Berlin's favorite snack

"It's 10:30 in the morning already, but nothing is going on," complains Waltraud Ziervogel.

The down-to-earth 72-year-old with curly blonde hair is upset. Only a handful of people are standing in line for her food stand, waiting to buy the legendary "Konnopke" curried sausage.

Birth of an institution

Max Konnopke was Ziervogel's father, and she has been working at his stand since she was 19 years old. In the mid-1970s, she took over the stand, in Berlin's hip-and-happening Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood.

"I get up every morning at 3:30," says Ziervogel, a small, agile woman who wears glasses. "At 4:30 I am already at the stand. Then we get everything ready and open at 5:30."

While it may be hard to believe, there are indeed customers who come by at that early hour to buy a sausage smothered in curry-flavored ketchup with a side of fries - Berlin's most famous street snack, the currywurst.

Changing neighborhood

The earliest customers are generally those on their way home from a night on the town; they just left the dance floor of one of the many clubs in the neighborhood. At around 1:00 in the afternoon, Ziervogel's son takes her place, and she goes off to deal with bills and other administrative things.

Prenzlauer Berg wasn't always the center of the hipster scene. "When my father built his sausage stand here after the Second World War, it was a working-class neighborhood," Ziervogel said.

"Today there are students from the West; lawyers and doctors. And the kinds of people who used to live here can't keep up with the rents."

In 1942, Ziervogel's father and his wife started selling sausage from a little street stand. The best-selling currywurst only came into the picture later. In the 1950s, Ziervogel's brother worked in West Berlin - the city was already divided, but without a wall.

Secret "Konnopke" mixture

He first tasted currywurst there, and brought the recipe back to his father in the East. Using a bottle of ketchup as their guide, "we tried to mix tomato paste and tomato puree, and get something that tasted similar. Because in the East you couldn't get a real bottle of ketchup." Today, the special Konnopke mixture remains unchanged, and is irreplaceably delicious.

In Berlin, everything has changed over the past decades, but Konnopke's snack bar remains an island of stability. Ziervogel was here when the Wall was built, and she was here when the Wall fell, too. Then the westerners came.

"They all wanted to buy our currywurst - but we couldn't take their western money," she said, explaining what it was like in the exciting days following the fall of the Wall. Berlin is her city, and she says she could never live anywhere else.

What does she like about it? "That there is so much going on. Things are always changing."