The 1st German Bratwurst Museum opened on 28 May 2006 at Holzhausen, a village in the Ilm-Kreis six kilometres from Arnstadt, in the shadow of the Wachsenburg. Behind it stood an association with an unimprovable name: the Friends of the Thuringian Bratwurst. The collection was not a joke. It gathered pig breeds, the mechanics of meat and sausage processing, recipes, and the physical equipment of slaughtering and production - the ordinary technology of a food that most people never think about as having a technology at all. Broadcasters could not resist the angle. In September 2006 the ARD network filed it under Germany's most bizarre museums, and MDR sent a crew out on 29 June 2007 for a programme on Central German museum night. The public came anyway, roughly fifty thousand of them a year, more than 800,000 in all.

In January 2008 the exhibition grew a wing. Curators built a replica of a monastic kitchen and a provost's office as they might have looked in Arnstadt in 1404, putting a room around the account book. Alongside it went a miniature reconstruction of the Thuringian Fair, an attraction at the 1910 World Exhibition in Brussels: a festival ground of half-timbered houses laid out over 72 square metres, presided over by a figure called the Bratwurst Eater. The original life-sized version, carved by the sculptor Reinhard Moeller, survives in the German Toy Museum at Sonneberg. That November the Thuringian ministry for economy and science handed the museum its 2008 tourism marketing award, worth 8,000 euros. A village of a few hundred people was now running a regional attraction, and the strain showed.

By 2018 the museum had outgrown its infrastructure and was hunting for somewhere larger. The first site proposed at Muehlhausen was the ground of Martha II, a satellite camp of the Buchenwald concentration camp - one of the network of sites across Thuringia where camp prisoners were held and worked. Objections came quickly and from several directions, among them Josef Schuster, president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany. The plan was abandoned. The private investor and the city said afterwards that they had not known the history of the land, or had not properly weighed it. Both explanations are uncomfortable, and neither is really the point. What matters is that nobody now grills sausages on the place where those prisoners were held.

The replacement site is 3.7 hectares of the Muehlhaeuser Stadtwald on the south-western edge of the city, four times the size of Holzhausen. The foundation stone went down on 20 January 2020 - by coincidence the same calendar date as the 1404 entry - and the doors were supposed to open that May. Then the ground turned out to hold water, and then the pandemic arrived. Holzhausen had already closed for good on 1 April 2020, which left a museum with no museum. The stopgap was a travelling exhibition installed in the Muehlhaeuser Hof hotel in the centre of town, the Bratwurst Museum on the Road, keeping the collection in front of people while the new site drained. It finally reopened on 16 August 2023, three years and three months late.

There is a quiet irony in the founding document. The Walpurgis monastery at Arnstadt, whose provost signed off that groschen, did not survive the Reformation; it was dissolved, and the community that kept the ledger dispersed. The ledger outlasted them. Institutions built to last centuries vanished, while a routine note about sausage skins came through six hundred years intact and now anchors a theme park thirty kilometres away. Food history is usually like this. The grand things are recorded on purpose and the ordinary things survive by accident, which is why a museum devoted to a grilled pork sausage ends up being a museum about record-keeping, monasteries, pigs, and the long habit of a region that decided this particular sausage was worth arguing about.