Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin. Alexandra Richie

realize that with haughty indifference he determined the well-being and suffering of hundreds of thousands of people.’³⁰ For his part Hobrecht wanted to create a vast number of high density residential districts between the old Customs Wall and the S-Bahn ring railway. He despised London, claiming that the wealthy lived in elegant districts while the poor lived in areas entered ‘only by the policeman and the writer seeking sensation’.³¹ Hobrecht’s Berlin was to be ‘integrated’, with expensive flats at the front of the houses, and small, dark, cheap ones at the back. After drawing a gigantic ring around the city (the 1862 plan was never completed) he divided land into large 400-square-metre blocks separated by a grid of connecting roads. Then he let the developers loose, assuming that they would add small airy side streets, parks, footpaths and gardens to break up the blocks. The developers ignored all pleas for lawns and lanes and proceeded to build on every available inch of land by constructing enormous rectangular seven-storey brick barracks divided around successive paved courtyards. They could not have been less Haussmannesque, but these miserable buildings became the dark, infested, despised Hinterhöfe – the tenement blocks – of Berlin.

      Within a decade acres of these red and ochre brick buildings had spread like cancer over the city. The rooms within were tiny and badly lit, the air was poor, the facilities abysmal and made worse by the relentless flow of newcomers who filled every available space. Like many experts of his day Hobrecht had assumed Berlin would not reach a population of 4 million for at least a century; in fact it passed this mark in a few decades. The feverish growth and physical pressure for housing fuelled ever more crass speculation; in 1871–2 forty building societies were set up with capital of 194 million marks; in 1860 9,878 sites had been developed; in 1870 this had reached 14,618. Rental barracks sprang up so quickly on the farms of Wedding, Kreuzberg and Prenzlauer Berg that local peasants became millionaires overnight. The change was so startling that even the calm sociologist Rudolf Eberstadt said that the disorientation would prove immensely damaging to the health, and Georg Simmel warned of the damage caused by the Steigerung des Nervenlebens, an increasingly stressful life.³²

      Hobrecht’s rental barracks are still grim. As a research student in East Berlin I lived in a typical Hinterhof which, as it had not yet been ‘sanitized’ (a euphemism for renovation), had changed very little from pre-war days. The only door from the street led to a short dark corridor which in turn opened on to the first of four dingy courtyards of 28 square metres, the space once required for horse-drawn fire engines to turn. Rubbish was piled near the entrance, the wooden windows and doors were rotting in their frames and the grey-green stucco, a colour peculiar to Communist Europe, fell from the damp walls. Its oppressive nineteenth-century character was made all the more unpleasant by the sense of decay and fear which was omnipresent in the back streets of Honecker’s Berlin, and by the occupants of the ground floor, the Stasi ‘caretakers’ (they usually got the nicest flats), who would peer out from behind their filthy net curtains to check on the comings and goings of all the occupants. The flat was on the top floor and consisted of two grimy rectangular rooms and a small kitchen which was covered in turquoise plastic and fitted out with a few old appliances. One of its most pleasant features was the ceramic tile oven, which devoured bricks of the acrid brown coal that I was obliged to haul up from the cellar once a week in the winter. The back court was completely isolated from the streets outside; at night one could lean out of a window and smell the mixture of rubbish, coal smoke and sausages which rose through the gloom, or listen to muffled quarrels interrupted only by the echo of footsteps in the courtyard below. But whatever the drawbacks of life in late twentieth-century East Berlin my existence was luxurious compared with that endured by the original inhabitants.³³

      When my flat was built in 1870 Berlin had the highest urban density of any city in Europe. Each small block contained an average of fifty-three people compared with a mere eight in ghastly Dickensian London; by the turn of the century there were a staggering 1,000 people per hectare. Each room contained an average of five people but according to Berlin records, which were by their very nature incomplete, 27,000 had seven, 18,400 had eight, 10,700 nine, and many had more than twenty per room. A tiny flat like mine might well have housed fifteen people. Over 60,000 people ‘officially’ inhabited coal cellars; I shudder to think of people living in my dank, airless underground room with its walls glistening with slime and the numerous rats scurrying past in the dark.³⁴

      Some areas were notorious for overcrowding even then. The barracks between Luisenstadt and the Landwehrkanal housed more than 250 families and these numbers do not take into account the thousands of Schlafburschen or Schlafmädchen who rented a bed for a few hours a day, or the Trockenwohner who occupied rooms in building sites while the fresh plaster dried. The 1905 census showed that over 63,425 homes took in such part-time tenants, some of whom had young children.³⁵ The most infamous development was the ‘Meyers Hof’ in Wedding, built in a tough street which was later made famous – or infamous – through Georg Grosz’s graphic etching Sex Murder in the Ackerstrasse. Six Hinterhöfe were squeezed on to a site 150 metres long but only 40 metres wide, giving the effect of a long dark tunnel from which there was no escape. According to the magazine Architekten Verein the 300 flats housed well over 2,000 people a matter of days after completion, but the numbers were bound to rise, making it a breeding ground for illness and disease; indeed infant mortality in Wedding as late as 1905 was an extraordinary 42 per cent.³⁶ The complex was smashed by bombs in 1944, with the last remaining section pulled down a decade later to make way for the Ernst-Reuter development. Today the only thing that survives is the deceptively pretty mock Renaissance facade which was fastened to the front of another building nearby.³⁷

      Sanitary conditions in the slum rental barracks were totally inadequate; only a few outhouses were built for each back block and at the end of the century only 8 per cent of Berlin dwellings had a WC; even the residents of well-to-do areas would be woken at night by the sound of women clattering down the street in rickety carts, collecting sewage in large tanks and dumping it into the river. Again the officials disregarded calls for change. When residents in the Prenzlauer Berg complained that there was only one toilet for every ten flats the official Prussian response was typical: because most men were away for most of the day ‘when most stools are passed’, they were told, the toilets had only to accommodate ten or eleven women, and as ‘one sitting takes an average of 3–4 minutes or five including time to adjust one’s clothing even though this is not necessary for women … even allowing 10 minutes per sitting there should still be time in 12 daytime hours for 72 people to use the closet …’³⁸ Raw sewage ran in the streets for decades. Naturally, outbreaks of typhus and other illnesses were common. Cholera was another killer: in 1831 an outbreak killed around two-thirds of those infected, including Hegel, and it was the terrible epidemic of 1868 which prompted the liberal scientist Rudolf Virchow to promote the development of sanitary systems like the Rieselfelder sewage works.³⁹ The smallpox epidemic of 1871 struck so many that the Berlin garrison allowed health workers to set up hospital tents on their parade ground at the Tempelhof field, on the very site where the Wright brothers would soon test their planes: 6,478 people died, which was not surprising given that the only prescription for the ‘poor person’s illness’ was turnip soup. Every day, wrote Rosa Luxemburg, homeless people die in Berlin, broken by hunger and cold: ‘nobody notices them, particularly not the police reports’.⁴⁰ Venereal disease was rampant and Virchow estimated that around 3.8 per cent of men in the Prussian army and 5 per cent of the population of Berlin were infected. But the great national disease of the century was tuberculosis. For some reason this became a romantic disease, said to create ‘radiant beauty’ as it killed, and could only be ‘cured’ with opium. For the poor who were stricken, the strange potions, the blood letting, the laxatives and the poultices administered by quack healers did little good. According to Virchow, around 15 per cent of all fatalities in Prussia in 1860 could be attributed to tuberculosis, and many thousands coughed and sweated to death in conditions which bore little resemblance to the glorious sets of La Traviata.

      As the century wore on the numbers of migrants steadily increased, and even the over-filled rental barracks failed to meet the escalating housing needs. Thousands of people slept in courtyards, at train stations or under makeshift shelters; some were forced into the infamous workhouses such as the eighteenth-century Ochsenkopf on