Wilhelm Beetz – To satisfy Viennese needs

That nightmare: You need to go to the toilet urgently. Searching, running, asking – nothing helps. Nowhere a toilette. Depending on your personality the dream may continue in different fatal ways. What if a man or a women would appear, covered in a wide coat that covers a wooden bucket too. The bucket to sit on – the coat to cover you. Would you dare to end your problem for just two kreutzers?

These Buttenmänner and Buttenweiber (wooden bucket men, wooden bucket women) did exist really in Vienna at the beginning 19th century and this already meant some hygienic improvement. Because the situation in Vienna was upsetting: “heavy-weight air”, “harmful evaporations”, “like in fog”, a higher mortality rate than in Paris and London. A long way to improvements: beginning with the Buttenmänner and Buttenweiber and Nothwinkeln (emergency corners) via „Straßen-Retiraden“ (mobile toilets) to public urinals and toilets. But always accompanied by tough struggles of opponents and supporters. In 1880 there enters a strong and innovative person that stage – Wilhelm Beetz (1844 – 1921). Born near Berlin he sees the first wooden public toilets there and offers the Viennese magistrate venturously to build and to maintain them. The magistrate said no. Beetz owned fortunately enough the energy necessary to improve the Viennese hygienic situation. He didn’t give in and in 1883 he gets the authorization to build public urinals and toilets in Vienna. Probably only because he offered a low priced contract. Reading how he persevered in the area of conflict of economically difficult contracts and the struggle with the opponents in the magistrate and the opponents in the population and moreover how he invented improved facilities and made technical innovations like the “Urinol” (oil replacing water to disinfect the urinals and to fight unpleasant odours) this encourages us not to abandon ideas and beliefs too fast.

Till today there and interesting to look at and for usage is the underground toilet at the Graben (photo). Too an example for the stamina of Beetz. Because a first attempt to build it at the Stephansplatz failed due to the closeness of St. Stephen’s Cathedral.

Reeding about satisfying Viennese needs is not only alternative town history but makes aware of the dealing with human excrements during the course of time. Changes, constraints, taboos that work in our dreams too. And for this kind of “dreams” Vienna is anyway the ideal place.

Beetz-Sources:
Beetz details are taken from the German book „Unentbehrliche Requisiten der Großstadt. Eine Kulturgeschichte der öffentlichen Bedürfnisanstalten von Wien.“ (Indispensable requisite of a metropolis. The cultural history of the public toilets of Vienna) by Peter Payer. Löcker Verlag Wien, 2006. An intersection of the research topics (Town history / History of the senses / Environmental history / Everyday life history) of Peter Payer.

Firm Wilhelm Beetz Gesellschaft m.b.H. (3rd district)

More Beetz photos: „Wilhelm Beetz und die öffentlichen Toiletten Wiens“ (Wilhelm Beetz and the public toilets of Vienna), part 1 und part 2