I was enjoying Jennifer Wilson’s New Yorker piece (archived) on the various traumas of renting and buying (particularly in New York) when I got to this passage:
I imagined living in a society where people don’t need to own a home only to have something they can take out a mortgage on should calamity or college tuition strike. There, the flimsy divide between low- and middle-income workers wouldn’t be concretized through housing policy. In Vienna, for example, where income limits for government benefits are less stringent, eighty per cent of the population qualifies for social housing. (The Austrian city is famous for its Pawlatschen, “access balconies,” which open up onto a shared courtyard.)
Of course, I fixated on the Pawlatschen (you can see examples at the German Wikipedia article); it turns out the word Pawlatsche is borrowed from Czech pavlač, which is derived from the verb povléct ‘to cover,’ a prefixed descendant of Proto-Slavic *velťi ‘to drag’ (“Indo-European background unclear”). I thought that was interesting enough to share (and I envy the Viennese).
The spirit of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Vienna
lives on.
Einverstanden, Genosse!
I am surprised to hear that Vienna is “famous for Pawlatschen”, it is a style that I associate with Budapest or Brno. It is generally a Monarchy era working class housing style, so I’m not sure why the author wants to connect it to social housing. As the Wikipedia article notes, Vienna prohibited building them after 1881 so we have fewer examples than other KuK cities. Generally Viennese « Gemeindebau » , including the famous examples from the Rotes Wien era, have apartments accessible from interior stairwells not exterior balconies.
I have lived here for 14 years and have never lived in a building with Pawlatschen, and as far as I can recall have never even visited anyone living in a building with Pawlatschen, so you can transfer your envy towards the Hungarians. Whenever I have rented an Air BnB apartment in Budapest, the building would have a beautiful interior courtyard with balconies. I remember thinking “how come we don’t have these in Vienna?”
They are also fairy typical for old Lemberg / Lwow / L’viv, although I never heard any specific word for their courtyard balconies. They just say “entrance from the balcony”. Sometimes a bathroom has a separate entrance from the balcony!
The Czech word probably evolved from “awning” => “covered gallery” => courtyard balcony. In archaic Russian there is a similar word паволока, “a fancy fabric cover” and generally a textile used for such a purpose. It was an item of value and the chronicles occasionally measure values in it, say, a slave was worth 2 pavoloks:
И аще ускочить челядинъ от Руси, по не же приидуть въ страну царства нашего, и от святаго Мамы, и аще будеть и обрящеться, да поимуть и́, аще ли не обрящется, да на роту идут наши христеяне руси, а не христьянии — по закону своему, ти тогда взимають от нас цѣну свою, якоже уставлено есть преже, 2 паволоцѣ за челядинъ.
The article tends to confirm that New Yorkers who write for The New Yorker are frequently the most parochial and provincial of Americans – ignorant and incurious about the radically different ways other people live outside the city limits. With, in this case, the partial exception of the writer imagining she knows a little about living in Los Angeles and selected other locales because of course she has seen fictional movies and tv shows set there.
German wikipedia, FWIW, sez ‘Die engen, teils bereits als Element sozialen Wohnens konzipierten, im 20. Jahrhundert oft baufälligen Pawlatschenhäuser entwickelten sich zu Wohngebieten unterer Einkommensgruppen und umgangssprachlich wurde „Pawlatsche“ auch zum Synonym eines baufälligen Hauses.’ Google translate Englishes that as ‘The narrow, partly already designed as an element of social housing, often dilapidated Pawlatschen houses in the 20th century developed into residential areas for lower income groups and colloquially “Pawlatsche” also became a synonym for a dilapidated house.’
I have lived here for 14 years and have never lived in a building with Pawlatschen, and as far as I can recall have never even visited anyone living in a building with Pawlatschen, so you can transfer your envy towards the Hungarians.
Done! My grandson recently spent some time in Budapest, and the pictures he sent were gorgeous.
The Wikidata English name is “access balcony”, also used for the photo categories in wikimedia, except the subcategory Pawlatschen in Vienna,
… colloquially “Pawlatsche” also became a synonym for a dilapidated house.’
source: etymonline.com
In archaic Russian there is a similar word паволока, “a fancy fabric cover” and generally a textile used for such a purpose.
Thanks, it’s nice to know there’s a Russian cognate!
I didn’t even know the word. Not sure I’ve seen the thing (as opposed to possibly former ones subdivided by panels into one balcony per apartment).
Red Vienna keeps on keeping on even though the Reds (Social Democrats) no longer have a majority on their own. The city of Vienna remains the world’s biggest homeowner. The lack of an income limit for social, i.e. city-owned, housing is deliberate – this way, you can never be sure from someone’s address that they’re poor. AOC recently proposed to copy the whole thing for America.
After some Google Translate on the German Wikiparticle, I gather these things are reached by indoor stairs, often spiral. In the building I live in in New Mexico, the only access to the second floor is a Pawlatsche reached by an outdoor stair, up whose elaborate railing I grow morning glories, but I’m going to try Ipomoea lobata this summer. “Access balcony” seems a good term.
Note added in proof: The summer before last, we residents of this complex had a couple potluck dinners outdoors. If we do that again and have it on the balcony, and if people bring too much food as always, we could have a potluck potlatch on the Pawlatsche
Pawlatsch : access balcony
Norw. svalgang. Both the word and the building element has a long history. Da. svalegang looks like a folk etymology on svale “swallow (bird)”.
They are also dirt common in contemporary apartment buildings — i.e. this consulting structural engineer has come to know them very well.
There was some discussion of svalgang in the comments on swale.
I did remember that, but thought it was longer ago. Also (briefly) Svalastog.
Pawlatsche is stressed on the second syllable, which suggests to me it was borrowed into Viennese from Hungarian, or maybe Yiddish or even Rotwelsch. Wouldn’t a straight loan from Czech have produced a “Pawlatsch” with initial stress?
Hungarian is also initial-stress.
Hungarian words with a long second vowel are often borrowed into German with the long vowel stressed. I.e Hungarian pogácsa became German PoGAtsche, and the similarity in form is suggestive. The problem with my theory is that I don’t actually know what the Hungarian word is. May also be that “Powlatsche” got second syllable stress by analogy.
you can never be sure from someone’s address that they’re poor. AOC recently proposed to copy the whole thing for America.
Hah, that’s not going to fly in the US of A. What’s the point of having a fancy address if the peons don’t recognize what it means?
I’m sure they exist in the UK in working-class housing. I’ve seen many detective dramas in which police approach a suspect’s flat (apartment) by walking along a balcony.
@Kate Bunting: Those external balcony entrances are one of the things that make British council estates very visually distinct from American housing projects.
The fact that the second vowel is unreduced is probably enough to get it stressed. Viennese dialect doesn’t have vowel length anyway.
That said, I certainly can’t rule out analogy from Golatschen (second-syllable stress) < koláč (first-syllable stress because Czech).
(BTW, the third vowel is a legal fiction – it’s etymological nativization into Standard German so you can write the word.)
Nono, there are fancy addresses in Vienna; in large parts of some districts, every address is a villa. It’s the opposite that doesn’t exist.
…doesn’t have phonemic vowel length. Phonetically, it’s not only there, it’s coupled with stress (like in Russian), so it’s an even stronger reason for what Vanya said.
Those external balcony entrances are one of the things that make British council estates very visually distinct from American housing projects.
I’ve seen similar architecture in Germany, in buildings from the 50s and 60s, mostly dormitories or rental housing at the cheaper end of the market. They don’t have the charm of the Pawlatschen.
A similar sort of access-to-unit-via-upper-floor-balcony style is reasonably common in the U.S. for lower-price-point hotels/motels in parts of the country where the climate is such that the balcony-as-access-route is unlikely to be overwhelmed with snow/ice in the winter. I assume it’s cheaper construction than an internal corridor would be, and the plumbing for bathrooms/etc is all in the back of the units and thus using the same pipes that serve the other-side-of-the-building units right through the wall. I’m not sure of any reason why it wouldn’t be used for longer-term cheap rental properties – might be random historical contingency; might be different building-code requirements for rent-by-the-night structures versus rent-by-the-month structures and the varying incentives those code requirements create.
American two-story motels have them. But no courtyard, just a parking lot.
Oh! Yes. I’ve stayed in some.
A similar sort of access-to-unit-via-upper-floor-balcony style is reasonably common in the U.S. for lower-price-point hotels/motels in parts of the country where the climate is such that the balcony-as-access-route is unlikely to be overwhelmed with snow/ice in the winter.
Also for apartments. These are fairly common in Southern California with or without a courtyard. A lot of them look like they were built back in the 50s and 60s.
I used to live in one. It was a three-sided courtyard with the entrances to the apartments facing towards it and a swimming pool right in the middle. A couple of staircases reached the long porch/balcony that stretched around the courtyard for the apartments on the second floor.
I recently stayed at a Hilton hotel with external balconies off which some of the rooms were placed. It was a high rise, about twenty stories, in a flattened W shape. Around the central open area, where the desk, shop, and restaurants were located on the lower floors, there were rooms with internal doors. However, the internal balconies (taking the shape of the central inverted V in the W shape) ended at doors out onto external balconies that formed the two external legs. I was surprised that I had to enter the lobby, take an elevator up, then go back outside to get to my room.
External access to climate-controlled internal areas—whether hotel rooms, apartments, or offices—is a common characteristic of brutalist architecture. I would assume that, like the British council estates, the midcentury dormitories and rental housing mentioned by Hans were mostly built in that style. There is a lot of bad brutalism out there, as well as some very good brutalism, but cheap housing naturally tends to fall into the former category. As an example of the latter, with external (although under a massive awning-like construction) walkways between the offices, I have previously mentioned the City Hall in Salem, Oregon.
The Hungarian for Pawlatsche must be gang:
gang on wikiszótár:
Gang on wikipédia:
(DeepL translations)
And apparently a cultural, entertainment and debate tv programme “Gang” was named after it.
My primary objection to brutaliam is that it always looks like it could do with a good wash. The peculiar shapes would often be bearable if they were *clean* peculiar shapes.
A first step might be to encourage residents not to cover pathways, surfaces and common areas with human and animal bodily fluids and other excreta, needles, takeaway cups and wrappers, bits of unfinished takeaways accidentally discarded by hardworking residents in their rush to get to the bookies, etc. Or a (probably non-local) scouting group could undertake a weekly cleanup, if the Council would stump up for their biohazard suits.
Now that’s interesting, because Gang is “aisle, corridor” in… German.
The façades of the federal buildings along the National Mall in DC don’t suffer from any of these problems. And yet, they’re just as ugly.
Yes, pure concrete facades are simply ugly, whatever you do architecture-wise.
Milan’s case di ringhiera (once working-class, now tony) are very similar. Funny that they should have sprung up in a city once ruled by Austria, although it no longer was by the time they were built.
I recently stayed at a Hilton hotel with external balconies off which some of the rooms were placed. It was a high rise, about twenty stories
I also recently attended a conference in a high-rise hotel with rooms placed along balconies around an open (though roofed) inner space and found it very disconcerting. It reminded me of the TV series Silo, but also conjured up images of suicides and drunken accidents.
And yet, they’re just as ugly.
Yes, my comment was mostly about Brett’s example of good brutalism, whose dirty looking bits are partly high in the air. It’s not that stone or brick or whatever doesn’t discolour, but it doesn’t often look stained in quite the same way.
Now that’s interesting, because Gang is “aisle, corridor” in… German.
Spoiler: The Hungarian word is borrowed from… German.
Yes, it’s just mildly funny because German doesn’t use that word for that thing and has instead borrowed one.
That’s actually possible because the word isn’t widely known.
Edit: “that” being the following comment, which was deleted and reposted.
Pawlatschen
case di ringhiera
This is a very interesting LH post! Thanks for talking about this topic. For those who might have missed it at the end of the German Wikipedia article that Hat links to, Kafka uses Pawlatsche in his Brief an den Vater (1919):
The German Wikipedia article also mentions use by Egon Kisch. Can this be the sum total of uses of this word in the notable literature of Austria-Hungary?
I might note that outside access balconies are simpler and cheaper than inside access corridors or separate staircases for each vertical rack of apartments, so whichever scale we’re looking at, the block with outside access is at the low end. With much money in the project, architects are quite good at making the balconies nice and charming, but it’s still the low end of much money.
Their charm in old backyards is not unrelated to the fact that the original inhabitants moved out to new projects characterized by charmless access balconies – and architects moved in.
Edit/afterthought: This discussion would have had AJP all over the architectural history – and quickly dispelling me of simple notions like this,
montréal has a certain version of this, too: double or triple-decker row- or semi-detached houses with the apartment doors – usually one per floor, sometimes two – on a series of balcony/porches linked by exterior stairs. doubtless cheaper to construct than the boston-area style of tripledecker, with their interior stairways and larger porches/balconies, but wow! are they not well-suited to the climate.
Apparently Pawlatsche isn’t common enough for DeepL to really get it. For the Kafka passage, it translates it as “pavilion” the first time and “pavement” the second.
And Google Translate uses “loft” the first time and “pawlatsche” the second.
Well, the dictionaries (Duden and Wahrig) mark it as “österreichisch”, and if you ask them, most Germans (as in people who grew up and live in Germany) will have no idea what a Pawlatsche is supposed to be.
I’m sorry if I sounded bitter. I do think there is a lot more bad brutalist architecture than good, but I love the good. I have been grappling with a close friend telling me he is dying. Secondarily, I have been getting a lot of notices about my upcoming thirtieth high school reunion; my high school principal hated me for reasons I never understood, but he screwed me over multiple times. So I have been quite tetchy, for which I apologize.
Kafka is just lucky his father was not Michael Jackson.
I have been quite tetchy, for which I apologize.
No problem — I think we’ve all been there.
Nobody noting that the whole idea that you have to borrow large sums of money to pay for your kids to go to university is very American? In Austria there are more or less no tuition fees / Studiengebühren, nor something like the Ivy League which is less a place of education than a place for the next generation of the elite to network. Likewise the way that American health care and lack of social benefits make life so precarious even for the middle class.
Paul Celan, “Schnellfeuer-Perihel”:
Would this invoke the architecture of the Czernowitz of his childhood—the view up from the courtyard of the building in which his family had a basement apartment?
That first line… indelible.
I found an English and a French translation of that Kafka passage. Both translators just left Pawlatsche in the text with a footnote.
@Sean, my guess is most of the posters here are very familiar with the differences between the American and European university systems.
The peculiar evil of America is that it is far more expensive to get a mediocre to bad education than a good one. A child of the „middle class“, which nowadays seems to mean a family earning less than $200,000 a year may pay less for an Ivy League education than an Austrian will to attend TU Wien, after you factor in food and housing. And far far less than you have to pay in the UK these days. Harvard gives a complete free ride to kids from low income families (>100K)
The Ivy League is not really the best place to network. If a network is what you are after you are better off going to a school with a strong fraternity/sorority system like Syracuse or Duke.
Under the new U.S. ruling class an Ivy League education may soon be a social liability anyway, marking you as suspiciously „woke“.
The poem is about Prague in 1968 being occupied by Soviet troops. The “kommentierte Gesamtausgabe” writes: “Offene Laubengänge as Zugang zu den Wohnungen von außen gibt es in allen größeren Städten des ehemaligen Österreich-Ungarn, so auch in Prag”. Pawlatschen are not mentioned in Celan’s source, an article in Der Spiegel.
At the undergraduate level there’s a fair amount of tuition subsidy available to almost any student. For instance, the average tuition at Big 10 schools is $41,000, but roughly $14,000 in-state. Big 10 schools are premier institutions in their states, in the top 10 in the country in many fields. Three of the top 10 engineering schools in the country are in the Big 10. Getting beyond the central university in each state, in-state tuition at Northern Illinois is $12,500. And nearly every school in the country offers some financial aid for lower-income students.
I’m not saying the American system is the fairest or most democratic, but the headline grabbing people with large educational debts are almost all liberal arts grad students, and the people setting the narrative in the media are mostly people whose kids have non-Ivy private schools on their lists. Those are the areas where costs have exploded, and aid hasn’t kept up.
I’m not sure if TU Wien is really a Big 10 school, even if it isn’t docked for lack of a football team. But maybe a good comparator would be a well-regarded engineering-focused public university in one of the less-populated U.S. states, like Auburn (current in-state tuition before financial aid around $13K) or Clemson (ditto a bit over $15K)?
I am by free association struck by the historical pattern that although present-day Austria certainly does possess universities, some of considerable antiquity, they have minimal brand-name recognition in the Anglophone or at least American world as compared to many other German-lands universities. In particular, American higher education was transformed during the 19th century by the substantial number of Americans (approx 10,000 over the course of the century) who pursued graduate study in German-lands universities (starting well before 1871 or 1866, and thus when “Germany” as a unified political entity excluding Austria was not yet a thing) and who then came back to the U.S. to serve as faculty members generally promoting the German-style research university as a model to be emulated in preference to the old-fashioned Oxbridge-derived liberal arts college. But you generally don’t hear about those folks having studied at Vienna or Graz or for that matter Charles in Prague – it was instead Leipzig or Heidelberg or Goettingen or Halle or various others.*
I don’t know if the universities in the Hapsburg lands were slow to adopt the new 19th-century model of what a university should be like conventionally, said to have been pioneered by Humboldt in Berlin and then adopted by many other German-speaking universities with older roots, or if American students studying abroad in those days tended for sociological reasons to go to “Protestant” (nominally or otherwise) universities and eschew “Catholic” (ditto) ones, or what.
*Example: William Dwight Whitney, first professor of “linguistics” (technically his title never got past “of Sanskrit and Comparative Philology”) in North America, who in the 1850’s studied at both Berlin and Tuebingen before eventually being awarded a doctorate by the University of Breslau.
Until the Nazis devastated it, I do believe the University of Vienna was considered one of the best places to study medicine and psychology in the world. The only prominent American who comes to mind though is William S Burroughs, who enrolled in the medical school 1936-37. Obviously by that time Heidelberg and Leipzig were considerably less attractive to Americans.
It also wouldn’t be all that surprising to discover that by the late 19th century the top universities in the Habsburg lands were regarded as “too Jewish” by the typical American WASP who was looking to study in Europe.
I looked up the bio of James McKeen Cattell (1860-1944), generally said to have been the first professor of psychology at a U.S. university, and he apparently got his doctorate at Leipzig, with some additional study at Goettingen along the way. He is probably best known for having been summarily fired from his faculty post at Columbia in 1917 for his public opposition to the U.S. going to war against Austria-Hungary and her allies, an event which in due time led (after the Harding-era “return to normalcy”) to greater job security for tenured faculty with out-of-fashion opinions. It may not have helped that at the same time his own son was one of two Columbia students who were convicted* of federal felony conspiracy charges for plotting to discourage their fellow students from cooperating with newly-introduced military conscription, to tie this to a theme in another current thread.
*Their female co-conspirator, Miss Eleanor Parker of Barnard College (a kooky bohemian first cousin of my maternal grandfather), was acquitted, much to her chagrin. To her chagrin because it was pretty obviously in context the result of paternalism/chivalry/condescension by a male judge who simply did not take her radicalism seriously on account of she was a girl. Although her long-suffering mother (my great-great-aunt Kate) apparently took the view that getting convicted of federal felonies was really not the right sphere of human endeavor to focus on when working for progress toward equal treatment for women.
I can understand and sympathize with both points of view.
Vanya, my understanding of the way that the Ivies work is 1) tiny student bodies (thousands not tens of thousands of undergraduates) weighted towards children of the elite, and 2) many high-paying white-collar employers who preferentially recruit from specific universities.
It does seem like fraternities / sororities could partially recreate the first benefit, but its hard to avoid making useful friends when you spend 4 years living and working with children of executives and senior professionals and senior officials and old money.
This discussion is talking about one side of the coin (homeowners build capital which insulates them against financial shocks) but I think I was the first person to mention that those shocks are more common in the USA than say Canada or Austria. I can’t know what strangers on the Internet are thinking just what they post.
J.W. Brewer: I think there is a trade book in how the Austro-Hungarian Empire gave the Anglosphere so many key engineers, technicians, and academics in the 20th century without getting as much prestige as France or Germany. Its not just the Nazi persecutions because Nikola Tesla was earlier. The author would need to know the right modern languages, and could not market it to a diaspora like “How the Scots Invented the Modern World.”
Part of that lies no doubt in the fact that in the US it is normal to live on campus. (Some – many? – universities there even have a requirement that students, or first-year students or something like that, must live on campus.) I don’t think the U of Vienna owns a single bed. And the Sorbonne didn’t own any until recently, and now owns a very small number.
Part of the reason is that places like Heidelberg, Tübingen, Göttingen and Halle are university towns in the sense that there is nothing there except the university. These universities were founded by the princes of tiny independent countries in order to attract prestige and perhaps money from abroad. Not so with Prague (1348) or Vienna (1365).
Leipzig and especially Berlin are not in that category, but may have found themselves in competition with the university towns and reacted accordingly. Not so with Prague or Vienna, or Graz.
On top of that, the emperor – one and the same from 1848 to 1916 – was extremely conservative.
Shortly before medicine was spun off as its own university in the early 00s, Vienna had over a hundred thousand students in total. (And that’s with economics, and as mentioned engineering, already separate. And in a country of, then, barely eight million people.)
…I scrolled back up through the whole thread to find that discussion, because I didn’t remember it. The topic is there in the first sentence of the quote in the OP, but… we didn’t discuss it. We ignored it completely so far.
Anyway, I think there’s also something else going on here: Americans being a lot more mobile than Europeans (for a number of reasons – one is that, for example, even Ukraine is only as big as Texas). In Europe, buying a house or apartment as a financial investment is something that actual investment firms do (en gros), but individuals or families don’t – they buy homes to live there for the next few decades because they don’t expect to (have to) move anytime soon if ever. Even landlords are very large corporations (or the city of Vienna).
David Marjanović: from my own student days in mainland Europe I remember how the density and good public transit of most European cities make it easy to connect with other students even if you don’t live in a Studentenheim. In contrast, much of the USA and Canada are very suburban, so it can be hard to get together in the evening if you live somewhere cheap off-campus and are too poor for your own car.
I know a modestly wealthy British woman whose investments are all in real estate. Obviously you have to be much wealthier than average to buy housing to rent in the North Atlantic or the Pacific Rim these days.
I also know some people, middle class Germans, who have a couple of apartments as investment which they rent out. They’re not as conspicuous as the big real estate corporations, but AFAIK such small-scale landlords altogether own a significant part of the rental housing stock in Germany.
Back before the Third Reich, German/Austrian universities tended to have smaller student bodies (and probably in general more socially-elite ones) than they now do and a rather more substantial percentage of students participated in the various genres of Studentenverbindungen (with or without dueling scars included), which thus offered that sort of networking opportunity, whether or not the university proper owned the beds where the students slept. Indeed, the wikipedia article auf Englisch on _Studentenverbindung_ deploys the German noun Lebensbund in its first paragraph. The resultant sense of community and camaraderie often depicted in 19th-century Anglophone literature about German student life appears not to have survived the war and not been substantially revived thereafter. I’m sure the students still get drunk and all, but seemingly not with the same sort of sense of carrying forward an important and inherited cultural task (passed down from the Middle Ages as filtered through your Schillers and your Humboldts) via their drunkenness. If you want that you may need to leave the old university towns for one of those open-air summer heavy metal festivals or something.
I sit corrected.
Still exist, still ritually drink beer on command in insane quantities, and still shunt jobs toward their graduated members, but they’re all either nothing short of reactionary (…those are the ones that were liberal in 1848; they haven’t moved since then…) or Totally Not Nazis, How Dare You, You’re Persecuting Us Like The Gestapo. Neither version is at all popular in these vulgar times (i.e. since 1968). Other kinds of fraternity/sorority do not seem to exist.
@JWB: It wasn’t the war; from what I’ve read, if you’d gone to one of the traditional universities like Heidelberg in the 50s, you still could have seen the traditional beer and fencing student life. Even now, the Verbindungen still exist, their members just have become a minuscule part of the overall student body, mostly due to social change and the opening up of universities to a much bigger cross-section of the population since about the 60s. Many Verbindungen didn’t want to take in the hoi polloi, but also joining one became uncool even among many of the students from legacy families.
Edit: Ninja’d by DM; as he says, the reactionary politics of the Verbindungen is a reason why they became mostly irrelevant to student life. And uniforms and militaristic rituals became deeply uncool after 1968.
@Hans: okay, that’s plausible on timing, but the question remains why no other autonomous-small-group subcultures with a different aesthetic vibe emerged to offer similar Lebensbund possibilities amidst the bureaucratic anomie of much larger institutions.
In the U.S. context many of the traditional-elite-networking-formation student subcultures proved over time quite adept at adopting to shifting student-body demographics on the assumption that participating in the formation of the next elite generation was worthwhile regardless of who the recruits’ grandparents may have been. If their European counterparts proved less flexible in that regard, that’s on them.
its hard to avoid making useful friends when you spend 4 years living and working with children of executives and senior professionals and senior officials and old money.
I managed somehow. My Ivy League degree may have opened some doors but none of my college friends have proved particularly “useful” other than moral support post graduation. Missing out on social status advancement is pretty easy if your friends are mostly musicians, interested in the arts or serious academics. My brother made a very good friend from serious old money while at Yale. Turns out just being friends with old money doesn’t actually make you wealthy by osmosis, also some old money live off trust funds and pursue idiosyncratic careers.
An Ivy League degree is just not the guaranteed networking tool people think it is. Now joining a secret society while at Yale, yes I suspect that certainly puts you into a real “network” of connected people but that’s a small minority of the student body.
@JWB: There are lots of other opportunities and groupings to make friends – clubs like AIESEC, student politics (German universities have a student parliament and a student committee with formal roles in university administration, and many subsequent politicians cut their teeth there), and nothing keeps you from associating and partying with your fellow students. I myself am a member of the association of Economics students of my former university, although I don’t regularlily participate in their events. It’s just that the specific combination of fencing, wearing uniforms, and formalized quaffing became regarded as reactionary and ridiculous (and quite rightly so).
To complete the picture, most of the Verbindungen nowadays are nicht-schlagend (no fencing / duelling), and many dropped the uniforms as well (nicht-farbentragend), and those tend to be less radically reactionary, but they still mostly are too conservative for the taste of most modern students, and their image is still heavily influenced by the hardcore duelling and uniform-wearing ones. They also tend to recruit their members from the circle of family and friends of alumni members (alte Herren) and my impression is that they’re not interested in mass membership. So it’s a combination of off-putting views and rituals plus an unwillingness to become more inclusive that vastly reduced their significance for modern student life.
My Ivy League degree may have opened some doors but none of my college friends have proved particularly “useful” other than moral support post graduation. …. My brother made a very good friend from serious old money while at Yale. Turns out just being friends with old money doesn’t actually make you wealthy by osmosis … An Ivy League degree is just not the guaranteed networking tool people think it is.
Obviously it’s not literally a matter of osmosis — you have to be the kind of person who spends much of your time and mental energy working on becoming rich and/or powerful. That means you don’t waste time hanging out with musicians, artsy types, and academics, you cultivate the people who can get you started on the ladder. If you’re that type of person, the Ivy League is an excellent Petri dish.
@hans
I have an acquaintance who was recruited as a student by one of these societies in the 1990s. I am not sure if his father had been a member, but the father was a distinguished professional and the son was studying medicine and became a surgeon. He said they offered a lot of benefits, e.g., free housing and free or subsidised meals, as well as the competitive drinking parties. In later life, I told him: we do not have to keep up with Holger, Holger does not expect this, as he is a lot bigger and does this more regularly, Holger just smiled. My acquaintance did not listen and had a terrible hangover the next day.
If you’re that type of person, the Ivy League is an excellent Petri dish.
Of course, but so are any of the top universities, including Stanford, USC, Duke, Michigan, etc. Sean seems to be saying that just being at an Ivy League school guarantees you will hobnob with and befriend the rich and powerful. In reality, even at Yale or Harvard, if you don’t already come from that social class when you start as a first-year, you aren’t going to be automatically accepted into their ranks and, as you point out, you will have to work hard at it if social climbing is your goal. Granted, an Ivy League degree probably does confer immedate social benefits to underprivileged kids who can jump straight to the middle/upper middle class – I’m not sure that’s a bad thing though.
I am not sure if his father had been a member, but the father was a distinguished professional and the son was studying medicine and became a surgeon.
All I can say is that the Verbindungen are strongest at the traditional faculties (law, medicine) at old universities, so medicine would fit.
The “it’s a question of honor to keep up when drinking” culture is one of the topics raised in this piece by Kurt Tucholsky from the 1920s.
the reactionary politics of the Verbindungen is a reason why they became mostly irrelevant to student life. And uniforms and militaristic rituals became deeply uncool after 1968
This whole discussion has sent me down a rabbit hole about goliardia, the Italian tradition of student associations. Those groups also became uncool in the late ’60s, but not because they were reactionary or militaristic; from what I gather they were mainly associated with obscene songs and minor acts of vandalism, and if anything were a bit antiauthoritarian. Not enough for the zeitgeist, though, which considered them frivolous. And having recently come across my father-in-law’s feluca, a very silly cap covered in weird trinkets (chickens and so forth), I can see why.
I’m going to speculate that the Italian-student “feluca” is somehow etymologically related to the French-student https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faluche. NB that that article mentions the feluca without actually explaining or describing it but further asserts that it is “also called pileo, goliardo or berretto universitario.”
So, football fandom without the football. Yeah, I can see why they’re extinct.
Compare the British and Irish rag:— in my experience not a standalone society but rather a limb of the students’ union whose sole function is to organise Rag Week. Perhaps the hazing of pledges is the closest US equivalent, though my knowledge of that is solely from TV.
Vanya: Duke says they have only 6,500 undergraduate students which does not contradict my arguments that keeping student bodies small is for networking.
I suspect that say Fine Arts or Journalism majors with an Ivy League degree are disproportionately successful in those fields but I also agree that not everyone in those environments manages to use them to create a money-generating network.