The Invention of Curried Sausage

The Invention of Curried Sausage represents exactly why I love reading books from the list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. I have almost no doubt that without the list, I'd have never discovered this gem of a book. For every dog on the list (see: Choke), there are several great finds (see: this book).

This short novel by Uwe Timm, and translated from the German by Leila Vennewitz, has a whole bunch of Big Themes wrapped up in one small and extremely readable package. The book deals with a man who spends his afternoons in Hamburg visiting with an old family neighbor and listening to her story about how she invented currywurst, which is the national 'fast food' or street food of Germany. The woman, Lena Brucker, begins her tale in the waning days of World War II in Hamburg. Conditions there are, as you can imagine, rather dire. Lena, never a party member or sympathizer, is hoping the war will end soon so life can begin to get back to some sense of normalcy. She meets a younger soldier who is scheduled to head to one of the fast-falling fronts and has basically been assigned to become cannon fodder. She decides to conceal him in her third floor apartment, where they become lovers and she becomes his only link to the outside world.

As the war ends and the British occupy Hamburg, Lena deceives the young soldier into thinking that the war is still ongoing so that he will not leave. She has fallen in love with him and she is sure that once he can return to his young family she will be left alone. Her husband has been missing in service for years and her children are far away.

I'll let the reader discover how and why all of this has to do with the invention of curried sausage. The novella tackles themes of duty, loneliness, conditional ethics, and the horror of the Nazi campaign for those who were willing and unwitting collaborators. I liked this book so much, I'm going to try making some curried sausage for myself.