They always say Berliners are so critical. And it’s true. They’re quick-witted, not so easily fooled. They’re bright. But it must be said that as far as their buildings and apartments are concerned, for centuries they’ve gotten the short end of the stick. And if in the beginning they might have blamed the authorities, or the king who dictated what and where to build, things didn’t improve even a tiny bit when they later governed the city themselves; in fact, they got worse. Perhaps they were so free with their skeptical humor and wit because they all too seldom thought about putting them to practical use. And the worst of it is that even though Berliners are regarded rather critically within the Empire, and their city is hardly considered the model for much, their rental barracks have been replicated all over Germany.
Rental barracks — that sounds so military.2 Not only does the word suggest the military, but the rise of the rental barracks is indeed closely tied to the army. Berlin has been a military city since the Hohenzollerns, and there have been times in which the military, that is the soldiers and their families, has constituted one third of Berlin’s entire population. When the Prussian army was not yet so large, the soldiers and their families were often lodged in the homes of townspeople. Fourteen days ago I told you about Berlin’s building history under Frederick William I.3 You heard then how every Berliner was obligated to put up a certain number of soldiers, depending on the size of his house or apartment. This was still possible under Frederick William I; although it was very burdensome for the townspeople, the army was still small and so much was being built that there was no real threat of a housing shortage. When Frederick William I died, Berlin’s garrison numbered roughly 19,000. But when Frederick the Great died in 1786, there were some 36,000 men stationed in Berlin. It was no longer possible to house this number of troops in the old way, so Frederick the Great built a whole series of barracks, eight alone during the last four years of his reign. The barracks housed not only soldiers, but also their families. To us, it may seem funny for soldiers to live in barracks together with women and children. The reasons for this, however, were anything but funny. Simply put, Prussian military culture was so dreadfully inhumane that many were driven to desert at the first opportunity. If soldiers were allowed to go home to their families every evening, or even a few times a week, perhaps only half would return the next morning, which is why they were kept with their families in barracks and seldom allowed to leave, and then only with special permission.
Frederick the Great went on to impose this housing remedy, barracking, on Berlin’s civilian population. Unlike his father, who enlarged the capital horizontally, he extended it vertically, up into the air. He used Paris as a model, but this was unwarranted. Paris was a fortress; the city could not expand beyond its forts and bastions. And since its 150,000 citizens made it Europe’s largest city, the Parisians had no choice but to construct buildings of many stories. Berlin in Frederick the Great’s day, however, was even less of a fortress than it is now. Thus, the city could easily have been extended horizontally. When the Emperor of China at that time was shown images of buildings of such unusual height, he said disdainfully: “Europe must be a very small land indeed if the people have so little space on the ground that they must live in the air.” For the Berliners’ health, of course, the old building scheme would have been better; instead they were crammed with as many people as possible into tenements that were as high as possible. But the economic effects resulting from these constructions were even more dire than the health risks. Since Frederick the Great, people no longer cared to develop and build on new and inexpensive land along the former city limits; rather, building upon already developed lots, they constructed multi-story buildings and rental barracks where once there had been one- and two-story single-family homes. Because these rental barracks, with their many tenants, brought in much more for their owners than the previous smaller houses, the land on which they stood became more and more valuable. Very soon this influenced the prices of undeveloped lots, which could still be found all across the city. When building lots were sold, sellers could demand prices buyers could only afford if they stuck to the rental barrack scheme and built one apartment piled on top of the next to offset the high property prices with more rent.
A description of Berlin from the year of Frederick the Great’s death shows how awful things already looked then. But in those days, of course, the ill-effects of this building style were rarely visible, so that Nicolai, a born Berliner and the writer who gave us this description, is filled with pride that almost half of the apartment blocks had handsome side and rear buildings, which in many areas of the city were almost as densely populated as the front ones. There were buildings in which about sixteen families lived. In most cities, 6,500 apartment blocks would likely house no more than 145,000 residents.4 That makes for an average of twenty-two occupants per building. In Berlin today, however, we take it for granted that there are apartment buildings that house well over 500 people. One hundred and twenty years after Nicolai’s account, an apartment house on Ackerstraße is home to over 1,000 people. It’s at number 132. Go and see for yourselves. If you look from the street down the row of courtyards, it’s as if you were looking into a tunnel.5 In Nicolai’s time, the industrialization of Berlin was still in its infancy. The real catastrophe would occur much later, when all attempts by Baron vom Stein to help Berliners through Prussian municipal reforms went awry and, in 1858, the horrific Berlin development plan was executed, making way for the rental barracks to dominate.6 To understand today’s Berlin, we must take a look at this development plan, according to which the average rental barracks had three courtyards. Each of these courtyards was required — it sounds completely unimaginable, but it’s true — to be just slightly over five square meters in size. Rental barracks were laid out with twenty meters of street front and extended fifty-six meters deep. If such a house occupied the customary seven stories, including the ground floor, up to 650 people could be crammed inside. You have to wonder how such poor and harmful regulations were possible. And really, the rationale was as convoluted and unhealthy as the homes it produced.
The story begins quite harmlessly. The great development plan was intended to resolve Berlin’s problems for many decades to come. The plan was drawn up in the police headquarters. Then it turned out that many of the planned streets crossed land held by private owners. The state, which was executing the development scheme, would have needed to reimburse those private owners. That would have cost a lot of money, especially at a time when there was still no law by which property could be seized in the public interest. If the state wanted to build its streets but not spend any money, it had to win over the property owners. Some crafty public officials said to themselves: We need to allow people to develop their properties, so that they can get much more money from renters than if they were to sell to us, at such a high price, the little plots of land that we need for our streets. This clever idea would bring about the greatest misfortune. And there was worse. As it happened, the scheme was not carried out according to plan. The plan, originally including only the main roads, was to be expanded to open up side streets that would have provided much air and light. But later on, the thinking changed. The money for the new streets was to be saved, leaving these massive building lots packed with giant rental barracks only occasionally intersected by streets.