D' Kehrwoch aus Sicht der USA...
Leider hat sich die Kehrwoche auch schon in den USA herumgesprochen und es geistern folgende Schreckensbilder durchs Internet:
And if you came into the hallway--often the landlady would be sitting there as a concierge in the hallway and would ask you please to wipe your feet one more time, because it was raining outside and she didn't want the floors ruined. So even if you'd already wiped your feet, you had to go back and do it one more time to show her that she was in charge. And all my guests were always questioned why they were coming and how long they would stay. And once a week, well, we had to do Kehrwoche (kehr- 'scrub', Woche-'week') in South Germany.
The North Germans don't have this lovely habit, which is to clean the stairs and hallways, to wash the floors, dust things in the public hallway where people enter the apartment building. And people live in fear constantly, in South Germany, of losing their apartment if they should be ill and not be able to clean when it's their week, or they're afraid to travel. What if it snows and I can't shovel the snow that week? This is a condition for breaking your contract. For instance, my boss at my first company would never take a winter vacation because of the snow that she had to shovel on the weeks that she had this Kehrwoche.
This was a common topic in conversation, a filler: Well, how are your relationships to your landlady? And how's the cleaning going? And what did she make you do this week? People spent a lot of time when they first got together, talking about these kinds of problems. And the important thing was to be seen doing it. If I cleaned before people got up on Saturday morning, for instance, and it was all sparkling and dry, everyone in the apartment building would knock on my door and ask if I had done it yet. And I'd say, "Yes, can't you see?" Well, I learned what they wanted to see was me on my hands and knees scrubbing the steps. Right? And since everybody had this problem, they all felt they had to watch everybody else and see if they did a good job, too. So if you had done the stairs beautifully, but you'd missed those windows on the landing, they would tell you, "Well, the windows weren't clean enough on the landing. Could you do them one more time?"
So you'd be thinking of the revenge you could take on them next week when they had the Kehrwoche. Well, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but--Definitely, the thing to do is never live in a building where the landlord actually lives there, because there's just no end to the power these people think they can have.
