A Tour Around the 1920s Berlin Project: Part 1

One thing that is truly wonderful about the 1920s Berlin Project in Second Life is the realism that is pursued there.  As Augusta found out when she first arrived in Berlin, the sim is set up into different districts, and set up to represent life in the era as realistically as possible.  The residents have all kinds of products and services available in Berlin, and depending on your status there, what you might have to do for yourself would vary.

Outside of the laundry owned by Jacob Cohen and Son.

Even though washing clothes is not really needed in a virtual world, it would have been necessary in a Berlin neighborhood, especially one that was inhabited by the working classes.

Our virutal tour of the 1920s Berlin Project will start at the laundromat, which is located across the Steinpforte from the Keller.

One thing that the students I teach are mystified by is the fact that you actually had to do things that today are done by machines.  Ask them how their
own laundry is done, and they give you a blank stare.  For many of them, clean clothing just reappears in their drawers or closets.  And Augusta would have been in a similar situation.  Coming from an upper-class household, doing the laundry would have been a mysterious process, but a task that she would have had to learn when she arrived in Berlin.

Washboard

It begins with a water and laundry detergent.  After getting the clothing wet, the laundry is then soaped, with stains being scrubbed out on the washboard, which is behind Augusta in the picture.  The washboard is a wavy piece of metal set inside a wooden frame that you hold into the bucket.  Then, the laundry is scrubbed against it as vigorously as necessary in order to scrub out the dirt.  It means using what used to be called "elbow grease" to get the stains out.

Mangle

The next part involves rinsing the soap out of the clothes.  The Cohen and Son laundry has a pair of sinks that can be used for this, but it also has a device that will let you rinse the clothes, and then "mangle" the rinse water out.  Augusta is looking at the mangle, which uses a crank to squeeze the laundry through two rotating cylinders.  A smart laundress would probably put the clothes through the mangle more than once to make sure they are as dry as possible.

All of these different steps in the washing process is accomplished today with the washing machine, which agitates the dirt out of the clothing and then spins out the excess water after the machine rinses the laundry.

Now Augusta's clothing is washed, but needs to be hauled back home to dry on a line or to be dried with an iron.  The washing process could damage the clothes with heavy detergents like those advertised outside of the laundry.  The mangle alone could break buttons or tear them off, not to mention setting in wrinkles!  And there were no wrinkle-free fabrics back in the 1920s either.  Synthetic rayon was available in the early part of the century, but the big advancements in synthetics did not occur until the 1930s.

So how could I use this in my classroom?  By investigating the 1920s Berlin Project, students of today could learn much more about communities of the past.  Students could use the Jacob Cohen und Sohn Waescherei to recreate the time involved in washing one basket of laundry.  Students could be asked to research different household tasks and compare and contrast them over time:  How long would it take Augusta to figure out how to use the equipment, and how is the same work accomplished today?  It would allow students to investigate how the Industrial Revolution led to innovations that provided homemakers and domestic workers with time-saving appliances that made necessary work, like laundry, easier and less labor intensive.