Hufeisensiedlung, Berlin

Berlin is waking up. In every house and apartment bells are ringing, chiming, clanging. The sleepy population rises from their beds; big comfy doubles with another human close beside (some loved, others not so much, if at all), single beds, bunk beds, sofa beds, mattresses on the floor, piles of rags in unusual corners.

The night-time economy people are returning to the beds that the day-time economy people are vacating. Bed renting is on the up; don’t you know that Berlin has a housing crisis?

The vampires of the city climb into empty coffins and holes in the ground and old cellars where they will hang upside down on dusty wooden beams until the daylight fades once more.

I am a visitor here and have no bell, or clock or measure of the day. I get up when the light coming through the windows seems about right.

The small table by the attic window is covered with maps, leaflets, books, paper and pens. I make a small space and place a bowl of cereal and fruit and cup of coffee there.

I glance at notes, categories, subject matter, questions, leads, dead-ends, diversions, tangents; changes in labour processes in construction, the organisation of workers, technical change, appropriation of machinery, the rate of exploitation, length of the working day, intensity of labour processes, rates of pay, role of migrant labour, raising of capital for construction, capital flows, debt levels, interest rates and working conditions.

I check the calendar and calculate that the end date of this particular project might be the year 2097.

And what, you may ask, is this project? The working title is ‘Modern Housing in the Weimar Republic’. And today this will involve a field trip to the Hufeisensiedlung in the Neukölln area of Berlin.

And then, a Revolution

The trajectory of German history has been intense, violent and unstable. The First World War was finally stopped by a widespread revolution of sailors, workers and soldiers which broke the power of the monarchy, autocracy and aristocracy.

Well supported factory councils took control of transport, food distribution, law and order and in some cases, industrial production.

The experience of military defeat, the actions of the right wing of social democracy and the unbroken power of Prussian militarism encouraged fascist gangs, political murder and attempted coups.

The imposition of reparations by the Entente powers helped create populist nationalism and an inflationary period in which people were paid in paper money. It was stamped with enormous numbers but had little worth or value.

In October 1923 a Berlin metal worker received a pay packet of 6.5 billion Deutsche Marks. A single egg had a price tag of 100 million marks.

By 1924 the currency was stabilised and the economy began to grow once more. The pressing need for good quality, low cost housing continued to exert a pressure on the governments of the new Republic.

Between 1924 to 1930 it is estimated that over two million homes were built.

This house building programme was part of a wider set of reforms generated by the political and social energy of the revolution. It was within the context of new political rights and freedoms and an active working class with a recent history of organisation and participation in radical events.

A new German constitution was written in August 1919. It described widespread changes to the length of the working day, the payment of pensions and sickness benefits, unemployment insurance, a greater role for the trade unions and stronger rights for workers.

The franchise was extended and women gained new democratic rights. They could now vote, stand for elections at a local and national level and take positions in a range of professional careers.

This same constitution delivered reforms in the sphere of housing.

Article 155 declared ‘housing as a right’ and that provision should be made ‘to secure healthy housing to all German families especially those with many children’, and ‘a healthy home for every German’.

Government finance and support was available to build houses, schools, kindergartens, play areas and services and facilities to support housing.

This happened across Germany. What is the legacy of that housing in Berlin today?

A Topography of Modern Housing

There are six modern housing estates in the city designated as UNESCO world heritage sites. The one in question here is generally called the Hufeisensiedlung but that’s a bit confusing. It’s more accurate to describe the housing like this:

Overall the areas is described as the Große Britz Siedlung, ‘the Large Britz Estate’.

This can be categorised into four main components.

1. Hufeisensiedlung. This is the area with the horse-shoe building and surrounding streets that radiate from that apartment block. For the purpose of this article, this is what I am mainly going to describe.
2. Krugpfhul
3. I am not sure what this part is called and I won’t be referencing it here
4. This is the final phase of building of the Hufeisensiedlung.

This map shows the four components together.

Hufeisensiedlung

There are obviously different ways to approach the estate. My visits have always started at the Blaschkoallee U-Bahn station. I use the south exit which comes out at the junction of Fritz-Reuter-Allee and Stavenhagener Strasse.

If you walk around you will discover the housing is a range of styles and types. This includes the horse shoe shaped apartment block, terraced housing, streets with straight lines, streets with curves, the almost semi circle of Lowise-Reuter-Ring, a sensitive and glowing colour palette.

There is a network of footpaths that run between the streets and through the back gardens. They provide foliage, mystery, intrigue, bursts of flower colour, an escape from urbanism.

The estate was built between 1925 to 1931. The main architect was Bruno Taut with some work by Martin Wagner. Landscaping was by Leberecht Migge and Ottakar Wagler. The flats were considered to be spacious for the 1920s with the most typical being around 54 square metres in size.

This was built by the GEHAG housing association and describe as being radical, socialist and progressive.

Stavenhagener Strasse

This is a good place to start. The housing was designed by Martin Wagner and it is the only part of the estate which he was the main architect for.

Martin Wager was a committed socialist, the chief city planner for Berlin and hugely influential in the development of public housing in the city. In 1925 he helped to establish the housing association GEHAG (Gemeinnützige Heimstätten-, Bau-, Spar, und Aktien-Gesellschaft). He had also attempted to organise the Berlin building trades into profit-sharing cooperatives.

There is at least one record of him speaking at a large demonstration of people demanding better housing.

Liningstrasse, Miningstrasse, Onkel-Bräsig-Strasse, Hüsung, Paster-Behrens Strasse, Dörchäuchtingstrasse, Jochen-Nüßler-Strasse

These streets are composed of terraced housing with large gardens. There are paths that run between the large back gardens. You will notice the degrees of standardization in terms of windows, doorways, porches and so on. This helped to reduce the costs of construction.

The intelligent use of colour, the overall layout and the way residents have personalised their gardens creates a great deal of individuality within the whole.

Onkel-Bräsig-Strasse is the western perimeter of the estate and beyond there is green space, a larger pond, a school. On the other side of Fulhamer Allee is the Schlosspark Britz, Schloss Britz, a city farm and the Neukölln museum. It is an attractive and pleasant environment when taken as a whole and it is worth walking around this to put the estate into a wider context.

Onkel-Bräsig-Strasse is a good example of what Bruno Taut set out to achieve. There are front and back gardens, terraced housing in white, blue, terracotta, burnt orange colours. The street is lined with cherry trees which produce gorgeous blossom in the spring.

Leon Hirsch, anarchist and poetry publisher had lived at 16 Paster-Behrens Strasse (then
16 Moses-Löwenthal-Strasse). He had helped to found the cabaret group Die Wespen’ (The Wasps). He managed to escape to Switzerland in the 1930s. His good friend and colleague Erich Mühsam was less fortunate and was brutally beaten, tortured and murdered by the Nazis.

While walking through one of the paths between the gardens I stopped to make some notes in my pocket book. I got the feeling that someone was watching me. Looking down I realised that there was; a woman kneeling on an old bit of carpet weeding a flower bed. “Ich bin forschunger’, I said, and threw together ‘wohnung’ ‘Weimar Republic’ ‘Bruno Taut’ and some other words.

She stood up and wiped her hands on her trousers. She showed sympathy for my esoteric interpretation of the German language and mercifully she subtly moved the conversation into English which she spoke perfectly.

She explained that the housing was originally built for working class people, was of good quality, the gardens were lovely and the path (that I was on) was really useful.

I noted the cherry blossom and the overall sense of luxury green space. The ambiance. How something in the planning had enabled us to meet and talk in this way.

She went on to tell me that this housing (and similar) in Berlin was still highly regarded, particularly among the older generation who had grown up in it. She explained that her step-father who had lived in the estate as a child, had become a Professor of Medicine.

‘It’s only since I’ve lived here that I’ve understood how someone from a working class background could do that. It was coming from a place like this that made it possible’. She added that Bruno Taut’s ambition with the estate was to ‘better people’s lives’.

I referenced the path and she said that they were communally owned and everyone was supposed to look after their ‘section’. She prodded some leaves with the toe of her shoe and laughed. “I do my bit!’.

Once a year there is a festival in which large numbers of residents join in. There are now fourth generation people living on the estate and ‘the festival time is like living in a village’.

‘There is a spirit here’, she said and described social stability, social networks and a real sense of community.

She told me something of the oral stories passed down from the 1920s and 1930s and the rise of fascism.

This was known as the Red Settlement, the sort of place where socialists and trade unionists and progressive people wanted to live. There were people living here who opposed the Nazis. Resistance fighters who were forced to leave their homes here and hide in Berlin or go into exile.

We chatted for longer and then, during a natural break in the conversation, we both folded our arms at the same time. She looked at me with a smile. I could not express to her how much I appreciated her time, conversation and thoughts. She had opened up the Hufeisensiedlung in a way that I could not have imagined.

‘I have to go’, she said, nodding her head towards her house. I hoped there wasn’t something on the cooker disappearing into cinders and smoke. I handed her my card. It would be great to hear some more of these stories.

I came back out onto the road. There were four teenage girls on scooters laughing and whizzing along. One was wearing a headscarf and I only mention it here because those four girls are an example of the secret integration. An expression of basic social solidarity. How to turn that into a political movement?

A Horse Shoe Shaped Building

This is the apartment block, in the shape of a horse-shoe with a pond and garden in the centre. It was built between 1925 to 1931 to a design by Bruno Taut and landscaping by Leberecht Migge.

It still looks grand today and one wonders what the impression would have been when first completed.

The principles of light, air, sun and green space are well applied. The sun rises from the east, filling the estate with early morning light. The shape is reminiscent of an ancient henge, of stone circles, to capture and worship the mystical and life empowering qualities of the sun itself.

The main entrance to the estate is from Fritz-Reuter-Allee. Imposing square shaped buildings provide a monumental, but not overbearing mass. At ground level they have shops and restaurants and a museum and visitors centre.

There are brick steps into the central space. Here the pond and open space are the predominant features and they provide something natural and timeless as if the buildings were an inheritance from an earlier age rather than an imposition. And yet it also seems so modern and fitting with its surroundings.

The shops, along with the housing, is also well designed and of good quality.

Red Front Buildings

These were built between 1925 to 1926 in a modernist style to a design by Bruno Taut. It was called the ‘Red Front’ as a deliberate nod to its political leanings.

This is the elevation that faces to the Fritz-Reuter-Allee and stand in opposition to the Krugpfhul estate on the opposite side of the road. They are austere and, well, fortress like. Note the small windows in the stair wells. Convenient for archers old and new.

The rear elevation is much more paradise-like with large blooming gardens. There is a nod to the architecture of Red Vienna here too.

Krugpfuhl, also called Eierteichsiedlung

I didn’t explore this area to the same degree but took a few photographs.

It was built between 1925 and 1927. The architects and planners were Ernst Engelmann and Emil Fangmeyer. This was build by the DEGEWO housing association and described as conservative and right wing.

It is composed of a number of streets of two storey terraced housing with three (to four?) storey housing on the perimeter. There is an attractive use of colour of the terraced housing and the apartment blocks have individual design features.

There is also a pond with trees which makes for the sort of wild-feeling play area which is important for child development in urban areas.

There are more details of Krugpfuhlsiedlung here.

Phase Four

Often with large housing estates the final phases begin to degrade in terms of quality and style. The money is running out and everyone involved in planning, designing and building is losing steam.

Commercial pressures on the firms involved are encouraging quick completion and moving on to the next projects.

It is worth going to see this however (see map above).

It feels to have a bit more wear and tear and more working class. I spoke to a woman tending a bit of garden here too; not her own garden but part of a communal area. Her face was more lined and she looked like she had experienced a harder life.

I asked her what it was like to live in this housing. She paused for quite some time and eventually said, ‘It’s alright. I have my flat and I do this bit of gardening’.

In terms of the house building of the Weimar Republic, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 led within two years to a huge economic depression across Germany. Public finances were wrecked and six million people were out of work.

In the tensions and conflicts both the Nazis and Communists began to increase their influence and voting figures. By this time the Communist Party was under the disastrous control of Stalinism.

When the Nazis were handed power by Hindenburg in January 1933, they immediately began to sack Jewish and politically organised workers, jail and murder socialists and communists and end the progressive policies of Weimar.

Housing continued to be built but more barrack like, with little flair or elan and without the ethos of hope, liberation and optimism of the Weimar time.

Many of the architects, designers and planners went into exile. Some who stayed perished in the death camps.

In 1998 the Berlin Senate voted to sell the housing of GEHAG to Deutche Wohnen. Since 2021 it has been taken over by Vonovia, a commercial business which claims to be Europe’s largest landlord.

And yet when building is done well, with attractive and thoughtful landscaping, and supported with services and facilities, it continues to offer something that is not easily removed or destroyed by corporate interests.

For it is not the buildings or the plan that are the problem here but the social relations, based on ideas of private property, which now surround them.

And the basic principles of sun, light, air and green space which Bruno Taut, Martin Wagner, Leberecht Migge and others fought to apply continue to shine today.

If you get the chance to visit, you will know exactly what that means.

And don’t forget to tip your hat to Bruno Taut.