The Schornsteinfeger Cometh

This morning was the annual maintenance visit from the chimney sweep.

Yes, the chimney sweep. Sometimes, in Germany, there are these little moments where I wonder just what century I'm living in!

Every building is required (by law, I think; and in fact by old-timey, convoluted laws, because this is one of those super old professions governed by all kinds of quirky traditions and rules) to pay the chimney sweep once a year to come and check in on things.

In buildings that still have functioning chimneys, I assume part of the chimney sweep's work involves cleaning those, but in modernized buildings like mine, what he does instead is inspect the gas heater. Incidentally, this is a task that's also done by the guy from the heating and gas company, who's also required to come once a year. Hoo boy, that German efficiency you always hear about? It's dead. There's more than enough German bureaucracy to go around, but believe me, bureaucracy is not the same as efficiency.

Anyway, once a year the chimney sweep shows up in his traditional black garb and jaunty little black cap, at some ridiculously early hour of the morning, and cheerfully totes all his gadgets and equipment into my apartment. It's always the same guy (again, if I understood right, there's actually a law that assigns chimney sweeps each a specific bit of the city, and forbids them poaching one another's territory!) In fact, I think this picture I posted three winters ago, of a chimney sweep on the roof of the building opposite, is him, too. He's very nice about explaining what he's doing and answering my curious-foreigner questions!

First he started by opening a little flap in the wall near my (modern, gas, no longer connected to a chimney) kitchen stove and shoveling out the soot and debris that had collected there over the course of the year. I asked him why there's soot in there, given that the chimney hasn't been used in years (I live in a typical Berlin "Altbau," a turn-of-the-twentieth-century six-story apartment building, but one that was completely renovated after the fall of the Wall) and he said that over time, damp air shakes loose a bit more the soot stuck to the inside of the chimney. It must be true, because there's always that bit of soot when he opens the flap!

Once he was done being all anachronistic, with his little black cap and his bucket and spade for mucking out the chimney, he opened up his toolkit and whipped out his modern measuring instruments and turned his attention to my apartment's actual heater, to measure carbon monoxide and things. All in all, it only took a couple minutes, and then he jauntily packed up his things and cheerily headed back out the door. I wonder if all chimney sweeps are that happy? It seems to speak well for the profession!