When, a young Provincial of Franconia [territoire de Bavière], I went to Turkey in the summer of 1994 without having passed through Berlin – the capital of döner – I only knew the word from a song by Tarkan, the Turkish pop superstar. the tube Is It All Yours? going on in all the clubs and bars at the time. Curious, I had myself translated at the edge of the dance floor the “Oh it turns on” what the singer sighed: “You turn as if you were in the fire”, one explained to me. “The fire is spinning”, says the other. Well, there was something going around.
The thing in question was a beautiful lady, not a “revolving grill”, which is Döner kebab in Germany. Where we were going, the only meat there was sis kebab [chiche-kebab]small skewers, or meatball [keftas, boulettes].
When I returned to Franconia, the land of sausage, I kept getting a gyros pita at the Greek restaurant. There was no döner anywhere. When you tell that to someone 20 years old today, it’s as if you were talking about the time of the Merovingians.
550 tonnes per day consumed in Germany
Today, [en Allemagne]we devour 550 tons of döner every day in all its forms − döner, situation rotary [dans une galette] and doner plates [sans le pain] − In Germany alone, sales represent 5 billion euros, more than those of all the German subsidiaries of McDonald’s taken together. Who eats all this? Express survey in my circle of friends: nobody. Well, well it must be the others then.
When you wonder when and where you ate your first döner, you inevitably find yourself in a piece of German-Turkish history. The book Rotary − a Turkish-German cultural history [“Döner − Une histoire culturelle germano-turque”]by Eberhard Seidel, provides a very useful and entertaining guide.
Sociologist and journalist, the author is considered the specialist par excellence of the vertical spit in Germany. Living in Berlin since the mid-1970s, he was an early döner consumer. He observed, over the years, the euphoria of the beginnings and the decline