The greatest and worst factor of evil is undoubtedly the keeping of lodgers and boarders. This is the bane of the German working man’s home, but in the large majority of cases it is an economic necessity. The trifling profit which results from it is an ardently desired addition to the housekeeper’s fund. It is not to be supposed that the working men trouble themselves about strangers for pleasure only. On the contrary, numerous instances convinced me that whoever could do so kept his house free from outsiders. But when it was not to be avoided, young men were always taken in preference to young women.
The sleeping accommodations were of distinct kinds, both the better and the worse. The most pernicious and the most dangerous sort from a moral and sanitary point of view, has happily been prohibited by the Chemnitz Chief of Police, a just regulation, well worthy of imitation. By this ordinance a minimum of space, defined in terms of cubic metres, is prescribed for each sleeper, and private families are strictly forbidden to lodge young men and young women at the same time. During my visits and investigations I found about the following results.
a) Sleeping places in the rooms partitioned off in the garret, as I have before described them. Here almost every family was in the habit of keeping from one to three beds, so that often no storey of the house was more thickly crowded at night than this one under the eaves, whose steep ceiling consisted of the bare rafters and tiles. In the old houses, and especially during the heat of summer, they must have been places of nightly martyrdom; in the more solidly built of the modern houses they were, however, among the best bedrooms. In any case, this kind of sleeping-quarters had the great advantage of isolating the lodgers from the family at night, and it was also the more frequent kind, more or less expensive according to its degree of goodness. The cheaper sort were taken by the poor masons and ditchers from Bohemia, who worked here only in the months of summer. The weekly charges averaged two marks, which included coffee in the morning. Apprentices were lodged by the small master-mechanics, acquaintances sometimes, but often all strangers to one another. In the case of lesser officials, small tradesmen and similar households where a servant is usually kept and space is scanty, the maid’s bed alone occupies the garret. With the exception of the bedstead and a few pegs in the walls, there is ordinarily no furniture in the room, unless, indeed, the lodger brings with him either a commode, which seldom happens, or a chest, which is often seen. The few clothes which such a child of humanity possesses are hung upon the pegs, the linen and other trifles laid away in the chest, and the extra pair of boots put by in the corner. Whoever, from choice or necessity, sought the very cheapest shelter, rented such a garret with a single bed, in common with a friend.
print version
return to list
previous document