Reinliche Leiber, Schmutzige Geschafte: Korperhygiene und Reinlichkeitsvorstellungen in zwei Jahrhunderten (review)

This collection of papers stems from a project of Göttingen University folklorists (Volkskundler) who, with their students, prepared an exposition on the culture of cleanliness in Göttingen. Such projects serve mainly to prepare folklorists for their later professional practice as curators in museums. Folklorists increasingly believe not only that they should mediate between historical research and the public, but that they themselves should develop historical research in fields that have been neglected by German historians. A few years ago “concepts and practices of cleanliness” would have been such a field, and the editors claim that this subject can best be treated using the methods of “Kulturwissenschaft.”

In the first of the book’s four sections, on “public space,” we read about legislation dealing with the environmental situation of Göttingen, and we learn that the political intentions of the authors of these bills were their primary motivation. Two papers based on administrative correspondence discuss the growing impact of public administration on ridding the city of its excremental matter, and the attempts to organize the water supply of the psychiatric clinic—the latter involving a battle between the clinic director’s medical arguments and the stinginess of the state administration. A fine paper portrays the changing image of Göttingen in late Enlightenment travelers’ reports.

The second section, “the clean body,” has a paper on hygienic advice given in the “Ratgeberliteratur”: the author states that the tone of such advice becomes more serious at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but she does not provide us with any reflection on the constitution of her corpus of sources. In another paper, the diffusion of public baths represents, statistically, a relative success for the campaign to promote associations for this institution of hygiene, but the concomitant project of a general reform of manners was less successful. A paper on the artisans providing “perruques” and barbers of Göttingen is methodically akin to (and somewhat worse than) the positivistic “Handwerksgeschichte” of around 1900. “White linen from Bielefeld” draws some ideas from catalogs of a Bielefeld company selling this important tool for cleanliness.

The third section, on “the body in danger,” has a paper on cholera in Göttingen that presents its history as a narrative of the city physician’s activities. Given this orientation, it is not astonishing that even Evans’s book on Hamburg ¹ is missing from the bibliography. The paper on assistance to tuberculosis patients discusses the beginning of public health politics in Göttingen, and shows the attempt of some poorer people to receive meals from the administration in order to avoid the more shameful dependence on the assistance of the general public. In another paper, the fact that women in labor were very much in danger before the introduction of antiseptic measures seems to be news when it is combined with the fact that this danger was less important when women gave birth at home. The explanations of inflammation in the nineteenth century are considered “strange”; that Beck’s 1986 publication on the Göttingen maternity clinic is not in the bibliography seems even more strange to this reviewer.

In the last section, on “private space,” the papers are concerned with the contradictory advice given by physicians at the end of the century; with 1920s hygiene propaganda for couples planning to marry; and with the advice given on sex and contraception.

This book is irritating: despite the pretensions of the editors, most of the subjects have been studied for years in neighboring disciplines. That students worked for the first time in local archives might be praiseworthy; but that they were not sufficiently advised—neither about bibliography, nor about the evaluation of sources, nor about the state of the art in history, medical history, or cultural sciences—is evident. In most articles there has been no methodological reflection at all—and...