Lovin' their elevator: why Germans are loopy about their revolving lifts

As the paternoster cabin in which he was slowly descending into the bowels of Stuttgart’s town hall plunged into darkness, Dejan Tuco giggled infectiously. He pointed out the oily cogs of its internal workings that were just about visible as it shuddered to the left, and gripped his stomach when it rose again with a gentle jolt. “We’re not supposed to do the full circuit,” he said. “But that’s the best way to feel like you’re on a ferris wheel or a gondola.”

The 12-year-old German-Serb schoolboy was on a roll, spending several hours one day last week riding the open elevator shaft known as a paternoster, a 19th-century invention that has just been given a stay of execution after campaigners persuaded Germany’s government to reverse a decision to ban its public use.

That the doorless lift, which consists of two shafts side by side within which a chain of open cabins descend and ascend continuously on a belt, has narrowly escaped becoming a victim of safety regulations, has everything to do with a deeply felt German affection for what many consider an old-fashioned yet efficient form of transport.

In the UK, where paternosters were invented in the 1860s, only one or two are believed to be in use. In Germany which first adopted them in the 1870s, there are an estimated 250 and there was an outcry, particularly among civil servants, when they were brought to a standstill this summer while the legislation was reviewed.

Officials in Stuttgart were among the loudest protesters against the labour minister Andrea Nahles’ new workplace safety regulations, which stated that the lifts could only be used by employees trained in paternoster riding.

“It took the heart out of this place when our paternoster was brought to a halt, and it slowed down our work considerably,” said Wolfgang Wölfle, Stuttgart’s deputy mayor, who vociferously fought the ban and called for the reinstatement of the town hall’s lift, which has been running since 1956.

“They suit the German character very well. I’m too impatient to wait for a conventional lift and the best thing about a paternoster is that you can hop on and off it as you please. You can also communicate with people between floors when they’re riding on one. I see colleagues flirt in them all the time,” he added, celebrating its reopening at a recent town hall party to which hundreds of members of the public were invited.

Among the streams of those who jumped on and off as tunes such as Roxette’s Joyride and Aerosmith’s Love in an Elevator pumped out of speakers, were a Polish woman and her poodle, couples who held hands in the anxious seconds before hopping on board, a one-legged man who joked that the paternoster was not to blame for the loss of his limb, and Dejan, who rushed to the town hall straight from school and spent three hours tirelessly riding up and down. Some passengers were as confident as ballet dancers, others somewhat more hesitant.

In officialese the lifts are referred to as Personenumlaufaufzüge – people circulation lifts – while a popular bureaucrats’ nickname for them is Beamtenbagger or “civil servant excavator”. The name paternoster – Latin for “our father” – is a reference to one of the prayers said by Catholics using rosary beads, which are meditatively passed through the hand, just as the cabins are in perpetual motion around the shaft.

British in origin, they were invented by Peter Ellis, a Liverpudlian civil engineer and architect. In 1876 the General Post Office in London got one, which is often referred to as the first in the world, although Ellis had installed a paternoster in Oriel Chambers, Liverpool, eight years before.

Charlie Chaplin is said to have started the myth still circulating to this day, especially by schoolchildren trying to dare each other to complete the whole circuit, that if the passenger stays in the paternoster once it has reached the last floor, they either risk being squashed by its roof or the cabin will turn upside down and they come down standing on their heads.

The new page of rules that is required reading before riding on the Stuttgart machine does nothing to disabuse novices of that notion. It warns of the “risk of being crushed … between car and landing”, and states that the paternoster is only to be ridden “at the user’s own risk”.

These days the lifts are mainly to be found in administrative buildings such as government ministries, town halls and police headquarters. But a ban in west Germany on building new paternosters that has existed since 1974, owing to safety concerns and disability access regulations, together with the expense of maintaining them, means they are a dying breed.

Aficionados have underscored their popularity in Germany by using them to stage everything from theatre and dance performances to classical concerts, speed dating, and even political canvassing (in which voters have the length of a paternoster circuit to question election candidates).

Film directors have frequently seized on their dramatic potential, such as the 1948 picture Berlin Express, about a kidnapped peace activist.

In Murke’s Collected Silences, a popular short story about the postwar generational relationships in Germany, the main character, Doktor Murke, starts his working day at Cologne’s broadcasting house with a “panic breakfast” which involves him hopping into the paternoster and riding to the top for the thrill he gets from the prospect of getting stuck. Nowadays, the very paternoster that inspired Heinrich Böll’s story is the setting for a popular weekly radio celebrity interview by West German Radio called the WDR2 Paternoster. .

From Graham Greene to David Lodge, writers have immortalised the contraption in English literature. In Lodge’s Changing Places, it is the scene of a chase, involving American academic Morris Zapp, who lauds it as a “profoundly poetic machine” that “eliminated all tedious waiting” and “imparted to the ordinary, quotidian action of taking an elevator a certain existential edge of drama, for one had to time one’s leap into and out of the moving compartment with finesse and positive commitment”.

Jumping on to one recently with all the prowess of a veteran rider, the editor in chief of the Berlin-based leftwing paper Neues Deutschland referred to the juddering metal cage as “the socialist among elevators”. Together with a slim camera man, Tom Strohschneider squeezes into one – a relic of communist East Germany, clad in 1970s plywood – on a weekly basis to record a podcast called “1’24”, the time it takes to complete the full circuit.

“I’m used to talking about the Greek crisis, or the recent train drivers’ strike, but little did I expect that the paternoster would turn into my subject,” Strohschneider said.

“Paternoster users of the world, unite!” he appealed, in a podcast dedicated to the lift during the recent ban, which included appeals from his reporters who pledged to occupy the lift until the labour minister saw sense.

Strohschneider believes the reason why many paternosters still exist in Germany, relative to elsewhere in Europe, is because they suit the “German penchant for reliability, efficiency and resistance to change. They are like Angela Merkel. They’ve been around a long time, they work well and because of that they give us a sense of security.”

Germany’s labour minister, caved in under pressure from campaigns such as those by Strohschneider and his staff, and the civil servants at Stuttgart town hall. Nahles claimed she had failed to read the small print in the new law restricting the use of paternosters, saying had she done so she would not have signed off on it.

On 1 June, when it was scheduled to come into effect, she reacted to the outcry by announcing it would be amended and posting on her Facebook page: “The paternoster is the VW Beetle among lifts. Not many people ride them any more, but many people love them.”

Cornelius Mager of Munich’s Paternoster Association, which was established in 1994 to fight off the last time the government attempted to ban the lifts, said arguments that the contraptions were dangerous, with some even comparing them to guillotines, were largely unfounded.

“There have been repeated claims that people have died riding paternosters, but no one has ever been able to produce a single case,” he said. “Sometimes you get an idiot who tries to take a ladder into one and that obviously can’t end well. But I think crossing the road is probably more dangerous and taking the stairs can also be a fraught business.”