Passport glass

Passport glass

Jan Jansz van de Velde's still life with a large beer glass from 1647. The glass shown is a passport glass.

Dancing couple by Adriaen van Ostade . The person on the right is drinking from a passport glass.

As ball lenses or ball Humpen high, nozzle-like are glasses ( rod lenses ) called, the melted on the outer side horizontal ribbon or helical marks ( tapeworm glass ) which divide the glass vertically at equal intervals. Passport glasses were used for drinking games between the 16th and 18th centuries in Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden, among others . Beer was mainly drunk from pass glasses.

Drinking games

There were different ways of handling passport glasses. According to what is probably the most common, people drank up to an agreed mark and then passed the glass on. If you didn't hit the mark, but missed it, you had to drink it up; the glass was refilled and the game started over. An alternative variant stipulated that the drinker drinks to the next marking and then passes the glass on. If you didn't hit the mark, the glass had to be emptied until the next mark.

Word origin

The name pass glass ( Latin for “step”) comes from the horizontal markings on the glass, the so-called passports or pass rings.

Passport glasses in painting, poetry and music

Passport glasses were popular motifs in painting during the Golden Age in the Netherlands. Adriaen van Ostade's painting Dancing Couple shows a scene with dancing and partying peasants, one of whom drinks from a passport glass. In Rembrandt's self-portrait with Saskia, he toasted the viewer with a half-filled passport glass. Passport glasses are also depicted in numerous still lifes by the painter Jan Jansz van de Velde .

In Christoph Martin Wieland's Der neue Amadis (Ninth Song), the pass glass is mentioned: "And, presumably to better grasp it / a mighty pass glass from sparkling Vin de Brie."

A leaflet published in 1618 from a Catholic position directed against the 100th anniversary of the Reformation in 1617 defamed Luther's catechism , inter alia by means of an illustration of a cylindrical passport glass with central concepts of the Christian faith depicted on it, by interfering with Luther's teaching and relating to alcoholism .

In the fifth appearance of the first act of the opera Der Freischütz , hunter boy Kaspar invites his competitor Max to drink and orders “Wine! Wine! Two passport glasses! ".

literature

• Werner Best, A pass glass from the Werburg in Spenge and the "Sauffteuffel" in the early modern period. Archäologie in Westfalen-Lippe 2013 (152–155), accessed on March 8, 2018

Web links

Commons : Passglas  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• The Passglas: Drinking Games in the Colony , PDF, accessed on March 8, 2018
• Passport glass in the art lexicon of P. W. Hartmann on beyars.com , accessed on March 8, 2018
• Description of a passport glass on museum-digital.de , accessed on March 8, 2018
• Description of a passport glass at the Corning Museum of Glass , accessed March 8, 2018

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Werner Best: A passport glass from the Werburg in Spenge and the "Sauffteuffel" in the early modern period. Retrieved March 18, 2018 . 
2. ↑ Johann Christoph Adelung: Orthographic and etymological pocket dictionary of the German language . Ed .: Martin Span . 1819, p. 345 ( google.de ).
3. ↑ DM Luther's jubilation Glaß. Retrieved March 18, 2018 .