The Invention of Curried Sausage by Uwe Timm

For a moment she struggled with herself as to whether she should confess that she had been keeping something from him, in fact she had lied to him, but now she could no longer say it, now it was too late. It had been a game. Now it had turned serious, bloodily serious. To him it would now appear as a low-down dirty lie, as if she had meant to trick him, keep him like a household pet, make a fool of him, and finally drive him to a total loss of self-control. And hadn't she done exactly that? If she had at least let him twist her arm or strike her--she had never thought of that, instead she had held him in a grip of iron, using all her strength: in fact, she had defended herself. If she were now to sit across from him with a swollen eye and bruises on her arm, it would have made everything easier; she could have said, I just wanted to keep you here a bit longer. But now he was sitting there with his bandaged right hand, apologizing for having gone out of his mind.

The narrator of The Invention of Curried Sausage is sure that, contra the wisdom of the day that curried sausage was invented in Berlin, it actually came from his home town of Hamburg, where it was first sold by Lena Brucker, a food-stall proprietor he remembers from his youth. Intent on proving his theory, he travels back to Hamburg to find Lena in a retirement home, where she unfolds the story of curried sausage over a series of visits, a story that turns out not to be about curried sausage at all, really, but about the last days of Nazi Germany and the upheaval of the lives of ordinary Germans. Lena tells the narrator a story about how, abandoned by her husband in the final days of the war, she picked up a much younger soldier in a bomb shelter, taking him back to her apartment where they begin a torrid but complicated affair.

For Lena, the presence of the young soldier Bremer reinvigorates a life that had grown stale and isolating. For the soldier, Lena offers the companionship of a beautiful older woman and safety from the front lines, where soldiers are being offered up as sacrifices in a last-ditch effort to save the Reich. But the war is over within a few days of the young soldier's arrival, and Lena quickly and instinctively makes the decision not to tell him. As long as he believes the war is still ongoing, he knows that he will be shot as a deserter as soon as he emerges. When British soldiers appear on the streets, she even makes up a story about an armistice signed between Germany and the Allied powers to fight the Russian menace in the East. In a way, what The Invention of Curried Sausage reminded me of was the wonderful movie Goodbye, Lenin, about a young man in post-Soviet Russia who must convince his ailing mother that the Iron Curtain has not fallen. Both stories are about the ways that, in the midst of rapid transformation and change, we lie to ourselves--and to others--in order to hold onto the world to which we've become accustomed.

It's clear from the very beginning, almost cheekily so, that the curried sausage is a red herring. We eventually do get the story of the curried sausage, which involves the resourceful Lena making a series of effective black market trades after the war's end, mastering the shifting reality of a makeshift economy. Bremer the soldier is, at best, a footnote to that story. But the story the narrator takes away is of much greater insight and significance than the wone he went looking for, because it captures something meaningful of the reality of the German landscape at the end of the war. I was really struck by the shrewdness and psychological richness of Timm's novel. Let's be honest, few people are hankering for realistic novels from the perspective of the Germans in World War II. But by exploring the specific moment of the Reich's collapse from the point of view of two ordinary but, like all ordinary people, exceptional people, The Invention of Curried Sausage struck me as interesting and gratifying.