Bürgen is leaving New Zealand. After decades on our supermarket shelves, the grainy loaves with the German name will soon be gone.

Except the name was never German. Master baker Doug Leighton invented Bürgen in the 1980s. Its owner, George Weston Foods, is as Australian as Vegemite.

The recipe leaned on Europe, and the umlaut (ü) did the rest.

With two tiny dots above a vowel, a factory loaf somehow becomes European. The umlaut promises density, seriousness and authenticity. As a native German speaker, I am impressed.

The trick is rather old: in 1959, Reuben and Rose Mattus, Polish-Jewish immigrants in the Bronx, needed a name for their premium ice cream. They settled on Häagen-Dazs to make it sound of old-world sophistication.

Except, Häagen-Dazs means nothing in any language. Danish has æ, ø and å but no ä, and no Danish word contains “zs”. Early cartons showed a map of Denmark anyway.

New Zealand later added Haägen, a locally brewed “German-style” lager that moved the ice cream’s dots one vowel along, as if that made a difference.

Nobody understood the umlaut premium better than Ahmet Yaltirakli, an Istanbul-born, Cologne-raised entrepreneur who started a bakery chain in Sydney.

Yaltirakli was not even a baker; his dough arrived deep frozen from Germany. But he had the genius to call his shops Lüneburger, after a town he had never visited. You cannot get more German than the dots on the ü, he reasoned. Eleven successful bakeries across New South Wales prove him right.

Heavy metal made the same discovery. Motörhead, Mötley Crüe and Blue Öyster Cult adopted the umlaut to look dangerous. However, I still do not understand what should be dangerous about a vowel modifier.

The fans never attempt the pronunciation, because the dots are body paint rather than language. Except for their German fans who got confused.

The genuine German special characters get no such respect. In England, my old English teacher, Frau Voß, pronounced “Foss”, became Mrs Vob, with her ß mistaken for a b. And every German abroad knows ALT+0228 by heart, the five keystrokes between us and a properly spelled ä.

So farewell, Bürgen. New Zealand mourns you as a German loss, which is generous, because no German ever mistook your loaves for German bread.

A proper Roggenbrot, a dense rye, holds its shape against two fingers. Bürgen’s surrendered half its volume the way Worcestershire loses half its letters in the mouth. German bread, like German words, resists compression.

The umlaut was real. Nothing else ever was.