Two dots above a vowel and a loaf of bread becomes continental.

New Zealand is about to lose a German bread that was never German, and as the only German in sight, I have been invited to grieve.

I will pass. Bürgen was invented in Auckland in 1987 by a master baker called Doug Leighton. Australia took it five years later, and an Australian company, George Weston Foods, has owned it ever since. Australia is keeping it. We are not.

What was German was the umlaut. Two dots above a vowel, and a factory loaf becomes continental. The umlaut promises density, seriousness and authenticity. As a native German speaker, I am impressed.

I should know about deceptive names. If you are called Oliver Hartwich, it is easy to be mistaken for British. Until I open my mouth, at least.

Perhaps that is why I find country branding so interesting. Or perhaps it is because I once wrote a doctoral thesis on advertising regulation in Australia and Germany.

Bürgen was not even the boldest attempt. At the end of the 1950s, Reuben Mattus wanted his Bronx ice cream to sound Danish, he said, as a tribute to how Denmark had treated its Jews during the war. It was the birth of Häagen-Dazs. But the ä he settled on is German. The zs is Hungarian. Neither exists in Danish. The most successful fake origin in the food business is an immigrant’s thank-you note, misspelled.

Why does the German version work at all? Because the reputation being borrowed is real, even if it was not always a compliment.

In 1887, the British parliament set out to humiliate German industry. The Merchandise Marks Act required foreign goods carrying British names to declare where they were really made. The target was German firms, Solingen’s cutlers above all, stamping “Sheffield” on their blades. “Made in Germany” was invented as a warning label. Within 30 years it was a price premium, because the goods got good.

Audi shows how strange the mechanism is. The German car maker August Horch had been selling cars under his own name since 1901. In 1909 he set up a rival firm under the same name, promptly lost a court case that barred him from using it, and translated it into Latin instead. Horch means listen. So does audi.

By the 1980s that had backfired. To British ears Audi sounded Italian, which is useful if you are selling supercars and useless if you are selling a serious saloon. Nobody has ever paid extra for a Fiat.

In 1982, Audi’s British advertising agency had a brilliant idea. It found an old German slogan on publicity material in Ingolstadt, adopted it and refused to translate it. Almost nobody in Britain could tell you what Vorsprung durch Technik means. That was the point. It informed no one. But it sounded expensively German, which was what Audi needed.

Mercedes never needed the trick. The most German car of all wears a Spanish girl’s name, taken from the daughter of an Austrian dealer and registered as a trademark in 1902. When the product speaks clearly enough, the name can be anything.

However, did I mention that there was also a Daimler that was British rather than German? Built in Coventry from 1896, wound up last Christmas. But I digress.

Still, do names really change what consumers do? Well, it has been tested. In 2021, researchers ran experiments with pasta brands. Chinese consumers were willing to pay ¥18.84 for genuine “Made in Italy” pasta and ¥17.96  for pasta that merely sounded Italian. Ordinary Chinese pasta got ¥9.30. The fake captured almost the whole premium. Meanwhile, Italian consumers, tested alongside, were immune to this al dente deception.

Incidentally, Bürgen bread was not New Zealand’s only German-sounding invention. Steinlager exists because of Arnold Nordmeyer, the Labour finance minister whose 1958 Black Budget doubled the Customs duty on beer. New Zealand Breweries answered with a lager named Steinecker, after the German firm whose equipment the company used to brew it, and shortened it to Steinlager in 1962.

The Commerce Commission went after Speight’s in 2001 for claiming to be brewed in Dunedin when it came from Christchurch and Auckland. Nobody has ever complained about Steinlager sounding German.

Faking a New Zealand origin impacts New Zealanders, and somebody complains. Faking a German one damages Germans, who are not here.

I said I would not mourn Bürgen, and I will not, not least because it had always been too soft for my German taste. Yet I will admit to a certain professional respect. Bürgen never claimed to be German. It could not, because that claim would have been actionable. It put two dots where no dots belonged and let 40 years of New Zealanders think of Germany over their lunchtime sandwiches.

Farewell, Bürgen. Somewhere, your two dots are already looking for new work.