OZY’s Weekend Top 10 | Walls, New and Old

OZY’s States of the Nation: Germany series discovers the next walls to go up, or come down, in Deutschland.

As Germany marks 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, OZY brings you previously untold stories on the new divisions and disruptions that could shape the country’s future. Over the past six weeks, OZY’s States of the Nation: Germany series reported from each of the country’s 16 states. Here are some of the next walls that we discovered are going up – or coming down.

The German auto giant’s Wolfsburg plant, the world’s largest factory, produces many more wursts than cars.

While thousands of cars roll off the production lines at the headquarters of Volkswagen each day, a group of German butchers huddles around a table at lunch to carefully inspect, smell and taste test a different product: the day’s freshly produced currywurst sausage.

And 40 percent of those sausages — 2.5 million in 2018 — are consumed at German Volkswagen plants alone. At the Wolfsburg factory, the sausages — along with a Volkswagen currywurst sauce — are served for breakfast, lunch and dinner at its more than a dozen restaurants and canteens. But since the company’s internal butchery started to produce the sausage in 1973 using a secret recipe that incorporates pork belly and cheek, bacon and curry spices, the Volkswagen currywurst has become so popular that the vast majority is now sold via a major supermarket chain and consumed by households across the country. A package of five sausages and a bottle of Volkswagen spiced ketchup costs around $10.

Jamila Al-Yousef is changing Berlin's music scene with a dash of cultural activism.

Dreams of war are not uncommon for Jamila Al-Yousef: bullets strewn across ruined streets, slowly approaching bombs, strategizing how to hide, impending death. And when she opens her eyes, she works for a better reality.

When she was all of 15 in 2004, Jamila had walked up to the politicians of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern to ensure that a Serbian girl did not get deported. That year, she convinced the city councilors to let her host a music festival against racism.

Now, on the cusp of turning 30, she is changing the music landscape of Berlin by infusing Arabic folk with psychedelic rock and neo-soul — and a dash of cultural activism.