The döner kebab has a meaty role in German society

“I have an onion on my head/I am a kebab/because kebab makes you more beautiful.” It is no surprise that the lyrics of “Döner macht schöner”, a German hit from 2004, do not deliver quite the same emotional payload in English. In Britain the kebab is a byword for drunken excess, devoured before bed and recalled in shame. In Germany, especially its capital, it is a more exalted affair. Every Berliner has a favoured Dönerladen. Many build family outings around them.

The döner kebab (the umlaut is essential) long ago displaced currywurst as Berliners’ fast food of choice. But these days its ubiquity obliges it to carry a lot more than succulent strips of seasoned meat—lamb, veal or beef—served in flatbread with salad and sauces.

Take inflation: where Germans once assessed price rises via the cost of ice-cream or beer, today newspapers calculate how many kebabs an hour’s labour might earn you. After supply-chain shocks and war sent prices soaring, some politicians called for a dönerpreisbremse: a cap on the cost of kebabs. “Talk to Putin, I want to pay four euros for a kebab!” one döner-demonstrator shouted at the chancellor in 2022.

Don’t laugh: Döner-Diplomatie is a thing. In April Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Germany’s president, was skewered for inviting a Berlin kebab-shop owner, complete with a 60kg slab of meat, to join him on a state visit to Turkey. Might a better symbol of German-Turkish amity, sniffed columnists, not have been Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci, the Mainz-based couple behind the first mRNA covid vaccine? Nonsense, says Eberhard Seidel, author of “Döner: A Turkish-German Cultural History”, who snagged an invite on the president’s plane. The kebab was served to Turks at a reception in Istanbul, while Germans feasted on plates of garlic sausage with a side of sauerkraut. What better way to celebrate the humble roots of the migrants on whom the relationship between these two countries rests?

Any foundational cuisine attracts its myths. Mr Seidel places the origins of the döner in the Ottoman empire. (The vertical-roasting technique was probably invented in Bursa, in north-west Turkey.) In the 1970s some Turkish Gastarbeiter (guest workers) in West Germany were forced to open kebab stands after the factories and mines they had migrated to work in were closed. They adapted the döner to German tastes, concocting the trio of sauces that any self-respecting stand must offer—herb, garlic and scharf (spicy)—and, crucially, serving it in bread. This cheap, portable dish spread across Germany quickly.

More recent migrants have taken the döner in new directions. At Rüyam Kebab, in Berlin’s Schöneberg district, your correspondent is served a gemüse (vegetable) döner as big as his head. The staff, largely Arabs rather than Turks, have added carrots and aubergine to the usual salad. The resulting array of lushly coloured, carefully layered ingredients is not just delicious but (perhaps not coincidentally) perfect for Instagram. It is not yet 6pm, and the queue extends out of the door. ■