I'm a simple emigrant, and I like it when there is a bathtub in the apartment

Even if I climb into it at most once every six months. Especially since it’s in a separate room, behind a closed door, and not in the middle of the apartment. And in Frankfurt something like this happened. In the 1920s here they devised Frankfurter Bad, or the Frankfurt bath: right in the kitchen they designed a special niche for a bath and shower. It was enclosed by a door or a curtain. This was part of the large “Neues Frankfurt” project by architect Ernst May — at that time the city had built about 12,000 new apartments in just a few years. Now the idea sounds strange, though quite convenient: you can also keep an eye on the pasta on the stove. Back then the plumbing was only just arriving in city apartments, but a separate bathroom was still a luxury. Toilets were often built on the stairwell landings. In big cities, construction had to be fast and plentiful. Architects had to fit water and heating into small and relatively inexpensive apartments. Gradually hygiene came into fashion and people began to realize that washing more often wouldn’t hurt. And baths themselves gradually ceased to be a luxury: they learned to mass-produce them and they became noticeably cheaper. But there simply wasn’t room to install them. Then the architects figured out where it would be simplest to squeeze a bathtub? Of course, into the kitchen: there is plumbing, the stove is always warm, and you don’t have to carry boiling water far. Thus in new houses they immediately laid out this nook, and in old ones they simply put a tub in the corner of the kitchen and fenced it off with something. Turn on the fashionable water heater, wash, draw the curtain — and you’re back in an ordinary kitchen with no tub to bathe in. After World War II standards changed; in houses they began to build the bathrooms we’re used to. Very rarely, but to this day in some old houses you can still find a Frankfurter Bad. I haven’t come across such a thing yet, but I’d like to see a museum exhibit in its natural setting. For some reason I imagine that in such a bath you would have to lie down and, at the same time, cook soup there, stirring it with a ladle. And would you live in such a thing now? #frankfurt #history #madeinGermany photo from the manufacturer mbv-ka