Roman bath (Vienna)

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Roman bath 1873: left entrance from Kleine Stadtgutgasse, middle and right: Holzhausergasse

The Roman Bath , also known for short as the Roman Bath , was a luxurious private bathing establishment opened in the world exhibition year of 1873 and closed in 1953 near the Praterstern in Leopoldstadt , Vienna's 2nd  district .

history

Warm and cold pool for men
Warm and cold pool for women
Roman bath 1873

The Roman Bath was built by the Actien-Gesellschaft for hotels and bathing establishments founded especially for this purpose in today's Volkertviertel . Rudolf Ditmar von Hopfen, Louis Haber Freiherr von Linsberg, Baron Johann Mayer, Dr. jur. Josef Mitscha and Dr. Johann Nepomuk von Heinrich (the actual initiator) involved. The plans were drawn up by the architects Heinrich Claus and Josef Groß with the assistance of Heinrich. Artists such as Franz Melnitzky (figures above the entrance) and Hans Canon (two paintings in the vestibule of the Herrenbad) were brought in to design the bathroom . According to Czeike , the bath was then the largest steam and hot air bath in the world .

The entrance was at Kleine Stadtgutgasse 9, on the corner of Holzhausergasse (where the bathroom had a long front without an entrance), only one block from the Praterstern traffic junction and the Nordbahnhof , Vienna's most important train station at the time. In the neighboring block of houses at Nordbahnstrasse 50 was the "Hotel Donau" (280 beds; later Federal Railway Directorate Vienna) built by the same company. In the opening year, the Vienna World Exhibition 1873 took place in the Prater not far from the Praterstern .

Emperor Franz Joseph I visited the bath on August 12, 1873 before it was opened; other prominent guests were Dom Pedro II , Emperor of Brazil on March 13, 1877 , and Naser ad-Din Shah , the monarch of Persia on July 13, 1878 . ( On the other hand, alleged visits by the emperors to Vienna's Central-Bad in the inner city are only legend, as this was only opened in 1889.)

The Roman bath was a luxurious bathing establishment for the upper social classes. Indoor swimming pools for the general public operated by the city administration were only built around forty and fifty years later (see: Jörgerbad 1914, Amalienbad 1926). Most of the visitors to the Roman bath had "daytime free time" and were not tied to the evening hours and Sundays to visit the bath.

Rumors about homosexual activities in the Roman bath, in which even the highest celebrities are said to have played a role, brought this into the headlines several times and brought it into disrepute. According to research by Andreas Brunner and Hannes Sulzenbacher , 18-year-old Franz Doms, who was executed during the Nazi era for his homosexuality and sentenced to death on November 10, 1943, made acquaintances in the Römerbad, as the steam bath was a popular meeting place for homosexual men .

During the time of the National Socialist rule in Austria , Jews were forbidden to use public baths. The private Roman bath apparently did not fall under this ban. Karl Berger (pseudonym Walter Singer) later recalled: We were also no longer allowed to go swimming in the Dianabad, only in the Römerbad, where only Jews frequented. After the Second World War, the police carried out raids on black market traders who went about their business in the building which had been damaged by bombs. The repair and continuation of the bathing business was no longer economical in view of the competition between the communal baths and the changed lifestyle; in addition, the bath was in the (until 1955) Soviet sector of Vienna. The Roman bath was closed, the three-story building on Kleine Stadtgutgasse, with the exception of the ground floor, which was later heavily modified, was demolished and added to an office building for the plastics company Heinrich Schmidberger Werke (a large, illuminated HSW logo is still on the roof today ). The building on Holzhausergasse, which has also been extended, shows the historical window arrangement on the lower floors with large arched windows on the main floor.

description

On the occasion of the opening, the contemporary press praised the bathroom, which was built in the Renaissance style, for its luxurious fittings, which apparently left nothing to be desired. The Roman bath was open to men and women alike, but strictly separated according to gender. There were 400 changing rooms available for men and 200 for women.

In the part of the bathroom accessible to the gentlemen, the path led from the cash desk in the vestibule through the gentlemen's entrance first to the reception room and from there to the changing rooms and then to the actual entrance to the bathroom, where retreats were. This was followed by the large bath room with a marble basin (water temperature around 26 degrees Celsius), showers and a dome supported by 24 pillars. Then it went either to Roman-Turkish or Russian sweat rooms and then to the terry toweling room, where the staff was cleaned. Then the bather came into a 30 × 6  fathom (56.9 × 11.4 m) large hall, the ceiling of which was supported by 28 marble columns, with a warm and a cold pool and showers. The conclusion was formed by a separate shower room and the drying room, from where the cabins were reached again.

Visiting the pool also took a similar course for women, albeit on a smaller scale. In addition to various baths, the offer also included water cures and electric baths for the treatment of nervous disorders.

Floor plan and elevations

  • Overall layout

  • Front elevation: Holzhausergasse

  • Elevation of the rear complex: women's baths

Ladies and gentlemen bath (with caricatures)

  • Separate entrances

  • Roman bath - ladies

  • "Frottirstube" for women

  • Roman bath - gentlemen

  • "Frottirstube" for men

  • "Douche" for men

Yiddish advertising

  • Description in Yiddish 1874 (1)

  • Description in Yiddish 1874 (2)

Today's building stock

Holzhausergasse

The two lower floors of the elongated building at Holzhausergasse 4–6 still come from the Roman bath. This remaining part of the bathroom was later increased by two floors for offices and workshops, accessible via the inner courtyard of the house at Fugbachgasse 4. This is where the swimwear and sportswear company anba Sportmode Vorsteher KG was run by the brothers Paul and Werner Vorsteher in the 1960s . (The word anba refers to anoraks and bathing suits.) Inside the building, a number of rooms have been preserved almost in their original state, but they are only used as storage.

In March 2012, the Viennese journalist Michael Hierner showed in a media report that essential parts of the architecture of the Roman Baths still exist today. The question was raised why the monument protection has not been active here so far.

See also

literature

  • Felix Czeike: Historisches Lexikon Wien , Volume 4, Kremayr & Scheriau, Vienna 1995, ISBN 3-218-00546-9 , p. 690
  • Claudia Feichtenberger: Our baths - from the bathing room to the adventure world - Viennese bathing culture then and now , Compress Verlag, Vienna 1994, ISBN 3-900607-257
  • Johann Nepomuk von Heinrich: The signpost in the Herrenbad of the Roman Baths at the Praterstern in Vienna , Verlag der Actien-Gesellschaft für Hotels und Bad-Anstalten, Vienna, 1873 (with 1 map)
  • Johann Nepomuk von Heinrich: The signpost in the ladies' and gentlemen's baths of the Roman baths at the Praterstern in Vienna , published by Actien-Gesellschaft für Hotels und Bade-Anstalten, Vienna, 1874 (with 5 plans and press documentation)
  • Michael Hierner : No monument protection for 140 year old Roman bath , in: Der Standard , Vienna, March 28, 2012 (with photos)
  • Dieter Klein , Martin Kupf , Robert Schediwy : Stadtbildverluste Wien - a look back over five decades , LIT Verlag, Vienna 2005, ISBN 978-3-8258-7754-5
  • Andreas Lehne: The Roman bath in Leopoldstadt . In: Austrian magazine for art and monument preservation; 39, 1985, pp. 104-113

Contemporary reports (with images) on the occasion of the opening:

Web links

Commons : Roman Bath  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Christine Klusacek / Kurt tuner: Leopoldstadt. An island in the middle of the city , Vienna 1978, p. 209
  2. ^ Entry in Lehmann 1873
  3. ^ Felix Czeike: Historisches Lexikon Wien , Volume 4, Kremayr & Scheriau, Vienna 1995, ISBN 3-218-00546-9 , p. 690
  4. ^ Hotel Donau in the Vienna History Wiki of the City of Vienna
  5. ^ Felix Czeike , Historisches Lexikon Wien , Volume 4, Kremayr & Scheriau, Vienna 2004, ISBN 3-218-00748-8 , p. 690
  6. ^ Andreas Brunner : The Roman bath in Leopoldstadt . Lambda Nachrichten 2/2012, Vienna 2012, pp. 44–45 (with illustrations ; PDF; 14.8 MB).
  7. ↑ http://www.qwien.at
  8. ↑ Franziska Tschinderle: Persecuted Love , in: weekly newspaper Die Zeit , Hamburg, Austria edition, No. 25, June 14, 2018, p. 11 f.
  9. ↑ Quotation in the article Eva Berger: "Nur für Arier" , in Wiener Geschichtsblätter , 73rd year, Heft 3/2018, p. 228, from Gerhard Roth : Die Geschichte der Dunkelheit (= Archive of Silence , Volume 6), Frankfurt am Main 1991, note 176, p. 58 f.
  10. ↑ https://www.kompany.at/p/at/1064s
  11. ↑ No monument protection for 140 year old Roman bath - derStandard.at. Retrieved February 6, 2020 (Austrian German).
  12. ↑ Michael Hierner : No monument protection for 140 year old Roman bath , website of the daily newspaper Der Standard , Vienna, March 28, 2012 (with photos)

Coordinates: 48 ° 13 ′ 11 "  N , 16 ° 23 ′ 19.7"  E