delirium clemens

Viennese cuisine between political correctness and nationalism

It is well-known that the Viennese cuisine mostly consists of stolen goods: the breaded schnitzel actually comes from Milan, the goulash from Hungary, and the dumplings from Bohemia. However, while German chancellor Angela Merkel asks half of Europe to tighten their belts, lucky Austria is worrying about the correct names for its delicious food.

It all began in March with a campaign by the Austrian NGO SOS Mitmensch (“SOS Fellow Human”) together with the Federal Business Chamber, Department of Gastronomy. Full of social optimism it was recommended to national restaurateurs to cease using discriminatory food labels. So, for instance, due to its alleged historical reference to slavery, the popular dessert Mohr im Hemd (“Moor in a Shirt”) should be called “chocolate cake with whipped cream” from now on, and also the “Gypsy schnitzel” is to disappear from the menu. “We are not insinuating that our inn keepers are consciously discriminating anyone,” Alexander Pollak, spokesman for SOS Mitmensch said, “but we are hoping for a sign of respect for black-skinned people, or Roma and Sinti.”

To be honest, I don’t find the term “black-skinned” (schwarzhäutig in the German original) very appropriate for a human rights spokesman. The term “Moor”, however, as it exists in many European languages, is such a hopelessly antiquated word for an African; does it really still hurt? According to Pollak’s logic, we also ought to revise Shakespeare’s “Moor of Venice” Othello (1603) then and call him henceforth an “Afro-Italian,” or, even better, refer to him as “Venetian with migration background”. On the other hand, take the traditional Meinl coffee brand in Vienna, which still has a clearly colonial logo with its “little Moor”: the Oriental servant boy – something that would be unthinkable of in Britain or America! And recently, the owner of a sweets shop in Vienna got reported to the official Austrian Equality Board, because he continues to sell Negerbrot (“Negro Bread” – milk chocolate with peanuts) despite of consumer protests; if he does not agree to a settlement, he will have to face a fine of up to 1,000 €.

The question remains whether “correct” language use on the menu really corrects the thinking in the heads of customers – and where it goes too far, as probably in the case of the chocolate cake with whip (no bad pun intended; it would not work in German anyway). But, to provide a striking counter-example: we live in a country where during the municipal elections of Innsbruck a poster by the right-populist Freedom Party FPÖ claimed Heimatliebe statt Marokkaner-Diebe (“Love your country instead of Moroccan thieves”). This slogan is truly racist and should be worth at least some thousands euros of fine – hadn’t it appeared in our beautiful Austrian countryside where there is no truly independent judiciary. Or did I get something wrong here and the person on the poster is the real thief, having stolen Moroccans (Marokkaner)? The bad German style leaves it open to your creativity.

Anyway, the kitchen battle is no longer on as a civil war, but has also raged between countries. In April, Slovenia wanted to make the EU protect its “Carniolan sausage” (Kranjska klobasa) as a brand name – like Austria had done with its “Tyrolean bacon” a while ago. However, the Viennese Ministry of Agriculture saw the Slovenian motion as an attack on the local hot dog stand, more precisely, the latter’s so-called Käsekrainer (in Viennese slang, this sausage is also referred to as Eitrige, meaning “purulent”, since the melted cheese squirts out like from a festering wound when you bite into it). Then angry Austrian tabloids spread the word nationwide: Käsekrainer darf uns nicht wurscht sein! (“Käsekrainer shouldn’t be all the same to us!”) After weeks of ensuing diplomatic threats by the Austrians against her little neighbor (and probably some overpaid lobbying in Brussels), the two post-Habsburg countries agreed on a compromise recently: the long overdue peaceful co-existence of the two sausages, since the Kranjska klobasa and the Käsekrainer allegedly contain completely different ingredients!

Usually such overrated disputes are fought in the Silly Season at the height of summer, and we may still be curious about what’s left in the pipeline – according to the beautiful German motto: “Everything has an end – only a sausage has two.” There would be more discriminating food names waiting for revision, e.g.

• the dessert Scheiterhaufen (“pyre” – euphemizing the Holy Inquisition and its witch hunts?),
• “Besoffener Kappuziner (“Drunken Monk” – denigration of religious organizations?), or
• Armer Ritter (“Poor Knight”, the German term for a French Toast – too classist or even worse: class struggle?).

And don’t forget about

• Schwedenbomben (“Swedish Bombs”, i.e. chocolate marshmallows which used to be Negerküsse – “Negro Kisses” – in Germany before the term was banned; they are mostly called Dickmanns nowadays – a case of fat-ism?),
• and last, but not least: the ominous Wieners (if you want to stay with sausages).

So, please: enjoy your summer meal. Or, as my grandmother, who was a great fan of healthy common sense, would say when somebody ranted too much: “I’d like to have your sorrows and all the Rothschilds’ money.”

PS. After this blog entry was written, two restaurants in L’viv, Ukraine (the old Austrian Lemberg) were publicly criticized by the Wiesenthal Center for making their guests wear black hats and fake side locks when they would order old East Jewish dishes – and they are supposed to haggle when paying their bill. This is outrageous indeed and a very different league of racism – isn’t it?

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(c) Ruthner & LIDOVÉ NOVINY, 2012

This entry was posted on 11 June 2012 at 10:43 and is filed under Uncategorized with tags Austria, food names, Käsekrainer, Mohr im Hemd, political correctness, Slovenia, Tyrol, Viennese cuisine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.