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Robert Goodrich
the Fröhlich baptism occurred in a society where elites and the middle classes
opposed excessive alcohol consumption by urban workers. Indeed, observers
interpreted the communal, popular, and public nature of working-class drinking
as familial decay, irreverence, and public indecency. 3 This attitude went beyond
observers during Germany’s industrialization. Many historians into the 1970s also
equated heavy drinking with alcohol(ism), which they recognized as a social
pathology, addiction, or vice. 4 The presumed rise in alcohol consumption accompanying
industrialization, above-average consumption among workers, and links
between drinking and poverty were axiomatic to all commentators, whether
middle-class, religious, or socialist, though here the cause-and-effect relationship
could be reversed. One need only compare the descriptions in Friedrich Engels’
Condition of the Working Class in England to those of non-socialist social critics
to see the continuity. Alcohol consumption among workers became a social, moral,
and medical reform issue as critics, embracing temperance as social reform,
routinely condemned the perceived excessive drinking habits of the working
classes. Indeed, the embeddedness of temperance rhetoric in a gendered, religious,
reformist middle-class ideology reflected cultural class boundaries and, contrary
to its unifying intention, often fostered class-based antagonisms. 5
Everyone but the male worker, it seems, perceived his drinking as a problem.
State officials and patriotic societies blamed proletarian drinking for declining birth
rates and military unpreparedness. Municipal officials regulated it. Fröhlich’s
Cologne, for example, established thirty-four drinking kiosks in the late 1890s as
non-alcoholic venues where workers “could afford a cheap refreshment without
being forced to go into a pub,” though financial failure led the city to grant them
alcohol licenses. 6 Religious organizations moralized it as contributory to public
immorality and broken families. Middle-class reformists viewed it as the cause of
poverty. Professionals and doctors medicalized it through an alcohol-specific
discourse of disease, hygiene, nutrition, and addiction. As alcohol reform quickly
politicized, the medicalized discourse merged with nationalist interests in the racial
hygiene movement. Anti-socialists were convinced alcohol fostered revolution,
leading French temperance advocates after the Paris Commune to use alcohol as
a metaphor for proletarian irrationality—a metaphor popular inside bourgeois
Germany. Occasionally, even socialists saw alcohol as a new opiate of the masses
undermining revolutionary politics.
Fröhlich’s Cologne harbored all of these temperance tendencies, yet alcohol
consumption remained a fixed part of workers’ everyday leisure culture. German
workers accepted and expected alcohol. The local Kölsch beer and a bottle of
schnapps accompanied every celebration, and masculine leisure activity focused
on a trip to the pub. Alcohol’s ubiquitous presence merged the private with the
public and the secular with the profane. Even religious rites of passage required
public generosity in the form of alcohol as religious-liturgical practices intertwined
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