“Würzburg’s Sausage Agony: The Political Divide over Meatless Festivals”

Manuela Rottmann, federal politician for the Greens, is currently doing it like this: “If someone in Berlin asks me about Würzburg, I cheat a bit because of my ties to my homeland.” She then said: “No, no, you misunderstood that. That’s Würzbach, the one with the sausage dispute. Everything is normal in Würzburg.”

It’s hard to show shame at home in a nicer way – and the fact that a politician publicly acknowledges such a method gives a deep insight into how bad it must be right now. Lower Franconia’s capital and cathedral city seemed to have overcome all of this long ago.

Sure, in the past elderly gentlemen there notoriously quarreled, everyone had a larger-than-life ego, were once in the CSU, but then founded their own party. Half of the Republic laughed at the bad-tempered “wine barrel on the Autobahn”, but if you did it too loudly, the CSU Federal Post Minister (yes, there was something like that once) Wolfgang Bötsch took action and personally insulted mockers, also at the standing reception. Shortly thereafter, someone created the place label – intended as a serious advertisement: “Province on a world level”.

Tempi passati, actually. There are still many church towers there, but Würzburg had made a name for itself in recent years as a free-spirited university town – in which the Greens are the strongest faction in the city council. Until now, the fundamental ideological debates have returned with full force, only with a different ideological sign. The so-called Layla ban went from the Main. And Würzburg is sinking into a kind of sausage agony because a municipal cultural festival – which is hardly known beyond Ochsenfurt – is to remain meatless for a few hours.

So the quarrel raged irreconcilably – “Cry, you sausages!” versus “We’re being oppressed vegan!” – that even the Spiegel prompted to intervene. Würzburg’s culture officer Achim Könneke, a well-mannered person with a degree in philosophy, was asked about the matter in an interview. His adrenaline balance seems to have been so out of whack by the pro-sausage faction’s attacks on the “educational range restriction” that he allowed himself to be tempted to show personal condescension. He was quoted as saying that he could “quite understand” the dismay of some of the city council – “from the butcher’s daughter or the big farmer”. And since then, the sausage in the province has really been burning at world level.