Humans are vulnerable in water. Beaches have red flags; swimming pools have flashy warning signs to remind us of our vulnerability when we just want to cool down in the midst of a searing heatwave. Pool rules are essential, especially when children are around, or tourists who don’t know about the local safety measures. With pictograms and whistling lifeguards, swimming pools usually manage to communicate danger without requiring visitors to pass a language test at the entrance. Until now, that is.
In the eastern German city of Halle, a public swimming lake turned away visitors who did not speak German during one of the hottest weeks of the year. The operator of the Heidebad natural pool at Heidesee lake, Mathias Nobel, argued that people without sufficient language skills may fail to understand the rules and thereby put themselves at risk. He said that as a trained lifeguard, he recently had to rescue a small child without armbands from the water, since the lake, a flooded former opencast mine, had a steeply sloping shoreline.
