West Germany: The Ultimate Status Symbol

At his villa by Bavaria’s Tegernsee, a West German industrialist recently celebrated the 18th birthday of his daughter with an intimate party for 100. The 20-ft.-long, damask-covered buffet table was laden with baked Prague ham, Alpine trout stuffed with Iranian caviar, roast venison from the Black Forest, Texas rattlesnake meat, capon breasts and small partridges on toast, Stuttgart quail, alligator soup, Strasbourg pâté de foie gras and aged black Chinese eggs. For hors d’oeuvres there were salted jasmine flowers, candied silkworms, toasted grasshoppers and grilled African honeybee. The wines were Moët & Chandon champagne (’59 and ’61) and reds and whites from the Crimea.

The entire $3,000 repast came from a Munich delicatessen, but hardly the kind where Americans pick up a six-pack or a pound of pastrami after the A & P has closed. Munich’s 250-year-old Alois Dallmayr’s is a Delikatessen in the original German sense of the word. Its sales of delicacies zu essen are soaring, as are those of practically every other fancy-food store in West Germany, on the strength of the latest craze to sweep the country: the Edelfresswelle, or exotic-food-devouring wave.

Ice & Spice. Germans have long been famed for conspicuous consumption, but the first fad in the early years of postwar prosperity was the Fresswelle, or eating vogue. When that first craving for wurst, schnitzel, dumplings and chocolate bars was satisfied, they sank their spare income in the Autowelle, deserting bicycles and motor scooters for automobiles, and after that in the Wohnungswelle (new homes), and then the Reisewelle (fad for traveling). Now things are right back where they started, but on a higher, more sophisticated plane. Explained one Hamburg University political scientist: “Food is an obsession with Germany. It is the symbol of everything the people lacked in the poverty and destruction of war. The most effective way a German has to remind himself that he is now prosperous is to be able to afford the most exotic foods in the world. It is the perfect, the ultimate status symbol.”

An estimated billion dollars a year is going into such specialty foods, and virtually every self-educated epicure in the country today has his favorite Delikatessen, whose virtues he will describe in endless, lip-smacking detail. Dallmayr’s, a dim, medieval-style emporium with vaulted arches, displays its caviar and Japanese shrimp on cracked ice (artfully hiding its modern refrigeration equipment), while live carp, perch, pike and rainbow trout swim in ornate marble fountains. Hamburg’s 150-year-old L.W.C. Michelsen’s offers a scientific index to its 1,000-odd spices, exhibits Australian apricots, French bread baked the same day in Paris—and, of all things, Heinz cream-of-mushroom soup. Rollenhagen’s in West Berlin operates a year-round airlift of fresh strawberries, lettuce, mangoes, papaya and eggplant.

Slice & Rice. Every other city has at least one “name” store, as well as a handful of less famous but no less ambitious ones. And though they boast of the barons and movie stars who patronize them, in fact the ordinary working-class German accounts for an increasingly large slice of the business. As one Bonn sociologist points out, the workingman uses smoked eel, sturgeon, venison, curried-rice salad, or even chocolate-covered grasshoppers to liven up his traditional light evening meal. “Today,” says Alfred Peters of Michelsen’s, which claims to be the largest importer of caviar in West Germany, “it’s nothing for the lower classes to come in here and purchase caviar [at $50 a pound]. They are the new gourmets.”