Stefanie Holzer, born in 1961, lives as a writer in Innsbruck.
Consciousness determines what is clean. First and foremost, what you have cleaned yourself is clean – especially when this cleaning is no longer really clean: The spotty appearance of my oven does not make it seem likely, but my oven is cleaned properly every now and then. The pipe is “clean”, although many stains can no longer be removed but are burned into the surface forever. The cleanliness of my pipe goes hand in hand with the memory of cleaning, so to speak. On the other hand, if I rented my own kitchen with this pipe, I would probably think: someone could have cleaned it!
The fear of the germ is implanted in people: If glasses or cups show signs of being used by others, I get nervous. I can’t help but imagine mouths, lips and hands touching my glass in front of me. For years, my children have broken down every dish into its component parts, as if it was my secret endeavor to feed them something gross. My friend W. has grown up for a long time, but she could never eat something that fell on the kitchen floor. The germs that are down there terrified them.
On the other hand, I’m afraid that the same germs can probably also be found higher up, for example on the table. And how quickly does a germ jump from the ground onto a piece of bread? The first studies in the 1980s showed that farm children were less likely to develop allergies because a cowshed was so full of germs that the immune system knew once and for all what its job was.
However, it seems to me that much of the physical robustness does not only arise on the physical plane: W. has a horror of the evil that in her eyes lurks everywhere. With her, it goes so far that she buys packaged meat, but no longer when the shelf life expires the day after next. It shortens the shelf life itself by two days. That’s how she feels about yoghurt, too. I, on the other hand, still use sour cream 14 days after the deadline. When W. receives home-made jam as a gift, she throws it away for fear that the work might not have been done properly.
But W. isn’t the only one around me who values cleanliness more than I do. My friend C. also has problems with the floor: when she saw an apprentice baker drop a roll that he wanted to put back in the basket, she insisted that this roll be thrown away. When I told this to a bakery employee I knew, she said the floor was the least of the problems. The mice are much worse…
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