Hausschuhe!

Walk into the front door of any German house and you will be confronted with shoes. Shoes, shoes, and more shoes. Shelves with shoes of all kinds; Birkenstocks, Jack Wolfskin hiking boots, trainers, and of course, the essential Hausschuhe – or house shoes. More often than not, there is no space inside a German flat for all the shoes required, so they tend to overspill into the communal corridor outside the flat. Yes, you will often see shelves all the way up to the ceiling in corridors stacked with shoes.

In Germany, it is of utmost importance to have the right kind of shoes for the right kind of weather. Be prepared, be sensible, be practical. A requirement at my daughter’s nursery, for example, is that she has her “Gummistiefel” (welly boots), her winter boots, and her Hausschuhe with her on a daily basis and I see the advantages – for one, the weather here is extremely unpredictable, so it is always best to have the different options at hand.

Hausschuhe are indeed perhaps the most practical of shoes I have ever come across. The concept makes complete sense; you get home, take off your outdoor shoes and put on your indoor ones. I like the concept of going round to other people’s houses and respecting their home by taking your shoes off (although it does require a certain amount of forward planning with regard to wearing clean, matching, non-holey socks). Hausschuhe keep your feet warm in the winter and the floors clean. Many Germans opt for the Birkenstock variety, but you can basically choose what you want as long as you have a designated pair of house shoes that you, under no circumstances, wear outside.

My daughter’s first pair of Hausschuhe were bright pink and had little glittery butterflies on them – they were so cute that all the other children in the nursery wanted to touch them and take them off, making her very possessive of and, dare I say, obsessed with her house shoes.  

I will never forget the time I came home from my pilates class and walked into her bedroom with my trainers on. She was sitting on her changing table reading a bedtime story with her Daddy. She immediately stopped what she was doing, looked down at my feet, pointed, and said “Hausschuhe!” I didn’t know until then that the word existed in her vocabulary. The mere fact that the word Hausschuhe was the second word I had ever heard her utter in German, second only to “nein”, highlights the importance of house shoes in German society.

Walk into our house these days and don’t expect to be greeted with a hello, cuddle or a kiss. If you dare walk past the shelf of shoes in the house (yes, we have one, too) with your outdoor shoes on, be prepared for a little voice to pipe up: “Hausschuhe!”