Tracing the transformation, evolving culinary landscape, and sociocultural significance of Germany's favourite fast food.
Döner kebab may not be the first food that comes to mind when thinking of a typical German dish, and yet, the juicy pide brimmed with tender pieces of spit-roasted meat, fresh veggies, topped with garlic sauce continues to be the country’s most popular fast food in 2022. The business of the tasty handful has become a billion-euro industry in Germany with döner marketed, prepared, and sold in around 18,000 shops across the federal republic. Despite the perceived Turkish delicacy’s proliferation across the globe, the take-away dish marketed in Germany certainly holds a unique appeal. The following article inquires about the transcultural dimensions of the döner, which might be labelled one of Germany’s “typical national dishes,” a notion that in and by itself turns out to be a misconception.
A transcultural approach to food challenges the idea that culturally defined food practices are bound to territorial, linguistic, or cultural “containers,” but only form through interactions, entanglement, and active negotiation. Such an approach facilitates a more comprehensive understanding of how food traditions develop and change over time and are not actually bound to borders of any kind. By recognising the interconnectedness of food cultures, we gain insights into the dynamic nature of culinary practices, the societies it unites and divides, and the politics in which they are embedded in.
As with many foods, the origin of döner kebab is not easily traceable. Forms of spit-roasted meats have existed for centuries and are believed to first have emerged in the Ottoman Empire, from which typical national dishes like gyros, alpastor, and shawarma have derived as a result of global cultural flows. This spread has led to a multitude of culinary "contact zones". However, rather than tracing the origins of cultural facets like foods, a transcultural perspective focuses on these multiple messy and entangled processes that have historically shaped and continue to alter the ideas, practices, and meanings around them. In fact, a quest for the origin or purity of a dish is neither a productive undertaking nor even aproposition in the realms of possibilities considering transcultural studies’ understanding of cultures, practices, and ideas not as fixed entities but products of interaction in themselves.
The döner as it is known in many German Döner shops was constructed at a Turkish snack bar at the Bahnhof Zoo in Berlin in 1975. Following the economic recession in the early 1970s that left many unemployed, a great number of Turkish immigrants decided to open businesses in the food sector to make a living, eventually leading German-Turks in Kreuzberg to create today’s distinctive staple fast food. Yet, while the döner kebab in Turkey was usually served on a plate in certain restaurants and was only later modified into an on-the-go dish served in a sandwich with pickles and ketchup, serving the döner in a pide and filling it with the krauts, onion, salad, and garlic sauce was new. Therefore, although often considered an ‘authentic’ Turkish dish brought to Germany by labour migrants, the new döner was not the product of a simple transfer. Rather, the alterations of the döner should be seen as an active negotiation with the new local context, transforming and retaining certain aspects of the home cuisine to appeal to a largely German palate and make a living in West Berlin. The döner therefore may be considered transformed as a result of the geographical relocation and transcultural interactions much like its inventors themselves.
The pide, the bread döner kebab is served in today, has similarly undergone a process of transculturation. In Turkey, this special Turkish flatbread is usually only being prepared and eaten during Ramadan. Yet, the pide proved practical to hold the amount of various filling considered appropriate for German customers and easy to consume due to its round shape and surface. As the new centrepiece of the adapted version of the döner in Germany, pide was soon not only produced once a year but all year around. The inflationary production soon led to the loss of the bread’s religious significance and its connection to the Islamic fast month for Turkish migrants. As a result, a new form of pide, ramazan pidesi, was introduced by local Turkish bakeries which substituted the pide with a slightly adapted version that was only available during Ramadan. Commodified out of practicality and entrepreneurial spirit to construct the döner they saw fit to cater to a German market, the emergence of the ramazan pidesi may be seen as a reclamation of a Turkish identity marker.
Further, the German-Turkish business owners were not solely selling a hybridised dish but constructed an “exotic experience,” for which there was a large demand in post-war Germany. This aesthetics concerned the outline of the store as well as the visual, auditory, and sensory presentation and marketing and included the employment of “‘folkloric discourse of Turkishness’… [that] drew heavily on orientalist images” (see Möhring 2011), Turkish souvenirs, posters, and coloured lighting. Rather than appropriating these associations, Turkish immigrants who opened döner businesses catered to their customer base’s demands just as business owners in other food sectors did. They profited from the oriental image because it was selling well.
Through self-employment liberated from oppressive contracts, Turkish businessmen therefore played an active role in the configuration of their product as much as the dominant society in Germany played one in accepting the new dish. And yet, since food is so closely related to identity, the döner has always been highly politicised. Quite ironically, despite its hybrid nature and diasporic and transformative proliferation into almost every part of the world, the dish has been instrumentalized within the national borders of Germany for two diagonally opposing nationalist agendas: it is used both as an allegory of successful integration of Turkish immigrants in Germany and as a racist personification for the Turkish ‘Other’ within Germany. Both often entail either a deliberate consumption or refusal of the fast-food item as a stance on one’s own views on asylum politics.
A transcultural perspective on typical national dish[es] indicates the necessity of deconstructing both the ‘typical’ and the ‘national’ of a dish: while there are certainly specific foodways within set boundaries, the notion of ‘typical’ suggests a distinctive, stable, and fixed nature of eating which disregards Germany’s heterogeneous population and concomitant versatile cuisines and food preferences. Lindner et al. further detect a hierarchical sentiment within the logics of nationstates, which imposes a “desired ‘national standard’ at the top and the ‘lower’, less desirable cultural forms subject to marginalization”. Labelling a dish as 'national' implies it is authentic to a specific culture, but this notion is often an illusion tied to preserving nationalist ideology. In reality, all dishes have evolved through cultural exchanges.
Since cultures are constantly in motion as a result of the agency of individuals and groups, the prevalent fashion of how döner is both prepared and consumed continuously migrates and takes on new innovative forms and meanings. Examples are the Glasgow-based fast food franchise German Doner Kebab, which advertises its product as “[m]aintaining the authenticity and originality” and runs branches in Europe, North America, and the Middle East, the döner’s appearance in popular culture in form of song lyrics and fashion logos, or the Berlin-based Hotel Adlon’s 27 Euro spin called „türkische[r] Klassiker,“ garnished with a high-end truffle sauce. And while this article has shown that the döner is neither authentically Turkish nor German and prompts the question what ‘authenticity’ or ‘originality’ actually stands for other than a selling point – it is in any way ‘authentically’ transcultural.
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