser Allee in Prenzlauer Berg. The family business has been running since 1930 and started serving currywurst in 1960, with its own secret family recipe for the sauce, of course.
With or without?
The first question you'll hear when you order a currywurst: mit oder ohne Darm? With or without the skin?
The skinless sausage is an East Berlin technical achievement. Like the original currywurst, it started as a solution in hard times. Many ingredients were constantly in short supply in East Germany, and one of the hardest to get was natural casing for sausages. So East Germans developed a sausage without a casing, and it became very popular as currywurst.
Today you'll find it all over the city, East and West. Later generations solved the casing problem with artificial casings, for those with a sensitive stomach.
The museum that was
Yes, there was even a museum. The Deutsches Currywurst Museum opened near Checkpoint Charlie in 2009, for the sausage's 60th birthday, and closed at the end of 2018.
The idea sounds ridiculous at first, but it was actually pretty good, especially for families. It was mostly interactive, with everything you could want to know about the sausage, a (nearly) real sausage stand where you could try being the seller, and video clips, including a nostalgic one of Herta Heuwer on an old German TV show. It's a pity it's gone.
Street food, luxury edition
Currywurst is one of the cheapest meals in the city. Today it costs around €4. Only a few places could ever charge much more without it seeming absurd, and for years one of them was the Hilton.
Berlin was probably the only place in the world where a Hilton ran a sausage stand, and a good one. It stood across from the hotel at Gendarmenmarkt, served currywurst on porcelain plates with a metal fork instead of the usual paper tray, and offered buffalo, ostrich and even fish sausages. Sadly, it has closed.
📍 Where to eat? My short list Konnopke's Imbiss My personal favourite ❤️ Schönhauser Allee 44B, Prenzlauer Berg. The East Berlin original, under the U-Bahn tracks since 1930 and still a family-owned business today. They also have a bison sausage and a vegan one. Map ↗ Mehringdamm 36, Kreuzberg. A West Berlin classic, and one of the stops on our sausage tour. Map ↗ Oranienburger Straße 6, Mitte. Right in the centre, easy to fit in between sights. Map ↗ Curry & Chili 🌶️🌶️🌶️ Osloer Straße 109, Wedding. It's far from the centre, but I sometimes go there just for this. The sauce comes in spice levels up to 10, and it is really spicy, not "German spicy". I don't think I've ever gone above 7. Those who survive a 10 get their photo on the wall of fame. Map ↗ |
Volkswagen: the car factory that makes sausages
Everybody knows Volkswagen as the car maker from Wolfsburg. Fewer people know it's also a respected currywurst producer.
The factory was built in a fairly empty area, and Wolfsburg grew around it, so it was only natural for the company to produce food for its many workers. By the 1950s it was already making several kinds of sausages for its own canteens. Currywurst production started in 1973, and the sausage has its own VW part number, like any other component: 199 398 500 A.
In 2024, Volkswagen sold a record 8.5 million currywursts, while about 5.2 million cars and vans carried the VW logo. And when one of its Wolfsburg canteens dropped meat in 2021, it made national headlines. The currywurst came back in 2023.
A sausage party
So how much currywurst do Germans eat? Commonly cited estimates speak of around 800 million a year across Germany, about 70 million of them in Berlin.
Impressive, but is it Berlin's favourite street food? Not quite. That title goes to the döner kebab, the Berlin version of Turkish döner, with estimates of hundreds of thousands sold in the city every day. Döner is deeply rooted in Berlin culture too: there's probably no TV series filmed here without at least one döner scene.
🌭 Taste the story: Berlin's Great Sausage History Currywurst is only one chapter. On our sausage tour through West Berlin, we follow the city's history one sausage at a time: from a Bavarian Weisswurst and air-dried specialities to currywurst (with and without skin), Turkish mumbar and traditional Berlin blood sausage. Sausages, beer and stories included. Private tour · Mon–Fri at 11:00 · 3.5–4 hours · from €420 · we meet you at your hotel Reservations: info@foodelements.net |
Written by Itay Novik, founder of Elements of Food, chef and culinary guide in Berlin. A Hebrew version of this article was first published in Haaretz in 2017. Updated for 2026.
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