1971, the year Eckart Witzigmann started as head chef at Munich restaurant Tantris, is generally considered the birth of German gourmet cuisine. Wolfram Siebeck once remarked that this moment divided post-war German cuisine into two eras: ante and post Witzigmann. The story since that founding year has been told often and with great enthusiasm, not least in the chronicles of the glossy magazines that sprang up in the wake of the boom in German gourmet cuisine. And we also think we know the story that came before. The hard ‘bread of the early years’ in the immediate post-war period, which followed the Nazis’ stew Sundays. Then the fat roast pork and bacon of the German Wirtschaftswunder. The cold party and buffet cuisine of the modern, emancipated housewife and finally the temptations of guest worker cuisine.
Escoffier’s disciples in Germany
In the years after the war, there was hardly anything resembling haute cuisine. Yet at the beginning of the century, Hamburg, Berlin and Munich had already been culinary centres strongly inspired by French haute cuisine. This was particularly exciting at the time because it had been reformed by master chef Auguste Escoffier. In the version of his textbook ‘Le Guide culinaire’, it rose to become the celebrated standard of top restaurants and grand hotel kitchens worldwide. In Hamburg, Franz Pfordte was the celebrated ambassador of a radically French-oriented cuisine in his restaurant. At the 1900 World’s Fair, he caused a sensation in the ‘Deutsches Restaurant’ even in sophisticated Paris. After taking over the Atlantic Hotel in Hamburg, Pfordte was the first in Germany to introduce Escoffier’s brigade system in 1909, which clearly defined the cooks’ areas of responsibility. To this day, it remains the fundamental organisational principle in top-class gastronomy.
But at the beginning of the 20th century, signs of the birth of German haute cuisine were also emerging in Berlin. After becoming the capital of the German Empire, the city in the Mark Brandenburg had lost everything Old Prussian in a very short time. Fresh money from French reparations and the Gründerzeit boom, coupled with a new capital city consciousness, meant that an internationally competitive restaurant scene had suddenly emerged in Berlin. In 1907, Lorenz Adlon created a hotel with international appeal – with culinary advice from Auguste Escoffier. In contrast, Adlon sold his famous Berlin wine bar ‘Hiller’, which was frequented by almost the entire German aristocracy, to the young Alfred Walterspiel in 1910. Walterspiel had previously demonstrated his skills as head chef alongside Franz Pfordte at the ‘Atlantic’ in Hamburg.
The first German culinary magazines
In 1917, due to the war, the Hiller was declared an ‘untimely luxury establishment’ and closed. Walterspiel escaped the end of the war and the turmoil of the revolution to Munich, where things were only slightly calmer. French cuisine had already taken root here, not least thanks to the influence of Johann Rottenhöfer, the majordomo of the Bavarian kings Maximilian II and Ludwig II. Walterspiel founded a restaurant named after himself in 1922 and, together with his brother, took over the Munich luxury hotel ‘Vier Jahreszeiten’ in 1926. Both establishments enjoyed an excellent reputation until Walterspiel’s death in 1960.
The lively press of the Wilhelmine era also took up this phenomenon of a restaurant and hotel boom in Germany. From 1899, the magazine Kochkunst (later Kochkunst und Tafelwesen, and from 1920 simply Die Küche) appeared in Frankfurt am Main, a ‘modern illustrated bi-monthly magazine for hotels, restaurants and stately households’. In Hamburg, the merchant and publisher Heinrich Eisler, scion of a Jewish-Hungarian family with Austro-Hungarian citizenship, who had settled in the Hanseatic city in the 19th century, had been publishing the weekly magazine ‘Küche und Keller’ (Kitchen and Cellar) since 1905 (from 1922 ‘Deutsche-Hotelnachrichten: mit Küche und Keller’ (German Hotel News: with Kitchen and Cellar)). It quickly rose to become the most important organ of the hospitality industry. Today, it is still the official organ of the German Hotel and Restaurant Association (DEHOGA) under the name ‘Allgemeine Hotel- und Gaststättenzeitung’ (General Hotel and Restaurant Newspaper).
The founding of the Feinschmecker magazine
Eisler’s son Georg joined his father’s publishing house at an early age and continued to run it after his death. After 1914, he became a close friend of constitutional lawyer Carl Schmitt, whom he helped financially on several occasions and commissioned to write for Hamburger Woche, which was also published by Eisler Verlag. While Schmitt made a career as a jurist in the Third Reich after 1933, Georg Eisler was forced to emigrate via London to New York, where he founded various publishing houses. After the war, Eisler spent several extended periods in Hamburg from 1948 onwards, where he successfully asserted his claims for restitution. In 1955, while still in the United States, he founded Fachverlag GmbH to publish trade journals and specialist literature. The 26-year-old trained chef, pastry chef and hotel manager Arne Krüger was on the board of directors. In 1960, the publishing house launched a new quarterly magazine with a circulation of 6,000 copies. Its title: ‘Der Feinschmecker’ (The Gourmet).
In fact, the magazine was not quite as new as it appeared. It largely adopted the layout and many editorial articles from the French magazine ‘Cuisine et Vins de France’ in German translation. This was also clearly stated on the front page and in the imprint. ‘Cuisine et vin de France’ was itself a magazine that had only been founded in 1947 by the two most dominant figures in French cuisine after the First World War: Prosper Montagné, who had made a name for himself with the ‘Larousse Gastronomique’ in 1938, and Maurice-Edmond Sailland, known as Cournonsky. The pioneer of modern restaurant criticism and father of the ‘Guide Michelin’ had appointed 3,000 colleagues as ‘princes of gastronomy’. And Maurice-Edmond Sailland, known as Cournonsky. The pioneer of modern restaurant criticism and father of the ‘Guide Michelin’ had been named ‘Prince of Gastronomes’ by 3,000 colleagues. Even today, ‘Cuisine et vin de France’ is still the highest-circulation cooking magazine in France. After Cournonsky’s death in 1956, Madeleine Decure became editor-in-chief. German readers of Feinschmecker magazine got to know her through many articles and recipes as a great master of haute cuisine. With her step-by-step photos, she was ahead of her time, anticipating the cookbook innovations of the Zabert&Sandmann publishing house in the 1990s.
Between Volkshochschule and French model
Incidentally, Feinschmecker read like an adult education course on French cuisine and lifestyle. It incessantly extolled the charms of the French regions, the diversity and quality of the wines and food, and the sophistication of authentic French cuisine. Agricultural associations and producers from the neighbouring country advertised extensively. Even the advertisements for Parisian gourmet restaurants were taken from the French parent magazine. What ‘action culturelle’ was as political cultural work by the French occupying power after 1945 in Germany for the democratic education of young people and future political elites, ‘Der Feinschmecker’ was in the field of culinary education in the young Federal Republic. In the field of gastronomy, however, it was not least about tangible economic interests. For France, agricultural exports were, after all, the most important pillar of foreign trade. President Giscard d’Estaing would later coin the phrase ‘pétrole vert’, the ‘green oil’ of France, to describe agricultural goods.
For this reason, the Grande Nation created Sopexa, the Society for the Export of Agricultural Products and Foodstuffs, in 1961. Using numerous marketing tools, it was tasked with boosting sales of French goods in important foreign markets. And since Germany had become the number one export partner for agricultural and food products, the efforts made in this country since 1962 by Sopexa’s first foreign office in Düsseldorf and its various branches were particularly sustained. No wonder that the agency also appears in many places in ‘Feinschmecker’, in reports on trade fairs and sales campaigns and, last but not least, as a supplier of image material.
Only ‘mid-range gastronomy’?
Nevertheless, the magazine gradually began to break away from its French parent. But instead of developing its own profile, it became primarily a publication forum for kitchen appliance manufacturers and the food industry. In response to a letter from a reader in 1969 complaining that Der Feinschmecker gave the impression of being ‘written for medium-range restaurants that use frozen foods, canned goods and stock cubes,’ Arne Krüger replied resignedly that the majority of readers had told him that the magazine’s standard was ‘too high.’
In fact, as secretly and quietly as French culinary culture had regained influence among German gourmets after the war, little remained at the end of the 1960s of the impetus that French haute cuisine had once given to German gastronomy . The influence of the Third Reich, which had brought Germany’s flirtation with international haute cuisine to an abrupt end, was too strong. In its place, the Nazis had propagated self-sufficiency, especially vegetarianism. Home cooking was imbued with ideological significance, and culinary sophistication was considered a sign of decadence and degeneration. The Reich Food Administration, the National Socialist Women’s League and the German Women’s Association had only twelve years to drum this message into the minds of the German population. But since it fell on mostly fertile ground, the effect was all the more lasting. The lost war did the rest.
Turning point in 1971
Of course, there were still a few beacons, such as the Erbprinz in Ettlingen, Katzenberger’s Adler in Rastatt or, perhaps in the wrong place at the wrong time, Henri Levy’s Maitre in Berlin. However, in the economy boom years of post-war Germany, establishments such as the Humpelmayr in Munich, where, as Vincent Klink recalled, 30 Breton lobsters were ‘chopped up’ into cocktails every evening, or the ‘Ritz’ in Berlin, which took the concept of a speciality restaurant to the extreme by offering rattlesnakes in clay and iguana soup on its menu. The majority of German gourmet restaurants in the post-war period consisted of a standardised and misunderstood scaled-down version of French-international haute cuisine.
At that moment, the arrival of Eckart Witzigmann, who brought French cuisine to Germany in 1971 at the Tantris, perfecting it with all the consistency he had learned from his mentors Paul Haeberlin and Paul Bocuse, must have seemed like a revolution. Not least because this cuisine was already ‘infected’ by the principles that were to shake up gastronomy in 1973 following the manifesto by journalists Henri Gault and Christian Millau: the ‘nouvelle cuisine’. A cuisine that rebelled against the grande cuisine that had become routine, as Auguste Escoffier had, so to speak, ‘set in stone’ before the turn of the century, and which after the war had also become part of the luxury inventory of the bourgeoisie in France, against which not only students rebelled.
Nouvelle Cuisine
At first, there were only a few people in Germany who could correctly assess the beginning of the era of Witzigmann and a few other like-minded chefs such as Otto Koch and Dieter Müller. Their revolution was elitist, certainly, but no less radical than that of the students. They too dispelled the ‘mildew of a thousand years’ and cleansed the kitchen of misunderstood traditions and pointless rituals. At a time when classic German cuisine had reached its lowest ebb, Eckart Witzigmann ushered in the ‘German culinary miracle’ by celebrating his own ‘nouvelle cuisine’ in Munich – radically modern and radically French.
In fact, the French-oriented gourmet cuisine, kissed awake by ‘nouvelle cuisine’ and so brilliantly represented by Eckart Witzigmann, enjoyed enormous success in Germany in the 1970s. This was reflected in the Michelin Guide, which was republished in Germany in 1964 after a 50-year hiatus and has been awarding its famous stars in Germany since 1966. By 1969, the number of German one-star restaurants had risen to 186, but it was not until 1974 that the first seven two-star restaurants were added, and in 1980 Eckart Witzigmann was the first to receive a third star in his new restaurant, Aubergine, in Munich.
The relaunch of Feinschmecker magazine
Around 1972, German restaurant criticism became more professional, and large publishing houses began to take an interest in what had once been a niche topic. In Hamburg, publisher Kurt Ganske became aware of Arne Krüger and his Feinschmecker, which was now being published by Krüger himself and, despite several graphic revamps, was still languishing with a four-figure print run. But Krüger had shown a much more skilful hand with other projects. His compendium Spezialitäten der Welt (Specialities of the World) was the first German cookbook to be translated into French in 1967. In the same year, he began producing washable cooking cards for Gräfe und Unzer Verlag (GU), based on the Japanese model, with photographs by Christian Teubner. Over the years, GU sold seven million copies of these card packs – and caused a minor earthquake in the conservative book trade because a large proportion of them were sold through so-called ‘non-book specialist retailers’, in Rosenthal studios, WMF branches and household goods stores. In 1973, Arne Krüger’s cookbook Kochen heute (Cooking Today), sold in a bundle with a packet of coffee at Tchibo, caused a veritable industry crisis and was expected to reach a total print run of over one million copies.
Reason enough for a publisher whose family had grown up with reading circles to take a closer look at Feinschmecker. Kurt Ganske commissioned his former assistant Jochen Karstens to develop a new concept for the magazine, which was finally approved by Ganske after considerable resistance from the publishing group’s management. In September 1975, the first issue of the new Feinschmecker appeared with a print run of 100,000 copies – with Arne Krüger as publisher and Jochen Karstens as editor-in-chief. This year, Hamburg is celebrating the 50th anniversary of Feinschmecker. It seems as if no one in Hamburg remembers that it is actually its 65th anniversary
The right moment
1975 was indeed the perfect moment for relaunching the magazine. Georg Eisler and Arne Krüger had clearly been too early. It took an initial impetus, such as Eckart Witzigmann’s work, to really establish gourmet cuisine in Germany on a permanent basis. In 1960, it was an attempt by an emigrant to build on the publishing successes of the pre-war years and the dream of a talented young man to educate Germans to become gourmets with the help of the press. Despite the charisma of the French model (and its concentrated marketing power), this was not enough. It required sensual evidence, chefs who created culinary sensations evening after evening, even if these were not immediately understood at first. It was only when more and more restaurants in Germany delivered on the promise that the magazines and newspapers had proclaimed so eloquently that a magazine like Der Feinschmecker could become successful.
P.S.: This text first appeared ten years ago in a slightly expanded version under the title ‘Die Wurzeln und die Träume. Zur Vorgeschichte des deutschen Küchenwunders’ (The roots and dreams. On the history of the German culinary miracle) in FINE 2/2015 (reprinted in FINE Excellent 2017). The editorial team of ‘Feinschmecker’ at the time, which had of course received a copy, did not respond. The current anniversary issue contains a text about the first edition, which states somewhat cryptically that ‘Jochen Karsten, together with publisher Kurt Ganske (Jahreszeiten Verlag), took over Feinschmecker from publisher Arne Krüger’ in 1975 (online here). At least this makes it clear that Feinschmecker already existed before 1975. Even if this obviously contradicts the proclaimed ‘No. 1’ issue of 1975. It would have been appropriate for Jahreszeiten-Verlag to acknowledge the pioneering work of Arne Krüger and Georg Eisler in the current anniversary edition. Especially since emigrant Eisler and his publisher family are associated with the first blossoming of German cuisine at the beginning of the 20th century.
Rights
Text: © 2015, 2025 Stefan Pegatzky
Images: Except for the following, all images are from the archive of Stefan Pegatzky.
Incidentally, the German Gastronomic Academy wanted to introduce the world to Germany’s culinary culture with its recipe collection ‘Specialities from German Lands’ for the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. The cover speaks for itself.
Kitchen of the ‘Restaurant Pfordte’ at its opening: http://www.koch-welten.de/Franzpfordte.htm
Hotel-Restaurant Adlon: janwillemsen
Magazine ‘Koch-Kunst’ (Cooking Art): http://www.kochbuchsammler.de/tafelwesen.htm
French cuisine. 40 recipes. Publisher: Sopexa, promotional association for French agricultural products. Source: Portal Everyday Cultures in the Rhineland
Restaurant ‘Tantris’ in the evening: Oliver Raupach / CC BY 2.5
Le Nouveau Guide Gault-Michelin: https://www.gaultmillau.org/history/?lang=en
Cover of the first edition of ‘Der Feinschmecker’: Der Feinschmecker/Jahreszeiten Verlag GmbH
Portrait of Arne Krüger: Ulrich Gerken / CC
