Döner Kebab and West German Consumer (Multi-)Cultures

MAREN MÖHRING

N 1999, CEM ÖZDEMIR, a member of the European Parliament and former member of the German Parliament for the Green Party, published a book on immigration policies and multiculturalism in Ger- I 1 many. The title of the book reads Currywurst und Döner. He uses these two dishes as symbols of the integration of immigrants into German society, the latter (the döner) being the topic of his book.2 The title seems to suggest that Currywurst and döner kebab, both of them very popular fast foods in Germany, coexist peacefully, connected through the copula ‘and’. Whereas one might consider Currywurst as a German dish, the curry in it betrays that it has not been a traditional German food item for a long time.3 The döner kebab, on the

1 Cem Özdemir, Currywurst und Döner: Integration in Deutschland (Bergisch Gladbach: Gustav Lübbe, 1999). A Currywurst is a chopped-up grilled sausage swimming in a hot ketchup-type sauce sprinkled with curry powder (see also fn 3 below). A Döner (hence- forth döner kebab), like the Greek pitta gyros, has as its main ingredient meat – usually a mixture of compressed flaps of beef and lamb – sliced off a vertical spit (= kebab / gyros) and inserted into a pouch of unleavened bread along with various vegetables and flavourings. Like the pitta gyros, a variant of the döner kebab is also found elsewhere in the world (in anglophone countries it is often called and written ‘doner’). 2 Heike Henderson, “Beyond Currywurst and Döner: The Role of Food in German Multicultural Literature and Society,” Glossen 20 (2004), http://alpha.dickinson.edu /departments/germn/glossen/heft20/Henderson.html (accessed 22 January 2010). 3 It is said that Currywurst was invented after World War II in Berlin, combining American ketchup with German sausages and adding curry to make it spicier. An alternative story of the origin of Currywurst, situating its invention in Hamburg, is given in 152 MAREN MÖHRING  other hand – which may be considered a Turkish specialty – is, as it is sold in Germany, a Turkish-German invention. By choosing these two dishes, Özdemir seems to point to the hybrid nature of so-called national dishes. At the same time, he demonstrates that, despite their hybridity, specific food items come to serve as “metonym[s] for national cultures,”4 often in a very stereotypical or auto-stereotypical way. Food or food metaphors are powerful means of addressing questions of personal and social identities. But what do these foods, what does the döner kebab, tell us about immigrants or their integration into German society? Can they tell us anything about it – as Özdemir suggests? Does the enormous success of döner kebab signify a form of acceptance of Turks and German- Turks in Germany? There are reasons to be very sceptical: “Integration is not the sum of all döner snack-bars in a street,” as Heribert Prantl put it in a newspaper article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung.5 “Racists eat döner, too,” he concludes. I will elaborate on this aspect in the second part of this chapter. In the first part, I will provide a short overview of the history of the döner kebab in Germany, the images and narratives surrounding this fast food, and the processes of cultural negotiation involved in the production and consumption of the döner.

Döner Kebab as a Translocal Food Item Whereas Italian cuisine is still the most popular ‘foreign’ cuisine in Germany, döner kebab is the most successful fast food in the Federal Republic today, selling better than hamburgers. Indeed, in 1997, twenty-five tons were sold daily in Berlin, thirty-five tons in the eastern and a hundred and forty tons in the western part of Germany.6 The success story of Döner started in Berlin in

Uwe Timm’s novel The Invention of Curried Sausage, tr. Leila Vennewitz (Die Entdeckung der Currywurst, 1995; New York: New Directions, 1995). 4 Shannan Peckham, “Consuming Nations,” in Consuming Passions: Food in the Age of Anxiety, ed. Sian Griffith & Jennifer Wallace (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1998): 172. 5 Heribert Prantl, “Reichtum im Gepäck: Geschichtslos, erinnerungslos; die Crux unserer Ausländerpolitik,” Süddeutsche Zeitung (1 December 2003). 6 Felicitas Hillmann & Hedwig Rudolph, Redistributing the Cake? Ethnicisation Processes in the Berlin Food Sector (Discussion Paper FS I 97-101, Berlin: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, 1997): 19. In 2008 c. 200 tons were sold in Germany. See www.aeidd .com/A.E.I.D.D.%20ev/6_ausbildung/VereinderDoenerbetriebe.pdf (accessed 22 Jan- uary 2010).