About 200,000 Turkish citizens live in Berlin. A real city within the city. A city, to give you an idea, almost as big as Verona. It is not for nothing that the former workingclass district of Kreuzberg in the German capital has long since earned the nickname Little Istanbul: Little Istanbul. In fact, among the hipster clubs, there are dozens of snack bars, restaurants, and grocery stores selling Middle Eastern specialties. And then mosques, hammams, barber shops. Most women you meet on the street wear the veil. No wonder, then, that the kebab is more popular than Mc Donalds. Turkish piadina, with spitroasted meat inside accompanied by vegetables, sauces and spices, is the third most consumed food after currywurst and pizza. Burgers come later.
To be more precise, more than three million doner kebabs are eaten in Germany every day. Multiplied by 365, that’s over a billion annually. If we assume that about five euros are spent on each portion, we arrive at a record value of five billion. A figure that would actually exceed the American fastfood chain’s annual sales in the country. According to the German journalist Eberhard Seidel, it’s all about this foodintegration between the Germans and the Turkish community. He explains this in his latest book “Döner a GermanTurkish cultural history”. On more than 250 pages, the life, work and miracles of the dish, which has rightly entered the German gastronomic tradition, are traced. Word of Elon Musk. When asked in autumn 2020 what he likes to eat most in Germany, he answered unequivocally: “Doner kebab”.
“The kebab has promoted intercultural exchange more than friendship celebrations and moral and political appeals. It can hurt, but makes its modest importance clear, writes Seidel in the freshly printed volume, to which Die Welt dedicated an article weeks ago. The sociologist has no doubt: the doner kebab as we know it, the one in a piadina tightened with aluminum foil, was not born in Ankara or even in Istanbul, but in Berlin. It’s 1972 and at Bahnhof Zoo, made famous by the ‘boys’ from the book of the same name, Kadir Nurman, one of the first Turks to emigrate to Germany in the 1960s, has a vision: to replace the Germans’ walking sandwich with kebab. The idea was immediately successful and today there are more than 1,600 kiosks like Nurman’s in Berlin. The Italia Oggi newspaper speaks of almost 18,500 companies throughout Germany that employ around 60,000 people. Many of the Turks who moved to the country thanks to the rotisserie were able to finance their children’s studies.
Today, the luxury hotel Adlon Kempinski, a stone’s throw from the Brandenburg Gate, also serves the “classic Turkish” doner kebab in its revised version with truffle sauce. In Munich, on the other hand, a place has emerged that produces the “first German craft doner kebab. Proof that the food, which has spread to popular neighborhoods for its value for money, has truly conquered everyone. “The kebab needed the Germans and the Germans needed the kebab,” writes Die Welt. So much so that 50 years after the invention of the roll walking wrapped in silver paper is perhaps appreciated more by Berliners than the Turks themselves.