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Spelunke: It was rare for women to go to pubs, but it did happen, like here in Hamburg around 1906
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VINTAGE GERMANY
"Knipen" is Low German and means something like "squeeze together, pinch": anyone who goes to the pub knows that it will be tight.
The bar's boom just started because its guests wanted to escape another form of tightness.
The rise of the simply furnished schnapps and beer bar, where sausage and bread were sometimes served at the counter, was a side effect of the industrial revolution.
Not least because many workers are open to life.
The living conditions in the growing urban agglomerations were poor and cramped.
Many in the emerging "proletariat" could hardly afford the rents: families lived in a confined space and, for a fee, also took in "sleepers" - young workers without their own apartments.
There was hardly any private space, so the sub-tenants in particular were drawn to the pub in the evening.
The proverbial »living room of the little man« was not just a substitute for a lack of privacy.
It was also the place where a wide range of contacts were made: with colleagues, with potential employers or at least with clients - and yes, also with political interest groups, who were forbidden to agitate and inform workers for a long time.
Most of these workers' pubs were small, extremely simply designed and mostly frequented by men.
Its most extreme form was the "Schnapskasino", which arose as a reaction to Bismarck's socialist laws (between 1878 and 1890) and the evening curfews prescribed at the same time: Organized as a social club and operated without a regular bar license, it promised its members a cheap, drunkenness.
Only an increase in the spirits tax in 1887 and finally a change in the trade regulations in 1896 put an end to the unlicensed liquor excess.
Cold beer instead of potato schnapps
The workforce now switched to beer, which had been becoming increasingly popular since 1876: It was the year in which Carl von Linde patented the artificial cooling system, which made it possible to brew bottom-fermented beers regardless of the season.
That changed the pub culture, because innkeepers could now store cool, long-life beer in large quantities and offer it fresh (hence "lager").
From the point of view of the authorities, all of this defused two pressing problems: Suff and subversion.
Above all, the invention of the Prussian potato schnapps from 1816 had led to a considerable increase in alcohol abuse among workers - Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels also complained about this misery alcoholism.
In this matter they were allowed to feel on the same side as the employers.
For 2019, the Federal Center for Health Education estimated the consumption of pure alcohol in Germany at 10.9 liters per capita.
An estimate by the historian Hasso Spode puts the alcohol consumption of workers in the middle of the 19th century at 60 liters of schnapps per year - plus around 20 liters of beer, which would correspond to at least 25 liters of pure alcohol.
That was a thorn in the side of the industrialists too: increasingly complex production methods required more sober workers, and beer provided a gentler, less potent high.
Shelters for free speech
In the meantime, the authorities were bothered by something else: Because people stayed largely "to themselves" in the pubs, they also became shelters for free speech.
The schnapps casino was even a closed society, and of course political actors hoped there to channel the drunken frustration of the discontented into revolutionary channels.
But even the open pub, wrote Karl Kautsky in 1891, remained the "only bulwark of the political freedom of the proletarian."
Above all socialists and social democrats used the protection of the pubs and casinos.
The security authorities of the empire also knew this.
The Hamburg Political Police had the conversations in the pubs between 1892 and 1914 monitored and recorded by spies on an almost daily basis: the transcripts they received fill more than 20,000 pages.
They show that there were no topics that were not discussed in the workers' pub, but many that were only discussed with extreme caution: criticism of the emperor and chancellor was dangerous.
But who thinks of something like that when it comes to the "men's table setting"?
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