The Dirt on Clean - Katherine Ashenburg [65]
Cologne’s Hohenstaufenbad, which opened in 1885, was typical. Built on the Ringstrasse, close to the Opera House and other examples of local prowess, the bath was designed in the elaborate Renaissance Revival style, rich with murals, decorative glass and verses painted on the walls that celebrated cleanliness, progress and the continuity with Roman bathing. The Hohenstaufenbad offered separate swimming pools for men, women and workers, a restaurant, a barbershop and three different classes of bathtubs. The Volksschwimmbad, or people’s swimming pool, was located at the back of the building, with a separate entrance not on the Ringstrasse.
But building civic temples where the well-to-do bathed in style while the poor entered—literally—at the back door did not succeed in bringing sanitation to the masses. The poor felt ill at ease in such sumptuous surroundings, and swimming pools and private baths did not serve their needs particularly well. Swimming pools were expensive to maintain and recreational rather than cleansing. A bath was necessary before a swim, but bath-tubs and grimy workingmen made a bad combination, because the worker was soon sitting in his own dirty water. The statistics were not encouraging: one turn—of-the—century survey suggested that the average German took five baths in a year. Although the lavish bathhouses were not self-supporting, municipalities persisted in building them—they were too prestigious and too much enjoyed by the bourgeoisie to discontinue.
“DIE DOUCHE ALS VOLKSBAD”
“The rain bath is the people’s bath” became the international slogan for Oscar Lassar’s movement to bring cleanliness to the masses.
In 1883, Dr. Lassar proposed a new and affordable way of cleaning the working class. At the Berlin Public Health Exhibition, he displayed a model bathhouse that consisted only of individual stalls with nozzles mounted high on the wall—simple showers. The shower, more or less rudimentary, had been known to the ancient Greeks as well as to Montaigne and Madame de Sévigné, but the popular mind connected them with prisoners, soldiers and horridly cold water. Although Lassar was influenced by the Prussian army showers, the “People’s Bath” he exhibited in Berlin sprayed warm water. A corrugated-iron building, it held five shower cubicles for men, and five for women. Probably inspired by the new public urinals of Paris, the showers were also intended for the street. At the exhibition, tens of thousands of adventurous visitors paid ten pfennigs for a shower that included the use of soap and a towel.
Calculating that one mark paid for the water for 33 baths or 666 showers, Lassar claimed that his innovation would save more than 66 million marks a year. An American sanitary engineer agreed. The “rain bath,” as the shower was called, was
the simplest, quickest, cheapest, cleanest and withal best bath for people’s bath houses; the one which requires the least space, the least time, the least amount of water, the least fuel for warming water, the least attendance, the least cost of maintenance. Standing under such an inclined spray the bather can soap and rub his body, rinse it with more clean warm water, which falls down in a gentle yet invigorating rain of fine jets from the neck downward… The rain bath has, for all these reasons, become the modern favourite method, and is destined to be the bath of the future for people’s baths.
The unappealing streetside shower-houses never caught on, for obvious reasons. But Vienna, Frankfurt and several other German cities soon added rows of showers to their public bathhouses, usually at a cost of ten pfennigs per shower. By 1904, 101 of 137 German public baths included showers, usually in combination with baths. Although clearly more economical, showers did not became as well-used as Lassar had hoped. Perhaps they never entirely outgrew their institutional, slightly menacing image. Perhaps even a timed