The time of shivering is over, the Munich pools are raising their temperatures back to Willy Brandt levels. High time to do away with the cliché of the effeminate wimp.
Finally a message that warms the heart. And not only that, but also the skin: most municipal swimming pools raise their water temperatures before the carnival holidays, and after months of shivering, the people of Munich are allowed to splash again at Willy Brandt level. Herbert Wehner once slandered him: “The gentleman likes to take a lukewarm bath.”
At this point, a drop of sympathy for the wimps and their closest relatives, the wimps, mixes with the well-tempered water. They are constantly in public like watered poodles, and not just since Wehner and Brandt. It started with the ancient Greeks, who had a lot of inventive talent to bring their water to a comfortable temperature. No sooner had they devised underfloor heating for this purpose than Aristophanes came along and denounced the warm baths as “pernicious through and through” because they “make a man a coward”.
A few centuries later, it cost the life of a certain Siegfried for overestimating the effects of a near-full bath in warm dragon’s blood. So, if dragons are even-tempered beings at all, the specialist literature has gaps here. Maybe fresh dragon’s blood is as cold as a Kneipp pool? That, in turn, would have pleased its inventor: the Swabian bathing pastor commented in the 19th century that the “softening” caused by tepid water opened the “door and gate for many diseases”.
When it comes to critically examining hygiene rituals, Swabians know all the tricks. Harald Schmidt, who was socialized in Nürtingen, for example, may not have invented the modern wimp, but he did at least establish it in the German swear word, as a term of abuse for his compatriot and Klinsmann during the 1998 World Cup. Since then, wimp has been a synonym for washcloth – until Putin, a Kaltbader by tradition – drove a wedge between the pair of terms. The background noise of the past few months: wimps are gas storage empty showers, the energy crisis can only be solved with a washcloth (first law of Kretschmann).
Lo and behold, it worked. Thanks to all the hard-working washcloth users, energy costs are falling and Munich water temperatures are rising. And not only with those, the saunas also open again. This is a turning point, albeit a small one. A coalition of wimps, wimps and sauna-down-seaters can rival the Russian ice swimmer — if that’s not heartwarming news.