Alcohol in History: The Myths of the Drunk

Alcohol is so tightly interwoven with our society that of all people who do not drink in good company are assumed to have an alcohol problem.

Toasting the turn of the year is a cult, beer is poured in barrels at folk festivals, and every gourmet menu has the right wine.

How did ethanol of all intoxicants become a cultural phenomenon?

Johanna Kuroczik

Editor in the "Science" section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung.

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Alcohol has a special role among drugs, it is almost part of being human. A mutation around ten million years ago enabled the ancestors of humans, gorillas and chimpanzees to effectively break down ethanol using an enzyme, as researchers at the University of California at Berkeley found out based on genetic analyzes in 2015: This was how our ancestors could eat fermented fruits from the forest floor that supplied calories.

Many scientists suspect that

settled down not only to plant grain for bread, but also to brew beer with it. Stone vessels with remains of a fermentation process that were used 13,000 years ago and are therefore the oldest references to brewing were stored in the Rakefet Cave in today's Israel. At that time people of the Natufien culture lived there, for whom beer was part of festivals. Alcoholic grain preparations were also popular among the Babylonians and in ancient Egypt. Admittedly, these differed from the Germans' favorite drink, contained no hops and also less ethanol.

Archaeologists recently reported on what is probably the oldest brewery on an industrial scale. In Abydos, the seat of the early Egyptian rulers, around 3000 BC Around 22,000 liters of beer can be produced at once. They were used to erect monuments like mortuary temples, because workers received beer as wages. It was also part of cultural rituals and festivities. “In the early high cultures, beer or alcohol was drunk collectively, especially by men and with cultic significance,” says Gunther Hirschfelder, holder of the chair for comparative cultural studies at the University of Regensburg and author of a book on the history of beer. So alcohol consumption, intoxication and religion were closely related. This runs through history - think of Dionysus or Bacchus,the god of wine and intoxication of classical antiquity, or the hundreds of passages in the Bible that speak of wine.

When did “alcoholism” become weakness?

Intoxicating drinks were invented on almost every continent. Asian steppe peoples drank fermented mare's milk, the rice wine sake has been sipped in Japan for around 2000 years, in South America the Incas brewed a type of beer from corn, and in Mesoamerica pulque, fermented agave juice, was said to be. The Teutons also drank honey-based mead in honor of their gods. The Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus wrote in the early second century about the feasts of the Teutons: “There is absolutely nothing objectionable to drinking through days and nights.” Such testimonies give the impression that in antiquity everyone was constantly staggering around drunk. But that is deceptive. “The level of alcohol consumption that we imagine today cannot be assumed,” says Hirschfelder.Most people repeatedly lacked food, and the fluctuations in the harvest prevented a constant flow of alcohol. In addition: "There was a hierarchy in the entire food sector, from early high cultures to 19th century farms," ​​says Hirschfelder. Regular excesses were only possible for the upper class.

There is also a myth that in the Middle Ages people in Central Europe only drank alcohol because the water was so dirty. In fact, in later Germany, those who could afford it drank beer during the day, although it contained little alcohol, or wine, especially in cities where the water quality was poor. But for the urban underclass and simple farmers, the main drink was still water. Alcohol was more of a nutritious addition, so children ate beer soup for breakfast well into the 19th century.

Even for Tacitus, the Germanic peoples' “drunkenness” was a weakness, and the Aztec ruler Motecuhzoma I issued draconian penalties against pulque consumption. But it wasn't until the 19th century that people became aware of the dangers of alcohol for health. One occasion was the so-called brandy plague: schnapps, originally a medicine, was suddenly drunk in large quantities, around 1840 a man in Prussia consumed an average of eight liters of pure alcohol a year. Simple workers also drank, but misery alcoholism was not as widespread as we believe today, says Hirschfelder. "The main class of people who could drink freely were men from the bourgeoisie, the artisans and especially the upper class."Alcoholism was increasingly viewed by medical professionals as harmful and pathological.

The way we drink is still changing today: In the 20th century, for example, due to the demands of the working world, people drank more in the evening than during the day.

But even in the 1970s, employers were still providing their staff with service beer, and in some offices a bottle of whiskey was always close at hand.

The level of alcohol consumption that is normal is different every time.