Qualla: 1st German Bratwurst Museum

1st German Bratwurst Museum: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bratwurst Museum Betriebs-GmbH, CC BY-SA 4.0. The oldest known written mention of bratwurst is an expense line. On 20 January 1404, Johann von Siebeleben, provost of the Walpurgis monastery at Arnstadt, recorded that one groschen had gone out of the accounts "vor darme czu brotwurstin" - for casings for bratwurst. No recipe, no ceremony, just a purchase somebody bothered to write down. Six centuries later that entry is the centrepiece of a museum with a theme park attached, and knowing about it explains a great deal about how seriously Thuringia takes the subject.

Image: Bratwurst Museum Betriebs-GmbH | CC BY-SA 4.0

1st German Bratwurst Museum: A Museum About a Sausage

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bratwurst Museum Betriebs-GmbH, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 no...

Image: Bratwurst Museum Betriebs-GmbH | CC BY-SA 4.0

1st German Bratwurst Museum: A Fair Rebuilt in Miniature

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Giorno2, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 attract...

Image: Giorno2 | CC BY-SA 4.0

1st German Bratwurst Museum: The Ground They Did Not Build On

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michael Sander, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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 w...

Image: Michael Sander | CC BY-SA 3.0

1st German Bratwurst Museum: Waterlogged

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bratwurst Museum Betriebs-GmbH, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 t...

Image: Bratwurst Museum Betriebs-GmbH | CC BY-SA 4.0

1st German Bratwurst Museum: What Survived the Monastery

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bratwurst Museum Betriebs-GmbH, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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...

Image: Bratwurst Museum Betriebs-GmbH | CC BY-SA 4.0