A sharp-tongued Polish cleaning lady is making a splash in Germany with a tell-all memoir revealing the seamy underbelly of Europe’s biggest economy and exploding the myth of Germans’ penchant for order.
Under German Beds written under the pen name Justyna Polanska shot to No. 4 on online retailer Amazon’s best-seller list after its release this month.
It is a cringe-inducing, stomach-churning read for the legions of middle-class Germans who employ a cleaner, exposing the pettiness, hypocrisy, lechery and plain filth behind the tidiest facades in the country.
Photo: AFP
“I wrote this book because I’d like to see more humanity and more respect for cleaning women,” Polanska told Agence France-Presse.
“Asking during a telephone interview if I have large breasts or am wearing red underwear is rather crass, don’t you think?” she asked, recounting just a few of the degrading experiences the German job market has offered her.
Employers have also dropped their trousers in front of her, flaunted luxurious new clothes then failed to pay her in full, and falsely accused her of stealing.
The 31-year-old Polanska is among an estimated 500,000 Polish women who have crossed the border since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989 with the hope of cleaning their way to a better life.
She hastens to say that Germany has been good to her on the whole and she has many German friends. But her hair-raising discoveries behind closed doors may surprise those with the image of Germany as a nation of neat freaks.
Among the grisly items she has discovered under German beds are freshly extracted wisdom teeth, half a roast chicken, bloody tampons, an entire toenail and a dead hamster, as well as loose cash intended to test her honesty.
“When I lived in Poland, I had an image of Germans as clean and orderly,” she explained in fluent, lightly accented German. “When I started cleaning here I saw that was not the case — not with everyone but with more than I ever would have thought.”
Her eye-opening and often humorous memoir turns a harsh light on aspects of German society that — fortunately — remain hidden from the overwhelming majority.
It comes in a long line of get-the-bosses exposes such as The Nanny Diaries, books by call-center agents, breakdown service staff and secretaries, and the recent international best-seller by French checkout worker Anna Sam, which Polanska cites as an inspiration.
When she felt she had a good story to tell, Polanska shopped the idea to publishing houses until she found one with a German ghostwriter “where the chemistry was right.”
“Since it was published, I’ve had some very nasty feedback on the Internet with people saying ‘Stupid cow, Germans are very tidy’ and ‘She’s only after a buck,’” she said.
“And the reaction on Polish Web sites was not much better — some were quite aggressive. I think they just don’t get it — I’m not complaining, I want to keep working. But I want respect.”
A Polish translation is in the works and several English-language publishers have expressed interest. Flush with success, Polanska said she was considering using her earnings to train as a cosmetologist and leave the world of cleaning behind, not least because she generally works on the black.
A study released in November by the IW institute for economic research in the western city of Cologne said an estimated four million undeclared employees work in German households. By 2050, the number is expected to triple to 12 million, with one in three households paying their help without informing the tax authorities.
Factors driving the rise include an ageing population, more double-income families with children and more people in demanding jobs, all of whom are more likely to need assistance at home.
Germany attempted in 2003 to simplify the so-called “minijob” sector — people doing low-paid or short-term work — by making it in many cases only slightly more expensive for families to register their household help.
An organization pushing for more legal employment in German homes, Minijob-Zentrale, said in December that there were now 211,600 people officially registered as working in private households, a more than 15 percent rise over 2009 and six times more than in 2003.
“The process has really been streamlined,” said Susanne Heinrich of the Minijob-Zentrale in the western city of Bochum. “People are afraid there will be lots of red tape and in fact for most cases it is enough to fill out one sheet of paper.”
But Polanska said she has never had an employer who did not want her to work on the black. “I don’t know a single cleaner — regardless of her nationality — who does not earn at least part of her money illicitly,” she writes. “Or any employer who doesn’t think it’s great because they can get someone to clean, wash, iron and sometimes cook for them for 10 euros [US$14] an hour.”
A few weeks ago I found myself at a Family Mart talking with the morning shift worker there, who has become my coffee guy. Both of us were in a funk over the “unseasonable” warm weather, a state of mind known as “solastalgia” — distress produced by environmental change. In fact, the weather was not that out of the ordinary in boiling Central Taiwan, and likely cooler than the temperatures we will experience in the near-future. According to the Taiwan Adaptation Platform, between 1957 and 2006, summer lengthened by 27.8 days, while winter shrunk by 29.7 days. Winter is not
Taiwan’s post-World War II architecture, “practical, cheap and temporary,” not to mention “rather forgettable.” This was a characterization recently given by Taiwan-based historian John Ross on his Formosa Files podcast. Yet the 1960s and 1970s were, in fact, the period of Taiwan’s foundational building boom, which, to a great extent, defined the look of Taiwan’s cities, determining the way denizens live today. During this period, functionalist concrete blocks and Chinese nostalgia gave way to new interpretations of modernism, large planned communities and high-rise skyscrapers. It is currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Modern
March 25 to March 31 A 56-year-old Wu Li Yu-ke (吳李玉哥) was straightening out her artist son’s piles of drawings when she inadvertently flipped one over, revealing the blank backside of the paper. Absent-mindedly, she picked up a pencil and recalled how she used to sketch embroidery designs for her clothing business. Without clients and budget or labor constraints to worry about, Wu Li drew freely whatever image came to her mind. With much more free time now that her son had found a job, she found herself missing her home village in China, where she
In recent years, Slovakia has been seen as a highly democratic and Western-oriented Central European country. This image was reinforced by the election of the country’s first female president in 2019, efforts to provide extensive assistance to Ukraine and the strengthening of relations with Taiwan, all of which strengthened Slovakia’s position within the European Union. However, the latest developments in the country suggest that the situation is changing rapidly. As such, the presidential elections to be held on March 23 will be an indicator of whether Slovakia remains in the Western sphere of influence or moves eastward, notably towards Russia and