SCHUBERTH AND SCHUBERTH

The range is also chang­ing. In Tante Jolesch, Tor­berg used to eat an apple at night at the sausage stand at Schot­ten­tor, while his quirky com­pan­ion Dr. Sper­ber ate some Boer sausages. Until 30 years ago, the built-in sausage stove dom­i­nat­ed the menu with­out restric­tion; the Meter­bu­ren­wurst, Debrezin­er, Frank­furter and Wald­viertler sausages float­ed in the water bath, invis­i­ble and hid­den from hun­gry eyes. Then the grilled Käsekrain­er began its tri­umphal march and today it already accounts for 70 per­cent of sausage con­sump­tion in inner-city loca­tions. Form fol­lows func­tion: grill plates and deep fry­ers take up con­sid­er­ably more space than before and require com­plex exhaust sys­tems. The stalls are trans­formed into small restau­rants where every­thing can be accom­mo­dat­ed in a very small space.

But what could a new sausage stand look like? The attempt to learn some­thing from the exist­ing huts, as a blame­less expres­sion of anony­mous archi­tec­ture, is more like­ly to lead to mad­ness. In terms of design, the stands should appear open and trans­par­ent, with food and prod­ucts vis­i­ble and staged in dis­play cas­es and win­dows. The stand as an object can appear sym­bol­ic, but not clum­sy. The typo­log­i­cal prox­im­i­ty to the beach kiosk and mobile ice cream van is greater than that to the snack restau­rant. Mate­r­i­al, light­ing and let­ter­ing play a major role, allow­ing ref­er­ences and play­ful ref­er­ences to be expressed.

All this is less a ques­tion of style; inter­ven­ing with plan­ning here means above all orga­niz­ing the inner life and arrang­ing tech­ni­cal require­ments, oth­er­wise the pret­ti­est out­er dress will not fit well in the end because some­thing is push­ing through here and some­thing is stick­ing out there. This is a fid­dly job with lots of coor­di­na­tion and detailed draw­ings. At least as many com­pa­nies are present at the con­struc­tion meet­ings as for a medi­um-sized res­i­den­tial build­ing.

It is said to have hap­pened not so long ago at a stall at Florids­dor­fer Spitz: eager tax offi­cials observed the object in secret for a while before they then had the con­tents of all the dung bins spread out accu­rate­ly on the ground to prove con­sump­tion with­in a cer­tain peri­od of time. You won’t find such wild tax audits today since cash reg­is­ters have become wide­spread in stalls, part­ly because they are used to check employ­ees. This is how sto­ries can become anec­dotes. One oper­a­tor recount­ed the fol­low­ing episode from the 1980s, when an attack was car­ried out on the Hun­gar­i­an bank on the cor­ner of Kruger­straße and Kärnt­ner­straße and the explo­sion sent splin­ters and frag­ments fly­ing in all direc­tions, at which point the sausage sell­er in the adja­cent sausage stand bent down to grab a mus­tard buck­et, thus pre­serv­ing his life in trou­bled times. The cir­cum­stances have long been for­got­ten, the con­tem­po­rane­ity has slipped into an anec­do­tal guise.

The appeal­ing idea of the sausage stand as a place of com­mu­ni­ca­tion con­ceals its actu­al func­tion as a local sup­pli­er: this is where peo­ple in a hur­ry and work­ing peo­ple eat, stand­ing between two paths, it has to be cheap and fast, as a play­er in the fast food seg­ment, a pair of frank­furters can hard­ly cost more than €2.90, even in good loca­tions. Here, the fam­i­ly resem­blance with piz­za stall, kebab stand and Asian snack is par­tic­u­lar­ly evi­dent.

How do you become a sausage stand own­er? Depend­ing on the sit­u­a­tion and size, the build­ing author­i­ty, the mar­ket office or the munic­i­pal dis­trict office is respon­si­ble for licens­ing. This leaves some room for a strate­gic approach; one pre­ferred way was to obtain a com­mer­cial per­mit for the busi­ness premis­es with­out the Depart­ment of Urban Design, MA19, hav­ing any say in the mat­ter. As a result, many a stand was for­mal­ly and legal­ly approved with­out any­one feel­ing respon­si­ble for the over­all view. For some years now, the author­i­ties have been more atten­tive and new stands are hard­ly ever approved any more. The Cham­ber of Com­merce cur­rent­ly counts 603 sausage and kebab stands in Vien­na.

Instead of the plot in Döblinger Cot­tage, one could just as well hope for a lease agree­ment for a good loca­tion from the unknown hered­i­tary uncle, near the Ring or Schwe­den­platz. The oper­a­tion is a cater­ing trade with­out a cer­tifi­cate of com­pe­tence, a so-called free trade. That sounds bold and proud, and in a coun­try where so much is reg­u­lat­ed, free trade still holds the promise of a future for new­com­ers and new arrivals. Quite a few oper­a­tors have immi­grat­ed in this gen­er­a­tion and mix with old Aus­tri­an sausage barns and third-gen­er­a­tion pub oper­a­tors.