SEVEN: Drinking Places

Written by Wolfgang Schivelbusch

Wednesday, 20 February 2013 00:00 -

Throughout history drinking alcohol has meant creating social bonds. The oldest drinking rites
were demonstrations of the fellowship built up among participants. The guest offered a drink of
welcome is being symbolically accepted as a part of his host's household. Drinking to
someone's health, making toasts, fraternity drinking, drinking in rounds unite participants at
least for the duration of their drinking. In no situation is this archaic meaning clearer than in the
public drinking place. Here a set of rules and regulations holds sway different from any found
outside in normal middle-class life. As an American sociological study puts it: "Public drinking
places are 'open regions': those who are present, acquainted or not, have the right to engage
others in conversational interaction and the duty to accept the overtures of sociability proffered
to them. While many, and perhaps the majority, of conventional settings customarily limit the
extent of contact among strangers, sociability is the most general rule in the public drinking
place. Although the bar is typically populated primarily by strangers, interaction is available to all
those who choose to enter. The physical door through which one enters a drinking
establishment is a symbolic door as well, for those who come through it declare by entering that
unless they put forth evidence to the contrary, they will be open for conversation with
unacquainted others for the duration of their stay. Whatever their age, sex, or apparent position,
their biographical blemishes or physical stigmas, all who enter are immediately vested with the
status of an open person, open both in having the right to make contact with the others present
and in the general obligation of being open to others who may contact them." If this general
openness on the part of guests marks the bar or pub as an archaic territory, it remains at the
same time a thoroughly modern one, in that the drinks served in it must still be paid for. The
barkeeper or publican is not a host, but a merchant. The clientele may for a while suspend the
principle of exchange as they embrace and offer one another drinks. But for the barkeeper
"host"apart from any momentary rushes of similar largessethese "guests" are still
customers, served as long as they can still pay.

TABLE COMPANIONS IN A DRINKING PARLOR, SIXTEENTH CENTURY

(The Round Table of Jobst Tetzel, painting from Tetzel's guest book.)

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SEVEN: Drinking Places

Written by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
Wednesday, 20 February 2013 00:00 -

STUDENT DRINKING AND SMOKING SOCIETY, EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

(A page from the register of the Drinking Fraternity of the Students
of Jena.)

MEDIEVAL INN
Households that sold their surplus of homemade beer or wine
advertised the fact by hanging a bundle of brushwood, a broom, or a
wreath, mounted upon a pole outside their house. Out of this very
primitive form (our illustration dates from the thirteenth century)
there gradually evolved over the centuries the artistic signs that still
hang to this day outside old inns in Germany.

The conflicting character of the bar, the site of an almost symbolic repeal of the laws of
exchange yet at the same time a commercial establishment like any other, can be traced to a
long historical process of commercialized hospitality. Before inns, hotels, restaurants, and
taverns assumed their present form, various other intermediary forms came and went. Out of
the pure hospitality that still prevailed in the early Middle Ages, there arose in the later Middle

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SEVEN: Drinking Places

Written by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
Wednesday, 20 February 2013 00:00 -

Ages a transitional form of hospitality in the guest trade run by the corporative estates. The inns
for merchants in the great fair- and trading-cities, the so-called merchants' courts, were part of
this phenomenon. As for early forms of the tavern, these included urban "drinking rooms," which
were also run by the corporative estates and could be called prototypes of the later clubs and
associations. The city fathers and the individual guilds would meet in these drinking parlors for
certain purposes (release of apprentices, funeral feasts, weddings, etc.) as well as when
councils were held to discuss the affairs of their own groups and of the city. A drinking code
comparable to that of student fraternities prevailed at these meetings.

The public drinking place developed along a quite different line than these associationlike
corporative establishments. It was a product of the money economy and of expanded foreign
trade, both forces that pulled the rug out from under the older hospitality, replacing it with a
"paying-guest trade." Three services were available to the clientele: room, board, and a place to
drink. For ages these had existed under one roof; travelers as a rule were offered not only a
bed, but also food and drink. Even today this is true of the better hotels, which contain a
restaurant and a bar. But for a long time there have also existed special types of establishments
to fulfill the separate needs of the guest trade. For eating there was the restaurant (earlier the
eating house or "cookshop"), for staying overnight the hotel (earlier the inn), for drinking the pub
or bar (earlier the alehouse or tavern). Originally all these sites were barely distinguishable from
a private household. Indeed, they started out as private households that simply made whatever
surpluses they may have had (of rooms, food, drink) available to strangers, for a price. Only
gradually did the guesthouse begin to be commercialized. From the changes in the interior of
the public house or tavern, we can see how a once thoroughly private setting gradually was
transformed to meet the requirements of a commercial drinking place. This physical
transformation took place around the hub of the tavern, the counter.

The Coming of Counters and Bars

Originally the restaurant was identical with the kitchen of the house. The kitchen was more
than just the place where food was prepared; it was an all-purpose room. The social life of the
restaurant took place around the open hearthwhere the food was also preparedeven as late
as the eighteenth century. A separate area for guests existed only in the large inns and only for
upper-class travelers. The innkeeper's family, the help, and guests mingled in this all-purpose
room, or, to put it another way, the guest, for the length of his stay, became part of the
innkeeper's family, the only difference being that he paid for the privilege.

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SEVEN: Drinking Places

Written by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
Wednesday, 20 February 2013 00:00 -

The more professionally an inn was run, the larger its "guest room" or restaurant, which no
longer functioned as a kitchen. The cooking was relegated to a separate space. The only trace
left of it in the restaurant was the open hearth and the (now merely decorative) pots, pans, and
crockery on the walls.

Around 1800 the restaurant became separated from the innkeeper's private rooms. It became
the commercial space in which the clientele was served. Yet compared to other types of
business premises, it still retained an aura of relative privacy, resembling a pleasant parlor that
just happened to be open to the public. This was because it was not yet equipped with what had
been a permanent feature of the retail trade since the late Middle Ages: a counter marking the
concrete boundary across which buyers and sellers dealt with one another. Goods were passed
over the counter to enter the possession of the buyer as soon as he laid the required money on
it.

FROM KITCHEN TO BAR

THE EVOLUTION OF THE PUBLIC ROOM
The space shown in the drawing Village Inn (p. 198) and in Taste (pp.
196-97) by Adrien von Ostade, is kitchen, guest room, and living
room rolled into one for the innkeeper's family. Everything centers on
the hearth, the only one in the house. This is still true of the country
inn in Rowlandson's early-nineteenth-century drawing (top, p. 199),
though here things are already clearly arranged in a new way: the
serving staff is now in evidence, as are the guests' places at a table
prepared for them. In the background the actual kitchen and the space
for the beer tap are already separated by a partition from the area
reserved for guests. An urban variant on this transition from kitchen
to restaurant is shown in the eighteenth-century illustration of the
Parisian establishment Ramponneau (bottom, p. 199). Kitchen and
restaurant still form a single spatial unit, but both are already clearly
marked off from one another by a divider through which the food and
drink customers have ordered is received by the waiters. From the
number of tables in the guests' area it is apparent how much business
has expanded, thus necessitating this new spatial arrangement.
Finally, in both of Cruikshank's illustrations (pp. 200, 201) we see
how the "gin palace," a completely new type of drinking place,
responded to the increased volume in patronage. The counter, already
visible at the Ramponneau, where it still plays a rather minor role,
now assumes a central place in the activity, as a sort of traffic island
or nodal point at which business is transacted. The restaurant with
seating arrangements, if it still exists at all, is separate from the bar,

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SEVEN: Drinking Places

Written by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
Wednesday, 20 February 2013 00:00 -

and reached by a small staircase (Parlour Upstairs, p. 200). Customers

normally do their drinking standing up at the bar (p. 201).
Restaurants were transformed by these conditions only in England
and the United States, the bastions of capitalism. In Germany the bar
never quite caught on to this degree. Karl Kautsky had the
Gemiitlichkeit of German taverns in mind when he wrote of English
bars in 1891: "The English tavern is merely a shop in which spirits
are sold; it is set up so that no one could possibly feel tempted to
linger longer than necessary to empty a glass, which one does, in fact,
while standing at the service counter. In such a place there is not a
trace of camaraderie or exchange of ideas."

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SEVEN: Drinking Places

Written by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
Wednesday, 20 February 2013 00:00 -

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SEVEN: Drinking Places

Written by Wolfgang Schivelbusch
Wednesday, 20 February 2013 00:00 -

that
and
restaurant
found
behind
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Standing
itself
tavern-keeper
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Continent
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States,
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in
the
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a
lesson
English
given
never
in
and
drinks,
Germany
culture
being
Kneipen
language
particularly
acquired
is
a
rinse
that
mere
is
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(taverns)
by
has
glasses,
one
calls
this
stump.
in
become
of
Germany
exact
length
Gemiitlichkeit.
the
drink
etc.
The
ways
significance.
of
the
While
French
at
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its
tables.
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to
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bar
that
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Compared
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regulars
long
mainly
behind
these
commercialism
in
American
England
only.
as
two
is
which
a
one
place
To
bar,
and
this

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