In the opening weeks of the First World War, German immigrants in Britain faced a series of isolated attacks, mostly focused on German retailers. At the end of August 1914, a more serious disturbance broke out in Keighley, Yorkshire, which resulted in attacks on four German butcher shops.Footnote 1 Throughout 1914 and 1915, German butchers in London, Crewe, and elsewhere became targets of anti-German violence. Attacks reached a peak in 1915, as the Germanophobic hysteria that broke out following the sinking of the Lusitania led to riots across Britain. In many cases, violence and property damage focused initially on German butchers because both German food manufacturers and German food offered a visible symbol of Germany and German influences on Britain.Footnote 2 In the following year, the Daily Mail explained how certain restaurants had renamed various national dishes so that the “Vienna steak” became the “Belgian steak” and the “German sausage” the “English sausage,” and by 1917, German barrage balloons were being widely referred to as German sausage balloons.Footnote 3 War with Germany provided a potent context for Germanophobia, but attacks on German butchers need to be placed within a longer chronology of popular anti-German sentiments, representations of the German nation, and growing fears about the dangers contained within German meat products.
While the use of foodstuffs as signals of national identity has a long history, in the nineteenth century connections between food and nation became more prominent as certain national foodstuffs became associated with the spread of disease. Mid-Victorian debates on tea adulteration focused on “dirty Chinamen,” Italian ice cream was linked to outbreaks of typhoid, and between 1879 and 1881, Italy, Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, Turkey, and Greece imposed restrictions on the importation of American pork and pork products ostensibly because of concerns about high levels of trichinosis and the risk to human health.Footnote 4 Concerns about national foodstuffs and disease need to be seen in the context of growing fears about food quality and safety, but by the 1880s, the danger of eating meat from diseased livestock was arousing particular expert and public alarm.Footnote 5 In these debates, sausages were believed to present the gravest threat to health from diseased meat, and fears about the hazardous nature of sausages became emblematic of many of the issues that came to surround Victorian and Edwardian concerns about the risks associated with eating putrid meat or meat from diseased livestock.Footnote 6 However, while all types of sausages were increasingly viewed with suspicion, not all sausages aroused identical fears. In newspapers reports, medical journals, and court cases, German sausages were singled out as more prone to harboring putrid or diseased meat and for spreading more disease than any other meat product. Although this is not to suggest that anxieties about national foodstuffs and disease centered solely on Germany or the German sausage, concern went beyond German sausages as “unfit for human consumption,” as they came to be used metaphorically in expressions of Britain's ongoing love-hate relationship with Germany. If cultural and intellectual interactions between Britain and Germany influenced several generations of Britons, ideas that Anglo-German friendship in the nineteenth century was replaced by Anglo-German antagonism after 1900 is oversimplistic, and these ideas conceal a strand of popular anti-German sentiment that reflected ignorance, misunderstanding, and growing fears of competition.Footnote 7 Between 1850 and the First World War, German sausages were used in these expressions of anti-German sentiment as apprehension about Germany and German immigrants merged with anxieties about food and disease.
As historians have become increasingly sensitive to questions of material culture and the cultural construction of food, they have concluded that food is not something simply to be used to measure standards of living.Footnote 8 Scholarship has moved away from studies preoccupied with consumption in terms of goods purchased to examine things—often the “soft” objects of consumption, like food—as bearers of meanings in the larger context of home, nation, and empire. This approach is adopted in this essay.Footnote 9 As anthropologists have shown, food, particularly meat, was laden with a variety of meanings. In Spicing up Britain, Panikos Panayi drew on the theory of the imagined or constructed nation and on work on immigrant groups and food in the United States to explore how food provided a focus for a sense of national identity.Footnote 10 Indeed, food was equally used to confer identities on different national and immigrant groups—from the German sausage and the Spanish onion to the Roast Beef of Old England—in a form of culinary and “gastro-nationalism.” As Ben Rogers explains in his Beef and Liberty, “[A]fter language, food is the most important bearer of national identity,” and this is particularly true of meat and meat products.Footnote 11 While it is important not to overstate the connections among food, national identity, and national stereotypes, Victorian and Edwardian cookbooks noted how specific foods reflected the character of those nations who produced them.Footnote 12 National meat dishes and foodstuffs were used as symbols in broader nationalist discourses, but they also acted as a “potent source of xenophobia” that filtered national stereotypes, as demonstrated by Erika Rappaport's study of mid-Victorian fears surrounding Chinese green tea.Footnote 13 By building on a literature that examines the symbolic nature of consumption and how material objects confer identities, as well as on cultural histories of Anglo-German attitudes, this essay brings together aspects of the history of science, food, and culture to show how the symbolic and physical attributes of the German sausage reflected and informed British perceptions of Germans and Germany.Footnote 14
British attitudes toward Germany in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were complex and often ambiguous, while feelings toward German immigrants were further informed by an anti-alien mentality and fears of competition.Footnote 15 Part of the complexity surrounding attitudes toward Germany and German immigrants were the connections established after 1850 between food and disease, and a popular strand of anti-German sentiment. Although German sausages were not the only national foodstuffs to be associated with disease and the dietary practices of other nations, notably the French, were criticized, German sausages became bundles of ingredients that acquired “bundles of meaning.” In the process of acquiring these meanings, they came to stand in as “representative” objects for Germany and the dangers of diseased meat.Footnote 16 Notwithstanding the fact that British diets included a wide range of sausages and other processed-meat products, the hostility directed at German sausages and German-sausage makers expressed not only fears about food and disease but also growing anxieties related to Germany that reflected a fluctuating strand of Anglo-German antagonism rather than political, socioeconomic, or cultural realities.Footnote 17 While this emphasis on the German sausage is not to ignore how other national foodstuffs were used as national signifiers or in expressions of xenophobia, this essay concentrates on how material objects were employed to focalize national stereotypes of Germany and how the discourse around German sausages can be understood as part of the growing concern about German nationhood and German competition. It addresses how sausages were used as symbols in expressions of anti-German sentiment and how German sausages and German-sausage makers became things and people to be feared. Such an examination provides a further way of understanding Victorian and Edwardian interactions with Germany, concerns about food, and the role of the popular press in voicing these fears, because it was through the German sausage that anti-German sentiment and questions of food safety were articulated, merged, and mutually reinforced.
Newspaper, periodicals, and comical and satirical magazines offer rich sources for examining sausages as material objects, symbolic objects, and sources of concern. In looking at how the German sausage was represented in editorials, in letters to the press, in satirical cartoons, in the reporting of prosecutions for the sale of diseased meat, and in medical debates, it becomes possible to examine not only their physical attributes—or the dangers associated with their ingredients—but also how they were employed metaphorically in manifestations of anti-German sentiment. There are, however, limitations to these sources. Editorial positions cannot be taken as proxies for public opinion, and it is hard to determine how readers may have read and understood newspaper articles, reports, and illustrations. Notwithstanding these limitations, as Mark Hampton explains, “[I]t is difficult to overstate the importance” of the Victorian and Edwardian press because newspapers and periodicals were an essential reference point for many and a means through which the social world was represented and understood.Footnote 18 Newspapers were the most important organs for spreading popular ideas and were a powerful, if controversial, mechanism for expressing and shaping questions of identity. They acted as conduits for disseminating reports, informed opinion from experts, gossip, and rumors to the widest possible audience, often with a view to building circulation. In doing so, they fed public and political discussions of local, national, and foreign events. While Jan Rüger suggests that the “established quality press” voiced opinions “more or less rationally,” the increasing use of sensation-seeking reports in provincial newspapers stirred up the fears and prejudices of their readers. Yet the need to sell newspapers ensured that they printed what they believed would be popular, in effect giving voice to their readers' “subconscious thoughts.”Footnote 19 Newspapers spoke to and claimed to speak for various publics, and thus they became conduits for expressions of anti-German feeling. Through an analysis of newspapers' discussions of the German sausage and sausage makers, and an examination of how newspapers and periodicals employed the sausage as a synecdoche for Germany, a further dimension to British perceptions about Germany is exposed. Rather than being simply tied to fluctuations in international relations, the labels and concerns that came to be attached to the German sausage reveal how the two decades before 1914 were not as transformative in shaping Anglo-German perceptions as others have suggested.Footnote 20
Sausages, Symbols, and Xenophobia
Although the sausage was no Victorian culinary invention, in the nineteenth century sausages became an essential component of working-class diets and fast-food stalls. In an environment where most meat was cooked in a frying pan, sausages were an ideal and convenient food. Immigration and culinary transfer saw new types of sausages introduced into British diets, but they essentially formed what the medical officer of Strand Union referred to as “low food.”Footnote 21 For many, sausages were “cheap food for hungry soul[s]” and offered a savory flavor for those who seldom had a full meal.Footnote 22 However, although the sausage's associations with cheap and poor diets persisted in the second half of the nineteenth century, all types of sausages grew in popularity. They progressively appeared on the tables of middle-class families and were mentioned as suitable hors d'oeuvres for modest dinner parties. As the number of butchers involved in the sausage trade rose dramatically, newspapers carried an ever-increasing number of advertisements from a range of butchers, meat sellers, and delicatessens, both English and European, which prominently featured a wide variety of sausages for sale. By the 1880s, sausages were reported to be very much in vogue among all classes, while commentators in the early twentieth century noted how working-class diets had come to favor “prepared or semi-prepared” foods, such as sausages.Footnote 23
Sausages were not simply present in diets or on the streets. They were a feature of numerous contemporary novels, either as food or as a descriptive term or signifier, and were culturally visible in other ways, from Punch and Judy shows to the knowing culture of music hall songs.Footnote 24 The sausage was equally used in political satires. More than this, the sausage became associated in the public mind with Germany and Germans. Although the German immigrant community, which reached its peak in the 1890s, predominantly settled in London, there was a much wider awareness of German immigrants and Germany.Footnote 25 Victoria's marriage to Albert, Prince of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, helped set German immigrants apart from other groups and was to have a profound influence on Victorianism, but the monarchy was not the only factor shaping Britain's image of Germany and Germans.Footnote 26 Until 1891, Germans represented the largest minority population in Britain: in 1861 there were 28,644 Germans in England and Wales, rising to their peak of 53,324 in 1911. Outside London, there were small but significant German communities in Manchester, Liverpool, Bradford, Hull, Leeds, and Glasgow.Footnote 27 Although merchants and entrepreneurs constituted the most important occupational group in terms of numbers and influence, many German immigrants moved into the food and catering trades, often as butchers, sugar-bakers, waiters, hoteliers, and delicatessen owners. They became an important component in the provision of meats: estimates suggested that some 1,200 German butchers were in business between 1881 and 1911, with Sheffield having 18 German butchers by 1914. Given the size of the German immigrant community, many of these butchers catered to local and nonimmigrant communities, and German butchers became particularly prominent in the sausage trade. They introduced a variety of sausages into Britain as part of a culinary transfer, ensuring that the German sausage became the most visible German influence on British diets.Footnote 28 These sausages were branded as “German” to reflect their alleged geographical provenance, ingredients, and style. The West and the East End of London, Liverpool, and Manchester boasted German-sausage factories, and many of these businesses advertised nationally.Footnote 29
Long-standing connections between Britain and Germany informed the ways in which the British viewed the country and its inhabitants because the Victorians were fascinated by Germany. German culture and learning—from theology, philosophy, and art reform to German science, medicine, and universities—were discussed and admired by key British individuals and intellectuals, while a racial affinity between Teutons and Anglo-Saxons was identified.Footnote 30 However, we should be wary of reading the opinions of an elite of cultural brokers and Germanophiles as representing uniform attitudes toward Germany. Popular opinion was often contradictory and not as positive. Although Anglo-German hostility in 1914 was never preordained, feelings toward Germany fluctuated between 1850 and 1914. Press attitudes, even in the years immediately before the First World War, could change from Germanophobe to Germanophile according to political and imperial developments, and even conservative Fleet Street newspapers like The Times, which were broadly sympathetic to Germany, could be critical.Footnote 31 As Lord Houghton explained to the Leeds Mechanics Institute in 1870, the German people were regarded in Britain with a “mingled feeling of interest and disregard.”Footnote 32 Some of this feeling was shaped by what one German refugee felt was his fellow immigrants' “ponderous, prosy and cantankerous nature.”Footnote 33
Although comments on German provincialism, boorishness, and drunkenness were part of a broader hostility toward immigrants in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, this feeling of disregard was reflected in how popular stereotypes of Germans shifted. Whereas early nineteenth-century representations of Germany associated Germans with beer and Romanticism—music, romantic poetry, and picturesque landscapes—these virtues were supplemented after 1840 by other qualities. Notwithstanding the continuing rise in Germany's reputation for scholarship, science, and medicine, after 1871 growing ambivalence toward Germany and periodic outbursts of Germanophobia started to color perceptions. The creation of a new nation-state at the heart of Europe—one associated with neofeudal militarism—did create unease, and British commentary on Germany started to be more voluble in its concerns about authoritarianism, illiberalism, and anti-Enlightenment irrationality. Growing nationalism and national rivalry in Europe focused attention on German competition, and the end of the nineteenth century saw the beginnings of an Anglo-German estrangement.Footnote 34 Fears about Germany spilled over into the cultural sphere and were discussed extensively in the press. Existing stereotypes combined with newer sets of representations that built on perceptions of growing socioeconomic hostility and equated Germans with militarism, boorishness, immorality, corpulence, and their sausage-based and unwholesome diets.Footnote 35
German sausages had started to be eaten outside Germany in the sixteenth century, but by the mid-nineteenth century, clear connections were made between the German nation and diet that reflected the importance of food for German immigrant communities, the visibility of the sausage in German diets, and the role of German immigrants in the meat trade.Footnote 36 Radical and satirical periodicals drew on associations among Germany, sausages, and pauperism to present Germany and Germans in stereotyped ways that built on ideas of sausages as cheap food and on perceptions of the German diet. For example, in expressions of hostility toward Victoria's marriage to Albert, the radical Cleave's Penny Gazette of Variety and Amusement noted how upon marrying Victoria, Albert needed to no longer make a living from “sausage making” (see figure 1). Slights on Albert reflected specific worries about how much he and the German princes would cost Britain, but links between the Germans and their diet, and sausages also had a much wider currency.Footnote 37 The Peelite Morning Chronicle, which was known for its lively reporting on foreign policy, spoke of “immortal sausages” in 1845 in connection with Germany; in discussing national stereotypes, the popular Liverpool Mercury explained how the German had his “ponderous sausage.”Footnote 38 As negative comments about Germany began to appear throughout the 1860s, connections between Germany and the “sausage eating propensities” of the Germans became commonplace.Footnote 39 Whereas the cheap mass-circulation Penny Illustrated Paper and Illustrated Times, for example, could easily refer to “Herr German Sausage” in 1889 when making comparisons between Britain and Germany, the American writer and journalist Julian Hawthorne in the high-respected Contemporary Review could equally inform readers how “Nothing is more peculiarly national than the German sausage.” In his account of his European travels, Hawthorne explained how Germans had “a way of carrying sausage about with them in their pockets—not always in their coat-pockets, either—and pulling it out to gnaw upon it, in moments of abstraction or ennui.” He added that when commented upon, a German would scornfully reply, “Es ist mir Wurst!” [There is my Wurst].Footnote 40 In newspapers and periodicals and in satirical representations of Germany, sausages were both the quintessential German food and part of the Teutonic temperament.
“Shutting Up the Sausage Shop.” Source: Cleave's Penny Gazette of Variety and Amusement, 18 January 1840, 1
The association of Germany with sausages was seldom sympathetic, however. Notions of Anglo-German affinity and enthusiasm for German learning coexisted with anti-German feeling. Although anti-German sentiment did not result in violence against German immigrants until 1914, outside of assault cases and sporadic outbreaks in the 1890s, less violent forms of Germanophobia intensified as Germany was more and more perceived as an economic and imperial rival.Footnote 41 Sausages were employed in these anti-German discourses as Germans were variously stereotyped as uncouth, brutish, immoral, and poor. For example, Germans were considered so unromantic that they sent their sweethearts “Strasburg sausage.”Footnote 42 Expressions of anti-German feeling and the use of the sausage stereotype increased in the 1880s as anxiety grew about commercial competition. The influx of German clerks acted as one focus of fears that German immigrants were undercutting British workers.Footnote 43 In “The Complaint of the Cockney Clerk,” Punch attacked German clerks who “[s]lave like a nigger” and voiced a common retort:
Punch was not alone in expressing such sentiments. In an attack on free trade and foreign competition in 1886, the Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle demanded the expulsion of all foreign businesses and opened its “war cry” with “down with the German sausage.”Footnote 45 From attacks on German princes as “sausage bloated royal paupers” in the 1840s to concerns about competition after 1880, the sausage stereotype proved popular with satirists, radicals, and journalists as a symbol for German greed, provincialism, and boorishness.Footnote 46
As concern grew about Germany's national strength and Anglo-German diplomatic relations fluctuated, the German sausage became a visible metaphor for Germany in representations of international affairs. Before 1871, images of “fat little” German sausages that needed to be restrained were fairly benign, as demonstrated in satirical outbursts surrounding the Schleswig-Holstein question and Prussian military intervention in the duchies, which was widely perceived in Britain as an unnecessary attack on the legitimate rights of Denmark. Although the Schleswig-Holstein conflict was notoriously difficult to unravel, Punch's widely circulated “Anti-Sausage League” satirized Prussian expansionist ambitions in Schleswig-Holstein.Footnote 47Punch had already employed the notion of the “Great Sausage League” in 1855 when writing about attempts to form a stronger confederation of German states against Russian naval interests in the Baltic.Footnote 48 In the “Anti-Sausage League” and the accompanying carton, foods were used as national signifiers as complex international issues were reduced to understandable stereotypes (see figure 2). In the satirical verse, “bold Mr. BEEF” and “brave MONSIEUR BORDEAUX” are cast as the policemen of Europe to prevent “these small German Sausages” from kicking up “a shine.” In attacking “the various Teutonical tobies,” the rights of Denmark were defended, with Punch concluding that “the Sausages party had better look out” or they would be “fried.”Footnote 49
“English Beef, the French Wine, and the German Sausages.” Source: Punch, 9 January 1864, 17
Following the Franco-Prussian War and the creation of the Kaiserreich, attacks became more acerbic and built on an existing sense of Germany's apparent technical and scientific superiority as well as on concerns about commercial and military rivalry.Footnote 50 Negative attitudes toward Germany reflected increasing political concerns over Weltpolitik and the perceived threat to Britain's colonial interests and naval supremacy. This antagonism toward Germany found expression in periodic outbursts of press hostility and in a more visible popular anti-German sentiment, which mixed xenophobic with jingoistic elements. Although in music hall songs Germanophobia mainly concentrated on the influx of Germans into the catering trade and the commercial sector, in newspapers and cartoons the German sausage acted as a convenient and negative signifier.Footnote 51 Such representations were evident in relation to Germany's haphazard acquisition of colonies in the 1880s, but they were at their most potent in relation to German ambitions in Africa that ran counter to British interests. For example, Fun magazine referred to the “dis Afrigan beest” being turned into sausages in “der Faderland” as part of the “Germano-Africo Sausage Company” (see figure 3). With explicit reference to stereotypes of the German diet and Germany as a sausage-making nation, and to the suspect use of taboo meats in German sausages, the cartoon cast Germany as a butcher carving up Africa in the face of British passivity. In expressing fears about Germany's “unlimited” colonial aspirations, Fun linked German militarism and greed to German sausages to illustrate how both were integral to the German national character.Footnote 52 This link was made not only in popular or satirical newspapers. When Kaiser Wilhelm II visited London in 1891, the crowd was reported to have been abusive, shouting at one point “We don't want any German sausages here!” as they protested against German support for the Boers in South Africa.Footnote 53 Reactions to the Krüger telegram in 1896 equally drew on the sausage stereotype as attitudes toward Germany became more critical. The issue served to bring growing commercial, imperial, and political tensions together as hostility was expressed about the Kaiser's congratulations to President Krüger of the Transvaal following the defeat of the Jameson raid of the previous year. One newspaper protested about being “bounced out of our rights by the German sausage,” while another referred to the kaiser as the “Sausage King.”Footnote 54 As the Aberdeen Weekly Journal commented, “[T]he feeling of hatred against the ‘sausage element’ is bitter in the extreme.”Footnote 55 By 1898, the Pall Mall Gazette could comfortably make a direct link between “the military sausage” and “the making of an empire.”Footnote 56 In making repeated reference to the propensities of the “typical sausage-loving Germans” and their colonial aspirations, the British press voiced concern about German interventionism and militarism.Footnote 57 In terms of social, cultural, and political representations, Germany had become by the 1890s both a sausage-eating nation and an aggressive one—the sausage a synecdoche for Germany.
“Germano-Africo Sausage Company Unlimited.” Source: Fun, 20 August 1890
Negative attitudes toward Germany became more visible in the prewar period as Anglo-German relations were heavily strained by the start of German naval building, the two Moroccan crises, and the naval panic of 1908–9. Anti-German sentiment found expression in isolated outbreaks of violence directed at German immigrants and in growing press criticisms of Wilhelm II.Footnote 58 “Spy-fever,” conspiracy theories, and fears of invasion drew popular interest, but the German sausage remained a visible symbol with which to represent Germany.Footnote 59 As one character in the invasion novel When William Came (1913) noted, England was “not going to be held under for long by a lot of damned sausage-eating Germans.”Footnote 60 In debates about free trade and the provision of cheap food, the German sausage offered a symbol of the dangers of protectionism. Leading Liberal politicians waved German sausages in front of audiences as a warning and highlighted the poverty of the German diet.Footnote 61 Lloyd George rallied supporters by telling them that he “was not afraid of the German navy; he was not afraid of German trade competition; but he had a real dread of the German sausage,” while at York he informed a meeting “If this country wanted German tariffs, it must have German wages . . . German militarism and German sausages.”Footnote 62 German sausages offered a recognizable image through which to express anxieties about free trade, competition, and militarism.
As Stibbe explains, there is little doubt that such images (both positive and hostile) “are important historical facts in their own right.”Footnote 63 While it is hard to unpick the influence of the sausage stereotype on popular perceptions of Germany or German immigrants, the frequency with which it was used in newspapers from across the political spectrum suggests that it offered a metaphor that was widely understood. As witness statements in a number of assault cases illustrate, the phrase “German sausage” as a slur on nationality did come into general usage.Footnote 64 For example, in one case in 1895, the court was told how a girl called Violet King had regularly annoyed a local barber of German descent “by pushing open the door of his shop and calling out, ‘German Sausage,’ ‘Dirty German.’”Footnote 65 Such taunts were not limited to childhood pranks: in a dispute between James Mason and his neighbor Richard Hupfer, a toolmaker, in Wittle, Essex, in 1903, Mason was reported to have told Hupfer's wife “to keep the dirty, stinking German sausage smell out of your premises.” Mason also referred to Hupfer's friends as “German sausages,” a phrase which met with knowing laughter in the court.Footnote 66 As one writer in the Birmingham Post explained, it became “a stale and thrashed-out joke” to refer to Germans as German sausages—such was the ubiquity of the term.Footnote 67
The knowing laughter, the use of the German sausage as a symbol in debates about free trade and in racial slurs, and the visibility of the sausage as a synecdoche for Germany in expressing concerns about economic or imperial rivalry are suggestive of how newspaper accounts reflected and influenced expressions of popular anti-German sentiment. Although after 1914 the German sausage was overtaken by images of the “Beastly Hun,” the repeated use of the sausage in characterizing Germany and the negative associations of Germans with their sausages may help explain why anti-German violence in 1914 and 1915 focused on German butchers. By 1914, the German sausage had come to be loaded with meanings to represent an easily understood symbol of Germany and German influences on Britain.
“The Mysterious Sausage and the Perplexing Polony”Footnote 68
Whereas the sausage stereotype was used widely to represent Germany and featured prominently in attacks on the German nation and its colonial aspirations, another dimension to German sausages can be detected that linked these stereotypes and expressions of anti-German sentiment to growing fears about food safety. Sausages, no matter what their provenance or national association, were complex objects: they were full of ingredients and meanings that were the subject of uncertainty and gratuitous newspaper accounts that gave expression to growing alarm about the composition of the average sausage. The Victorians were troubled by the nature and quality of most manufactured foods, but as anxiety about food quality increased after 1850, and as the local apparatus of food and meat inspection was extended, concerns about all types of sausages and what went into them became shriller.Footnote 69 If sausages never became the focus of a particular food scare in the same way as milk, beer, or imported meat did, they were regularly used to remind readers of the risks of eating certain foods.Footnote 70 To understand this fear, it is necessary to place the sausage and its materiality in context.
What went into the average sausage had long been a target for humorists, but as the British Medical Journal explained in 1899, the “individual endowed with the average amount of caution exhibits a genuine distrust of them.”Footnote 71 Sausages were seldom what they seemed. Medical and newspaper reports emphasized how the proportion of meat in the average sausage was low and how they contained unexpected ingredients from moldy bread and sharp sand to tainted leaves “and other equally dubious material.”Footnote 72 Claims that antiseptics, colorings, and preservatives were commonly added to all types of sausages and how starch, flour, rice, and breadcrumbs were used to bolster sausages and to help them hold water were legitimate.Footnote 73 Worries about the ingredients used in sausage making were part of a wider discourse about adulteration following revelations by analysts and doctors in the 1850s, which were given considerable publicity in the emerging national press. Alarm about the adulteration of everyday foods acquired renewed prominence after 1870 as anxiety focused on the sophistication of adulteration methods and wider concerns about public health.Footnote 74 Clear links were made between cheap and common foods, and adulteration; between dangerous and fraudulent food, and ill health; and among commodities, producers, and consumers. Growing apprehension about what went into sausages was part of these broader concerns about food production. However, notwithstanding a sense that sausages all too often included unwelcomed and dangerous ingredients, the threat from adulteration was not the primary concern—the main source of alarm was the meat used in sausages. Whereas apprehension about adulteration focused on the idea that the public were “cheated rather than poisoned,” in debates about the sausage this was reversed.
A focus on sausages and the meat they contained reflected the nature of food inspection and growing worries about the relationship between meat and disease as public apprehension about adulteration became less vociferous and local efforts to regulate markets and food retailers concentrated on cleaning up the meat and milk trade. Haphazard and fragmentary systems of local inspection and opposition from butchers ensured that identifying meat and meat products deemed “unfit for human consumption” was problematic. Nevertheless, notwithstanding these problems, attention focused on the physical properties of the meat inspected and the meat used in sausages.
Although the more squeamish avoided commenting on the precise composition of many sausages “for the obvious reason that it is not warranted to be formed of the flesh of any particular domestic animal,” sausages were feared to contain various taboo meats—notably, horseflesh, cat, and dog meat.Footnote 75 Evidence from seriocomic newspapers, such as Illustrated Chips and Funny Folks, illustrate how by the 1890s the suspected use of dog meat in sausages had become a running joke (see figures 4–5). If apprehension about the inclusion of various taboo meats was not enough, it was widely assumed that sausages existed at the bottom of the meat industry and harbored meat that was “unfit for human consumption” either because it was putrid or because it came from pigs, cows, sheep, or horses that had died from disease.Footnote 76 There was even a language to describe such meat: slinked veal, staggering bobs, and tibbies were used by the less scrupulous to produce imitation pork sausages, while “screw beef” was reportedly used in the manufacture of other types of sausage.Footnote 77 Evidence that sausages contained a significant proportion of diseased, “putrid, stinking and maggoty” meat was regularly commented upon by meat inspectors and became the subject of repeated court cases, which were extensively covered in the press. This trade was not only limited to those butchers who met the needs of the urban poor: it was felt that even respectable tradesmen “do not scruple to employ such materials [diseased meat] in supplying the demand for sausages.”Footnote 78 Many contemporary observers feared that it was a certainty that most sausages contained some putrid or diseased meat.
“Another Sausage Mystery.” Source: Illustrated Chips, 8 December 1900, 3
“You Never Sausage a Thing.” Source: Funny Folks, 6 July 1889, 215
Such sausages were not just an offense to senses of taste. Although the epidemiological impact of meat-borne disease remained minimal, a growing body of medical opinion informed first by pathological studies and then by bacteriological research argued that putrid and diseased meat was prejudicial to health.Footnote 79 By the 1880s, it was generally accepted that certain animal diseases could cross the species barrier, that organisms found in meat could cause illness, and that, as the Sanitary Record explained, “people who ate flesh in [a] state of disease were likely to catch the disease.”Footnote 80
In debates about the dangers of diseased meat to human health, the sausage was identified as a major source of concern. As Thomas Walley, principal of the Royal Dick Veterinary School in Edinburgh and author of A Practical Guide to Meat Inspection, explained, of all the diseased meat sold, the amount of danger “is very small indeed as compared with that which exists in the consumption of sausages.”Footnote 81 Reporting on a case in which a diseased cow was made into sausages, Henry Letheby, the strident medical officer of health and food analyst for the City of London, described how of the sixty-six people who ate the sausages, sixty-four were seized by symptoms of poisoning and one man was reported to have died. The case was not an isolated incident. Such was the level of concern that newspapers repeatedly warned of the association of sausages with disease.Footnote 82 At the very least, it was believed that eating sausages made from putrid or diseased meat caused diarrheal disorders, but the discovery in 1863–64 that the parasitic disease trichinosis could infect humans made pork sausages potentially dangerous. In response, doctors warned the public not to touch “any variety of sausages under any circumstances.”Footnote 83 Although such warnings did little to reduce sausage consumption, in the 1880s and 1890s a growing body of medical studies implicated sausages in the spread of a range of other diseases, including typhoid and tuberculosis. In the first decades of the twentieth century, numerous public health manuals were clear about the potential health risk sausages represented.Footnote 84
Fears that sausages harbored putrid or diseased meat drew on a sense that the composition of most sausages, and hence the risk, was unknown. Chums, a weekly illustrated paper for boys, reinvented Otto von Bismarck's challenge of a duel to the pathologist Rudolf Virchow. The challenge had arisen in 1865 out of a debate in the Prussian Landtag over the refusal of the chamber to vote funds for the creation of a naval base at Kiel and the building of two frigates. In the debate, Virchow had accused Bismarck of misrepresentation. Bismarck sought deliberately to provoke conflict and discredit a political opponent as Virchow vehemently opposed his policies and championed social reforms over rearmament. In Chums's reimagined account, Virchow presents Bismarck with “two large sausages.” On doing so, Virchow is reported to have explained, “One of the sausages . . . is filled with trichinae—it is deadly. The other is perfectly wholesome. Externally they can't be told apart.”Footnote 85 Events were different from how Chums recounted them: although Bismarck did challenge Virchow to a duel, the sausage reference came from a public meeting at which Virchow spoke where a defender of the German sausage industry was forced by a journalist to consume a dubious sausage.Footnote 86 Although Chums's intention was comic, the short article pointed to the difficulties in recognizing the concealed dangers sausages contained. As one experienced London sausage maker explained to a reporter from the Daily Telegraph, “If you take my advice, you won't look at the sausages at all. There ain't no pints about a sausage that you could tell a good 'un from a bad 'un by.”Footnote 87
Difficulties with recognizing “dangerous food which offered no telltale indications of smell, taste, or appearance” more generally presented doctors, as Hardy has explained, with “a serious problem of identification.” The problems in identifying sausages containing diseased or putrid meat, however, were compounded by how they were made.Footnote 88 Sausage manufacturers relied upon a number of processes to disguise the presence of putrid or diseased meat: such meat was often steeped in chemicals or boiled, and then minced with spices or smoked to mask the flavor and “cover all imperfections.” Unscrupulous manufacturers mixed diseased and putrid meat with good meat or would pour fat from healthy carcasses over diseased meat—a process called polishing—to give it the pretense of healthiness.Footnote 89 “In such cases,” as Public Health commented, “the detection of diseased or putrid meat is often difficult.”Footnote 90 The result was that, as the prosecution explained in a case brought against a German-sausage maker in 1882, those eating sausages could ingest “under a pleasant disguise some very disagreeable matter.”Footnote 91 What made matters worse was that it was feared that such diseased meat found its way not only into poor homes but also onto the dining tables of “the rich in the disguise of a well-seasoned [sausage].”Footnote 92 In the face of this evidence, commentators marveled how the consumption of sausages “was not signalized by a marked increase in the death rate in those localities where the demand for them was greatest.”Footnote 93 By the end of the nineteenth century, the public was regularly advised to “Beware of Sausages,” while local authorities stepped up their efforts in the first decades of the twentieth century to confiscate “considerable quantities of inferior, decomposing, or diseased meat about to be made up into sausages.”Footnote 94
“Unutterable Horror”—The German Danger
How then does nation fit into this growing fear about the potential of the humble sausage to transmit or cause disease? While all types of sausages (no matter what their provenance or national origin) were viewed with suspicion and represented as objects of concerns, it was the “unutterable horror” of the German sausage that became the focus of alarm, because it was shown to embody the worst excesses of the meat trade.Footnote 95 Although the production of sausages was not the exclusive preserve of German butchers or “meat mongers,” the German sausage and German-sausage makers were attacked more frequently and more vigorously in the press and in magistrates' courts than were any other type of sausage or sausage maker. The attention directed at them was disproportionate to the number of German butchers there actually were, but condemnation of the composition of German sausages and the German-sausage trade by newspapers and sanitary officials was more than opposition to foreign foods. The sheer volume of attacks and legal cases involving German sausages and German-sausage manufacturers, and the way they were reported, illustrates a link between how the sausage was used in representations of Germany, popular anti-German sentiment, and concerns about honesty and threat to health. Although it is hard to determine whether this anti-German sentiment was directed at sausage manufacturers who were German or those butchers who produced German sausages, German sausages and German-sausage makers were regularly held responsible for spreading contagion as concerns about diseased meat merged with growing popular Germanophobia that characterized late Victorian and Edwardian Britain.
Notwithstanding the availability of an array of German sausages and the popularity of leading German delicatessens, alarm was voiced about the cheap abominations “made in Germany” and German sausages.Footnote 96 Although some writers feared a culinary invasion and damaging effects on trade that the profusion of German delicatessens had, at a basic level it was felt that the endless varieties of German sausages caused “unpleasant sensations” for those used to the English diet.Footnote 97 More serious concerns were expressed about the composition of German sausages. Newspapers throughout the second half of the nineteenth century appeared increasingly willing to spread alarmist rumors and reports about what went into German sausages and the dishonest practices of German-sausage makers. The expansion of the provincial press ensured that local incidents and concerns about German sausages were reported to a readership often fascinated with sensational and salacious stories. At the same time, through the recycling and repetition of the sordid details of magistrate cases and exposés involving German sausages and sausage makers between newspapers, such reports reached a national audience. The result was that growing anxiety was expressed about the composition of German sausages, and this alarm offers insights into how anti-German sentiment found expression outside of the more visible forms of hostility, notably anti-immigrant violence, or in connection with international and imperial politics.
As the number of Germans in the catering trade grew and fears were voiced about German competition, clear connections were made between German butchers and sausage manufacturers, and dishonesty. The latter came to be seen as a national characteristic as unease grew about the number of poor German immigrants connected to criminality.Footnote 98 Just as Wilhelm II could be labeled duplicitous following his support of President Krüger against the British in South Africa, so too could German butchers and sausage makers be characterized because it was believed that the average German sausage contained “deadly mysteries” that were concealed beneath their “deadly red skins” by their smoked and spicy character.Footnote 99 In 1900, German sausage manufacturers were even reported to be using “Bismarck brown” and preservatives to conceal the nature of their “bundle[s] of mystery.”Footnote 100 Such attacks should not be read as suggesting that the British diet was essentially conservative in regard to taste—evidence points to the fact that many liked their foods spicy—or seen as reflecting a sense of culinary superiority. Rather, these concerns concentrated on what went into German sausages and the subsequent risks associated with eating them. As the Preston Guardian noted, “[T]he intellect of man staggers before the problem of what a German sausage may contain.”Footnote 101
Whereas complaints about adulteration concentrated on the dishonesty of German butchers and sausage manufacturers, German sausages were repeatedly attacked for containing horseflesh or dog meat—animals beyond the realms of good taste when it came to food.Footnote 102 As Judy magazine quipped, “I love my slice of German, I adore my cheap ‘polony,’ but never dreamed my luxuries were donkey, dog, and pony.”Footnote 103 Although the French were equally criticized for eating horsemeat, Germans were attacked for exposing the British to such distasteful practices, while the idea that German sausages were made from horseflesh and dog meat became a potent symbol in debates over free trade. As one liberal politician explained in 1909, where no Englishman ate horseflesh willingly, “he dare say if he wanted a horse sausage” he could get it from a German.Footnote 104 This association of German sausages with taboo meats was sufficient to arouse disgust. However, German sausages were also feared to be prone to putrefactive change. These concerns reflected contemporary ideas about meat products undergoing a process of decomposition, which was initially thought to be caused by chemical poisons and then by ptomaines or putrefactive alkaloids. Reports highlighted symptoms that came to be labeled “food poisoning” as attention was directed at bacterial food poisoning following a number of large-scale outbreaks that were traced back to processed meat.Footnote 105
Notwithstanding these worries about putrefaction and ptomaine poisoning, the key concern was not adulteration, “foreign” objects, or the use of taboo meats. Rather, it was the belief that German-sausage makers were the main culprits in the sale of “unwholesome food.” In a fictitious conversation in the popular magazine Once a Week, the more knowledgeable speaker commented: “[I]n all probability, that [German] sausage is made from putrid meat—you may always suspect bad meat where there is high seasoning, and there are hundreds of instances on record of people rotting away at their extremities, from eating these putrid German sausages.”Footnote 106 The Manchester Times explained to gourmets how those animals in an “advanced state of disease are slaughtered and sold on the spot, to the compilers of German sausages” before noting how “glandered horses, cows which die in calving, and still-born calves, are all considered as fair grist to the sausage-mills.”Footnote 107 This was not simply speculation. As a German-sausage maker in Liverpool explained: “[W]ots werry [sic] bad indeed, we makes inter saverlors and Germans.”Footnote 108 These claims were supported by numerous court cases. German butchers and “sausage monger[s]” were regularly prosecuted for using putrid or diseased meat. For example, a German-sausage manufacturer in Leeds was charged in 1881 with making sausages from rotten horseflesh, two horribly diseased sheep, and a can of red ochre, while in a widely reported case in 1903, John Hemeter, a German butcher in King's Lynn, was fined and imprisoned for preparing the carcass of a tubercular cow for a large German-sausage manufacturer in London.Footnote 109
The danger to health from German sausages was graphically highlighted in the respected Quarterly Review, which had played an important role in promoting the merits of German literature. The periodical explained that when German sausages were not properly prepared,
the sausages ferment; they grow soft . . . and in this state they occasion in the bodies of those who eat them a series of remarkable changes, followed by death. The blood and the muscles of a sausage-poisoned man gradually waste; as also do all the other organs and tissues susceptible to putrefaction.Footnote 110
While Once a Week sensationalized the threat, evidence in medical journals demonstrated just how dangerous German sausages could be. The British Medical Journal carried a report in 1855 from a Swansea doctor about the case of a “fine little boy” who had died within three hours of eating a German sausage. Further deaths were reported where German sausages were implicated.Footnote 111 The discovery in the 1860s of high levels of trichinosis in German livestock directly associated German meat, and particularly German sausages, with disease. Once a Week consequently warned its readers to “beware of German sausages . . . as they would beware of an assassin.”Footnote 112 A concrete threat to health from German sausages was detected in trichinosis, but this did not stop newspapers from associating the consumption of German sausages with a wide range of other diseases and disorders from tuberculosis to food poisoning.
As anti-German sentiments became more evident in newspapers and periodicals in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, opposition combined antialienism, class prejudice, and political, colonial, and economic rivalry. It was directed at German clerks, tailors, and waiters for taking jobs and working long hours, and at the noise created by German bands. But it also was expressed in increasingly vocal attacks on the dangerous German sausage.Footnote 113 In Preston, which was not known for its large German immigrant community, there was alarm not only at the fact that one slaughterhouse was regularly involved in the “killing of diseased animals,” but also that working in this slaughterhouse were “a number of Germans engaged in the manufacture of some kind of food from this unwholesome flesh.”Footnote 114
Concern peaked in the 1880s at the height of debate about the dangers posed by diseased meat and sausages and against a background of high levels of German immigration. Newspapers carried almost weekly revelations of the meat and other “materials” that went into German sausages. These revelations were backed up by an upsurge in the number of diseased meat cases brought before magistrates that involved German-sausage makers. Prosecutions were not just limited to London, where over half the German immigrants settled: cases were reported across the country and not just in those areas where Germans lived in larger numbers.Footnote 115 Although regulating the meat trade proved problematic, practical measures were taken by some councils to protect the consumer. For example, in 1881, Hackney Council appointed extra food inspectors to prevent the manufacture of “unwholesome” German sausages following reports that diseased horseflesh was used in their production.Footnote 116 Seizures of diseased meat and sausages suspected of harboring diseased meat rose dramatically. Whereas magistrates were felt to “show a remarkable disinclination to exercise full powers they posses of passing a sentence of imprisonment” for those caught selling diseased meat, German-sausage makers were not so fortunate.Footnote 117 When caught, they were more likely than other sausage makers, no matter what their nationality, to be prosecuted rather than warned: they were dealt with through heavier fines and could face longer terms of imprisonment. For example, in Liverpool “an atrocious ‘diseased meat case’” involving a German-sausage maker resulted in a £100 fine, while in Bradford the magistrate sentenced a German-sausage manufacturer named Naylor to three months imprisonment.Footnote 118 These attacks should not be seen as surprising. After 1870, opposition to German immigrants focused on their supposed influx into the catering trade, which produced a surge in popular expressions of anti-German feeling that gave voice to deeper anti-German sentiment and concerns about Germany's imperial aspirations. The press started to assume, as Charles Dickens's All Year Round explained in 1883, that “the adjective ‘German’ is . . . in English commerce the synonym for ‘bad,’ as, for instance . . . German sausages.”Footnote 119 Righteous indignation was expressed that all too often the “poisonous German sausage manufacturers” were allowed to escape with “comparatively trivial fines.”Footnote 120 The Preston Guardian, responding to the conviction of a German-sausage manufacturer, suggested that the man should not have been fined but instead horsewhipped before being sent to prison such was the abominable nature of his crimes.Footnote 121
The Preston Guardian's response was extreme, but throughout the 1890s and 1900s, German sausages and sausage makers continued to be targeted as hostility to German immigrants rose alongside growing Anglo-German antagonism and more widespread enmity toward immigrants.Footnote 122 German sausage manufacturers were watched by sanitary officials and, as the medical officer for Bethnal Green noted, unscrupulous sausage manufacturers “have to be very careful and cannot carry on their business openly.”Footnote 123 However, whereas newspapers continued to report sausages cases, the visibility of the German sausage and German-sausage makers in prosecutions declined in the 1900s. As Anglo-German tensions mounted, and as morning and evening halfpenny newspapers proliferated, anti-German sentiment was more likely to spill over into open hostility. At the same time, changes in the nature of meat inspection, which became routine and subject to less sensational reporting, rather than a fall in prosecutions, also accounts for this decline. As systems of meat inspection improved, there was equally a growing sense among sanitary officials that other food-related risks posed a more serious danger to health. The horrific revelations associated with the Chicago meatpacking industry in 1906 and the dangers associated with American meat and meat products presented a new danger, while increasing attention was directed at the dangers of milk-borne infection.Footnote 124 As new items of food—milk, cockles, oysters—were implicated in the spread of disease, concerns about German sausages became less about disease and more about them as symbols.
Conclusions
The hostility expressed by the Preston Guardian was more than Charles Osbourne's music hall complaint about “swarms of foreigners everywhere”: it focused anti-German sentiment on the behavior of the makers of German sausages.Footnote 125 However, as this essay has illustrated, the opinion voiced by the Preston Guardian was not an isolated one. Although reports about German sausages and their manufacturers could not rival reports about the Chicago meatpacking industry, fears about diseased meat and sausages combined in the German sausage. Alarm about what went into German sausages gave expression to a growing strand of popular anti-German sentiment, which drew on mounting insecurity about Britain's position on the world stage and the perceived economic threat that Germany and German immigrants presented. Popular anti-German sentiment was translated into how Germans were caricatured and onto material objects—in this case, the “deadly mysteries” that were feared to go into German sausages. Rather than being a mark of quality, contemporaries were clear that German sausages and German-sausage makers posed a greater threat than did other sausages or meat products by the very fact that they were German. As expressions of anti-German sentiment, these concerns were at their peak in the 1880s, but connections continued to be made in the early twentieth century. Such was the potency of these representations and concerns that German butchers were targeted in anti-German riots in 1914 and 1915.
The reasons why the German sausage became a focus of widespread anxieties about Germany prior to the more obvious imperial rivalry of the 1890s and 1900s is connected to how sausages as material objects became bearers of complex meanings. Cultural and gastronomic stereotypes overlapped in a discourse that linked Germany and German foreign policy to their national diets and aggressive nature, and associated German sausages with fears about diseased meat, adulteration, and the risks involved from eating them. As material objects, German sausages, more than any other food, were clearly associated with the worst excesses of the trade in putrid and diseased meat by the very fact that they were German. Through the sausage, questions about food safety and popular Germanophobic discourses were articulated and merged to become mutually reinforcing, so much so that the German sausage became both a staple for satirical comic representations of Germany and dishonesty in food production and a xenophobic slur. The sausage was therefore doubly symbolic: it became a vehicle for popular anti-German sentiment by providing a convenient stereotype through which to express wider international and imperial concerns as well as anxieties about food and disease. The implication was that just as sausages were dangerous and deceitful, so too were Germans with their outer casing hiding inner rottenness and dishonesty. In providing a vehicle for concerns about Germany and Germans, the meanings attached to German sausages demonstrate how nationalism and xenophobia could be played out around food, providing a further insight into how the fears attached to immigrant groups could be expressed in ways other than racial violence.
Whereas the connections between sausages and anti-German sentiment became visible in a range of social and cultural settings through satirical representations, cartoons, slang terms, and racial slurs, pointing to their social influence concerning how Germans and Germany were represented, the economic impact of these concerns is harder to determine. German-sausage makers did face comparatively heavy fines and appeared to have been targeted by sanitary authorities, but there is little evidence to suggest that German-sausage makers were driven out of business; most of those caught continued to trade.Footnote 126 Indeed, one common complaint was that even after having been prosecuted, sausage makers could continue to “poison” consumers.Footnote 127 Attacks on German sausages did not translate onto patterns of consumption. German sausages, just like cheap and adulterated bread, milk, and other processed foods, continued to be eaten notwithstanding the fears generated by these foodstuffs and expert opinion that they were injurious to health. As I have argued elsewhere, food consumption was shaped more by material concerns, standards of living, and domestic technology than it was by press reports and the fears they engendered about food and disease.Footnote 128 Stomach upsets were too ordinary and trivial to warrant serious alarm or action, while cheapness often outweighed concerns about the risks from adulterated foods and diseased meat or meat products. German sausages and German delicatessens were a common feature of most towns, but in terms of newspaper reports, legal cases, and evidence from medical officers and social commentators, the German sausage was as big a threat to digestion as the German nation was to British economic and imperial interests.
