Dirty Linen

Never before had the myth of German cleanliness been questioned so rudely, and the Bundesrepublik erupted in indignant protest. In a full-page advertisement in West Germany's weekly magazine Der Spiegel, a family of three was shown in impeccable dress--but all with pigs' faces. Beneath them were the words: "This year, in the average German family, the child will wear his underwear four days, the wife five days and the husband seven days." The ad was placed by the obviously phony "Action Committee for Fresh Underwear," presumably an invention of German soft-goods manufacturers.

Sober periodicals such as the intellectual weekly Die Zeit questioned the ad's statistics, and the business journal Handelsblatt attacked it as "a model of tastelessness." Popular reaction was less restrained. Der Spiegel was deluged by bitter letters of complaint.

Less emotional observers, however, wondered whether the very scale of the response indicated that the accusation had hit home. A poll taken by the Allensbach Institute showed that three out of four Germans rated themselves "exceptionally clean." The average German housewife spends perhaps four hours daily scrubbing and polishing her home, and 75% of car owners feel obliged to wash and polish their autos every Saturday afternoon.

This obsessive cleanliness, however, applies chiefly to things the neighbors may see--and not to more personal areas. According to statistics gathered by two highly reliable market-research institutes, the average German changes his shirt every other day, his socks and underwear every three to four days, and his bed linen every four weeks. More than half of West Germany's citizens brush their teeth only rarely, and the same proportion bathe only once a week; for roughly 10% of the population, the figure is once every four weeks.

The cleanliness issue has cropped up across the border, too. East Germany's Volksarmee, honoring Lenin's 100th birthday, recently launched "Operation Clean Underpants" with an ambitious goal: to get 80% of the troopers to change their shorts once a week. The results have been scanty. Many soldiers simply wrote home for more underwear and regularly sent the new arrivals, unworn, to the Army laundry. Meanwhile they continued to wear, for periods of up to several weeks, the older, more lived-in garments to which they had become so attached.

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