Neither Gendered nor a Room: The Kitchen in Central Europe and the Masculinization of Modernity, 1800-1900

ABSTRACT

In nineteenth-century central Europe, the “kitchen” was neither necessarily gendered nor a room. Throughout the century, royalty maintained up to seven rooms purposed for cooking, the middling maintained one separate from working and dining areas, while working and rural poor could not maintain their cooking-area separate from the rest of their single-room dwelling. Further, royal kitchens preferentially employed men. The wider social conception of a kitchen as a single gendered room emerged late in the century among the middle class, buttressed by male sexual fantasies and part of a masculinized modernization.

KEYWORDS:

• kitchen
• gender
• modernity
• spatial history
• middle class
• Bürgertum
• long nineteenth century
• Germany

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Historical Institute, and the Laney Graduate School of Emory University for financial support. Further thanks to the participants of the Kitchens in Britain and Europe, 1500-1950 workshop, Centre for the Study of Body and Material Culture, Royal Holloway, University of London, especially Katie Carpenter, Sara Pennell, Sandra Cavallo and Jane Hamlett. Thanks equally, to the archivists, librarians, and staff of the various architectural source-providing bodies here cited. These include Günter Bolte of the Museum of Schönebeck Castle Bremen, Teresa Sandmeir and Dr. Timo Trümper of the Friedestein Castle Foundation, Sandra Seeber, Thuringian Foundation of Gardens and Castles, as well as Heike Wegner and Carl-Werner Möller at the World of Kitchen Museum, Hannover. Last but not least, many thanks to Riccardo Bavaj of the Institute for Transnational and Spatial History, the University of St Andrews. Use of relevant images is courtesy of the corresponding institutions and societies.

Notes

1. Berman, All That is Solid. See also Umbach, German Cities; Jenkins, Provincial Modernity; Lyotard, La condition postmoderne, Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, Le Rider, Modernity and Crises of Identity.

2. Abel, Das gesunde Wohnen, 289. On separating eating and living spaces in northern central Europe as early as the seventeenth century, see Meiners, “Wohnkultur.”

3. This analysis draws on Sara Pennell’s spatial approach to the kitchen, defining it as wherever cooking took place Pennell, The Birth of the English Kitchen, 37. While Tompkins states the “kitchen” is the “descendent” of the “hearth,” this article will work with the idea that cooking need not necessarily involve heat, and thus highlights the strength of Pennell’s practice-focused approach to examining the “kitchen,” combining it with the examination of the architectural act of constructing walls, and spatial interaction, including the closing of doors. Tompkins, Racial Indigestion, 15. On the flexibility of space and action, and the construction of spaces, see Foucault and Miskowiec, “Of Other Spaces”; and Thrift, Spatial Formations. The following will refer to oven and hob combinations as stove-top combinations; “hearths” will refer more flexibly to fireplaces for warmth and cooking, irrespective of design.

4. The terms “social middle” or the “middling” refer to a fluid social group dependent on “social recognition.” While the terms “royalty” and “nobility” in the below refer to the legal titles of the persons and families in question, “working” and “rural” poor in urban and small-town area and villages respectively which could not make their case for middlingness in this century and carried out tasks for survival in or outside of kitchens.” Kreklau, “‘Eat as the King Eats,’” 5, 30.

5. Framke and Marenk, Beruf der Jungfrau; Miklautz and Lachmayer, Die Küche; Corrodi, “On the Kitchen and Vulgar Odors”; Ottillinger, Küchen/Möbel.

6. Kreklau, “Travel, Technology, and Theory,” 591.

7. Kreklau, “Eat as the King Eats,” chapter 3.

8. Ibid, 214-215.

9. On gender, see Scott, “Gender.”

10. Bourdieu, Distinction, 165-166, 239.

11. The habitus influences both dynamics and perceptions of spacing. Rau, Räume, 164, and 172 onwards.

12. On the economics of paid “male” work and unpaid “female” activity, see Gray, Productive Men, Reproductive Women.

13. Umbach, Bourgeois modernism, 6. Jenkins, “Introduction,” 473-77. Kreklau, “Eat as the King Eats,” Chapter 5. On privacy, Duby, A History of Private Life and Pardailhé-Galabrun, The Birth of Intimacy. See also Craig, Beachy and Owens, “Introduction,” 10, 16-17; and Habermas, Frauen und Männer, 260-5. On sociability, see Sabean, “Constructing Middle-Class Milieus,” 36-44.

14. On increased sexism in the fin-de-siècle see Somart, “The Kaiser in his epoch,” and Le Rider, Modernity and Crisis of Identity. See also Reagin, “The Imagined Hausfrau.” On the influence of the middle class in the German Empire, see Blackbourn and Eley, The Peculiarities of German History. For a milestone work on the historic gendering of household tasks: Cowan, More Work for Mother.

15. Faber-Herman finds villa-architects placed kitchens in the souterrain until the 1870s whenever they could afford house-staff and an item-lift to connect the kitchen and the ground floor’s dining room, e.g. in August Kelpe’s design in the Blumenstrasse n.14, in Minden. Faber-Hermann, Bürgerlicher Wohnbau, 102, 145. Further, Siegfried Giedion, Die Herrschaft der Machanisierung, 557, cited in Ibid. Other examples include Villa Rosa, Dresden, 1839, Villa Schulze, Apolda, 1875, Villas Liebermann and Hirschberg in Berlin, 1870-1 and 1874, Villa Meissner, Villa Berg, Siegle, Bodensee Villa design dating from the 1870s, see blueprints in Brönner, Die bürgerliche Villa, images 400, 494, 514, 516, 532 535, 540, 571, respectively. There appears to have been a surge in construction placing kitchens in the sous-terrain in the 1870s. Ibid, 455-598. Many other blueprints from the era indicate an alternative and growing trend – architecturally, the Schillerhaus in Marbach, but the Goethe Haus in Frankfurt, Georg Dollman and Julius Hofmann’s Castle Herrenchiemsee, or even the Liebig Laboratories in Giessen, harbored kitchens on the ground floor, not their underground. “Erdgeschoss,” Liebig-Museum Giessen.” For further examples of architectural designs placing kitchens on the ground floor, see blueprints of Wohnhaus Sepp, Munich, 1858, Villa Abel, Berlin, 1896, Wohnhaus Hess, Hamburg, 1847, Schloss Mühlenthal, Bremen, 1900, Landhaus Marienburg, Monheim, 1879, Villa Cahn, Bonn-Plittersdorf, 1867-8, Deutsches Dreifensterhaus, Ebe und Benda, 1880, Laubegaster Ufer 33, Dresden, Villa Schmieder, Karlsruhe, 1869-70, Villa Imelmann, Berlin, 1898, Villa Seger, Berlin 1862, Villa Amalia, Wuppertal, 1883-4, in Brönner, Die bürgerliche Villa in Deutschland, images 218, 247, 251, 274, 298, 329, 452, 479, 502, 508, 520, and 522 respectively. The architect of Wohnhaus Tramm in Hannover, 1853, placed the kitchen on the first floor. Ibid, image 300. Finally, representations of the time of kitchens in Lübeck, Fulda, Bavaria and Linz dating as early as 1794 equally portrayed a single room situated on the ground floor with doors and windows accessing adjacent rooms or the outside. Fuldaisches Kochbuch, frontispiece. WOK, HG.Loo.1794, frontispiece, Meixner, Das neue Linzer Kochbuch, i; Huber, Bayerisches Kochbuch, frontispiece. These representations provide a good sampling from four geographic areas of central Europe.

16. See also on Lübeck, Kallen, “‘Sag mir, wo Du kochst,’” 157-221.

17. Note Architect Dominikus Böhm working for the German Colonial Society segregated laboring and resting areas (cooking vs. dining spaces) by placing servants and working quarters on a different floor with a separate entrance, or else, in an annex. Itohan. Colonialism and Modern Architecture.

18. Schütte-Lihotzky, Warum ich Architektin wurde, 41, 145.

19. Faber-Hermann, Bürgerlicher Wohnbau, 14; Griep, Kleine Kunstgeschichte, 69-71.

20. Older homes remained in usage keeping the landscape of usage as opposed to construction mixed and transient until the early twentieth century. Some architects remained partial to the “Sockelgeschoss” or semi-sous-terrain: Kastorff-Viehmann typologizes the Villa Steimbrüch in Erfurt built in 1893 as a middling Villa (“bürgerliche Villa”) with a semi-basement (Sockelgeschoss) including a kitchen. Kastorff-Viehmann, “Küche und Haus,” 78. He finds examples of subterranean middling kitchens as late as 1925. Ibid, 73, 75. Architects likely drew inspiration from castle-designs when three floors were available for construction, or roman designs in double or single-floor homes; the former placed kitchens underground, the latter, included a kitchen on the ground floor. Faber-Hermann proposes the latter point; Faber-Hermann, Bürgerlicher Wohnbau, 16. On the Roman design, see Sear, Roman Architecture, 108. On castle-influences more generally, see Brönner, Die bürgerliche Villa.

21. The small court kitchen and bakery were brought down after 1918; the remains of archways, doorways, and ovens behind the plaster on the renovated walls, suggest where structures may have previously stood. The so-called “Prince’s kitchen” however, on the upper floor, oven still largely intact, remained in usage until 1918. There were likely more re-heating niches located throughout the castle than the two currently known of.

22. Built-in brick and mortar ovens did not disappear until 1900, and remained in usage as long as the home that housed it stood. See representations in Pietsch, “Bürgerliche Küche,” 201-2, 205.

23. Rottenhöfer, Kochkunst, 960.

24. GStAPK, BPH, Rep.113, Nr 2197-2257.

25. Ottillinger notes that Frederick William IV reformed the main kitchen in Sanssoucis, moving its “rooms” from one part of the palace to another entirely. Ottillinger, “Küchenmöbel,” 44.

26. Ibid.

27. On Vogell and Andreas Rudolph see Ott, German Façade Design, chapter 4.

28. See blueprint of Berlin’s castle from the mid-nineteenth century in von Klöden, Andreas Schlüter, 254. Note how this design emulated the Roman villa model. Fentress, “The House of the Sicilian Greeks,” 35.

29. See, e.g. Schloss Schönebeck’s Schwarzküche part of HMSS.

30. Steffens, K. F. Schinkel 1781-1841, 53. On Schinkel, see Ott, German Façade Design, chapter 5. One may note that unlike in Britain, where early modern kitchens were sometimes built detached from the main building, this was not common practices in Central Europe. Cragoe, How to Read Buildings, 219.

31. For further examples of multiple kitchens in one palace, specifically in the Austrian empire, see Haslinger, “Die Küchen der Habsburger,” 131-142.

32. Cragoe, How to Read Buildings, 217.

33. Ziegler, and Davidis, “Theuerste Schwester,” 6.

34. Ibid, 11.

35. Kastorff-Viehmann, “Küche und Haus,” especially, 78. See Brönner, Die bürgerliche Villa, 158.

36. Daisenberger, Vollständiges Bayerisches Kochbuch, frontispiece. See also Rottenhöfer, Kochkunst, 334

37. Pietsch finds one kitchen-area in a large farmhouse without strict spacing. See Pietsch, “Bürgerliche Küche,” 203. Similarly, Kaspar, “Die bürgerliche Küche,” 96, 100.

38. Schwarzwälder, Geschichte der Freien Hansestadt Bremen, 87.

39. “The home of poor people,” Copperplate from 1823. HMSS, B.Schwa.3, 88. Very broadly speaking, this model dated back to the medieval period.

40. Brückner, “Das Nordfränkische Bauernhaus,” 60.

41. Leicht-Eckardt suggests rich farmers also owned a laundry and a scullery. Leicht-Eckardt, “Austattungsvarianten,” 168-169.

42. Faber-Hermann, Bürgerlicher Wohnbau, 14.

43. GHDI, “Working class quarters, 1910”; “2 Rental Barracks on Kastanienallee in the Prenzlauer Berg Neighborhood of Berlin (1880s).”

44. DHM, F 52/2975, “Elendsquartier in der Berliner Spreestr.6 um 1910.”

45. DHM, F/90/492.

46. Ibid., furthest left, a white-tiled heater with a visible iron stove top area. See also, GHDI, “Working class quarters, 1910.”

47. Rottke and Markmann, “Geschichte des deutschen Wohnimmobilienmarktes,” 41–71.

48. DHM, F 52/2975.

49. Ibid.

50. Leicht-Eckardt, “Austattungsvarianten,” 177.

51. WOK, HG.Wei.1900, vii.

52. FUBEG, N 8° 05425 (01): vii.

53. For a history of male chef’s in furthering culinary art and science from Antonin Carême onwards, see Kreklau, “‘Eat as the King Eats,’” 10, 161, 183-184, 186, 198, 199, 229, 231, 322-327, 390.

54. Besides caregiving and clothing producing, cooking represented one of few respectable and financially viable careers for women in the century. On limited job-opportunities and gendered education, see Frevert, Women in German History, 78, 80. Note that these norms too were inscribed into a reciprocal gendered cycle of labor, using the middle-class domestic ideal to define the parameters of women’s public involvement. Dollard, Surplus Woman, 155, 234.

55. Kreklau, “When ‘Germany’ Became the New ‘France’?” 46.

56. Rottenhöfer, Kochkunst, 22. For further examples, see Bechtel, Henriette Löfflers Kochbuch, section 19.

57. Ibid, 334.

58. Ibid, 388.

59. Weiler, Augsburgisches Kochbuch, copper.

60. WOK, HG.Hom.1879, HG.Löf.1897; HG.Kön.1900-05, approx., cover.

61. Ibid.

62. Rousseau and Goethe cited in Frevert, Women in German History, 67.

63. BSB, 3,240,982 2 Per. 6-1854,1 3,240,982 2 Per. 6-1854,1: Gartenlaube, (1853), 546.

64. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 91.

65. Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches. Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 92.

66. Hummel-Haasis, Schwestern, 22-23.

67. Globus, 1865.

68. Kreklau, “‘Eat as the King Eats,’” 174.

69. Ibid, 215.

70. Clark, Struggle for the Breeches.

71. Hand and Shove, “Orchestrating Concepts.” See also Freeman, The Making of the Modern Kitchen.

72. E.g. Johnson, “Browsing the Modern Kitchen.”

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Emory University, the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung, and the German Historical Institute Washington (GHI).

Notes on contributors

Claudia Kreklau

Dr. Claudia Kreklau is an Associate Lecturer in Modern European History at the University of St. Andrews. She is the author of “When ‘Germany’ became the new ‘France’?” (Kreklau 2017), “Travel, Technology, Theory” (Kreklau 2018b), the winner of the Richard Sussman Prize in the History of Science of the Goethe Society of America 2019, the Parker-Schmitt Dissertations Prize of 2018, and the German Studies Association Graduate Student Essay Prize of 2017. She has been supported by the German Historical Institute, Washington, the Wellcome Trust, London, the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, Cologne, the Central European History Society, the German Studies Association, and the Royal Historical Society. Her current book manuscript Making Modern Eating shows how middle-class households invented modern eating practices in central Europe in the long nineteenth century.