The worst came twenty years later, in 1871, with the victory over France that marked the beginning of the so-called Founding Years, in which people all over Germany lost their minds and speculated seemingly at random.7 At that time the Berlin authorities suffered from delusions of grandeur. An enormous building scheme was hatched, that was supposed to last for centuries, and over the years would have incorporated lands with the goal of housing no fewer than 21 million people. The wild fever of speculation, which rattled Berlin in the Founding Years and, as is well known, ended with the Great Crash of 1873, was to a large extent a result of these bloated plans for expansion. All at once, acres of land, which were still producing grain or potatoes, became building plots and in a few months the sandy soil of the Mark Brandenburg was transformed into fields of California gold for its owners. At the beginning of the 1870s, farmers, some of whom had been born into serfdom, became rich overnight, and sometimes millionaires, without the slightest bit of effort or merit. It was then, during the Founding Years, that the expression Millionaire Peasant was coined. Folks everywhere founded companies, purchased and speculated on land, but almost never developed it. For people at that time, nothing was good enough or expensive enough. When something was actually built, two rules held sway: one, that as many apartments as possible were piled under one roof, and two, that the building looked magnificent from the outside. Especially in the outskirts, so-called boulevards were built that ran from one end of the district to the other and then just fizzled out or terminated in a side street. Even the villas erected there were mostly just disguised rental barracks with basement apartments, cramped sleeping quarters, and scaled-back common areas. The vast and pretentious living rooms overlooked the street regardless of whether it ran north, never allowing sunlight to enter the room.
The egoism, shortsightedness and arrogance that gave rise to the rental barracks was the order of the day almost everywhere in Berlin until the World War. If you have a look around the fringes of Berlin, you’ll notice that much has changed since then. And not just the elegant western suburbs with their villas, in Dahlem or in Lichterfelde, but also down in Frohnau by the Stettiner railway, or in Püdersdorf, or closer to Berlin in Britz or Tempelhof. Tempelhof is a particularly good example of what has improved in Berlin since the revolution. You need only compare the houses erected from 1912 to 1914 on the old parade ground with those that lie today in the garden city on Tempelhof Field, each with its own patch of green. More telling than standing in front of the houses is looking at photos taken from a bird’s eye view, as if you were peering down on the premises. At first you see how grim, severe, gloomy, and military the rental barracks look in comparison to the peaceful houses of the garden plots, which are so amicably juxtaposed with one another. And you understand why Adolf Behne, who has done so much for this new Berlin, calls the rental barracks the last of the castle fortresses.8 Because, he says, they arose from a few landowners’ egotistical, brutal struggle over the land that they would dismember and divide among themselves. And this is why rental barracks have the shape of fortified and warlike castles, with their walled-in courtyards. As the owners are locked together in hostile confrontation, so too are the residents living in the hundreds of apartments that usually make up these city blocks. Have a look at the April edition of Uhu magazine and you’ll see images of a completely new form of American skyscraper.9 Long tenement blocks, so to speak, that are either set on their short end so that they project upward, or that lay on their broad side to make long rows of houses. I’m thinking to myself, this must be Uhu magazine’s idea of an April Fools’ joke. But the joke clearly shows how the rental barracks are on the way out: through the abolition of the somber and monumental stone building that has stood still, immovable, and unchanged for centuries. The stone is replaced by a narrow frame of concrete and steel, the compact and impenetrable façades by giant glass plates, and the four blank walls by deep-set and exposed stairs, platforms and roof gardens. The many people that will live in such buildings will gradually be transformed by them. They will be freer, less anxious, and also less belligerent. This future image of the city will inspire people at least as much as airships, automobiles, and ocean liners do today. And they will be grateful to those who led the struggle for liberation from the old, fortress-like, and gloomy barrack city. An important person for Berlin in this regard is Werner Hegemann, author of the book Das steinerne Berlin [Berlin, City of Stone], which offers a history of the city that is very much in favor of this new Berlin and from which you and I have learned all that we now know of the rental barracks.
“Die Mietskaserne,” GS, 7.1, 117–24. Translated by Jonathan Lutes.
The precise date of broadcast of “The Rental Barracks” has not been determined. It was most likely broadcast in the spring or summer of 1930. Benjamin’s reference to the April 1930 issue of Uhu magazine suggests a date at some point after the April 5, 1930 broadcast of “Borsig.” Bracketing it on the other end is the September 14, 1930 publication of Benjamin’s discussion of Werner Hegemann’s Das steinerne Berlin (GS, 3, 260–5), which almost certainly appeared after the broadcast of “The Rental Barracks.” Sabine Schiller-Lerg tentatively concludes that the broadcast took place on April 12, 1930 (Walter Benjamin und der Rundfunk, 112,142, 532).
1 Here, Benjamin’s language echoes the subtitle of Werner Hegemann’s Das steinerne Berlin: Geschichte der größten Mietskasernenstadt der Welt [Berlin, City of Stone: The Largest Tenement City in the World] (Berlin: Kiepenheuer, 1930), to which he will refer below. For Benjamin on Hegemann’s text, see also “Ein Jakobiner von Heute: Zu Werner Hegemanns Das steinerne Berlin [A Jacobin of Our Time: On Werner Hegemann’s Berlin, City of Stone], GS, 3, 260–5, first published in the Frankfurter Zeitung on September 14, 1930.
2 The term Benjamin uses throughout is “Mietskaserne”, which can be translated as both “tenement” and “rental barracks.” To emphasize the military history and resonance, as does Benjamin, we use “rental barracks” here and in the title.
3 It appears that this is a reference to a radio broadcast that has gone missing. Perhaps it is the same text Benjamin refers to in “Borsig” when he mentions having previously spoken about “the construction history of Berlin” (see “Borsig,” 50). Schiller-Lerg has given this reference the provisional title “Baugeschichte Berlins unter Friedrich Wilhelm I” [The Building History of Berlin under Frederick William I] and dates it as having likely been broadcast on Radio Berlin on March 29, 1930 (Walter Benjamin und der Rundfunk, 141–3, 530).