In midsummer temperatures, the entire stairwell always smelled of slurry.
The penetrating stench came from the washroom in the basement, which was about a meter lower than the normal basement floor. It was impossible to enter the room because it was full of fecal sludge up to the penultimate stone step.
The cause was the more or less constantly clogged sewage sluice, which had filled the washroom with stinking sewage due to the backwater.
Although the house was constantly inhabited except for the two attic apartments from the first floor to the third floor, this annoying condition did not seem to have bothered anyone, because not a single tenant had done anything about it so far.
Wearing chest-high fishing pants and arm-length rubber gloves, I climbed into the intake shaft and removed the mud that had accumulated there over the years. It was amazing what some tenants, in their thoughtlessness and convenience, had disposed of in the toilet bowl!
The highlight was a rotten bouquet of flowers, in addition to scouring pads and old socks. I angrily held the stinking bouquet under the noses of a few well-known quiet people in the house and made it unmistakably clear to them with harsh words that only shit, toilet paper and flush water belong in the toilet and nothing else.
But despite the help of some house inhabitants our cleaning attempts remained unsuccessful. The path of the sluice from the yard to the municipal sewer under the middle of the street was too long. Experts with the necessary technology were needed here.
The men came and made a good effort. Finally the sluice was free again. I was advised to install an additional inspection shaft, because shorter pipe sections make cleaning easier. This was good and sensible advice, but who was to build the shaft? After an intensive search, a private company took on the job.
They dug a two-meter-deep pit above the center of the sewer pipe. They lined the pit with concrete rings reinforced with crampons. Now it was possible to flush the sluice prophylactically from time to time with a pressure hose.
The problem was solved, provided that all the inhabitants of the house complied with my recommendation. The washroom fell dry, and we began to clean up the settled mud. During the cleaning, we unearthed a curved tin sign.
On the white enameled bottom of the sign was written in old German block letters, ‘Dienstboten Hintereingang benutzen.’ Reading this demand, my thoughts wandered back almost a century: during the Gründerzeit, during the First World War, during the Weimar Republic and into the 1930s, the only people who lived in this stately house were those who had never entered the laundry room.
Servants picked up the laundry, took it to the laundry and delivered it clean and ironed through the back entrance free of charge. The laundry room was used only by the janitor, the coachman, and the house cleaners from the attic apartments.
In the 1930s, it was quite possible for a Jewish doctor or lawyer and his family to be evicted so that a Nazi bigwig loyal to Hitler could move into the manorial apartment. The new gentleman, of course, had his dirty laundry and brown shirts cleaned in the laundry as well.
The sign salvaged from the mud had not yet been discarded at that time. 𝓣𝓸 𝓑𝓮 𝓒𝓸𝓷𝓽𝓲𝓷𝓾𝓮𝓭…
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