Upptäckten av currywursten

Currywurst is one of those weird results of the post-war era: the most teutonic of foods, the sausage, fried up in Indian curry (or rather a European version of it). As Timm puts it, it's the sort of food that could only be a hit in a country where grey must occasionally be offset by splats of red. It started turning up in hot dog stands in the 50s and became a staple of German fast food. Trying to pinpoint exactly when and by whom it was invented is like trying to decide who invented the hamburger or the kebab; it's always been there.

Except Timm (or rather his narrator) remembers eating it in Hamburg in the years directly after the war, as a kid picking through bombed-out houses and abandoned defense posts, and claims to know exactly who invented it. And so one day in the 1990s, he looks up the woman who used to run the local hot dog stand back then and asks her how she came to invent the recipe. She's old, pushing 90, and blind, but remembers him. You want to know how I invented curried sausage? It's a long story. It started in 1945, when I was 40, hadn't seen my husband since he joined the army 6 years earlier, and ran into this young sailor during an air raid who really didn't want to be crushed under a tank the next day...

The Invention Of Curried Sausage takes place during the last days of the war and the weeks after, as the British army crosses the river and the citizens of Hamburg are ordered by to fight to the last drop to turn around a war that's obviously already been lost, while Hitler blows his brains out in his bunker in Berlin. But that's not the focus. It's the story of one woman and one (much younger) man who cling to each other as everything falls apart around them - a love story that isn't one, since they're far too different, pushed together by circumstances that won't last, and lying their asses off to stave off the inevitable end. It's a simple story, but told so subtly and with so many little details that it captures so much more; the paranoia of living in a fascist dictatorship, the desperation of defeat, the realisation that you've been on the wrong side, the role of women in a society built on the idea of strength... all that, sure. But also the very nature of human interaction, trust, distrust, hope, despair, hunger. It's not pretty, it pretty much can't be under those circumstances. It's the sort of novel - short, greasy, and yet perfectly spiced - that belongs under a grey rainy sky in the shadow of quickly built concrete houses, with a plate of warm sausage in curry sauce.