There’s a virtual ring that runs around Vienna’s inner city reflecting where the Austrian empire’s rulers once held sway and where Hitler arrived to a tumultuous welcome from some 250 000 Austrians about 70 years ago. In relative terms, that was almost yesterday. Today, there is an art exhibition in the city called Restitution reflecting works stolen from Jews — many of the original owners now untraceable.
I suppose it’s a very different city now. There are many Africans and Turks and Serbs and Croats in the subways and shopping centres; with kebab and falafel outlets far more ubiquitous than McDonald’s. I find these things reassuring — call it the healthy paranoia of a non-European in Aryan territory. At my hotel, (the Mozart, across the road from the Wolfgang Pauli Institute of the University of Vienna who are my hosts), there is a fabulous sushi restaurant populated by a melting pot of student and academic types.
Back in my hotel room, I am suddenly reminded of a conversation I had in Sardinia 15 years before with my then landlord who told me that he had difficulty renting out the beachfront villa (which was to be my home for a while) because he did not rent to Germans.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because they put bricks in the toilet!”
I dismissed this at the time as paranoid ramblings of an insular island dweller until a few days later when I recounted this tale to one of my research assistants — who told me: “Yes, it’s true. They put bricks in the toilet!” His family too had a beachfront villa which they had rented to Germans, and had found a brick in the toilet — in the bowl.
It was around three years later when I visited Berlin that I found a clue. The toilet bowls had this truly bizarre shape — where one would expect excrement to drop into water masking the odour, German loos had a flat sill. Now with my boy scout background, I’m quite used to taking a dump in shallow excavations. But finding oneself inches away from the stuff in the home of Vorsprung durch Technik is quite disconcerting.
“What’s up with that?” I asked my host.
“It’s Hitler’s legacy,” she said.
“Hitler told his people that they should examine their stools to make sure that they were healthy. So the toilets were designed so that people could take a good look before flushing. It’s mainly the older generation and people from the East who still do this.”
“So what happens when they don’t have access to German toilets? Like when they are travelling?”
“Oh, some of them put bricks in the toilet.”
I was in Tübingen near Stuttgart two days ago. My friend there has a new apartment — eco-efficient with modern insulating materials and a heat exchange system which warms incoming air with the heat of outgoing air; and a familiar toilet bowl which would be equally at home in the US or South Africa.
But at the Hotel Mozart, some things have not changed. And so, for your edification and delight, I present the Hitler toilet bowl, with a wad of sodden toilet paper to demonstrate its usage.
Happy New Year. May it be one in which we are grateful for small mercies.
(Somewhere on a train between Vienna and Salzburg, 31 December 2008, 12.40pm)
Dear Sir,
Whilst I am grateful that someone in SA is highlighting the fact that everyone has their own idiosyncrasies, and that there is no “White” race, and that they are all different, with different cultures and customs, etc,,,
Could I just point out that the use of the word “Aryan” is discouraged in Europe, especially Germanic, or those conquered by the Nazis, since they were (are) the only ones who used it, and it’s use in modern donates a neo-nazi attitude.
So:
Please stop using it or otherwise, in illustration, I might have to write an article about the Darkie Toilets in the School of African and Oriental Studies in London, that are a hole in the Ground that you squat over.
And then you might realise what, as a “trained and qualified journalist” you have just written, and the Mail and Guardian have just published, world wide.
Please try to use the word “Caucasian” instead like anyone with racial sensitivity and any knowledge of European history does instead.
(PS is it actually a surprise to you of how many different races there are in any European city and how many have dark skins? Or are you also unaware of how any Gypsies (Roma) Hitler tried to get rid of from Germanic soils?)
This time when the old year ends and the new year starts, it is traditionally a time when journalists find it hard to write about something newsworthy, and that is no shit.
Dear Sir,
You inform me that you were in Vienna.
Could you explain to me why, considering you were in a Capital city with a millenia and half of history, culture and architecture behind it, including some lovely cakes, music and one of the largest open air free music festivals in the world, you are writing about toilets?
Perhaps the “Qualified and experienced” journalist should get his head out of the toilet bowl and try a glass of schnapps at the Donau Insel Fest.
@Alisdair Budd:
The following extracts from the current OED are submitted for your information. Of note is the fact that the OED records “Caucasian” as being an offensive term.
Aryan |ˌɛːrɪən|
noun
a member of a people speaking an Indo-European language who invaded northern India in the 2nd millennium bc, displacing the Dravidian and other aboriginal peoples.
• dated term for Proto-Indo-European or for Indo-Iranian .
• (in Nazi ideology) a person of Caucasian race not of Jewish descent.
adjective
of or relating to this people or their language.
ORIGIN from Sanskrit ārya ‘noble’ + -an .
Caucasian |kɔːˌkeɪzɪən| |-ʒ(ə)n|
adjective
1 often offensive of or relating to one of the traditional divisions of humankind, covering a broad group of peoples from Europe, western Asia, and parts of India and North Africa. [ORIGIN: so named because the German physiologist Blumenbach believed that it originated in the Caucasus region of southeastern Europe.]
• white-skinned; of European origin.
2 of or relating to the Caucasus.
3 of or relating to a group of languages spoken in the region of the Caucasus, of which thirty-eight are known, many not committed to writing. The most widely spoken is Georgian, of the small South Caucasian family, not related to the three North Caucasian families.
noun
often offensive a Caucasian person.
• a white person; a person of European origin.
USAGE In the racial classification as developed by anthropologists in the 19th century, Caucasian (or Caucasoid) included peoples whose skin color ranged from light (in northern Europe) to dark (in parts of North Africa and India). Although the classification is outdated and the categories are now not generally accepted as scientific ( see usage at Australoid and Mongoloid ), the term Caucasian has acquired a more restricted meaning. It is now used, esp. in the U.S., as a synonym for ‘white or of European origin,’ as in the following citation:: the police are looking for a Caucasian male in his forties.