The unspeakable has seldom been dressed in more sensitive words than in the scene in Lisa Eckhart’s novel “Omama”, in which the relationship between necessity and chinaware is finally clarified.
In her novel “Omama”, the cabaret artist Lisa Eckhart describes a full scene from the Austrian provinces in the war year 1945. At that time, Russian soldiers were quartered in her grandparents’ house, who the villagers trusted to do everything. Leaving the property was out of the question for the grandmother. She was unquestionably certain that the Russian would devastate her booth, but she wanted at least to be there and to comment on every move he made after some treasure with a sigh. Their request was: at least tell the Russians not to eat out of the chamber pot or to put a donut in the Gmunden porcelain.
Has the unspeakable ever been put into words more emotionally than here? Putting a donut is pure poetry on the dirty field that the author Georg Queri plowed in the chapter “Cacare” in his scandalous book “Kraftbayrisch” in 1912. Later the director Helmut Dietl emulated him as a documentary about the linguistic coarseness. In his film “Rossini” a lady suffering from constipation dampens the ambitions of a doctor in need of love with the words: “Spare me your fantasies and give me something so that I can finally shit again!”
Queri, in turn, called the product of excretion Bolln. In today’s children’s language, the term Kacks has prevailed. In addition, you don’t put the little ones on the pot until their buttocks are adorned with a red border. In the best case scenario, there was a nice sausage in the pot. Today the little ones can comfortably nappy for years. In the event of constipation, children would sooner be shoved a piece of soap into the exhaust pipe, as Eckhart describes this process, which usually triggered an explosion in the intestines.
In the country, for the sake of relief, the adults withdrew to a house with a heart-shaped peephole. This facility only had the disadvantage that you had to cross the courtyard, even in the dark of night, if there was not a Potschamperl (night cup) under the bed. Remote as it was, the Häusl was one of the few places where you could have peace and quiet on a farm. A lot of things could be done there that were otherwise disgusting. Oskar Maria Graf documented this in his novel “The Life of My Mother” (1940): “Where do I want to pray, the twelve Our Fathers … on the house.”