By Jim Johnson
2,000 years of cleanliness and culture
The cashier handed me my ticket and gave simple instructions: “Go upstairs, take your clothes off, and follow the numbers.” I must have looked confused. “Those stairs there. You will see.” Thus began my first visit to the Friedrichsbad, a 19th-century bath in Baden-Baden, Germany, where nearly two millennia of bathing tradition come together in a two-hour, follow-the-numbers experience.
Sure enough, before my last stitch disappeared, an attendant guided me to station one, the showers, where a sign specified five minutes under the spray. As I eased into relaxation, I saw a chart listing all sixteen stations with the recommended time allotments. Follow fifteen minutes in a warm-air bath with five minutes in the hot-air bath and a one-minute shower. I should plan on eight minutes for station five – the soap scrub and massage – followed by another one-minute shower. Then onward through steam bath I (113℉ for ten minutes) and the warmer steam bath II (119℉ for five minutes) before entering the first pool (97℉ for ten minutes). By then I felt like an ingredient in a complex recipe. But I didn’t care. As Mark Twain wrote after he visited the Friedrichsbad, “After ten minutes, you forget the time. After twenty, you forget the world.”
Well, I had forgotten my glasses and quickly became confused with the reflection I saw as I floated in the amniotic waters. I looked across the pool through an archway into an adjacent room with a circular pool. The mirror then reflected back across the circular pool into the room where I drifted. In my bliss, I noticed only one problem: As I glided one way, my reflection glided the other. Shortly before my ten minutes in station nine expired, I realized that I was not looking at a reflection, but rather at the other half of the baths. I also realized where all the women had gone and why I’d spent the past sixty-two minutes warming, steaming, showering, and scrubbing in the sole company of naked men, not typical for Germany, where gemischt – mixed – is the norm.
Apparently, I had missed one crucial sign – the one indicating men to the left, women to the right – at the top of the staircase. By luck, I’d entered the right changing room. What I’d seen was the women’s side. They had their own stations one through nine, identical to – but a mirror image of – the men’s side. The two sides came together in perfect symmetry in the circular pool.
The reason for this separate-then-equal approach, I learned later, was borne of tradition. The design for the building called for women and men to take the first stations separately. When they met in the central pool, they could discuss their experiences together. Then they’d continue to separate stations for another shower, a cold-water bath, a rub-down with massage cream, and thirty minutes in the “quiet area.”
The men and the women still have a lot to talk about when they reach the central pool, including the novel experience of progressing through a series of baths and heated rooms as well as the building itself.
The Friedrichsbad captures the glories of renaissance style and Roman architecture with vaulted ceilings, massive columns, elaborate mosaics and murals, an extensive statuary, and a breathtaking cupola. Although such equally magnificent structures as the Bagni Vecchi in Italy, Leukerbad in Switzerland, Bath in England, Bad Ischl in Austria, and the Rudas in Hungary, still exist, these baths are a rarity. Most baths built during the 17th century have been modernized or torn down.
Even the grandest 19th-century bath, however, paled in comparison to the baths built and used by the Romans nearly 2,000 years earlier. The Romans built more than 1,000 baths throughout their empire, from Bulgaria to Spain and from Italy to England. Rulers and regents used size and luxury of their baths to demonstrate their power. Mirrors lined the walls and intricate mosaics covered the floors. Vaulted ceilings were supported by massive columns. Water flowed from silver spigots. One bath complex covered twenty-eight acres, and another contained a pool with marble seats for 1,600 people.
Typically, a bather started in a courtyard with some strenuous activity to warm up the body. Next, the bathing ritual continued in a four-room sequence starting with an hour or so in the tepidarium, a lukewarm room with a small pool of warm water. After the pores opened, an attendant gave the guest a rub-down with olive oil and sand – and then scraped it away with a strigil. The second stop was the caldarium, with warmer air and water, followed by a quick visit to the third room, the sauna-like laconica, where temperatures could top 200℉. Another rub-down, scrubbing, and scraping followed before a dip in the cold water of room four, the frigidarium. Fully exfoliated and clean, the guest could then relax in the open-air pool, listen to poetry or musicians in the theater, read scrolls in the library, or buy food from vendors.
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