It's about the sausage, more precisely: about Frankfurter sausages.

Although they were named after the Main metropolis, in earlier years they were mainly made in the southern neighboring town of Neu-Isenburg.

The unmistakable taste of the Hessian delicacy is based on pork that has been lightly smoked over beech wood.

Three Neu-Isenburg butchers, Georg Adam Müller, Wilhelm Luft and Hans Wirth, set about industrially producing Frankfurter sausages in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Georg Adam Müller opened his business in Neu-Isenburg in 1860.

He was the brother of Christoph Müller II, who had already started producing Frankfurter sausages in Sprendlingen, today a district of Dreieich, in 1847, and whose son Heinrich Müller later continued the business under his name.

Georg Adam Müller first went to the United States, but returned after a serious illness and worked in Frankfurt selling Frankfurter sausages.

Because there were strict regulations that made it impossible for local butchers to expand their businesses, he founded his own company in Neu-Isenburg.

The oldest recipe dates back to 1749

Wilhelm Luft came from the family of Müller's wife and had learned from Müller.

In 1877, Luft set up his own butcher's shop in Neu-Isenburg, specializing in Frankfurter sausages.

From 1903 onwards, Hans Wirth completed the trio of Neu-Isenburg manufacturers who were able to make a good living from selling the sausage specialty.

Sausages were eaten in Frankfurt as early as the 16th century.

It is unclear whether they are to be regarded as the forerunners of the Frankfurter sausages: no recipes have survived from that time.

The oldest surviving recipe for boiled sausages dates back to 1749. In the Neu-Isenburg city museum "Haus zum Löwen", tins with the labels of the three sausage factories Müller, Luft and Wirth are reminiscent of the time when Frankfurt sausages came mainly from Neu-Isenburg.

However, not much was known about the beginnings of the Wilhelm Luft Wurst- & Fleisch-Konserven-Fabrik.

In a brochure published by the Neu-Isenburg Association for History, Home Care and Culture, the Neu-Isenburg historian Heidi Fogel closes this gap.

A few years ago, Fogel wrote the “Neu-Isenburg History Book”, which was also published by the association, and is regarded as an expert on the regional history of the Rhine-Main area.

During her research, she was able to draw on documents on the history of the Luft sausage factory, which were offered to the city in February 2020 by a fortunate circumstance: Thorsten Pohl from Böblingen came across newspaper clippings when clearing out the house of the Leukroth family there, which covered the period from the 1920s to to the 1950s included plans for the conversion of the Luft sausage factory, bank documents from the 1920s, numerous photos of meat and sausage production from 1916 and other documents that he wanted to hand over to the city of Neu-Isenburg.

There were close ties between the Luft and Leukroth families: the older daughter of the company founder Wilhelm Luft and his wife Sophie Katharina married the businessman Engelhard Leukroth from Marburg, who took over the commercial management of the Neu-Isenburg sausage factory Luft in 1914.

28 old black-and-white photos from Wilhelm Leukroth's estate are published in the brochure for the first time.