My awareness of German Bäder has not always been as impressive as it is today. Not long ago some friends of mine took me to the Badhotel of the town Bad Wildbad in Baden-Württemberg. My surprise was genuine, when my friends asked me if we should take a bath after lunch.
"What? Is there a bath here around?" I exclaimed, looking around as if someone had warned me for a savage Knödel.
I have since learnt that Bäder are very different, having about only one thing in common: water. However the amount of water, its quality and how it's used can vary.
If it tastes good, it cannot be good for drinking, so you bath in it.
If it feels nice, it cannot be good for bathing, so you drink it and try to convince yourself that it's healthy to drink tepid water, which tastes like sheep shampoo, if there is anything like that.
A visit to a German public bath can follow these lines.
You come to the ticket counter and ask for one entrance ticket. You don't need to rent any towel, you mention, as you brought your own. The lady behind the counter looks at you suspiciously. "I brought my own bathing trunks as well", you quickly add. "And bathing shoes, soap, a bathrobe, shampoo." Still the same suspicious look. "And I brought my yellow bathing duck Tim...".
"You won't need anything of all that. All you need is provided in the bath. And you won't need the bathing duck Tim", she adds as she gives you your ticket.
Immediately after you open the immense door to the bath, you come to the locker room. You look for the bathing trunks and the towel you were promised at the ticket counter, but see none. You undress and put all your belongings in a locker and boldly walk on as you were instructed, wearing no clothes at all, neither you, nor your bathing duck Tim. Hey! Put that duck away! You put Tim in the locker as well and walk on alone.
You remember all those films from the sixties about Egypt emperors and Roman philosophers and the splendour of the Greek gladiators? In the baths of those films, there was always a negro to serve you. (I use the word "negro" as it was used in those films. If you're offended by it, feel free to replace it with another word, like "Irishman" or "tram-driver". That won't make this message less sensible.) In this German bath, there is also a negro to take care of you. But this one is called Klaus, and he studies molecular physics at the nearby university, when he doesn't earn some extra money by welcoming people to the bath. The wise gladiators of the antiquity rarely studied that, and see, today all of them are gone.
Anyhow, Klaus gives you a pair of bathing shoes and a towel and then indicates step one, which is the showers. Before you're let out of the bath again, there are sixteen steps to pass, i.e. four more than Hercules had to pass before he was given the status of god. You won't be given the status of god, but you'll feel like a completely new person, once all is over. I don't know who this new person is and if you're going to like him, but that's the way things are.
Having stayed at hundreds or perhaps thousands of hotels all over the world, you thought you knew all possible shower controls. That may be true, but in this bath, they have an impossible shower control - a lever, so robust it probably comes from a dismantled East German tank. Soon, that is after 10 minutes, you realise that it actually is possible to move it back and forth, and the temperature of the water then gradually changes from cold to chilly or from warm to hot, depending on which shower you use.
After the shower, you go to the second station, a huge room with wooden benches. You're supposed to lie on one bench for 15 minutes says a sign on the wall. It doesn't say 10 to 20 minutes or "as long as you feel like", but exactly 15 minutes. You get a feeling that there will come someone and blow a whistle after 14 minutes and 59 seconds to make you move on. But after a few minutes some of the other persons in the room get up, put on their shoes and their towel and walk out, so it's apparently up to yourself how long your particular 15 minutes shall be. The temperature of the room is 54°, not 53° or 55°, but 54°. After 13 minutes you increasingly feel that all this is ridiculously action free, and you decide to sneak out before the 15 minutes are up. You feel very bad about cheating and hope no one noticed.
You come to a new room, with a new temperature, where you're supposed to sit for five minutes. You stay seven minutes, as you forget the time, besides you have to bend over to see the wall clock, because a very big German is sitting just in front of you.
One of the staff members now greets you by taking your towel and your shoes away from you. He then asks you to take a shower. The next room is a steam bath, where people sit on wet stones, and hope that their 13.5 minutes soon will be over. And then yet another steam bath, but without steam to make it more interesting.
Suddenly you find yourself in a room with a pool. Aha! This is why all this is called a bath. The pool is too small to make any swimming, but you're allowed to sit there for 10 minutes.
Then comes a pool with only one and a half foot of water, but it bubbles, which is fun enough to make you stay half of the prescribed 18 minutes. You don't feel at all bad about cheating by now.
Finally comes The Big Pool. This is a circular pool, with stairs all around it, so you imagine you can sit there for an hour or so and just relax. Unfortunately The Big Pool is a "Bewegungsbad", an action bath. The water is freezing cold to make you move all the time, and everyone in it swim as quick as they can in circle, which is the only way to swim in a circular pool, if you think about it. You don't have the time to think about it, but swim in a circle nevertheless, until you exhausted and frozen after your stipulated five minutes finally go on to the next room, which is the cold bath.
Now Klaus comes again, and gives you a warm towel. You try to take it with you on your way to the next station, but he friendly stops you and points at a sign on the wall: "Dry with warm towel. Four minutes." You sit there with the warm towel and ask Klaus if he has found any new molecules today, but he answers that most of them have been good old H2O. The four minutes have elapsed and you're bereft of your towel again. You feel extremely naked.
The last two stations are skin lotion and relaxing under a cosy blanket. If you feel like it, you can take that part of the tour. If not, you can start planning the next day so you can fit in your three hours and 14 minutes at the bath tomorrow as well.
3 January 1999
by Magnus Lewan