Abstract
In late-nineteenth-century Berlin, the rapid growth of tenements (Mietskaserne) housing the city’s expanding lower class population provoked a strong moral reaction from bourgeois social reformers in Germany, who railed against the perceived social disorders found therein. This essay explores the less understood moral terms upon which the problem of mass housing was articulated in response to the growth of the tenement system in Berlin, from the city’s first housing crisis in 1871 to the first widespread photographic inquiry of Berlin’s dwelling conditions in the first decade of the twentieth century. As this essay shows, debates on housing reform were not confined to bourgeois circles of social and public health expertise—they pervaded popular literature and formed an important part of a broader social imaginary that gave meaning to the urban environment and the task of nation-building at large.
Introduction
The eighteenth-century fortifications that once surrounded Berlin were gradually dismantled during the 1860s, having been made obsolete as working-class tenement blocks, or “rental barracks” (Mietskaserne), continued to encroach on the urban periphery at a swift pace. As an economic system, the Mietskaserne had two functions: first, to accommodate the forces of capitalist-industrialist production (requiring a high concentration of labor in cities) and second, to facilitate land speculation. 1 Taking the form of densely packed perimeter blocks, the Mietskaserne often had elaborate historicist façades facing the street, increasing their apparent value and shielding from public view the horrid conditions within them (which for bourgeois reformers included poor hygiene, overcrowding, criminal activity, and the spread of socialist ideas). While Berlin was fast becoming a cosmopolitan city with high cultural standards akin to those of Paris or London, the spread of the Mietskaserne represented Berlin’s “other” modernity: the city of the undifferentiated masses.
The evocation of the Mietskaserne in reformist literature served to stress the dangers of two phenomena: capitalist greed and the rise of proletarian culture. The housing question (Wohnungsfrage) emerged as a response to these conditions in the late 1840s and was a mainstay in debates on urban reform until World War 1, addressing itself to a realm of ethics that, as Engels famously mocked, conveniently eschewed the existence of class inequality inherent in the capitalist system. 2 Housing reformers (mostly politicians, medical and public health experts, economists, and nascent social scientists) promoted different solutions and levels of intervention in this realm, including more municipal intervention, more private philanthropy, and more education among the lower classes. Their moral arguments tended to reach a stronger consensus. By the end of the nineteenth century, a common understanding emerged that both homeownership and the building of single-family detached houses were essential in promoting, among the working class, correct German middle-class (bürgerlich) values, including parsimony, sobriety, diligence, and industriousness.
The bourgeois reformers’ moralizing response to the housing question is generally well known. Yet, this discourse is still little understood, constructed in the classic historiography of urban thought as a foil to the analysis of the arrival of the urban planning as an autonomous science at the end of the nineteenth century, freeing housing from the realm of misguided medico-moral politics. 3 While it is certainly true that dwelling conditions in Germany’s major cities were slower to improve for much of the nineteenth century, this was not owing to the absence of a sophisticated recognition of housing as a complex field. This essay attends to the terms and lines of intellectual continuity through which the reform discourse on the housing question was constructed from the mid-nineteenth century to the early 1900s.
It first explores early liberal-conservative debates on housing that emerged in response to the specter of socialism in Germany in the 1840s. In these debates, a natural ethical basis for urban growth was sought through reconfiguring the relations between domestic space and the modern city, effectively aiming to transform the homogeneous urban masses into productive members of the German people (Volk). This ethic was established not on exclusively racialist terms or on vague Christian notions of domestic virtue but on the growing authority of statistical and sociological knowledge of the urban population, constructed through psychosocial typologies (i.e., distinguishing industrious, artisanal, and parsimonious individuals from criminal or “sunken” individuals). The essay then explores Berlin’s late-nineteenth-century urban growth and the concurrent popular perceptions of the city’s housing crises, whereby the housing question gained a certain dynamism in the popular imagination in relation to the task of nation-building at large. While the discourse on the housing question in Germany helped produce the notion of an ethical urbanism aimed at humanizing the city, it did so by naturalizing the same system of urban development that initially led to the spread of the Mietskaserne.
Asceticism and the City
In the late 1840s, the German housing reformer Victor Aimé Huber returned from France with visions of cooperative ownership, which he reconciled with his conservative outlook via his promotion of joint-stock housing companies that combined worker self-help with help “from above.” His model was realized through the formation of the Berlin Cooperative Building Society (Berliner Gemeinnützige Baugesellschaft) in 1847—the first of its kind in Germany to construct reformed housing, designed specifically for familial privacy and promising workers a path to homeownership. The vision that Huber had experienced in France was the specter of philosopher Charles Fourier’s socialist Phalanx—a utopian model for an agricultural community that would live according to Fourier’s theory of the twelve passions (the uninhibited exercising of which, like notes played on a piano, would lead society into perfect harmony). 4 The individual Phalanx was to be composed of around 1,600 people of sufficient variety in passions, such that each member could find their sociability in “parties” that came together around a shared set of desires, however perverse—from sexual to gastronomic ones. In Fourier’s utopia, there was to be no normality, and no morality. The heart of the Phalanx where the parties took place was the phalanstère, a building that was to take the form of a palace akin to the one in Versailles. Fourier criticized traditional village communities based on small-scale family economies as being unproductive, arguing that the kind of economy needed to sustain the Phalanx sprang only from “large combinations,” for “God had to create a social theory applicable to large masses and not to three or four families.” 5
While the cooperative spirit of the phalanstère remained a tantalizing point of reference for reformers across Europe, the epistemological claims that structured Fourier’s universe of cosmic harmonies were being increasingly challenged by the positivism of the modern sciences. The bourgeoning field of psychology swallowed the philosophical study of the passions to which Fourier’s study conformed (albeit in radical terms) as the issue of housing began to be articulated in socio-psychological terms vastly different from those of Fourier. In Germany, increasing currency was given to the role of emotions (and their self-disciplining) in maintaining social cohesion, specifically in regard to moral feeling (sittliches Gefühl). Joseph Ben Prestel has shown that, as advances were made in the discipline of folk psychology, morality (Sitte) was increasingly read as an emotional practice that was able to hold urban populations together. Within folk psychology, the idea took hold that morality did not exist externally as a force to suppress passions (to be handed down by a “sermon, a small treatise, or a Cabinet order,” as one psychologist mocked) but existed internally, to be cultivated through the right social conditions. 6 While it was clear that desires like love preexisted in humans, morality also preexisted as an emotional practice that stabilized feelings such as love, making them into more permanent connections, such as marriage.
As a social reality that existed underneath modern political and economic structures, the emotional practice of Sitte was posed as an object of empirical observation that cut through doctrine. As Sabine Hake has shown, early theorists of socialist movements such as Leopold von Stein turned to new psychological theories of mass behavior to understand proletarian culture beyond a crude economic determinism. In more conservative studies on the working classes, emotions like hatred, wrath, and resentment over lack were perceived to define the proletariat as an emerging estate in modern society. 7
In his popular four-volume Natural History of the German People as the Foundation of German Social Policy (1851-1855), the German proto-sociologist Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl elaborated on the social fabric of the proletariat in its historical guise (which he argued was “uprooted” compared with the strength of the pre-modern urban artisans and burghers). 8 Riehl conducted extensive fieldwork into German folk custom for the purpose of constructing an elaborate typology of social groups, which included the burghers, whose strong moral feeling for family life instilled them with a sense of sobriety and self-moderation that upheld the natural equilibrium of the German people (Volk). The self-identity of the burgher in pre-modern times was strongly tied to the city (“his town—not his house—was his castle”) and for Riehl these values had passed over in modern times not to the bourgeoisie as a distinct class but to the petit-bourgeois artisans (Mittelstand). This group became a bastion of political stability in Riehl’s rhetoric. 9 He labeled the category of the “fourth estate” as consisting of the likes of gypsies, Jewish peddlers and intellectuals, the idle proletariat, and other uprooted members of society for whom the concept of family was less instilled. 10 The distinctions between these two groups—the Mittelstand and the proletarian masses—were slippery in Riehl’s social theory. What distinguished the good burgher from both the modern proletariat and bourgeoisie, Riehl vaguely asserted, was that the former sought wealth for honor rather than reward and was driven by a sense of vocation rather than passion.
Riehl’s social theory was significant in advancing a mode of reform based on giving the fourth estate “a history, a home, a social sphere,” such that they might become productive members of the Volk, laying down moral foundations of urban life that avoided economic determinism but did not rely exclusively on racial or religious arguments. 11 For Riehl, the city was not sinful per se—it could be reformed through educating the public about their productive role in controlling the fate of urban growth. As the title of his volume suggests, Riehl imagined his research as an applied, populist form of social research that had an “ascetic character” in reforming Mittelstand families toward a greater awareness of their historically ingrained values and their role in strengthening the nation. 12
While Riehl endorsed the model of the extended family, his theories translated well into liberalism’s principal ideology of the importance of the nuclear family and the “separate spheres.” In the field of historical economics in Germany, the idea of the nuclear family household served as both an “object of and framework for economic thought.” 13 While political economy addressed production at the scale of the nation—the “big family”—it addressed policy intervention at the scale of the nuclear family, which, based on ethical love rather than on other passions such as greed, served to ennoble self-interest (and ennoble the pursuit of capital). 14
Riehl’s self-admittedly nostalgic corporatist social theory would, ironically, come to underpin the logic of a very new and modern form of capitalism that arose in Germany, which based itself on an organic conception of national economic growth. As Parker Daly Everett has argued, corporatist capitalism emerged in the late nineteenth century as the dominant social condition shaping the discourse on urban growth (especially in Berlin). This discourse challenged the excesses of capitalist greed, but, in the process, naturalized other types of activities conducted by industrialists that focused on the concrete quality of production. This discourse rejected the abstractions of finance capitalism (personified by Jews creating “rigged capital” by speculating on Berlin’s housing market), while aestheticizing the productive, material, technological side of capitalist growth that appeared to be more socially concrete, organic, and historically embedded. 15 Riehl’s initial emphasis on the importance of vocation, and the power of Mittelstand production in shaping the fate of German cities, would find later relevance in urban debates concerned with creating the right material conditions, such as homeownership and family privacy, for the natural growth of the Mittelstand as the base of the nation.
Unsurprisingly, the housing question grew as a convenient catchword that allowed reformers to position their social critique of the proletariat not on class-interested political terms but on ethical terms oriented toward securing homeownership as well as the building of houses that protected the privacy of the family—creating a solid Mittelstand base out of the proletarian masses. The housing question conveniently bound issues of dwelling shortage, dwelling affordability, and dwelling quality together with a theory of an organic society that was based on the growing authority of empirical research.
Two groups led the way in expanding the housing question toward these aims in the 1860s. The publications of the Association for Public Health (Verein für Öffentliche Gesundheitspflege) were significant in bringing morality and hygiene into a common epistemological frame through analyses of housing conditions and standards in German cities. 16 The Congress of German Political Economists [Kongress Deutscher Volkswirte] took an interest in the housing question to advance a style of inquiry aimed at reconciling the authority of the empirical social sciences (established by theorists like Stein and Riehl) with a liberal urban regime—one that promised an upward socially leveling effect on urban populations rather than a downward one. At the same time, the discipline of folk psychology was demonstrating the complexity of human emotions and behaviors affecting economic decisions, showing them to not always be governed by pure rationality. Liberal economists likewise increasingly acknowledged that the “celestial law” of Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the market (and the purely rational behaviors that were hitherto perceived to govern it) could no longer be defended and needed to be brought into the realm of ethical human thought and action. 17
A host of statistical and economic studies followed which aimed to readdress the housing question through understanding the psychological relationship of the urban inhabitant to their dwelling. The German statistician Étienne Laspeyres’s 1869 study on the housing conditions of the Parisian working class sought to classify four “levels” of worker morality through their dwelling condition. This ranged from “good” (a full-time and industrious worker who occupies an orderly, clean room with furniture in a good state) to “very bad.” “Very bad” designated an individual who transcended licentiousness and drunken behavior, whose life was nothing but a “series of wicked behaviours and excessiveness of all types.” This individual “occupied a room of grime and pests, with no light or air, no furniture other than rags,” which contained a “stifling stench” that could only be cultivated through a learned routine. 18 “I am convinced that moral elevation is not achieved through moral preaching but by external factors,” Laspeyres concluded from the statistical findings, “and such external advantage by which one should possess an inner striving is the acquisition of a dignified dwelling.” 19
In 1865, the housing reformer and liberal journalist Julius Faucher declared that the answer to the housing question was not to be found in the “sphere of political economy, but essentially in cultural-historical and mass-psychological research.” 20 For Faucher, the solution to housing was to normalize national cultural aspirations toward homeownership as well as the sense of privacy offered by the single-family detached dwelling, where the family could gain material and moral independence and thus further gain the “zeal” necessary for the formation of capital. 21 This level of normality, for Faucher, excluded Irish and Jewish immigrants as well as other paupers who were merely “preserved artificially by industry between life and death” and who did not aspire to the moral benefits of homeownership. 22 Promoting the expansion of a zoned suburban residential belt for Berlin, Faucher was the first to pose the housing question in inextricably geographical terms. 23
Another prominent member of the Kongress, Eduard Wiss, advised that the housing question ought to be expanded further to incorporate knowledge developed in art history, but regretted that traditional art historiography was too focused on the “external form” of buildings rather than the “purposiveness of the construction.” 24 The discipline should strive, instead, to capture the “social forms of life of the people through the construction and furnishing of their dwelling houses.” 25 Wiss encouraged architectural historians to bring their discipline closer to the kinds of studies of material culture provided by Gustav Freytag and Georg Landau, which was already being popularized in magazines like Die Gartenlaube. 26 Traditional German building culture ought not to be of interest purely to the antiquarian but could be made into an instrument of housing reform. If such a knowledge base were developed, argued Wiss, housing reformers would know, for example, that English cottages had developed from old Germanic customs, and that the tenements that characterized many German cities were, in fact, Roman in origin. 27
As the housing question began to speak to a broader geographical imagination, the boundaries between scholarly and popular discourse on the city became increasingly blurred. It soon became difficult for political theory to separate its notion of urban society from that presented in depictions of the proletariat in popular novels. These blurred boundaries attested, as Hake has observed, to the “mutual dependency of scholarly and literary practices” in shaping a social imaginary constructed upon fears of the proletarian masses. 28 The circulation of imaginative literature and serialized feuilletons in Germany helped fashion popular perceptions of the urban poor through fictionalized character tropes of the sort found in Dickens’s East End of London and Eugène Sue’s Paris (with both these writers finding immense popularity among German audiences). These tropes formed an important part of visually and textually constructing the modern city. As Ian Hunter has argued in relation to the emergence of literary education in nineteenth-century Britain, the production of an urban “topography of class differences—criminal, dangerous, sunken, sinking, laboring, artisanal, respectful”—functioned as a product of a normative grid that was largely constructed from the exemplary actions of fictional characters found in the likes of Dickens’s novels. 29 Similarly, Robin Evans has argued that the “moral geography” constructed around London’s rookeries, which helped form a hierarchy of character (and upon which the rhetoric of housing reform was largely based), was “perhaps no more than a literary device.” 30
As Peter Fritzsche has shown, through the mass circulation of print material describing real or fictional urban “types,” Berlin’s urban population became highly trained at reading the city as a moral topography. 31 With an estimated readership of over 1 million (the largest of any magazine in Germany during the late nineteenth century), the Leipzig-based Die Gartenlaube, in particular, formed a crucial frame of cultural reference for Germany’s liberal-conservative Mittelstand base. The popular historical literature that it published, in particular, served the task of nation-building (particularly in the literature directed at educating women about the national importance of maintaining proper family life in the home), setting an important reading context for its coverage of topical issues such as Berlin’s growing housing crisis. 32 The issue of families being able to find appropriate housing in the city was particularly acute in its reportage, with landlords reported to be reluctant to accommodate families with many children. The author Max Ring decried such conditions when he described, in 1857, a recent venture into a Berlin workhouse (the Ox-Head) for Die Gartenlaube’s audience. He described walking through a gallery of human misery, which according to Ring, Dante, or Peter Breughel the Younger could not capture (Figures 1 and 2). Ring observed a cast of downtrodden characters, from honest craftsmen and industrious workers (who got to the workhouse through no fault of their own but through the reluctance of landlords) to the “self-inflicted” wretchedness of the majority of the workhouse inhabitants. The former, Ring lamented, would inevitably sink into the misery of the latter if they could not swiftly locate a suitable dwelling. 33
Portrait of the “sick and insane” in Max Ring, “Das Berliner Arbeitshaus,” Die Gartenlaube, no. 34 (1857): 465.
Ring glances into the courtyard to observe the boisterous laughter of “street prostitutes” teasing a new member of the workhouse who has been brought in by the police. She turns away with shame and indignation (“soon she will befriend them and lose the last bit of shame remaining”).
Likewise, Die Gartenlaube reported on positive developments in reformed housing that had an upward leveling effect on worker morality, such as the famous town of Mulhouse in eastern France which an industrialist had built for his workers in 1853. One reporter who ventured into Mulhouse to document the conditions there in 1865 remarked pleasingly on the transformations in both the workers’ morals and physical appearance when supplied with a modest family cottage which, after fourteen years of payments, they could own outright (Figure 3). One inhabitant of Mulhouse, a pregnant housewife, allegedly described to the reporter that since moving into Mulhouse, her husband had forsaken drinking and gambling that had characterized his life in the city to pay off their house and “be free as soon as possible.” 34
The worker’s quarter in Mulhouse.
Growth and Crisis
In the few years leading up to Germany’s unification in 1871, Berlin would undergo immense change as the city’s outer suburbs grew to accommodate the massive workforce entering the city (Huber’s cooperatives, as the only reformed housing in the city, largely proving to have little effect on improving general conditions). Under the direction of James Hobrecht, the Prussian Police Planning Authority began to implement an ambitious expansion plan for Berlin in 1862 which came to be known as the Hobrecht Plan (Figure 4). The plan was an expansive grid composed of a series of housing blocks and ring roads which extended past the city’s old eighteenth-century fortifications. Hobrecht’s tabula rasa design approach encouraged rampant real estate speculation and facilitated the spread of Berlin’s infamous Mietskaserne. These blocks were usually composed of a street-facing Vorderhaus (“front-house”) with the addition of Seitenflügel (side wings) and a Hinterhaus (rear building) accessible only through the courtyard. While Mittelstand families typically occupied the street-facing apartments, poorer classes tended to occupy the rear apartments. These blocks came to dominate Berlin’s lower class immigrant neighborhoods, particularly in the northern districts of the city. 35
The Hobrecht Plan from 1862.
Hobrecht articulated his response to the housing question in an 1868 book on public hygiene, in which he questioned the “apostle” Faucher and his widely accepted promotion of English suburban planning principles for Germany, explaining thus: who could deny that anyone who lives in their own [detached] house can better protect himself from the harmful effects, both moral and physical, of the so-called “tenement barracks”? The fact is, however, that this can do little to solve the housing question. It should be remembered that in such matters, the poor are the ones that deserve special consideration.
36
Hobrecht believed that, on the basis of Germany’s laissez-faire economic liberalism, the types of living conditions desired by the market would naturally create more competition and would thus create a higher standard of housing. Tenement apartment housing would, for Hobrecht, have a positive leveling social effect; the affluent would have closer contact with the lower classes and thus would gain everyday insight into the general conditions affecting the majority of urban dwellers. In turn, the wealthy could act as exemplars for the poor. Warning of the moral dangers of worker-dominated suburbs, Hobrecht enlivened this ideal situation of socially mixed conviviality for his readers. He described poor but industrious cobblers and seamstresses living in the rear buildings, doing odd jobs for the more wealthy inhabitants occupying the Vorderhaus, and described both poor and rich children walking side by side on their way to their public and private schools, respectively. 37
The Hobrecht Plan would infamously fall short of achieving these moralizing ideals in the following decades. Given the large amount of capital needed to manage and partition the large blocks created by Hobrecht, this duty fell into the hands of large companies. 38 Individuals with stakes in the buying and selling of the new urban blocks belonged to the new propertied elite (the Besitzbürgertum) and consisted of a heterogeneous group of “real estate corporations, banks, individual speculators, contractors and landlords.” 39 An artificial short supply in the housing market left the vast majority of the petit bourgeoisie and the working classes to endure the worst of the excessively high rental prices—forcing them in many cases to take on working-class lodgers.
As far as Berlin’s real estate was concerned, the most lucrative profits in the 1870s were to be had speculating on land values, with only marginal profits to be made in the building industry itself as speculators quickly sold off plots of land which left builders scraping together enough capital (Baugeld) for tenement construction. 40 Despite tenement construction itself being a relatively fruitless industry, a kind of industrious, do-it-yourself mentality became highly prominent within the construction industry, in which, as Håkan Forsell remarks, “all imaginable social strata, classes and would-be craftsmen could try their luck.” 41 Real estate remained a mainstay in the stock market during the 1870s although it formed a relatively small percentage of speculative activity. In Berlin, the business elite’s various spheres of activity formed a growing real estate culture in Berlin which circulated on daily stock exchange newspapers such as the Berliner Börsen-Zeitung. The flurry of industrial and commercial activity that occurred in the wake of German unification was so characteristic of this era that it came to be known as the Gründerzeit (literally founders’ years, in reference to the speculators who founded the joint-stock companies).
The sense of urgency for efficient administration in the domain of housing was fueled by the housing shortage (Wohnungsnot) that started to plague the city following the boom. As Berlin’s old fortifications were removed in a piecemeal manner from the 1860s onward, shantytowns began to appear on the city’s periphery. The area near Cottbusser Tor, to the south of the city, was marked out on the Hobrecht Plan as an area for intense developed. However, by the 1870s, it formed the largest concentration of shanty dwellers. The shanties located at Cottbusser Tor were constructed of materials which, as one newspaper reported in June 1872, were gathered from demolition sites: “windows and doors from all sorts of demolished houses have found use here, and the vestiges of early wallpapers and oil paints speak of a ‘lost splendour.’” 42 Another equally critical Viennese newspaper described the shanties in Cottbusser Tor as being made of walls created from rotten boards, scraps of oilcloth, old theater decorations, and old bits of furniture. 43 The men who lived there, the newspaper reported, were mostly craftsmen, journeymen, and workers, and the women and children were made to “dispense with the ‘domestic hearth’” as they “wash and cook on the street in front of their shanty.” 44
Other newspapers spoke more favorably of the shantytown, describing it as a new frontier that possessed a distinctly American pioneering spirit, where German families lived in rudimentary conditions but nonetheless cultivated their domestic lifestyles through the construction and maintenance of their wooden huts. Cottbusser Tor was frequently depicted with a flag and a shop selling beer and other provisions at its entrance (Figures 5 and 6). In a semi-fictional 1872 article for Die Gartenlaube, Max Ring once again returned to tracing the fate of his hardworking laborers and industrious craftsmen in a report on a trip to the Cottbusser Tor shantytown, in which he described workers who shunned the city’s workhouses and found a place within the shanties as productive entrepreneurs and self-builders rather than as idle beggars. The article began with a fictional account of the writer and his friend making their way to visit the Cottbusser Tor shantytown—dubbed the “Berlin Republic of Barackia.” The writer’s friend asked if he had heard of those in the shantytown who had managed to escape the “contaminated gutters and dingy cesspools” of the tenement city.
45
The writer replied, You can’t be talking about those unfortunate people who, because of the prevailing housing shortage, have nowhere else to go? I believe that the poor should be the object of compassion rather than ridicule. “Unfortunate?!” cried my friend almost indignantly. “They are just as unfortunate as the American hillbilly, who certainly would not exchange his admittedly crude blockhouse, which is nevertheless comfortable and healthy, for our miserable tenements. In any case, right now, these poor people live better and happier in their shanties than in the wretched attics and dank cellar holes that they occupied before.”
46
As the protagonists made their way to Cottbusser Gate, they discussed the abnormal rental conditions which had made landlords reluctant to accept large families, driving these families to the shanties. The writer asked, “But we still have shelters for the homeless and the workhouses, which offer refuges for such sad cases?” to which his friend replied that the “honest worker or industrious craftsman” shunned contact with the workhouse, which consisted of work-shy vagabonds, wanton prostitutes, and other rabble. 47
Sketch of the Berlin shanties in Cottbusser Tor in a Viennese newspaper, in Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt, August 18, 1872: 1.
The Berlin shanties in Cottbusser Tor “sketched from nature” by L. Loeffler, in Max Ring, “Ein Besuch in Barackia,” Die Gartenlaube, no. 28 (1872): 459.
As they reached Cottbusser Gate, the two friends encountered the sight of Barackia, composed of a few hundred families occupying wooden huts. As they walked through the shantytown, they found a host of small entrepreneurs who had already begun to employ the principle of self-help through the makeshift construction of their shanties and through the cultivation of their plants, vegetable patches, and flowerbeds. The huts were described as comfortable and even luxurious. “Whoever, then, searches for mysteries about criminals, vagabonds, and similar romantic rabble in Barackia à la Eugène Sue” would find themselves deceived, the writer declared, and would likewise discover little “squalor or misery of a depraved proletariat” in the shanties. Within the small-scale construction economy of the shantytown, even a kind of “jealousy” and “innate individualism” prevailed that was causing some minor conflicts within its social fabric. 48 Upon leaving, the friends praised the health and social life of the shanty but nevertheless agreed that its occupants would not survive the winter storms and would need to be accommodated.
As Kristin Poling argues, the American frontier myth constructed around the “natural” growth of the shanties came to symbolize German settlement abroad, and was largely an attempt to “manage the meaning of Berlin’s growth, and to domesticate it” within wider attempts to forge an imagined national community. 49
Indeed, the feuilleton piece was one of many that lauded the self-help ethos of the shanties as an indication of the good character of the German people, who held strong family and community values but were nonetheless largely individualistic (self-interested), fearful of the proletarian masses lurking in the tenements, and suspicious of cooperation. Utilizing the kind of language typical of Riehl’s characterization of the Volk that had come to typify the nationalist rhetoric of Die Gartenlaube, the occupants of the shanties were popularly imagined not as a reserve labor force, composed of an idle and resentful proletariat (who naturally preferred the overcrowded Mietskaserne and the workhouses), but rather as a community whose feeling for Sitte aligned with the traditional peasants and burghers in seeking to maintain the bastions of familial tradition, and in espousing virtuous economic and moral traits of thrift, honesty, and industriousness.
The impetus behind housing reform became, in myths of the shanty, not one of simply providing more housing but of understanding the principal economic ethic that had driven their healthy growth—making use of the knowledge of this naturalness to drive housing policy. This economic understanding was based not only on the tendency of the struggling urban Mittelstand to shun the misery in the tenements but also on their tendency to curb their self-interest and live harmoniously in the shantytown. After the 1872 stock market crash, the housing question began to address a sphere of unnatural market relations that was perceived to stem from capitalist greed and unrestrained passions that fueled the excitement of the stock exchange. The characterization of speculation and speculators in Berlin formed an important part of how the city’s housing crises were popularly imagined. The concept of speculation was generally seen as a phenomenon different to the responsible management of business. There existed a pervasive negative attitude toward “speculator types” following the crash.
This attitude was strongly anti-Semitic. Riehl’s stereotype of the itinerant and intellectual Jews as uprooted began to shape the popular image of the international banker as distinctly Jewish. In a series of articles for Die Gartenlaube, the journalist Otto Glagau famously attributed the crash to the recklessness of the Jewish speculators acting in the housing market. Having lost money in the stock market himself, Glagau claimed that 90 percent of the speculators involved in the crash were Jews. 50 Glagau blamed fraudulent Berlin speculators who had exploited the “most sacred feelings” of national fervor that accompanied unification and brought enthusiastic crowds into the nation’s capital. Glagau complained of the speculative builders who seized on the housing question to address shortage, while in the dizziness of buying and selling in the housing market had created a monopoly over land prices in the best areas of Berlin—forcing the middle classes into perpetual housing uncertainty while constructing ostentatious villa suburbs for themselves in the greener outskirts of the city. The true victims, in Glagau’s view, remained the deserving poor—the “ordinary families” of craftsmen and workers, who had been displaced from rising rents and overcrowding, forced to make do in the shanties. 51
By the end of the 1870s, these local attitudes about Jewish speculators had become pervasive. When the British expatriate Henry Vizetelly served as a correspondent in Berlin for the Illustrated London News, he recounted his experience within the Berlin stock exchange, remarking that the “regular man on ‘Change [the stock exchange] who is almost always a Jew, is looked upon with dislike and distrust by the outside public” due to that fact that these “‘yellow internationals,’ as it is the fashion to dub these Hebrew plutocrats, are often rendered offensively arrogant by the possession of untoiled-for gains”. 52 Accompanying Vizetelly’s descriptions of the goings-on at the stock exchange were various sketches, such as the one with the caption “Types of Börse speculators” that displayed speculators as dark, hairy, hook-nosed men in a fashion typical of anti-Semitic caricature (Figures 7 and 8). While Vizetelly praised the stock exchange itself as an important institution, he nevertheless attributed its corruption to bribing and swindling “speculative types” with distinctly ethnic traits. The swindlers on the stock market quickly gained a notoriety similar to that possessed by the criminals and vagabonds belonging to the proletariat, both images contributing to a broader social reasoning about urban society that resonated with Faucher’s promotion of normality in the suburbs—one capable of dulling the excitement and nervous passions of urban life.
Types of Börse speculators.
A sketch of speculators at the Börse.
The production of populist historiography that linked family, city, and nation in popular magazines such as Die Gartenlaube clearly resonated with the work of economists like Faucher and Wiss, who imagined that research on housing as a complex cultural and art-historical product could have a didactic role and could inform urban policy. In 1872, Friedrich Engels ridiculed this situation in summarizing the lamentable state of political economy across Europe. Focusing on the work of Emil Sax who had provided a neat literature review of the state of the housing question, Engels set out to lambast the Austrian housing reformer’s dubious sources, which included the “recognized authority” Faucher, as well as pieces from Illustrated London News and Uber Land und Meer (“all that is missing in this list of sources is Die Gartenlaube,” Engels mocked). 53
Engels challenged the popular caricatures of speculators that pervaded housing discourse, placing speculation in the broader context of capitalism and its many ills. Engels quoted Sax: Good dwellings are so expensive that it is absolutely impossible for the greater part of the workers to make use of them. Big capital . . . is shy of investing in houses for the working classes . . . and as a result these classes and their housing needs fall mostly a prey to the speculators.
54
Engels replied to this with sarcasm: “Disgusting speculation—big capital naturally never speculates! But it is not ill will, it is only ignorance which prevents big capital from speculating in workers’ houses.”
55
Criticizing those who relegated the economic problems to a certain character type, Engels sarcastically remarked elsewhere: let not the honest “respectable” merchant rise above the gambling on the Stock Exchange with a Pharisaic “I thank thee, O Lord . . . ,” etc. He is as bad as the speculators in stocks and shares. He speculates just as much as they do. He has to: competition compels him to.
56
Berlin, c. 1900
As the housing shortage began to ease in Berlin, there was a relative silence on matters of housing in both scholarly and popular discourse for over a decade. During this period, the city experienced the kind of immense growth that Hobrecht could not have predicted. By 1890, urban commentators were announcing the arrival of Berlin as a true world city. One reporter for Die Gartenlaube observed the drastic changes that had altered the physical fabric of the city within merely twenty years. These included major advances in urban transportation, the paving of streets with asphalt, the introduction of public lighting (with the number of lanterns tripling), the introduction of a sewage system, the commercialization of the city center, and the exodus of dwellings to the peripheries (the elite to villa suburbs in the western parts and the workers to a ring of cramped tenement suburbs in the north and south). The new urban experience, the author claimed, had provoked a new kind of human ingenuity, based on entrepreneurship stripped of the “petty monetary concerns” that had characterized the previous era. “The more the big city allows the lower passions to lead their hidden existence amongst the chaos,” the author confidently asserted, “the more it also provides a sphere of influence for the prevailing virtues of human kindness and care for general welfare and happiness.” 57
As Die Gartenlaube’s correspondent conceded, among these positive developments the dwelling conditions of the lower classes remained far behind world-city standards. Over the past few decades, there had been limited municipal legislation to address dwelling health standards. Rental prices remained at exploitative levels. Overcrowding was still rife. Distinctly working-class agglomerations emerged in the inner-city suburbs of Wedding, Prenzlauer Berg, and Moabit in the north, and Rixdorf and Kreuzberg in the south. Philanthropic endeavors to provide reformed workers’ housing had minimal impact on disrupting the Mietskaserne system. 58 The emergence of Berlin as a fast-paced, commercial, cosmopolitan city triggered renewed debates about housing and its urban geography among a new generation of economists.
In economic discourse, the liberal tenets of the old Congress were increasingly being challenged through the formation in 1872 of the Association for Social Policy [Verein für Sozialpolitik] under the leadership of economist Gustav Schmoller, turning Riehl’s initial idea for national social policy into an influential and programmatic agenda for empirical and statistical research and policy recommendation. 59 The Verein formed because of a collective sense among some economists that the liberals of the Congress were not sufficiently addressing the social ills prevalent in Germany. However, they were far from being socialists.
Their response to the housing question largely repeated the tone of Laspeyres, Faucher, and Wiss, remaining more focused on curbing the dangers of proletarian doctrine and its spread in cities than on highlighting the contradictions of the classic liberal response. In a popular 1887 lecture, Schmoller discussed the critical importance of the housing question, which again lay in the cultivation of good domestic virtues in the family home, which, in the economist’s view, freed men from a tribal existence and bound them to the earth. Schmoller explained to his audience how the exercising of good economic virtues in the house, such as diligence and thrift, fostered positive psychological traits (such as decency). “The starting point [of the housing question] is a psychological one,” argued Schmoller, “the question is what effect the various types of dwellings exert on human, mainly moral, traits.” 60 Schmoller believed the answer to the housing question was a simple one: it foremost required educating the lower classes into the realization that it would be more dangerous, for the preservation of Sitte, to “renounce a good room than to renounce the Sunday pleasure of a glass of beer.” 61
Schmoller’s work was characterized by his exaltation of the German Mittelstand—the portion of society that Riehl viewed as having replaced burghers to become the heart of the modern nation and a bastion of morality. Schmoller’s major work on the history of the German handicrafts revealed that large-scale industry alone did not account for the declining handicraft economy in Prussia, with social, cultural, and psychological conditions having a more profound effect on traditional artisan families. 62 Schmoller suggested that the national economy was a “dwelling house,” the transformation of which ultimately lay in the hands of the people. It was up to future generations to “work out the rules of coexistence, morality, and outlook, which make dwelling in the new building [the nation] a blessing for all, or at least for the majority.” 63 While Riehl’s initial backward-looking vision of the natural city was undoubtedly crude, it found resonance, if implicitly, in Schmoller’s ideal of a “classless society” (Mittelstandgesellschaft) that transcended class doctrine, necessarily based on the artisan’s prevailing sense of historical right over the city as their castle—a right that ought to be defended through careful planning.
By the turn of the century, Schmoller’s particular views on housing formed a consensus among political economists and sociologists. The entry on housing in the 1901 edition of the Dictionary of State Science brought together a comprehensive bibliography on those who had contributed to the debate, most notably Faucher, Laspeyres, Wiss, Schmoller, and Sax (Engels absent). The entry called upon its reader to imagine a worker who, upon returning home from work, found no “cosiness” or “familial harmony” in his home, resorting to the inns where drunkenness ensued. This situation, the entry claimed, was “often only the result of deficient housing conditions.” 64 The entry also raised other issues including the dangers of mixing rooms of children of different gender within the household, claiming that the dwelling should foster “shame and propriety” as well as a “sense for cleanliness, parsimony, and law [Recht].” 65
By the turn of the century, however, urban planning had already replaced economics as the disciplinary heir of the long-standing debate on housing. Urban planning emerged as an energetic new field of practical and scientific expertise following the formation of the journal Der Städtebau in 1904. The discourse generated in this nascent field culminated in the influential Greater Berlin Competition (1908-1910). The General Secretary of the competition’s accompanying exhibition, Werner Hegemann, vigorously denounced the past “failures” of Hobrecht’s laissez-faire approach (and likewise championed Faucher as a heroic figure in the early discourse on urbanism). 66 Reviving the same corporatist logic that underpinned Riehl’s social theory, the city was reimagined in the field of urban planning as an integrated and complex social organism composed of key functioning parts, including housing, transport, municipal services, and public architecture—all bound to questions of hygiene, economics, and aesthetics.
While there were significant debates among experts about the nature and role of urban planning, there was also a general consensus that the provision of single-family housing, in particular, remained the field’s most pressing task. 67 In its capacity to naturalize a rigorously ethical form of economic self-interest mediated through the social structure and material life of the family, the single-family house was unique in structuring and justifying the interventionist logic that guided modern urban planning as a distinctly ethical mode of planning (evincing the same logic later expressed in Le Corbusier’s famous tagline “architecture or revolution?”).
Despite this pronounced shift in thinking about the city, the discourse generated around the Greater Berlin Competition and the Urban Planning Exhibition nonetheless reproduced a faith in the same capitalist urban forces that created the Mietskaserne—forces that were now centrifugal. Not content to simply lay down new streets, the competition criteria required its entrants to consider how a city might work as a series of functional components, the most important of which were mass transportation and zoning. These two components promised greater coordination between what had now become naturalized as part of the city’s perceived “organic” growth: the suburbanization of large-scale industry and the suburbanization of a housing industry that predominantly benefited new real estate companies. 68
While the field of urban planning pursued these goals, the Mietskaserne city remained a convenient foil for planners to distance themselves from the past era of “rigged” capital generated by speculators on the housing market. While planners continued to propose reformed urban blocks (as Huber had done, sixty years earlier), life in the tenements remained an object of widespread popular fascination.
By 1900, the urban experience of Berlin had become far too diverse and too sociologically complex to be understood in terms articulated by a disappearing Mittelstand (which had, in reality, become a disparate class of white-collar workers). 69 As Fritzsche has shown, newspaper feuilletons and other genres of popular urban sociology began to speak about the city’s proletarian underbelly in more ambivalent terms, which were not necessarily more tolerant, but more embracing of the urban chaos. 70 Daily newspapers like the Berliner Tageblatt began to offer a broader view of difference and diversity in the city. The tenement landscape and the “folk types” that could be found therein began to be naturalized in print media and helped construct Berlin’s new urban geography. 71 Racial and sexual stereotypes, in particular, were no longer isolated to particular sites like Ox-Head but extended to entire neighborhoods. With its dark, winding alleys, the neighborhood of Scheunenviertel gained a particularly notorious reputation as a place of backwardness, vice, and crime, containing a large number of Eastern European Jews who were popularly portrayed as the city’s parasites. 72 Further in the city’s northern districts, members of the proletarian population were described as faceless “Hottentots” of the North. 73 The typically porous form of the tenement block, with its permeable inner walls, its shared stairways, its shared water closets, and its perimeter block form that exposed the courtyard activities to the eyes of all the tenement’s inhabitants, formed an important imaginative prop for reformers and popular critics alike to make interlinked arguments about the spread of improper moral conduct, the growth of criminal activity, and the deterioration of public health.
The biggest myth about the dangers of tenement life formed around the tenement complex of Meyers Hof. The complex stood at Ackerstraße 132/133 in Berlin’s North, a district described in 1890 by one writer as “neither sanitary nor an aesthetically satisfying district of the city, neither with regard to its external appearance nor in respect of its population.” 74 Constructed in 1875 by the factory owner Jacques Meyer, it sought to accommodate nearby factory workers as well as provide a steady stream of rent for its owner. The tenement was composed of a street-facing block and six blocks accessible through a series of portals and rear courtyards (Figures 9 and 10). The dwellings within Meyers Hof numbered around 300 and were composed mostly of three-room family dwellings featuring a kitchen, a stube (a room with a stove), and a chamber (Kammer, an unheated room).
Willy Römer, Meyers Hof, c. 1910, photograph.
Plan of Meyers Hof. Reprinted from Joseph Stübben, Der Städtebau, 1907: 28.
An early report from 1876 described the complex as relatively clean, quiet, and composed of “well-disposed tenants.” 75 An 1887 report likewise praised its health standards, noting the provision of fresh air and light to the dwellings, as well as the provision of a communal bath for the tenants within a seventh block. 76 By 1901, however, the tenement’s population was reported, in a local paper, to have climbed to around 3,000 (an estimate of nine people per dwelling) and so began to gain notoriety. Many dwellings were illegally transformed into small businesses including those belonging to bakers, carpenters, locksmiths, and porcelain makers. A religious sect was established there—“even a few ‘wise women’ and card girls have their home there,” as one newspaper reported. 77 In the early twentieth century, the satirical cartoonist Heinrich Zille became famous for his depictions of prostitutes and other types of downtrodden characters likely to be found within Meyers Hof, so much so that it gained the name “Zille-Burg” (Zille-Castle). 78
Life in Meyers Hof was portrayed as a battleground between the tenants and their landlord. It was also a site of conflict between the tenants and the vice squad. The tenement’s design, although allowing more access to light and air to enter than the common perimeter block, was understood to exacerbate a variety of moral dangers. The rows of nondescript rooms in each block easily facilitated overcrowding, prostitution, and infidelity, while the labyrinthine stairways and corridors supplied tenants with escape routes from the police, providing much of the content for Zille’s cartoons (Figure 11). The majority of middle-class Berliners who never set foot in Berlin’s North became aware of Meyers Hof through occasional newspaper reports and Zille’s cartoons. While existing as a miniature city, guarded by a concierge and cutoff from the rest of society, its mere existence posed a looming threat to German society at large.
A Heinrich Zille cartoon titled “True Neighbours.” Caption reads: “Miss, the policeman’s coming now!” Heinrich Zille, “Getreue Nachbarn,” in Simplicissimus, 5 October 1908, 451.
In a 1906 edition of the Berliner Tageblatt, a feuilleton piece by Maximilian Fuhrmann humorously captured the kinds of characters to be found in Meyers Hof. The story takes place through the fictional contrivance of a tenement block that observes the private lives of Berliners who dwell within its walls—as though the block itself is a living thing. Standing in the poorest part of Berlin, the fictional tenement is told to have been built as the last speculative project of the “notorious building tycoon, the bankrupt Kornelius William Vogt, whose pointless extravagances are the subject of many stories and anecdotes still circulating in the city today.” 79 Swiftly erected and poorly constructed, the tenement tells us, it has become “so frail that a bull would not have much trouble piercing my walls with its horns.” 80 The overcrowded tenement is composed of “Danes, Swedes, Lithuanians, Poles, Russians, Slovakians, Swiss, Italians, and Negros from the Congo.” 81 Having had “many fowl elements implanted” in it over the years, the tenement became a place of dubious repute due to a waiter known in the underworld at “Cards Karl” stabbing and murdering a prostitute after a fit of jealousy on the top floor. Other characters occupying the tenement include an industrious cobbler, a one-eyed herring merchant “punished four times for butter falsification,” a revolutionary anarchist, and a former countess who, having “sunken into becoming a tramp well known across the city,” had been able to preserve nothing of her former wealth “except for a gold filling in one of the front teeth still remaining.” 82
In a particularly vivid description of proletarian daily life, the tenement proceeded to describe the restlessness teeming within its walls: I can only occasionally report happy marriages. I can count ten married women who are separated from their husbands. The conversations between husband and wife are usually in sinister attacking and defensive tones. The men have a tendency of assaulting their better halves, and because of that the women thrash their eldest children for no reason, the eldest children hit the youngest, the youngest hit the dogs.
83
The story ends as two police officers from the vice squad arrive in the early morning to arrest a prostitute on the second floor, who attempts to flee before running into the arms of an officer stationed on the street. The feuilleton humorously captured the other side of Berlin existing within the labyrinthine network of the Mietskaserne, highlighting the ongoing struggle against the vice, promiscuity, and contagion that characterized the city’s lower class underbelly. In a reversal of Hobrecht’s (equally moralizing) vision of the leveling social effect of the tenement city, popular representations of the tenement landscape portrayed it as a place where previously affluent people would “sink” into the misery of the proletariat, playing into established scholarly narratives on the determining effects of environment on behavior established by the likes of Laspeyres.
A thorough inspection of the conditions of the Mietskaserne began in 1902. Inspectors from the photography company Heinrich Lichte & Co entered the most decrepit basement and attic dwellings in the poorest parts of Berlin to take photos as part of an inquiry documenting the spread of urban sickness and disease. They recorded statistical data such as dwelling sizes, the number of windows per room, person per room, and person per bed. 84 The “Dwelling Inquiry” aimed to provide information that could serve the interests of private health insurance companies. Its photographs, which depicted the occupants inside their dwellings (Figure 12), also offered the public a glimpse into the fundamental moral depravity contained within the tenements, the full horrors of which, according to Kohn, “the pens or paintbrushes of our best artists could not be capable of representing.” 85 The Inquiry was largely sympathetic to the conditions facing tenement dwellers, depicting inhabitants making the best of their situation through turning their dwellings into workshops, including ones for the manufacturing of clothing, fur goods, cigars, confectionery, Christmas bonbons, and felt slippers. Other more downtrodden rag pickers were shown among their hoards of clothing and other scraps. Hygienic and moral dangers were often noted side by side, for example, when basement apartments were located right next to a horse barn, or when a whole family bedroom was located next to a water closet used by three different families. These photographs invited their middle-class audience not merely to reflect on the poor state of living conditions that afflicted Berlin’s urban population but to ascertain from the state of the inhabitants’ dwellings whether they had a hand in their decrepit state.
Heinrich Lichte & Co, Basement Dwelling in Berlin, Photograph, c. 1905.
The apparent necessity to include the tenement dwellers themselves in the photographs testifies to a growing requirement—established within popular fiction but evidently of increasing concern to statisticians and housing reformers—to locate the moral character of inhabitants within specific geographical urban scenes and settings. The photographs produced by the inquiry aimed to present an objective portrait of the inhabitants of the Mietskaserne. These visual forms nevertheless required one to read from them a dramatic life story contained therein. In this sense, they presented a narrative similar to a semi-fictional walk through the shantytown of Cottbusser Tor, or the fictional tale of the inner life of a decrepit tenement, increasingly blurring the boundaries between imaginative literature, urban reportage, and scholarly discourse on housing.
The photographs from the Inquiry were heavily circulated and were cited in a volume of Hans Ostwald’s famous feuilleton-like collection of urban snapshots, the Großstadt-Dokument (later to inspire the work of the Chicago School of Sociology). In the volume dedicated to recording the worst of Berlin’s living conditions, the social-democratic politician Albert Südekum described the state of housing in the most poverty-stricken housing blocks to be found in Berlin, arguing that “one could kill a person better with an apartment than with an axe.” 86 Aiming to offer a more sympathetic view to the kinds of emotions that afflicted the tenement dweller beyond negative ones, Südekum recalled an especially vivid memory of when he had accompanied a medical doctor to visit a woman with a broken leg, occupying the courtyard house of a block in the district of Wedding. As he walked through the courtyard, he was met with a noisy crowd of destitute children playing together and, upon entering the back stairwell and experiencing its stifling hot air, felt a “feeling of oppression” deep in his chest. He spoke to the injured women who, living day after day among the constant screaming and sound of arguments around her, confided that she feared losing her mind and throwing herself out the window—“if the sight of playing children had not stopped her, she might have already done so.” 87
In turning to the state of the housing question, Südekum was critical of the economic forces that had driven working-class families into increasing poverty, but nonetheless shared a similar moral sentiment to bourgeois reformers. Rejecting more radical scenarios to address the problem such as Peter Kropotkin’s call for the expropriation of housing, he blamed bad housing conditions on a shortage, encouraging the activities of housing societies and reasserting the conservative claim that those generations who had lived in such conditions showed “distinct signs of degeneration.” 88 While undoubtedly endeavoring to appeal to bourgeois sympathies on terms more familiar to them, in promoted the general reforming role of cottages, Südekum’s narrative ultimately ran counter to subversive tone that characterized the Großstadt-Dokument. As Fritzsche notes, Ostwald himself would later deviate from his own subversive narrative on Berlin’s outsiders when, in the Weimar period, he endorsed a more enduring image of the Volk as a “unified national subject” against the diversity and difference to be found in the city. 89
In conclusion, the debates on Berlin’s housing crises that existed from the 1870s to the early 1900s helped crystallize a dominant ethic underpinning the nature of urban growth, bringing forth the notion of an ethical urbanism, particularly in the field of urban planning. This notion of urbanism was corporatist and maintained the political strength of the Mittelstand (or Schmoller’s unified majority), whose strong family values and sense of nationalism were considered to be sacred in maintaining social equilibrium. This was a rationality that supposedly railed against the excesses of capitalism just as much as it did those of socialism, but nonetheless did little to challenge the social logic that drove the initial expansion of the Mietskaserne.
The housing question through this period spoke to a new and modern rationality that imagined the city as a complex organism, whereby housing solutions were able to address problems beyond those immediately concerning dwellings (such as the shortage of them, the affordability of them, and the quality of them). Housing became a productive solution—a technology of urban governance—that responded to problems that were justified through crude behavioral studies, but nonetheless produced a sophisticated intellectual frame that formed the basis of a new “scientific” field of urban planning.
Each time a housing crisis, problem, or threat in Berlin was reported, whether it was in the form of a popular lecture, a newspaper report, or a fictional feuilleton piece, this intellectual understanding of crisis became cemented in the public imagination, producing a shared sense of common morality that helped shape the meaning of urban growth. Reports on housing shortage, overcrowding, and over-speculation continually brought forth opportunities to negotiate what constituted “natural” and “unnatural” urban growth based on notational systems distinguishing the deserving from the undeserving poor, and distinguishing natural German citizens from unnatural ones. The language of danger and threat that characterized “official” responses to the housing question was part of larger set of normalizing techniques that helped create, house, and sustain certain forms of life considered “normal,” “decent,” or “virtuous” to the exclusion of others.
To identify and confront the role of housing was to simultaneously prompt a consideration of the task of urban growth and of nation-building at large. It did not prompt a reconsideration of the ethics of capitalism in its full dimensions, but merely in its “artificial” and “abstracted” dimensions, the social forms of which appeared to materialize both in the Jewish business elite and in the undifferentiated, “faceless” masses of Berlin’s underbelly. Both images shaped the material legacy of the Mietskaserne.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Bill Taylor, Dallas Rogers’s urbanism reading group at the University of Sydney, and the anonymous reviewers, for the thoughtful comments on my draft.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
