Depending on who you ask, Kettwurst (which is a hotdoglike sausage of the fast food variety found in former East Berlin) means:
- link sausage (Kette = link)
- a (German) phonetic rendering (no pun intended) of “cat” wurst, which they reportedly used to make and eat in the East during the time of the Wall
- staying on the “cat” theme, the East German counterpart to “hot dog”
- actually spelled Ketwurst with one t, it means a sausage with KETchup
Regrettably, the last explanation seems to be the true one (in addition to the most boring). If you don’t speak German look here for Google’s auto translation because I’m too lazy, and because it contains the amazing translation of Bockwurst “support sausage”.
Update: That link to the Google translation suddenly started redirecting straight to the German Wikipedia article again. I am too tired to figure out who is looking at whose IP/referrer and deciding all this is a bad idea, so I went nuts and took a screenshot of the translation. Given that this all started as a blog entry about a picture I took today, it’s rather amusing that it ends with one as well.
ORIGINAL KETWURST | 20-Apr-05 at 12:13 pm | Permalink
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ORIGINAL KETWURST?.
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Berlin Dinners: The Ket(t)wurst « A Berlin Diary | 06-Mar-07 at 1:57 am | Permalink
[...] In researching this post – a long drawn out process that involved typing both versions of the spelling into Google – I discovered, thanks to Bad Scene, that there is a debate as to the origins of the word. The options are; because the sausages arrived at the imbisses as link sausages (Kette=link); there is cat involved either in the process of making, or as a “clever” pun against the nasty capitalist-imperialist hot dog; or, more mundanely, that the Ketwurst is a wurst with Ket-chup. Unfortunately, Bad Scene believes the last one to be boringly true. [...]