Europe Revisited
III.—Vienna : The Dawn [Two years ago, the Spectator published a series of articles called " Europe after Twenty Years," recording impressions re- ceived during a tour through Northern Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, the Baltic Republics, Poland and the Danzig Corridor. The writer of these articles has just returned from a lengthy stay in Central Europe, during which he has had special opportunities of meeting many of the political leaders. Under the above heading he is contributing a series of articles dealing with Southern Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, of which this is the third.—En. Spectator.] MY last article dealt with some of the impressions- many of them of a sombre nature—which the isitor receives at Vienna after an absence of many years. I am now going to turn to one of the wonders of contem- porary Europe—the way Vienna is tackling the slum queaion—and I will try with the minimum of statistics to Make the readers of the Spectator see some of the wonders of social reform which I saw during several days spent wandering round the new working-class dwellings, children's kindergarten, welfare centres, public baths and children's baths.
A visit to Austria to-day is simultaneously a painful and a stimulating experience.. Painful because you see before you a microcosm of the suffering caused by war and chauvinism, and stimulating because in Vienna you see also what a great city, which has been through years of much tribulation, has achieved in the face of un- paralleled difficulties. If after what she has been through Vienna were nursing her grievances, sitting still and crying out for help, we could sympathize with her in her slough of despond. How different is the reality. I wonder if these men of vision who have done so much for Vienna and made her a place of pilgrimage for social workers and students from two hemispheres can under- stand just how an Englishman feels after a stay among them ? By far the strongest feeling I took away was one of shame for my country and for our national lethargy. Our country, one of the two richest in the world, the envy of much of Europe, has been content to let the years go by and has done practically nothing to come to grips with the slum menace which is eating away the vitals of our people.
Up and down Europe I have sought for slums corn- _ parable to our own, and the only place where I have seen anything approaching them has been in the ghettos of Warsaw, and even they were no worse than what I have seen in. London, Glasgow, Liverpool, and in any other industrial town in these islands. England is a delightful country to live in for the well-to-do classes, but it is a hell for many millions of our. people. The clearance of our slums, so glibly discussed at election-time and about which so many easy promises were made by all three parties, remains the biggest piece of internal constructive work before this generation. Posterity will judge us by what we do in the next few years. The Spectator in and out of season has advocated the compilation of a kind of Domesday Book of our slum problem, giving us the data to go on, the number of houses and the exact area involved, the number of people to be dehoused and re- housed, the extent of the temporary accommodation required during rebuilding, and the total cost involved' in the sweeping away of all our foul .and insanitary areas within ten years. But before we start on a great nation- wide slum clearance campaign we should profit by the experience of others. The Government should send a hundred of our leading housing experts to study at first hand the workmen's dwellings in the United States, in Holland, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Austria : and I venture to predict that the three or four days spent in Vienna would not be the least profitable part of their investigation.
My first visit to some of Vienna's new working-class dwellings was under the guidance of a young University man, a housing enthusiast who [had been sent by the municipal authorities (Burgermeister's office) to pilot me round. Subsequently I went unescorted. Those Englishmen who think that workmen's- dwellings must be ugly and uninviting-looking should come to Vienna, for they will find charming six-story buildings by the leading architects of the day which would adorn any. city. One great block of workmen's dwellings is very much like another, so for the purpose of description I will take the Wohnhausbau Reumannhof, built in 1925, consisting of 400 flats and containing about 1,400 inmates. The great six-story building enclosed three sides of a large stone-paved courtyard with plots of 'grass and flower-beds and a large pool of 'water in which the flowers were reflected. There were flower-boxes everywheie and many balconies, and I took away with me a vision of colour. The woodwork of the pergola in the courtyard was painted bright green and blue. The fountain, which is such a feature of these buildings, is called a " splashing basin " (Plautsch Becker), and here in the shallow water the children -splash about naked in the hot weather and keep cool. My guide took me along the veranda with its spotless mosaic floor past the boxes of petunias to the kindergarten for the children of the block. A kinder- garten is provided in all the up-to-date buildings. I found myself in a magic world of white and blue tiled corridors and cheerful, colourful 'rooms. On the threshold of the sanctum I was made to put on felt over- slippers such as the tourist is given when he visits Santa Sophia, Stamboul, or some other mosque. The ages of the children ranged from three to six, and each child had its Own peg with its own particular sign, which represents it instead of a number, and this sign remains its emblem during its career here. The signs are simple objects, such as a bird, an animal, a tree, a house, a watch, or some other familiar object. These emblems appear on all the child's possessions. They are embroidered in red on its clothes-bag—where the clothes in which the child arrives each morning are kept for the day and on its pinafore ; even on each drinking-glass is painted in oils each child's emblem. Never have I been in a more cheerful place and I almost wished I were a Vienna " slum:" child. Even the canary was extra cheerful; I think he was the most cheerful canary I have ever 'come across, and no wonder, for his cage was kept open and he 'flew about the room wherever the fancy took him. The door of his cage is never shut. The children were drinking their morning cocoa out of attractive blue and •iiaative mugs, sitting at diminutive little white tables. in' a spotless room and they themselves looked spotless too. I have never 'seen such clean children nor happier-looking ones. In the corner was a railed-off section in which' the toyS were kept. Round the walls were bright-coloured- friezes of amusing scenes out of story-books. I asked what kind of children they were, and was told by the intelligent matron that they were " "the children of the very poor," and corre- sponded to our poorest slum children. The visit re- minded Me of visits to happy nurseries in the homes of prosperous parents in large English country houses. I had expected to find an atmosphere Of institutionalism, but it was conspicuous by its absence. I was then switched off to the grown-up amenities— always in the same building—which included an office where mothers got advi& on health matters, a library for work-people, a steam laundry, and bathing tubs. I went next to the communal' wash-hall, a large room where fifty women Can wash at the same time with every imaginable steam and electric contrivance for washing, ironing, and drying clothes. Each *Milan is given a num- bered drying-bin into which she puts the clothes When they are washed, and in twenty minutes they are dry. They reminded me of the lockets in modern golf clubs in Anierica, being made 'of metal, only•they are larger and they Shoot out from' the wall, and inside you find a large elcitheS " horse " or towel rack on Which the clothes are hung, and then the whole contraption, contents and all, glides back into the wall and there is not a piece of white linen to be seen. In the most modern buildings erected during the lad two years the wash-halls are now divided into cabins,:s6 that there can be no invidious comparison between the' inmates as to the paucity or excessive qUantity of their washing. Such is human nature even in a -Utopian Viennese Workman's dwelling. Outside in the courtyard were provided waste-paper and litter baskets. I saw no litter lying about in these housing settlements. As I was coming out of this building the dust-cart had not yet been round. It was 9.15 a.m. In neat rows were thirty-five zinc boxes—the refuse of the whole building—looking like the large milk-cans to be seen at English railway stations. In a few minutes the municipal hygienic closed dust-cart arrived on the scene. A clean " overalled " man got down, fitted one by one the bins on to the back of the dust-cart, pulled a lever, and each bin was automatically emptied into the cart without its contents ever being exposed to the air or scattered to the winds of heaven. If an attempt were made to introduce into Vienna or other Continental cities our antiquated British methods of removing refuse by our antiquated dust-carts I think there would be a revolution. If my local council refuses to amend its ways I shall have to introduce a Continental dust-cart into London and give free demonstrations : only by such methods is it possible to move our city fathers.
On my way to another group of buildings in a very poor district swarms of clean children were playing in large sand-pits superintended by three cheerful-looking girls in white overalls. Then I visited another kinder- garten where the children were all having a siesta on their little mattresses, each with the child's emblem on it. I have refrained from statistics, as I think that two or three vivid pictures of the Viennese poor in their beflowered and beautiful buildings and their children in their colourful nurseries' and playing rooms are more valuable than pages of figures. There is one figure which must be -given. To-day in Vienna seven per cent. of the population (or 140,000) live in these modern workman's dwellings and housing settlements. After its housing achieirement the thing which most impressed me in Vienna was its system of public baths. European travel had long taught me that the statement that the " Englishman loves his daily tub " is an exploded myth. The English upper classes may like washing and bathing as much as of old and as much as any people, but the great mass of the population has much to learn from North America and from Nordic Europe in the matter of cleanliness. I wish it were possible to find statistics of the number of English men and women who do not indulge in a weekly bath. If we had the figures before us I think we should be surprised and would learn that our population as a whole, including city dwellers, does less bathing than almost any nation. It may not be entirely the fault of our 'City dwellers, for certainly the populations of the big cities in Scandinavia, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Hungary have much greater facilities for taking baths, and there are many more municipal and public baths than with us. But the masses of our people do not make use of their opportuni- ties in the way they would abroad. During the warm weather in this country the banks of our streams and rivers are not alive with stripped humanity as they are in Central Europe. But let us return to Vienna. The Viennese authorities, surprising as it may seem to Englishmen, think that dwellers in big towns should bathe frequently. In their case the question was par- ticularly urgent, as baths are lacking in the dwellings of the working-classes. Accordingly, a progressive policy of extension of public baths has been pursued. In 1913 4,000,000 persons used the public baths ; in 1927 9,000,000 ; and the total for the present year is much greater. A special feature of the Viennese bath extension programme has been the attention deVoted to children. Vienna to-day has twenty free children's open-air bathing pools in the public parks, and in the hot weather it was a delight to see' the children wading about in the water and splashing each other. I was told that the cost' of these baths was provided from the profits received from adult bathing establishments.
I will now describe my visit to the Municipal Amalien- bad, in a working-class district, which is one of the largest public baths in the world, and was built by the munici- pality in 1926 at a cost of £300,000. If poor, impov- erished Vienna can have a princely bathing establishment like this in a poor district, why cannot rich London, the metropolis of a world empire, do the same ? VVe have nothing comparable to the Amalienbad. Our authorities should build a chain of seven or eight of these great bathing establishments in London—in Stepney, White- chapel, Bermondsey, Lambeth, Fulham, and North Ken- sington, and if properly run they should be made to pay their way.
The Amalienbad stands in an open space, and as you approach it for the first time you are struck from a dis- tance with its fine architecture—a great modern eight- story building with a twelve-story clock tower. In front is an open green space with trees with no ugly iron railings or laurels, which we in England promptly put in every open space we can find and immediately turn into cat runs : no, just trees and a well-kept green lawn and one little iron rail three or four inches from the ground. You enter the great doors into which people are pouring as they do into Waterloo Station on a Saturday afternoon. You are in a mosaic-paved hall with bay-trees ; and there is a bookstall where current literature can be obtained; weighing machines, and the booking offices for the different kinds of bath—steam, ordinary, shower, sun, air, and, of course-, swimming pool. There is also a cure institute (Kuranstalt) where every form of hot-air, electric, radium, and medicinal bath and massage treat- ment can be obtained, and -a doctor is in attendance. Thirty-five thousand people bathe here each week, and the baths' patrons include all classes—smart office typists, busi- ness men, young and old working-men and women, fathers of families and their children. The swimming-bath is about 100 feet long, and at the time of my visit it was alive with humanity. There must have been three or four hun- dred persons in or around the water. Mixed bathing is permitted always, and the bath is open daily (Sundays included) from eight till seven or eight p.m. Swimming lessons can be obtained. I took away with me the picture of happy, brown-bodied bathers swimming in pale-green water—green from the colour of the tiles—and rows of spectators in bathing clothes looking down on the gay scene. For round the swimming hall run two galleries on which are the six hundred odd dressing cabins. The water is changed three times daily, and before entering the swimming-pool you must pass under the hot-water douche in the marble-lined passage-ways, and wash your feet in the hot-water pool : wise precautions which ensure the general atmosphere of cleanliness so noticeable. In fine weather the roof slides open and you look up at the blue heavens and the sun shines down on you. The standard of swimming has improved rapidly since the extension of bathing facilities, and swimming is now com pulsory for all children—the city giving free instruction. The high diving-boards were in constant request, and one happy group of women was spending its time in taking somersaults backwards. J.
(To be continued.)
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