Street cleaning week/Kehrwoche

You can do a course on how to do your bit in street cleaning week in the Ostfildern Volkshochschule (I associate this with Baden-Württemberg):

Samstag, 17. April

10:00 Uhr, VHS an der Halle, Nellingen, Esslingerstr. 26
Kehrwoche for beginners A1
Veranstalter: Volkshochschule Ostfildern

This course is designed for people from abroad who have recently arrived in Suabia or have been here for a while, but are not yet familiar with the Swabian tradition of the cleaning week (“Kehrwoche”). This could lead to cultural misunderstandings. Your landlord/-lady might have give you negative feedback on the way you do your Kehrwoche, for example, and you just don’t understand why, and because he speaks in dialect you don’t understand him, either. We will deal with the following aspects: – historical aspects: the origin of the Kehrwoche – tools and equipment (“Kutterschaufel und Kehrwisch”) – rules and standards (what to clean, best time to do the cleaning week, “big” and “small” cleaning week) – vocab and definitions (Kandel etc.) – how to become a Kehrwoche specialist/insider’s knowledge (e.g. how to make as much noise as possible so everybody notices you’re doing it) If you want to, you can bring your own equipment. The trainer will then tell you if it’s adequate. The course will be held in English and German.

(Via vowe.net)

5 thoughts on “Street cleaning week/Kehrwoche

  1. OK, Margaret, I call major BS… No way this is serious :) It does make me think though about the kind of fake courses they could offer where I live.

    • Well, we’re not long after April 1st, but I have read about this in previous years – in fact, I thought I must have blogged it before, but apparently not. I did read that it was an April fool’s joke a few years ago which attracted so many applications that the VHS decided to offer the course. This was all in 1998, so a course offered this year on April 17 may not be a joke. It doesn’t look like one, either. I can’t swear to it, though. Fortunately we don’t have that system in Franconia.

  2. ok…. First of all, it is true that the Kehrwoche is a serious thing in Suabia, and I think I might be one of the few true Exil-Schwaben who never got into it, but I have to say, when we first moved from Stuttgart to Franconia 10 years ago,I had never met anyone who was as obsessed with (street)cleaning as my very Franconian landlady :-)

    • Hi Nadine,

      Yes, I always thought Swabia got a bad press. Otherwise I wouldn’t have misguidedly believed that a Kehrwoche meant all the neighbours turning out to clean the street. Mind you, when we had this system here in F

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