In the flesh

The artist Julia Schäfer was scouring online auctions for vintage photographs of German abattoirs and meatpacking plants when she noticed something strange. Nestled among monochrome snapshots of gleaming facilities and white-coated butchers was a romantic postcard from the war in which a sausage was cast as the object of longing and affection. Interest piqued, Schäfer continued to dig around different archives and auction sites, slowly amassing a collection of similar artefacts and uncovering a veritable phenomenon. What was this genre of sausages and soldiers? In one postcard, a corpulent corporal sits angled in the corner of a room. On the table, an opened package; in his left hand, the letter that came with it. A cigarette hangs from his bemused lips as he looks down at the delivery's contents: a little flaccid sausage resting in his right palm. Beneath the illustration it reads: True love this is not!

Could it be that even in wartime, size matters? Or is it the substitution of something more (amorously) substantial with such a paltry snack that disappoints? [1] One thing is clear here: the sausage is a symbol of deception [2]. And that is possibly the truest thing one can say about this comestible pillar of our shared civilisation [3]; that since entering the cultural lexicon in the plays of Ancient Greece [4] (if not earlier), has served across millennia as an aesthetic shorthand for inanity, absurdity, lechery, abjection, violence, decadence, as well as plenitude, frugality, collective identity, industrial progress and just about anything else you can stuff in its casing.

For the better part of a decade I've been consumed, so to speak, by the presence of sausages in art. On a very basic level, this is because they tickle something within me. But it's also, I think, because of their extreme obviousness, what the poet Ariana Reines ascribes to ‘subjects or phenomena that are so ubiquitous we think we know what they mean, and what we feel about them.’[5] The sausage – and by extension, processed meats – is immediately legible, and presents to the passive viewer several low-hanging fruits of meaning, which typically smack of lechery, scatology or the inane. Yet this tired ubiquity has hardly stopped artists from continuing to employ the icon in their work. 

Around 2016, when sausage art [6] first began to capture my attention, the sheer quantity, and vast spectrum, of themes, subjects and media broached within said works, prompted me to begin cataloguing them under the assumed aegis [7] of The Sausage Museum of Art. The establishment of an imaginary institution dedicated to one symbol or form owes something to Marcel Broodthaers’s ambitious museum-fiction Musée d'Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (1968-1972) [8], through which he sought to mount political parodies of art shows and artistic parodies of political events [9] in the wake of May ‘68. But the application of an institutional framework –– with its attendant affects of gravitas and reverence, its exclusionary function and instrumentalisation in conferring (social and market) value to objects by deeming them worthy of our time and attention – to such a decidedly unserious subject, an object of the masses, also probed the question of seriousness in the art world or academy itself, as explored by the cultural theorists Irit Rogoff and Gavin Butt. Rather than trying to ‘legitimise’ the sausage as a topic of enquiry by subjecting it to the conventions of top-down knowledge production as dictated by, say, the ivory tower, the SMoA embraces seriousness as a counter to cynicism, described by Rogoff as ‘a form of knowingness in which everything has been established prior to the event, whereas taking things seriously is precisely a form of unknowingness.’[10] Moving away from the piousness of traditional models of engagement which insist on a unity of argument or experience, ‘the work of seriousness’, she continues, ‘is founded in an ability to deal with heterogeneity.’ [11] 

The fictiveness of the sausage museum’s collection, which to date has focused on artistic and cultural production from the 20th century until the present, allows for a certain promiscuity in its acquisitional scope, with holdings as varied, redundant, and non-hieratic as the sausage's many incarnations. Still, on the (ever-expanding) whole, the collection raises several questions. For example, what happens to the signifier when a symbol is exhausted beyond meaning? When its contents have been so thoroughly expressed there remains nothing but its translucent husk? Much like the food item itself – which has historically made use of all the leftover, less palatable scraps of the animal, transforming them into a seasoned pulp bolstered by fillers and concealed within a handy form – the sausage-as-symbol appears infinitely capacious and ambivalent. An emblem of heterogeneity itself: a metaphorical catch-all. It is precisely the obviousness of the sausage object, its undercutting silliness, that makes of the meat tube an object of deception, a Trojan horse.

Ceci n'est pas un saucisson. [12]

When Julia Schäfer invited me to contribute a text to accompany Only Those Who Know the Longing, her 2025 exhibition at the Institut français Stuttgart, I imagined it was because my passion for sausages preceded me. Yet it became clear that our mutual investment in sausage art belied deeper shared interests, a certain sensibility. Our conversations quickly shifted to questions of family history, the transmission of memories, intergenerational trauma and loss. The responsibility – as members of a so-called 'hinge generation' to which those born around the early 1990s, in respect to the events of the Second World War, belong – of preserving a past one is heir to, but didn't experience first-hand. These are subjects I feel stalked by, whose themes I find myself unable to escape in my writing.

The verb ‘to haunt’ originally comes from the Old Norse heimta (‘to bring home, to fetch’), from which the German Heimat is derived [13]. For Schäfer, the sausage is nothing if not heimisch, because for the past four generations, her family has operated a butchery in a small village in southern Germany. But to offer this as the primary reason for the presence of sausage in Schäfer's oeuvre would be too obvious, too reductive. Nevertheless, it seems that we can never run too far away from the contexts that shape us, the ghosts that haunt us.

The single-channel video Cling Film (2023) opens with a white screen, on which a dried sausage carefully wrapped in plastic and secured at both ends with tape slowly comes into focus. This is how Schäfer's mom used to pack them for her when she was a little girl. The artist's ASMR-like voice-over channels Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, a meditation on the relationships between grief, memory and the medium of photography. Like Barthes, Schäfer is searching for traces of her mother. Like Barthes, the images she revisits in Cling Film are personal in nature, originating from a family album. Unlike Barthes, however, the album Schäfer rediscovered in her grandmother's house following her passing contained photographs, not of children, grandchildren, aunts, cousins, etc., but of sausages. Tons and tons of various sausages in myriad displays and arrangements, from the family's butchery.

The video is an assiduous index of specific dates and facts, infused with the kind of fantastical filling-in that characterises post-memory [14]: the day her grandfather, suffering from dementia, could no longer remember how to make sausage. The day her once-teenaged mother danced to her favourite ABBA song for the first time. The period when the artist began to unlearn her Swabian dialect. As though by ascribing specific dates to events either unknowable to the artist or that unfolded along an imprecise durational stretch, paired with clips of home videos from Schäfer's childhood – evidentiary examples of Barthes' ça a été, the 'that which was here' (and that which is no longer here) [15] – she might arrest her family's recession into a historical past. Or, at the very least, temper the inevitable process by which the umbilical cord of memories that ties us to our forebears – the smells, sounds and stories that nourish our first notions of self – distends into a gossamer thread. Reflecting on the piece, Schäfer (a vegetarian) describes how in her uncle's unwillingness, or inability, to discuss the past, he only talks about the family trade. She evokes the image of a long chain of sausages passing along a production line, across generations, as a metaphor for the transmission of family history, but also its obfuscation. The passing along of omissions and secrets like embolisms of mystery. The ‘missing links’.

In Ken McMullen's 1983 film Ghost Dance, the evergreen Pascale Ogier interviews the philosopher of phantoms, Jacques Derrida. He meditates on an idea borrowed from the psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, that posits the theories of ghosts and mourning as two sides of the same coin. ‘Normally, in mourning one internalises the dead. One takes the dead within themselves and assimilates them … Whereas in mourning which doesn't develop normally, that is to say a mourning that goes wrong, there is no true internalisation. There is what Abraham and Torok call incorporation. Meaning, the dead are taken within us but they do not become part of us. They just occupy a particular place in our bodies.’ [16] Mourning as indigestion. Ghosts who sit heavy on the stomach, or lodge in our teeth, drawing all our waking (and dreaming) attention towards these individual, aching, parts.

I like thinking of ghosts this way, as foreign agents of nebulous feeling. Food is always getting stuck in my teeth, as was the case one evening at an Argentinian steakhouse in Paris when I was twenty years old. I had a posh, older boyfriend, whose corporate law career and bespoke suits lent him an air of worldliness that impressed me. One of the few people whose approval he desperately craved was his older brother, who was better looking and supposedly favoured by their parents. The night of our introduction, the brother had come in on the Eurostar for a double date, and had been stood up by his model girlfriend du jour before even pulling into Gare du Nord. From our little table in the cavernous cantina, the brother directed all of his attention to me, and my boyfriend all of his attention to his brother, and I, all of my attention to the inflamed gums behind my right incisor – discreetly trying to liberate a morsel of meat that had wedged itself between my teeth while still appearing engaged. ‘Tell me about yourself,’ he prompted. I abandoned my gingival enterprise and unthinkingly began telling the story of how my parents wound up in New York from Paris, and in Paris from Algeria and Germany and Ukraine before that. How my father was adopted by another Jewish family during the war with false papers, who hid and raised him until his real parents returned, and so on.

‘I asked about you, not your family.’

Like the flame-licked chorizo grilling in the nearby open-kitchen, I felt my face suddenly engulfed in shame. As though I were a ventriloquist's dummy with no essential identity or mind of my own. I didn't have the language then to articulate the extent to which the family events that transpired before my birth, and intersected with major historical and political events, indelibly shaped my interests, character and way of being in the world years after. How by virtue of my distance from these people and events in time and place, the experiences transmitted to me through their stories and behaviours were so deep and affective ‘as to seem to constitute memories in their own right.’[17]

The opening of André Breton's Nadja (1928) – which starts with a simple question: who am I? – turns on the French proverb: ‘Dis-moi qui tu hantes, je te dirai qui tu es.’[18] The verb hanter is employed in its original sense: ‘to visit often’ and ‘to continually seek the company of.’ Though, as the narrator continues, ‘...this last word [haunt] is misleading, tending to establish between certain beings and myself relations that are stranger, more inescapable, more disturbing than I intended. Such a word means more than it says, makes me, still alive, play a ghostly part.’[19]

As Derrida pinpoints in his theory of hauntology, haunting is above all a temporal disturbance, a scrambling of the linear past-present-future by which History and reason abide. Therefore, if I am who I am haunted by, then those doing the haunting are also haunted by me. Like the two ends of a sausage, haunting is bidirectional, in that the living can haunt the past just as much as they can be haunted by it. And so, Schäfer was scouring online auctions for vintage photographs of German abattoirs, once again searching for traces of her own family's history.

What to make of this strange phenomenon she uncovered, the prevalence of wartime postcards that conflate desire and longing with the phallic crudeness and inherent brutality of sausage? These artefacts resemble a case study one would expect to find in Male Fantasies, the sociologist Klaus Theweleit’s [20] seminal analysis of gender and sexuality under fascism and the construction of male identity within it. Theweleit describes how the soldiers of the Freikorps [21] developed an armoured sense of masculinity, geared to defend against perceived threats from both external enemies and internal emotions, which to the proto-fascists were symbolised by the female body and the flood. Theweleit observes that ‘as the woman fades out of sight, the contours of the male sharpen’ [22], offering one speculative reason for the overwriting of the romantic/feminine with sausage in the postcards. This gesture is mirrored, to a degree, in the events relayed in Cling Film, where any possible trace of the artist's mother is supplanted by photographs of sausage, and discussions of her family's history and trauma are eschewed in lieu of talk about the meat plant. 

With her epistolary findings, Julia Schäfer produced a four-channel video installation [23] in which the illustrated figures on the postcards are resurrected through digital animation. Their looping vignettes unfold alongside a husky male voice-over that weaves found field post (letters sent by soldiers on the front back to their loved ones) from both World Wars, more Barthes, and the artist's autobiographical musings into one seemingly coherent, but ultimately pseudo-first-person narration. The cut-up, as a literary technique, is notable here. With its roots in Dadaism and Surrealism (which emerged alongside the period of the postcards in question), it is a method of destabilising the literary 'self', of subverting the assertion of the Authorial I into a subjective one that is uncertain, tentative and speculative. (Who am I? asks Breton.) The cut-up, in its heterogeneity of source material and unified appearance, also bears resemblance to the sausage. 

The cut-up as sausage finds its literal expression in another keystone work from the Sausage Museum of Art’s collection: the Swiss-German artist Dieter Roth’s series of Literaturwurst (literature sausage), produced between 1961-70. Roth created these editions following traditional sausage recipes, blending fat, gelatin, spices and water with the ground-up pages of books or newspapers (in lieu of pork, veal or beef) which he then stuffed into intestinal casings and hung out to dry. Into the grinder went both tabloids and serious texts by contemporary authors, such as Günter Grass and Robert F. Kennedy, whom he professed to either envy or despise. But also major works by revered figures such as Karl Marx and Hegel, in a blatantly anti-authoritarian, as much as anti-authorial, gesture. With these objects, Roth ‘turned Literature into a metaphorical object for intellectual consumption and physical subsistence,’ [24] recalling once more Abraham and Torok’s theory of incorporation. Where Schäfer’s project assimilates the haunting presence of past voices into one spectral unity, the Literaturwürste seem driven by the impish desire to destabilise meaning at large, collapsing past and present, high and low; the loftiness of the mind and the baseness of bodily functions into an inescapably utilitarian and gormless form.  

Without wishing to collapse the myriad (possibly infinite?) significations to be found within the collected works of the SMoA into any one particular meaning, one could distil from the examples explored in this text that photographs, videos, postcards, books, sausages and even museums are necromantic objects, in that they conserve the shelf life of the dead and gone, extemporally extending our ability to taste, smell, see, hear, touch and think alongside them. The sausage symbol thus appears as one continuous mise en abyme of deferred meaning, referring always to the previous link, or the casing content’s pre-pulverised form. A matryoshka doll of cultural histories that point always to a sublimated entity that no longer, or does not yet, exist but is paradoxically preserved in the flesh of the present.

The inexhaustibility of the sausage as a formal, artistic subject perhaps points only to the insatiability of desire itself, calling to mind one postcard from Schäfer’s collection, in which a small dark dachshund stares longingly at the steaming brick of a blood sausage before it. The image is captioned with the first stanza of a Goethe poem [25]:

Only those who know the longing
Know what I suffer
Alone and cut off
From every joy,
I search the sky
In that direction.
Ah! He who loves and knows me
Is far away.
My head reels,
My body blazes.
Only those who know the longing
Know what I suffer 

The bookended structure of this lugubrious lament recalls another German aphorism:

Everything has an end, only a sausage has two.

This text is a reworked version of an exhibition essay first published on the occasion of Julia Schäfer: Only Those Who Know the Longing (Institut français Stuttgart, 2025). Mélanie Scheiner is a writer, curator and translator whose translation work includes texts for Mudam Luxembourg. 

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[1] It should be noted that during the First World War, even the smallest of wieners would have been nothing to sneeze at. The German military relied on ‘Goldbeater’s skins’, aka bovine intestines, for the hydrogen balloons required in the production of Zeppelins. Each aircraft demanded the intestines of about 250,000 cows, and so a ban on sausage-making was enacted in the Fatherland as well as in allied or occupied parts of Poland, Austria and northern France.

[2] In both the English and French senses of the word: duplicity and disappointment.

[3] Sausage, as a food item and as a means of conservation by salting and drying, is believed to have been invented approximately 5,000 years ago in Ancient Mesopotamia and is found in cuisines the world over.

[4] E.g. Epicharmus of Kos’ comedy Orya (‘The Sausage’, c. 500 BC); or Aristophanes’ political satire The Knights (424 BC), about a sausage vendor who is elected leader of Athens.

[5] Ariana Reines, Ann Craven: Twelve Moons, ed. Daniel S. Palmer, SCAD Museum of Art/Karma, New York, 2024.

[6] In its expanded definition, comprising processed and cured meats.

[7] While hesitating between the near-synonymous words ‘auspices’ and ‘aegis’ while writing this sentence, I discovered the etymology of the latter: aegis (n.), ‘protection’, is a figurative use of Latin Aegis, borrowed from the Greek Aigís, meaning ‘goatskin, mantle of Zeus’, as Zeus’ shield was made of goatskin. Merriam-Webster Dictionary, accessed 14 July 2026, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aegis.

[8] Inaugurated in Broodthaers’ Brussels apartment, the Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles (Museum of Modern Art, Department of Eagles) was divided into twelve sections – literary, documentary, seventeenth century, folkloric, cinema, financial, figure, publicity, modern art, nineteenth century, nineteenth century bis and twentieth century – and unfolded over four years across various venues. The Figures section, subtitled Der Adler von Oligozän bis heute (The Eagle from the Oligocene to the Present), was expressly dedicated to ‘the emphatic exploration of a singular icon, the representation of the eagle’. To be included, any object, document, or image needed only to bear the image or name of the bird. (Dirk Snauwaert, ‘Marcel Broodthaers, “Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section des Figures,” 1972’, The Artist as Curator #5, Mousse 46 (2015), published online 28 August 2015, https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/taac5-a/.)

[9] Marcel Broodthaers, ‘Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section Art Moderne et Publicité’ (1972), in Gloria Moure, Marcel Broodthaers: Collected Writings (Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2012), 354.

[10] Gavin Butt and Irit Rogoff, Visual Cultures as Seriousness, Sternberg Press, Berlin, p. 30.

[11] Ibid., p. 22.

[12] With a wink to his compatriot Magritte, Broodthaers affixed little wall labels reading ‘Ceci n’est pas une œuvre d’art’ next to the works on display in his exhibition of the Section des Figures.

[13] For Freud, the original Heimat was the mother’s womb, the ultimate home to which no person may return.

[14] A term coined by historian Marianne Hirsch to describe ‘the relationship that the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective and cultural trauma of those who came before – to experiences they “remember” only by means of the stories, images and behaviours among which they grew up … experiences transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right’. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust, Columbia University Press, 2016, p. 5.

[15] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, 1980.

[16] ‘Dans le deuil normal… on intériorise le mort. On prend le mort sur soi, on se l’assimile, et cette intériorisation qui est en même temps une idéalisation, accueille le mort. Tandis que dans un deuil qui ne se développe pas normalement, dans un travail de deuil qui ne marche pas en quelque sorte, il n’a pas de véritable intériorisation. Il y a, ce que Nicolas Abraham et Maria Torok appellent “une incorporation”. C’est-à-dire que le mort est pris en nous, mais ne devient pas nous-mêmes et il occupe une place particulière dans notre corps.’ Jacques Derrida, in Ghost Dance, dir. Ken McMullen, 1983, 49:40. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwkjAuN-_-k.

[17] See footnote 14.

[18] Literally: tell me who you haunt, and I’ll tell you who you are. More commonly, ‘you are the company you keep’. Akin to the English maxim ‘you are what you eat’, derived from the nineteenth-century French gastronomer Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s ‘dis-moi ce que tu manges, et je te dirai qui tu es’, which alludes less to one’s nutritional makeup than to a signifier of one’s occupation or class.

[19] André Breton, Nadja, 1928, trans. Richard Howard, Grove Press, New York, 1960, p. 7.

[20] Himself a child of the war, born to a Jewish mother and a ‘good fascist’ father.

[21] German paramilitary militias that formed in the aftermath of the First World War and eventually paved the way for, or were absorbed into, the Nazi SA and SS troops.

[22] Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 1977–78, p. 35.

[23] Julia Schäfer, Only Those Who Know the Longing (2024), Institut français Stuttgart.

[24] Museum of Modern Art, gallery label for Dieter Roth, Literature Sausage (Literaturwurst), in From the Collection: 1960–69, 26 March 2016–12 March 2017, https://www.moma.org/collection/works/141853.

[25] Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt’, in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Johann Friedrich Unger, Berlin, 1795, book 4, ch. 11; trans. Richard Stokes as ‘Mignon II’, in The Book of Lieder, Faber, London, 2005.