Toilet Slides, Sausage Catapults, and Giant Kebabs: Inside Europe's Weirdest Theme Park Chain

August 16, 2026

Forget Six Flags. Forget Cedar Point. The most deranged amusement park experience on Earth right now is a cluster of strawberry-themed villages in northern Germany called Karls Erlebnis-Dorf, and I cannot stop thinking about it.

Karls is a family-owned chain that started as a fruit farm stand and has metastasized into something I genuinely cannot classify. Is it a theme park? A food hall on PCP? A fever dream engineered by a committee of five-year-olds? Yes to all three. Their parks in Rövershagen, Döbeln, and Bremerhaven feature attractions that read like a dare from a drunk German grandmother: a toilet-themed giant slide (the Klo-Riesenrutsche), a Bockwurst catapult that literally launches giant sausages across a field, a mustard slide you ride down into "Bockwurstland," and a strawberry caterpillar coaster that looks adorable until you realize it's surrounded by goats on the roof.

Let me be clear about the Bockwurst catapult, because I need you to understand what we're dealing with. You sit in a massive sausage-shaped vehicle. A mechanism catapults you through the air. You land in a pile of… well, more sausage theming. It's the kind of ride concept a Six Flags engineer would sketch as a joke, and Karls just built it.

And the food — because of course there's food — is on the same wavelength. You can buy a döner kebab the size of your torso, enormous baked potatoes loaded with toppings like a German loaded-skin situation, and strawberry everything (they started as a fruit farm, remember). The jam-jar ride is exactly what it sounds like: you sit in a giant jam jar and spin around. That's it. It's brilliant because it's stupid.

The best part? Karls keeps expanding. Döbeln alone draws millions of visitors a year. The chain has figured out what the entire themed-entertainment industry keeps forgetting: people don't need another hypercoaster with a 300-foot drop. They need to be launched out of a sausage cannon and then eat a kebab the size of their torso while goats watch from a roof. That's the future. I'm not joking.

I want to ride a toilet slide so badly it almost hurts. Germany, you absolute lunatics — never change.