The Pool Reader 1

<p>The Sommerbad in Volkspark Humboldthain feels like home to me. Rain or shine, I’ve spent hours in this public pool. It’s not a light-hearted summer fling. It’s true love to a point where I run past during off-season—which is the majority of the year—to peek through the fence and check on the pallid basins, the withering slide and the leafless trees waiting for the visitors to return. By summer the facility will be as neat as always—a true working class idyll with bright blue water, lush green trees and quaint flat-roofed structures. If it wasn’t for the ridiculously strict regulations, intimidating security guards and screaming attendants who govern the up to 50,000 people that visit the pool from June to September, Sommerbad Humboldthain would be a paradisiacal refuge in the middle of the city for visitors of all ages and from various cultural contexts who interact more or less peacefully.</p> <p>It’s a very physical place. The playing kids, the flirting or fighting youngsters, the bored parents, the voracious family clans, the lazy freelancers, and the ruthless sporty types–I love watching all of them, how they (inter-)act. I observe myself observing them and think of one of my favourite lectures Techniques of the body (1934) by French sociologist Marcel Mauss. Inspired by an article on swimming and his own observation that more and more swimmers transitioned from breaststroke to crawl in the early 20th century, his proposition was as simple as it was groundbreaking for ethnology: We learn to use our body (eat, swim, sleep etc.) through imitation and education within our society and according to our role in this society. Such techniques of the body vary between different foreign cultures, generations or even communities. Especially on hot days, when a lot of very different people with very few clothes on co-exist in a very tight space, the study of body techniques can become crucial to classify one another and adjust the respective behaviour to avoid stressful misunderstandings. Yet, if even presumably genuine actions such as eating or the according to Mauss “gymnic art” of swimming can express cultural differences within the context of a public pool, to consider also the idea of addressing a public with culture becomes an even greater challenge. Because I’m not just content with feeding the visitors: I want to inspire them, too…</p>