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Confessional Drinking in Wilhelmine Germany
thus social function; it was widely considered an important nutritional supplement
and safe alternative to drinking water; and it acted as a cultural buffer to social
dislocation.
But how to approach this cultural construct theoretically? Here, we can draw
upon the concepts of Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu. Williams’s notion
of culture as “a whole way of life,” informed by Gramscian concepts of enabling
and restraining elements, expands definitions of the cultural to include mundane,
seemingly unritualized everyday experiences into the pattern of meaning conveyance.
14 Bourdieu’s notion of habitus augments this concept by including the notion
of “structure improvisation.” 15 Personal trajectories, cultural orientations, and the
compromise inherent in social interaction structured the drinking practices of
workers, and these practices as habitus inhabited contested terrain that emphasized
the inherent possibilities of development rather than limits. 16 Although no
homogeneity existed in working-class drinking patterns, drink cultures nonetheless
were disposed towards stability based on “an ensemble of values, gestures and
rituals, prohibitions and obligations.” 17 Thus, we can account for the resistance of
workers to attempts to alter leisure consumption not in an object/subject dichotomy,
but as a dynamic intersection between worker and society. Rather than
reducing the worker to the product of rational choice assessments, we allow for
the element of the irrational as lived. Further, though rules obviously informed the
parameters of actions, by recognizing that workers also could and did move
outside these borders we can analyze multiple behavioral variation potentialities,
which were situation dependent but nonetheless followed a social logic. The
essence of a viable theory of social interaction centered on leisure consumption,
therefore, is mediation rather than determinacy. 18
Returning to Cologne, the KAB confronted an ingrained culture of alcohol
consumption that, while expressing regional contours, typified a pub-centered
leisure culture. Club leaders remonstrated that even simple tasks required a drink
to seal the event or decision. After “something serious, a rehearsal, a consultation,”
the KAB press complained, the men had “to sit and to drink yet another glass.” 19
Like the German working classes in general, the male Catholic worker sought
everyday recreation in alcohol at the local pub. Numerous rituals, such as
Trinkzwang (expected buying of rounds), ensured consumption as a common ritual
of identity. Drinking, like pub visitation or club membership, was a sign of
inclusion in a unique masculine social space that blurred public and private. By
the 1880s when the clubs were first forming, the pub was the only social and public
space available around which to organize workers, and the clubs appropriated the
distinctively masculine ethos of the neighborhood working-class pub to facilitate
recruitment.
Both club and pub formed an alternative masculine working-class micro-culture
separate from home, factory, or church. 20 Club and pub inevitably blurred since
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