ABSTRACT
The name Aschinger has been forgotten, the restaurant chain's claim to fame usurped by an unlikely alliance of American burger moguls and entrepreneurial Turkish immigrants. Transitional moments of transgression, when shopgirls rubbed elbows with the stockbrokers and students, were possible within the disorderly spectacle of the modern fast-food restaurant, as they were throughout the modern industrial city. Military authorities made life especially difficult for restaurateurs, forbidding officers and soldiers to consume alcohol, forcing the city's pubs to shut early, and closing the dance halls. When the National Socialists occupied the Netherlands, Aschinger's acquired Kempinski's assets there, as well as a canned food factory. Though he claimed never to have been a party man, in 1946 Aschinger joined West Germany's new conservative party, the Christlich Demokratische Union, or CDU, and went back to work. Aschinger's mass-produced variety at bargain-basement prices laid the foundation for one of modern Germany's most phenomenal commercial success stories.
