This Year in Marienbad

"Are the stairs growing steeper?" ask advertisements in West German newspapers. "Or why is it that you must stop and rest halfway, with your heart beating in your throat?" The answer, according to the ad, is not to take the elevator but to take the cure at Bad Toelz, a gemuetlich Bavarian spa* where "a new, particularly iodine-rich spring gives your blood vessels elasticity, your heart strength, your nerves fresh vigor." Like all the 140 officially recognized watering places in West Germany, Bad Toelz is itself in the pink of condition, thanks to a booming health cult that in 1963 will lure a record 3,500,000 patients to spas offering cures for virtually every ailment known to medicine, and a few known only to Germans.

Unlike most Anglo-Saxons, for whom "taking the waters" went out with gout, Germans today fervently believe that any resort with Bad (meaning bath) in its name is good for what ails them. In fact the spa empire stretches beyond Germany's present borders. From Marienbad, now part of Czechoslovakia, to Baden, outside Vienna, where King Saud, his four wives and entourage are pumping $1 million a month into the local economy, hotel rooms in health resorts are booked solidly through summer and fall. In West Germany alone last year, Kurgaeste, or cure-guests, cast $375 million on the health-giving waters, a 250% increase since 1955. "The great, the rich and the fat still come," says an official of the West German spa association. "But now that our social structure is more egalitarian, the Kur is for everyone."

Bad Limburger. Germans with weak eyesight flock to Bad Wiessee; those in search of "rejuvenation" swear by Austria's Bad Gastein. Aix (pronounced aches) -la-Chapelle and Bad Oeynhausen offer famed rheumatism cures. Some resorts, such as Baden-Baden and nearby Badenweiler, are known as Gesellschaftsbaeder, or social spas, because patrons go there more for the crowd than the cure. Nearly all the spas advertise cures for the capitalist ailment known deferentially as Manager-Krankheit, the manager's disease. Says the owner of Baden-Baden's chic Bellevue Hotel, where Greta Garbo stayed through July without stirring a flicker of recognition: "With these rich people, all they really want is to recuperate from their last recuperation."

Indeed, the Kur means more to Germans than treatment for any specific ailment. It assures them sympathy in antiseptic surroundings, connotes that the cure-guest has patriotically worked himself to exhaustion, and allows patients endless opportunity to discuss a favorite topic: food and its effect on the digestive tract. Nearly all spa patrons go on rigorous diets, which make them feel better about overeating the rest of the year. Most treatments seem worse than the ailments they aim to cure. Rising at dawn, the dedicated Kurgast gulps beakers of water whose mineral content--notably sodium chloride, sulphur and iron--makes it smell like Bad Limburger; Marienbad's most famed spring is proudly called The Stinker, and it tastes like well rusted steel wool. The rest of the day they spend soaking, sipping, wading and inhaling as if their lives depended on it--and many believe they do.

Mud Mousse. At Bad Meinberg, sufferers from circulatory disorders are locked into therapeutic gas chambers that are pumped full of carbon dioxide. At Bad Neuenahr, one of West Germany's biggest health resorts, patients with respiratory ailments are sealed in transparent oven-wrap and gently parboiled in an "inhalatorium" full of thermal steam. One of the traditional cures is the Lehmbad, or dirt bath, in which the patient sits in a hole in the ground and marinates himself in a kind of mud mousse. After weeks of exposure to mud and sun, Germans acquire curiously even, cornflake-colored suntans that look as if they had been applied with a paint roller.

For treatment of liver, kidney and other intestinal disorders, Badeaerzte (bath doctors) make patients lie naked on a couch while an attendant pats piping hot mud pies over the affected area. After a few days of such torture, patients often complain that they feel worse than when they arrived. They are then said to be suffering from Badekoller, the bathhouse blues, which, explain cheerful spa doctors, only proves that the regimen is having some effect.

It must, for Germans have been drinking and dunking in thermal springs for 2,000 years, since the Roman legionnaires first used them to recuperate from the wars. New springs are still being discovered, though the latest and hottest (125DEG F.) at the new Bavarian resort of Bad Fussing had to be closed recently when the waters turned out to be rich in bacteria. Doctors have learned curiously little about the medical or psychological effects of the Kur, though a lavishly endowed Institute of Balneology, which opened at Bad Nauheim last month, aims to make long-term studies of this branch of healing. However, the vast majority of patients need no scientific evidence to convince them that the Kur really cures. Like the masochist who bangs his head on the wall because it is so pleasant when he stops, Germans say solemnly: "You can only appreciate the improvement after you get home."

*The word spa comes from a Belgian spa called Spa.

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