Into the Cold: Neighborliness,Class,and the Emotional Landscape of Urban Modernism in France and West Germany

Emotional Topographies in the Making: Of Warm Working-Class Neighborhoods and Cold Peripheral Estates

Under the title “A la découverte des Français” (Discovering the French), the French television station RTF (Radiodiffusion-télévision française) broadcasted a series of documentaries between 1957 and 1960. Each individual program of the series revolved around the inhabitants of a particular street, quarter, or village considered emblematic of a particular milieu. The series was presented by a well-known sociologist, Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe, and conceived by a research group he had initiated. ¹² The researchers tried to capture fundamental changes in French society by depicting the transformation of local housing conditions. In their series, they foregrounded the effects of urbanization, modernization, and the advent of mass consumption on people’s everyday lives. The first episode was set in Paris: in the 13th arrondissement, in a street called “Rue du Moulin de la Pointe” located in a traditional workers’ quarter. ¹³ According to the series, life in the narrow, unrenovated houses on this street was marked by the poor condition of the too-small apartments. Eighty-eight percent of the families there—the majority of whom were laborer families, whose men worked in the car industry—were living in apartments without running water or a toilet. “This neighborhood,” the commentator points out, “displays all the characteristics of a slum (‘quartier insalubre’),” including increased rates of mortality, crime, and tuberculosis. ¹⁴ However, rather than merely commenting on these material conditions, the documentary focused on the solidarity of the inhabitants and the quarter’s warm neighborhood life.

Like many journalists and sociologists at the time, Chombart de Lauwe and his collaborators sought to make sense of the social and emotional dimensions of urban modernization by turning to two apparently contrasting spaces: proletarian inner-city neighborhoods on one hand and the socially mixed, modernist banlieues on the other hand. After narrating the story of the Rue du Moulin in their first episode, the makers of “Discovering the French” went on to portray a new peripheral housing estate in their second episode. In terms of urban planning, the new high-rise estates on the periphery of French cities did in fact form a counterpart to the old, soon-to-be-demolished inner-city neighborhoods. However, whereas the urban planning regime and planning authorities greeted the demolishment of old and the erection of new housing with a modernist fervor, not all contemporaries welcomed these changes. Left-wing (catholic) critics like de Lauwe worried about the social effects induced by urban modernism. They spoke with a certain nostalgia about the old, soon-to-be-erased inner-city quarters and the proletarian milieu that originally resided there.

In the press and on TV, streets like the Rue du Moulin came to be associated with a neighborliness and solidarity whose loss was deplored. At the beginning of its very first episode, “Discovering the French” thus follows a married couple bringing their 15-day-old son, Serge Spinoza, home from the hospital. Bent over their window ledges or standing in front of their shops, the neighbors watch the arrival of little Serge and greet him heartily. Interspersed with narrative elements, the documentary then follows the parents to the one-room apartment where they live with their two other children. The father is a manual laborer at Renault. The mother, like many women in the neighborhood, does home-based paid work. Their son Serge, the documentary states, will now gradually be integrated into the local community. ¹⁵ The narrator imagines how the child will grow up in the neighborhood, known by everyone and brought up by his neighbors as well as his parents: The concierge’s daughter will give him his first pair of shoes. One of the neighbors will teach him to walk, another will look after him in the afternoon. Every Thursday, he will go to Mme Chambard, who owns a television, in order to watch the children’s program together with other children. And soon, the commentator continues, Serge will go to Mme Glade’s local grocery store to buy milk on his own for the first time. While the camera travels along the broken facades of a house, he concludes:

There are surely no secrets among the people of the Rue du Moulin (. . .), but what can also be found in these streets is a certain sensitivity that only exists in poor neighborhoods, an extraordinary “sense of solidarity.” ¹⁶

In their sociopsychological research, Paul-Henry Chombart de Lauwe and his entourage distinguished between a highly localized and familiar “proletarian” sociability and a less localized and formal, if not professionalized, “bourgeois” interaction with other urbanites. ¹⁷ In their series, they presented the neighborliness of traditional working-class quarters as an important resource that the residents risked losing when forced to leave these quarters. Their episode on the Rue du Moulin concluded with the depiction of a young family that departed to a newly built housing estate on the outskirts of the city. Still, this was hardly an unreservedly happing ending. Focusing in their second episode on a new estate in southern Paris, Chombart de Lauwe and his team did show how families like the Spinozas, along with many middle-class households, gained access to a previously unknown level of comfort there. Yet, they also warned of the social, emotional, and financial problems tied to this new modern life. ¹⁸ The families had to pay dearly for the privilege of living comfortably, as Chombart de Lauwe explained to the audience. ¹⁹ He was hardly the only critic. For while the dichotomy of the old, backward, and unsanitary quarters versus the modern ones continued to dominate the planning process, a different pairing soon prevailed in sociological analyses and press reports: the contrast between neighborly, historically grown quarters on one hand and cold, new settlements on the other hand.

Like in West Germany, the French state responded to the enormous housing crisis of the post-war period by advancing the construction of large social housing estates on a massive scale. ²⁰ Built on the margins of cities from the mid-1950s onward, the so-called grands ensembles were financed with the help of loans. While some contained owner-occupied flats, the ensembles were at least partly devised as HLM (Habitation à loyer modéré, moderate rent housing) designed to cater to low-income households. ²¹ Initially, however, mainly middle-class families and the upper stratum of the working class (employees and skilled workers) moved there, as rent in the new HLM tended to be higher than in unrenovated inner-city apartments. The residents were keen to secure one of the new, large, and well-equipped apartments on the outskirts of the city. Yet, as the grands ensembles took a period of several years to build, a considerable part of the population moved in while the settlement was still under construction. Many of the early inhabitants struggled with infrastructural problems, such as inadequate public transport or an undersupply of public facilities and shops. Families with small children made up a large part of the population, and they were concerned about the initial lack of schools, crèches, and playgrounds. ²² In addition, there were complaints about the housing blocks’ poor structural execution, their thin walls, and bad acoustics.

Still, in the plethora of TV documentaries, press articles, and commentaries that appeared on the grands ensembles soon after their creation, contemporary observers focused less on the estates’ infrastructural problems than on their anonymity, uniformity, and—time and again—their lack of “soul.” ²³ In doing so, they often made use of psychological terms.

August 1959, year fourteen of the “Battle for Housing.” Upon their return from the holidays, twelve million French people living in critically crowded conditions will learn about the exact nature of the secret ill that besets them: the neurosis of the banlieues.

Published in the popular science magazine Science et Vie in 1959, the article by the journalist Louis Caro on the “Insanity of the Grands ensembles” was an early example of a rapidly growing number of press articles on modern mass housing. Under the heading “Psychiatrists and Sociologists Denounce,” Caro warned his readers of the dangers of life in the grands ensembles. He pointed to the ensembles’ monotony as well as to the isolation and depression of their inhabitants. In order to support his warnings, he even referred to recent experiments on rats in a laboratory in Marseille that were supposed to illustrate the negative effects of mass housing on the inhabitants’ well-being. ²⁴ The response to Caro’s article was considerable. Among the letters to the editor printed in the magazine was a letter from former parliamentarian Philippe Serre, who agreed with Caro, as well as a letter from Pierre Sudreau, the current Minister of Construction, who criticized him and emphasized the need for more housing. ²⁵ This tension between the acute housing shortage and a sharp critique of urban modernism characterized the overall public debate on the grands ensembles in the year 1960.

In the late 1950s, observers across the political spectrum had begun to speculate about the neurotic effects of modern mass housing and its inhabitants’ loneliness. Their critique is indicative of the immense influence of sociopsychological discourses at the time. ²⁶ The conservative daily newspaper Le Figaro claimed in 1960 that “what sociologists call a ‘feeling of affective isolation’ is manifesting itself in the new cities.” ²⁷ In her multipart report written for the Catholic daily La Croix, journalist Geneviève Lainé maintained that the real illness of the grands ensembles was the inhabitants’ “isolation” (l’isolement). Lainé quoted a resident who attempted to describe the loneliness that she and her family experienced shortly after their relocation: “A mental state that can probably be compared to that of displaced persons seized us and frightened us; a fear of the brutal separation from our old relationships, our habits. You shut yourself in (On s’enferme chez soi).” ²⁸ In a similar way, the communist daily L’Humanité surmised that the newcomer to the grand ensemble was “exposed to his own loneliness among 999 other lonely people.” ²⁹ Be they in the conservative daily Le Figaro, the liberal Le Monde, or the communist L’Humanité, the critics of the grands ensembles all resembled each other in their depictions of the modern yet lonely life there.

Their reporting mirrored the increased academic interest in the high-rise estates, which social scientists viewed as social laboratories that allowed them to study the social and psychological effects of “modern life” as such. Researchers declared the new estates to be theaters of modern society. They associated them with a “new” placelessness, with “new” family, gender, and neighborly relations, and with a “new” society less structured by social class. ³⁰ A study carried out in the late 1960s by members of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s entourage exemplified this viewpoint. Jean-Claude Chamboredon and Madeleine Lemaire were two young sociologists who conducted their research in Anthony, a newly built grand ensemble in southern Paris. The pair claimed that the spatial proximity of different social classes there produced tensions. Unlike other urban neighborhoods, the estates were not characterized by a majority of one social class. According to the two sociologists, it was especially the families at the two extremes of the social hierarchy who struggled with this social mixing. Those on the lower end feared the contempt of their neighbors and felt humiliated by those neighbors’ level of comfort. Those families on the higher end worried about the devaluation of their neighborhood. In this light, the housing estates’ “felt atmosphere” was also a matter of class. Chambordeon and Lemaire quoted a working-class resident from Creteil, who declared in an interview that she would like to move to another estate, hoping it would be “moins fier” (less proud) and “plus ouvrier” (more working-class): “Here, there’s a mixture, a little of everything. It’s proud (c’est fier).” ³¹ Chamboredon and Lemaire’s account of the estates as arenas of shame and social tension was a decidedly sociological (and not a psychological) one. Nevertheless, it corresponded, at least in part, with those representations of the estates as cold and depressive predominant among the French public.

Even when employed half-jokingly, the “neurosis of the banlieue” was mainly a gendered concept that stood in a long tradition of gendering the self. Journalists and sociologists alike assumed that it was mainly women (and housewives in particular) who suffered from depressions after moving to the urban periphery. ³² Hence, when sociologist Michèle Huguet conducted a comprehensive study of grands ensembles in the mid-1960s, her main focus was their effect on the psyche of women. Huguet questioned the female residents of two estates about the repercussions of their move. ³³ She then subdivided those who showed signs of discontent into two groups: young middle-class and young working-class women. Huguet assumed that the women in the first group suffered because they missed a certain bourgeois urbanity, whereas the women in the second group longed for the neighborliness they had known in their former neighborhoods. In the sociologist’s view, the loneliness of the banlieues was both a gendered and a classed experience, and it was closely intertwined with the experience of mobility: It was the loneliness of those who had been uprooted from their former social environment and longed for the familiarity of their peers. ³⁴

Relocation to the urban periphery often precipitated a de facto restructuring of family and gender relations. The functional principles of modern urban planning stipulated that housing and work be spatially separated. Large-scale urban modernization thus often increased the spatial divide between the (traditionally gendered) spheres of “household” and “work-place.” As the majority of the residents did not find employment in the banlieues, they had to commute to work. In Sarcelles, one of the first grands ensembles to be built in the region of Paris, 95 percent of the employed men left their homes early in the morning to go to Paris by train or car, while the majority of women remained behind. ³⁵ The fact that the grands ensembles often still lacked public facilities serving the need of working mothers reinforced the gendered division of spheres. Shops were only gradually opened, and crèches were built with great delay. The same applied to local public transportation. ³⁶ Considering these circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the lonely mother and housewife, struggling not only with her boredom but also with the lack of childcare facilities in the banlieues, became a frequently evoked social figure in films and public debates. ³⁷

However, everyday life in the new grands ensembles was far more varied than the developments’ reputation as cold, soulless environments suggests. When later interviewed about their experiences, many of the early inhabitants remembered their move to the banlieues rather fondly. ³⁸ They often referred to the significant shortage of housing in the 1960s and related their relief and pride upon securing one of the new, large, and well-equipped apartments on the outskirts of the city. Moreover, many emphasized the communality of the early years. They spoke of a widespread solidarity and neighborly support in the face of an often still provisional, unfinished urban environment. As even a quick glance at the bulletins and annual reports of the numerous local associations suggests, a lively communal life indeed soon developed in many grands ensembles.

Nevertheless, the widespread representation of the isolation and soullessness of modern mass housing had a significant effect. Even where it did not mirror the initial common experience, this representation influenced how the residents related to their new environment. Many of the settlements called grands ensembles resembled each other only to a limited extent. They were administered differently, contained different proportions of social housing, and were architecturally quite variable. Nonetheless, journalists and social researchers treated the newly built estates as social and emotional worlds of their own. ³⁹ In order to denounce the negative effects of mass housing on the inhabitants’ mental well-being, journalists even coined a new term: “the Sarcellite.” ⁴⁰ In the late 1950s and 1960s, Sarcelles, a residential complex in the vicinity of Paris, had become the much-cited epitome of the grands ensembles and their problems. More or less every article and sociological study on the ensembles made reference to the Sarcellite and speculated about the residents’ purported depressive state. Sarcelles’ inhabitants themselves repeatedly commented on what they perceived as a misrepresentation of their settlement in the media. ⁴¹ In their various local bulletins, they also called on the local population to get involved in the lively local community life. The image of the modern high-rises as spaces of isolation proved to be influential anyway. One woman who moved to Sarcelles in 1973 later remembered being deeply afraid of catching the “Sarcellite.” She described her arrival in Sarcelles as a shocking experience, in which she felt lost and anxious: “I was completely confused! People had told me so much about the ills of Sarcelles.” This sentiment lasted for three years. Then she began to settle in. ⁴²

From the late 1960s onward, the grands ensembles were increasingly associated with residential segregation and urban marginality. ⁴³ While the critics still referred to the mass housing estates as spaces of depression and despair, they increasingly fixated their attention on the estates’ low-income households. Exemplary for such a classed narrative is a TV documentary entitled “L’enfer du décor” (The hell of decor), which aired on French television in 1973. ⁴⁴ The documentary was set on an estate on the periphery of Paris called La Grande Borne. La Grande Borne was originally intended as showpiece of a reformed mass housing scheme, meant to be more playful and warmer. Yet, right at the beginning of the film, the viewer sees a moving van. Asked by a journalist whether she regrets moving away, the woman standing by the van answers no: She does not like it here; her children got lice; there is no childcare; Paris is too far away; young people are bored and violent. ⁴⁵ Her list is long and it seems to be confirmed by most of the subsequent documentary, which chronicles the downsides of life on the periphery (and those forced to stay there). Most of the residents portrayed are young mothers, who are questioned about their sorrows. The interviewer even joins a paramedic returning in his car from an emergency call, who contemplates the estate’s high rate of suicide, especially among women. ⁴⁶ Unlike earlier documentaries, however, “L’enfer du décor” primarily tells a story of economic malaise. The single mother who reflects on her suicidal thoughts relates these to her debts and strained financial situation. The growing youth unemployment is discussed, and social workers are asked to comment on the many families placed under guardianship in order to get their debts under control. The inhabitants’ psychological problems are constantly linked to their economic woes.

This was hardly an exceptional tale. In contrast to their representation in the early 1960s, in the early 1970s, the high-rise banlieues were increasingly associated with impoverishment, unemployment, and marginality. The estates continued to be depicted as “cold” environments, but social criticism and a new concern for the inhabitants’ economic problems replaced the earlier focus on the neurosis of modern mass housing. The purportedly desolate life in the peripheral high-rise estate was increasingly classed, coming to be associated with the classes populaires, low-income households, and so-called “problem families.” Furthermore, whereas the numerous external observers of the settlements in the 1950s and 1960s had primarily called on residents to become active and get more involved in their community, the prevailing advice for the estate residents (and for French society as a whole) in the 1970s was to tackle their segregation from the urban middle classes.

While this shift corresponded to the growing influence of Marxist critics on French urbanism, it also reflected a change in the social composition of the estates. Middle-class households increasingly moved out of the ensembles. At the same time, groups moved in whose housing problems had not yet been resolved by the state–or were in fact caused by urban renewal schemes. The government began to promote home ownership on a larger scale in the late 1960s, while public housing associations committed themselves to making a higher proportion of their vacancies available to residents who came from shanty towns or who were classified as “poorly housed” for other reasons. ⁴⁷ Accordingly, the proportion of low-income households grew on the estates, while the number of middle-class families declined. Reports such as “The Hell of Decor” reflected these social changes. At the same time, they contributed to an image of the estates as arenas of economic and social malfunction that was hardly attractive to the local population–or to potential new residents. In fact, the estates’ bad reputation accelerated the exodus of those who could afford it and contributed to the stigmatization of those who stayed.

Spaces of Desolation and Mobilization. Mass Housing and the New Left in West Germany

In 1972, Irene Rakowitz, a working-class mother of four, complained about her isolation in the high-rise estate in which she lived on the periphery of West Berlin. She suspected that the blocks’ architecture as well as the social mix of the inhabitants stood in the way of neighborly contact.

In the end, we don’t have any neighbors. Even in the hallway where you live cheek by jowl with four other families, you don’t get together. (. . .). Man, it’s like being in jail. All those long corridors, that really isolates you. ⁴⁸

Irene was not necessarily a typical resident of the newly built social housing estate. She was, however, one of several residents whom the mass media presented as typical. While West Berlin’s peripheral high-rises were socially mixed at the time, the filmmakers, activists, and sociologists who began flocking to them in the late 1960s were mainly interested in large, low-income families. Moreover, they tended to focus on the inhabitants’ emotional states. The so-called “problem families” who increasingly figured as typical residents of “the projects” were primarily defined by their anxiety, isolation, and the neglect of their children. Thus, journalists and activists alike turned the peripheral estates into theaters of shattered relationships and economic malaise, contributing to the depiction of those areas as spaces of both marginality and desolation.

In contrast to France, widespread criticism of the suburban settlements did not begin in West Germany until the late 1960s, and it primarily—though by no means exclusively—emanated from left-wing liberals and actors of the emergent New Left. Nevertheless, by 1970, the topoi of alienation and isolation commonly employed in both countries to characterize the high-rise estates as worlds of their own had come to resemble each other. Moreover, in both France and West Germany, the depiction of the estates as “cold” and “desolate” environments tended to be part of a classed narrative. The way in which West Berlin’s Märkisches Viertel, for example, was portrayed as a place of fear, neglect, and loneliness was inextricably linked to its labeling as a lower-class quarter, even though the estate was decidedly socially mixed at the time. In order to make sense of this socio-emotional framing, it is crucial to take into account the political agenda of the filmmakers, journalists, and students whose interest in the estates in the late 1960s contributed to their notoriety. Their reputation as spaces of tension and desolation was primarily a product of those actors’ social criticism, psychological interests, and Marxian activism. ⁴⁹

West German authorities responded to the war destruction and severe housing shortage of the post-war period with an ambitious social housing policy. ⁵⁰ Closely intertwined with the ideals of functional urbanism, the growing number of large-scale high-rise estates on the periphery of German cities was an important element of this new public housing regime. ⁵¹ The publicly subsidized estates often combined high-rise towers with other multistoried blocks of flats and smaller sections of single-family houses in order to generate a certain social diversity. In the eyes of the planning authorities, a socially mixed composition was to lessen class divisions by removing working-class families from their traditional proletarian milieu in old inner-city neighborhoods.

Built between 1963 and 1974 along the wall to East Berlin, the Märkisches Viertel was one of many suburban housing estates emerging in the Federal Republic at that time. ⁵² Most residents of these so-called Großsiedlungen initially welcomed their transition to the well-equipped apartments on the urban periphery. They referred with pride to the comfort their new apartments afforded: their modern heating system, hot water, indoor toilets, and vicinity to green spaces. This was especially true for the Märkisches Viertel. A considerable number of the families who moved there had previously lived in barracks, emergency accommodation, or homeless shelters. The rest came from working-class, inner-city districts such as Wedding, which underwent extensive renewal from the mid-1960s onward. ⁵³ For most households, the new rents in the large housing estate were higher than those in their former apartments. Some struggled with this, particularly as the average income in the Märkisches Viertel lay below that in West Berlin. The share of laborers in the estate’s employed population was relatively high (40%), as was the percentage of low-income households. ⁵⁴ Still, the population of the quarter was far from socially homogeneous.

Nevertheless, the settlement soon acquired a reputation as a low-income neighborhood. This was mainly due to an upsurge in urban activism and social critique in the year 1968. In the late 1960s, a highly politicized group of students, lecturers, filmmakers, and journalists came to consider the high-rise estate Märkisches Viertel an ideal site for the observation and mobilization of West Berlin’s working classes. Pedagogy students and lecturers, aspiring architects, and activists launched a variety of community projects and political activities there, ranging from rent strikes to the establishment of a locally run community magazine. ⁵⁵ Apart from criticizing the contemporary urban planning regime for its creation of cold, inhumane environments, many aimed to foster a sense of solidarity in the new high-rises and in their “proletarian inhabitants” in particular. The residents themselves had protested against the estate’s infrastructural problems before. The incoming activists now amplified their protests, giving them a different (at times anti-capitalist) twist. The activists drew the attention of both filmmakers and the national press, which fervently reported on the high-rise estate up until the mid-1970s, when the media attention waned. ⁵⁶

Journalists in the national press portrayed the settlement as a theater of strained family and neighborly relations, referring to it as a “new slum” or the “rubbish dump of West German society.” ⁵⁷ The media’s critical depiction was part of a general trend away from modernist urban planning in West German public opinion. Led by the psychologist and public intellectual Alexander Mitscherlich, unease with urban modernism—particularly, its psychological effects—grew. ⁵⁸ Journalists and sociologists alike sought out the peripheral high-rises to study their alienating effect. ⁵⁹ For them, the Märkisches Viertel soon evolved into something like a shorthand: a seemingly typical showcase of the modernist public housing regime and its shortcomings. As part of their critique, they frequently evoked the estate’s “bleak” and “cold” atmosphere. In 1968, the weekly magazine Der Spiegel decried the Viertel as one of the “most desolate examples of cement architecture,” while the conservative daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung pitied the “thirty thousand people crammed together in its cement towers of dreary monotony.” ⁶⁰

Such depictions hardly mirrored the attitudes and experiences of the local population. As later surveys and individual recollections suggest, most residents were far from unhappy with their new urban environment. ⁶¹ The majority was rather content. In a survey conducted in the Märkisches Viertel in 1971, 36 percent of the interviewed households claimed to be “very satisfied” with their housing situation, 51 percent “satisfied,” 11 percent “partly satisfied, partly unsatisfied” and only 2 percent “unsatisfied.” ⁶² Yet, in the mass media, other voices dominated. Particularly influential was the estate’s depiction on television. Partly subsidized by public television funding, broadcasters and independent filmmakers produced a considerable number of documentaries on the high-rise estate. In the early 1970s, many of these productions reached a wide audience through TV broadcast. ⁶³ Others were displayed at film festivals and in cinemas. ⁶⁴ All of the films focused on “underprivileged” protagonists, mostly emphasizing their economic and emotional problems. The “socially disadvantaged” and “problem families” who figured as typical residents in these productions were primarily defined by their limited parenting skills, as well as their aggression, loneliness, and fear. The films repeatedly featured parents bellowing at their children or seeing them placed into foster care, as well as aggressive, young (working-class) men who violently struggled to find their place in society. ⁶⁵ All too often, an empathic account of their problems gave way to a pathologizing one.

These (emotionally and financially) distressed families were hardly representative of the estate’s overall population, but they influenced how the Märkisches Viertel, and the Großsiedlungen in general, came to be perceived in the West German public. Only a handful of residents figured again and again in the reports and documentaries on the Märkisches Viertel. First and foremost among them were four families named Rickmann, Rakowitz, Bruder, and Lange. ⁶⁶ Two of the four families struggled so greatly with financial problems that they received an eviction notice. In all four cases, the parents had working-class biographies and were heavily involved in the local protest movement launched by the students. Most had more than two children. ⁶⁷ Particularly often depicted was Irene Rakowitz, a trained seamstress. She and her husband, former miner Richard Rakowitz, had four children. Irene Rakowitz later divorced her at times violent husband, and in 1979, filmmaker Helga Reidemeister made a controversial documentary about the then-divorced mother and welfare recipient, who still lived in the Märkisches Viertel. ⁶⁸

Documentary-maker Helga Reidemeister was born in 1940 and worked herself as a student activist and social worker in the Märkisches Viertel before she began studying film in 1973. Reidemeister interviewed a number of residents over a period of several years. The four families named above were among those she interviewed. Reidemeister partly recorded and transcribed their conversations and partly filmed them, as well as lending her subjects a camera to film and represent themselves. ⁶⁹ She edited some of the film material for use in her documentary films. Other fragments were published in written form. ⁷⁰ The fact that excerpts from her interviews were printed in various magazines, papers, and even a text book for eighth-graders exemplifies their gradual condensation into documents of a seemingly representative nature. These excerpts contributed to the “language of class” commonly employed to represent the large housing estates in the 1970s.

In the available material, most interviewees described themselves as working-class. Quite a few classified their own living conditions with the help of Marxist rhetoric. As none of the available self-descriptions date from the time before the students came to the neighborhood (with the growing number of journalists, social scientists, and filmmakers in their tow), it is impossible to clearly distinguish the narratives of the students, social scientists, and journalists from those of the tenants. In any case, in their interaction with the activist interlocutors, the residents assessed their own situation not only in social terms but also politically—and emotionally. They did not merely describe living isolated from one another; they also wondered what this implied politically. In a documentary feature film entitled “Der Lange Jammer” (The Long Sorrow), which was set in the Märkisches Viertel and broadcasted on TV in 1975, the camera follows Hans Rickmann and Horst Lange as they discuss the difficulties of motivating others to join in their protests against rent increases:

The documentary mostly dealt with the inhabitants’ financial problems in terms of the angst they triggered and of the solidarity they necessitated. ⁷² It depicted the inhabitants’ strained neighborly relations as a problem that required both emotional work and political mobilization. In 1972, the film’s director Max D. Willutzki—like Helga Reidemeister, a former student of Berlin’s film academy—filmed the local protests against rent rises, which were jointly organized by students and residents. He later edited this footage and then added to it a series of re-enacted scenes based on the actual events. Again and again, the protagonists were shown speaking about the anxiety they associated with not being able to pay the comparatively high rents of the large housing estate. When they called a rent strike in the Viertel, their main slogan, repeated numerous times over the loudspeaker of a protest van, was: “Overcome your fear and join the protests.” Willutzki merged these images into a narrative about the solidarity of the oppressed that was meant as a political lesson. At the center of this narrative was the gradual (affective and political) self-empowerment of the working-class tenants who overcame their fear, called a rent strike, and organized a protest convoy.

As in other contexts as well, both the residents and their outside observers characterized the peripheral housing estate by contrasting it with West Berlin’s working-class, inner-city quarters, and the proletarian culture traditionally located there:

Like in France, the new high-rise estates’ position in the urban emotional topography was tinged with nostalgia. It was a product of the constant comparison of the “cold” estates with the “warm” familiarity of the old inner-city districts. In the case of the Märkisches Viertel, activists, journalists, and sociologists all emphasized the inhabitants’ loneliness by relating it to the intimate atmosphere of the working-class districts where many had previously lived. “Some of them,” journalist Marion Schreiber wrote in a 1968 article in the weekly paper Die Zeit,

travel by bus for half an hour or more to go and buy their groceries in their old corner shop in Wedding or Kreuzberg in order to satisfy their need for “information and contacts,” which means simply having a chat with their old acquaintances. ⁷⁴

The much-evoked isolation of the Viertel’s residents, who were not on speaking terms with their neighbors, was contrasted with the older districts’ neighborliness. Accordingly, in his 1973 analysis of the Märkisches Viertel, sociologist Hermann Fischer-Harriehausen not only referred to the high number of economically disadvantaged households in order to depict the estate as a problem area; he also highlighted the “isolation” of the inhabitants, which he contrasted with the close social life in the districts from which they had moved. ⁷⁵

Contemporary critics like him contributed to the estates’ discursive production as cold and desolate. Their films, reports, and studies illustrate the growing impact of sociopsychological ideas and New Left activism on West German urbanism. ⁷⁶ They thus help us understand how specific practices, ideas, and interests actively contributed to the settlements’ depiction as emotional worlds of their own. They also point to a problem generally inherent in practices of critique, that is, the fact that publicly naming and localizing social problems can have a stigmatizing effect on those named and localized. In the case of the Märkisches Viertel, critical engagement with the district spiraled in the late 1960s. Held up by activists from the New Left as a textbook example of the problems of both urban modernism and capitalism, the area was recommended to an ever-expanding circle of interested parties. While this did succeed in communicating local issues to a national audience, it also strengthened the Viertel’s bad reputation. In the two subsequent decades, this poor image remained relatively stable. While public interest decreased from the mid-1970s on, and occasional press reports discussed the improved living conditions on the estate, outside observers continued to depict it as an undesirable place to live. ⁷⁷ The estate’s social and emotional categorization as cold and socially problematic thus had long-lasting effects; effects that went far beyond West Berlin.

While actually quite different, the high-rise estates on the periphery of West German cities were often perceived as quasi-exchangeable “non-places.” ⁷⁸ Hence, contemporaries readily assumed that the problems of one settlement—like the Märkisches Viertel—equaled those of all others. At a time when the claims to “individuality” and “authenticity” became ever more important, ⁷⁹ the estates’ image as monotonous, cold, and alienating contributed to their devaluation. Surely, in West Germany, the peripheral settlements turned less into arenas of exclusion than the high-rise banlieues in France. Nonetheless, by the 1980s, they were widely regarded as unalluring lower-class neighborhoods.

The Loneliness of Mass Housing and the Longing for Community in a Time of High Mobility

The way in which critical observers depicted modernist high-rise estates as spaces of social and emotional malfunction affected their further development in France and West Germany. It contributed to their devaluation and slow social decline in the ensuing years. From the late 1950s onward in the French case and the late 1960s onward in the German case, journalists, social scientists, and activists became fascinated with the housing estates, considering them laboratories of urban modernism or modern capitalist society. They repaired to the urban periphery in search of a modern way of life that differed from the close-knit communality they associated with traditional working-class neighborhoods. By repeatedly contrasting the “coolness” of the socially mixed estates with the neighborliness of the old proletarian quarters, they contributed to the production of the former as social and emotional worlds of their own.

The genesis of this emotional landscape is revealing in at least two respects: While it points to the influence of psychological discourses and, from the late 1960s onward, a new left-wing activism on contemporary urbanism in the first place, it also brings into focus a sense of uprootedness shared by many in post-war Western Europe. Before I come back to this latter aspect, I will briefly comment on the first.

In 1960s France, journalists and sociologists came to associate modern mass housing with a social isolation that caused psychological problems, particularly for female inhabitants. The depressive mother and housewife struggling with her loneliness in the still new high-rise estates was a frequently evoked figure in both sociological studies and media reports. While for many families, the move to the modernist periphery did signify a change in their everyday routines and social lives, the prevalent representation of the grands ensembles mainly reflected their observers’ general fascination with sociopsychological and socio-pathological notions. The resulting public image presented the modernist settlements as cold and depressing; an image some inhabitants contested. Nevertheless, this image remained influential, though it was reframed and became more “classed” in the 1970s, when the high-rise banlieues experienced increasing residential segregation and growing unemployment.

In the case of West Germany, the portrayal of the peripheral high-rise estates as problem zones was greatly influenced by actors from the New Left. The ways in which they depicted West Berlin’s Märkisches Viertel as a place of angst, loneliness, and neglect was inextricably linked to its labeling as a working-class area (or, more specifically, as a typical environment of the so-called “socially deprived” or “problem families”). The estate’s social and emotional categorization can only be understood by taking into account that its various observers—publicists, students, filmmakers, and social scientists—were pursuing political aims through their depiction. They represented the area as one of neglect and desolation in order to support their calls for a different public housing regime, for social justice, or for a revolution.

Yet, while they succeeded, at least in part, to alert the public to the vulnerability of certain groups and territories, they also contributed to their notoriety in the public. And this dynamic was remarkably similar in post-1968 France and West Germany, even though the critical engagement with the new high-rise estates began earlier in France and even though the French estates morphed more quickly into spaces of social and ethnic segregation than in Germany. Still, in both cases, the mainly left-wing criticism of the settlements as spaces of despair did not simply echo local conditions, but amplified them; it hastened the exodus of those who could afford to leave.

While it thus reflected the interests and motives of their various observers, the estates’ identification with strained neighborhood relations and desolation also pointed to the fundamental experience of high mobility and displacement in post-war Western European cities. This was an experience closely tied to the modernist reorganization of cities. Generally, the post-war societies in France and West Germany were both societies on the move. This was true in social terms, as economic growth and mass consumerism led to significant changes in the lifestyles and social make-up of both societies between the 1950s and the 1970s, rendering them more middle-class. However, they were also literally on the move, as both societies witnessed a remarkable upsurge in residential mobility. While the war in the German case had resulted in the mass displacement of millions of people, France in particular witnessed a late wave of urbanization, which led French cities to grow on an impressive scale. ⁸⁰ In addition, reconstruction and the large-scale modernist building policy launched by both states caused many urbanites to leave their former neighborhoods. Taken together, these changes help us make sense of how remarkably concerned those societies were with the loneliness of modern mass housing.

To date, the French and West German societies of the 1950s to 1970s have mostly been described in terms of their upward mobility and expanding mass consumerism. However, the experiences tied to urban modernization suggest that these transformations left some groups uneasy, as they were forced to adjust to both a new urban environment and new social rules. The woman longing for a “more working-class environment” in the socially mixed French grand ensemble Creteil illustrates this experience well: For working-class families in particular, the move to the urban periphery not only brought new financial burdens with it, it also necessitated their adjustment to unfamiliar forms of sociability. ⁸¹ As interviews from that era and individual recollections suggests, far from all inhabitants longed for the close-knit community life that some had known in their earlier neighborhoods. In fact, some residents clearly appreciated the more anonymous, less-intrusive neighborhood relations on the urban periphery. ⁸² Nevertheless, many urbanites considered modern mass housing a new social world that necessitated adjustment and required new routines for moving comfortably within the neighborhood. Their initial uneasiness and yearning for a seemingly lost warmth of urban life suggests that the emergence of a modern, urbanized middle-class society felt at times less golden than common tales of the booming postwar period suggest. This was not only the case because this transformation brought new financial challenges to some but also because it forced contemporaries to reposition themselves socially.

While differently accentuated in each case, the emphasis on the coolness of modern mass housing is evidence of an intense longing for urban community and neighborly contacts in 1960s France and post-1968 West Germany. To date, historians have analyzed attempts to “make community” with the help of modern mass housing as an integral part of modernist urban planning and its technocratic agenda. However, the at times scandalizing depiction of the peripheral high-rises in both countries suggests a widespread longing for urban community that urban planners intent on forging a more homogenous society could not simply impose on the population. Their depictions tinged with nostalgia for a seemingly lost solidarity (or for the loss of the proletarian milieu as such), many contemporaries longed for less-isolated, more-familiar forms of communal living. Although this longing for neighborly cities was somewhat politicized, it stretched far beyond one particular group—and it seems worthwhile to explore its implications and repercussions further.