Notes on Hamburg and its Housing

One of the pleasures of arriving at a port-city is the first impression, the immediate surfaces, the familiar-strangeness. The roll of the train into the station; cinematic movement, office blocks, bridges, viaducts the electrical infrastructure of the inter-city and suburban railways, glimpses of an earlier time, when capital took different forms, red brick buildings with ghost signs, commodities long consumed, labour accumulated and dead, invisible power, indispensable movement of hands and brain, dried up money notes, stamped with the signs of hyper-inflation.

In the distance glimpses of dock cranes and 300,000 tonne container ships, steel boxes stacked up, branded with the marks of global logistics, Maersk, HAPAG Lloyd, China Shipping, ONE. The world always comes to Hamburg.

It was to Hamburg that Karl Marx travelled in April 1867 to deliver the manuscript of the first volume of Capital. And should he be found on the banks of the Elbe today enjoying a cold beer and a glass of Kümmel there would be nothing here to surprise him.

Hamburg at the barricades. Bloody street fighting. Desperate attacks on police stations. Armed cars and machine guns. Blood stained shirts hanging on the washing lines in the tenement blocks. Larissa Reissner with a notepad and pen, from the streets of revolution in Berlin to the dock areas of the port city. She is in Hamburg illegally; furtive and face hidden, difficult as she had a striking beauty and wrote poetically and with great power.

Hamburg developed as a great Hanseatic city, different in origins, development and traditions of the Germanic princely cities and absolutist domains. Trade came with the sea winds and carried the air of freedom. Independence of thought and a laissez faire approach to commerce.

In the eighteenth century Friedrich Schiller, a close friend of Goethe, suggested that art and culture are the foundation for ethical social behaviours and that art could be a force to help the evolution into the realm of freedom. The civic could be part of the education of the imagination. Bildung, the development of the individual through sustained interaction with art and culture.

The architect Gottfried Sempler, an active participant in the revolutions of 1848, believed that art was a force to help with the creation of a liberal society.


These theories swirled around in central Europe and beyond, seeds of ideas dropped here and there. Some landed in the northern shores and flowered in unexpected ways.

The spores of these unusual flowers blew into the study of the art historian Alfred Lichtwark. He became a exponent of the power of education through art and museum collections and became the first director of the Kunsthalle Hamburg in 1886.

He built up the collection to include the masters of medieval painting in the city, the German Romantics, Casper David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge, and commissioned artists to paint the city.

Late nineteenth century modernists, Lovis Corinth, Adolph Menzel, Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard and others were included.

Lichtwark suggested that galleries and museums should be open to all, places to study and learn. Smaller rooms in galleries would be furnished with books, tables and chairs. Museums and galleries to be spread across the city, ‘in communities of interconnected institutions that formed a web of sociability and social communications’ (Provincial Modernism – Jennifer Jenkins – 65).

His influences included William Morris and Arts and Crafts and the earlier Biedermeier time. An ethos of craft quality and an integration of the hand, heart and mind to produce aesthetically pleasing and satisfying design.

The art historian and cultural theorist, Aby Warburg was born in the city in 1866 and having travelled in the United States and lived in Florence, he returned with his young family in 1902. In the period before the First World War he became involved at an institutional level in the cultural world of the city. His lasting impact includes the incomplete Mnemosyne Atlas and the Warburg Institute in London.

Hamburg was deliberately and consciously being developed as a city of culture in the widest sense.

A further influence on the city, in the sphere of housing reform, was the cooperative movement founded in Britain in the early 1840s. One conduit for cooperative ideas was Victor Aimé Huber. He had been part of a conservative response to the radical Young Hegelians. Things change, people change, history changes; just as Hegel described.

He visited Birmingham and Manchester in 1844, the same year that Engels was working onThe Condition of the Working Class in England, and by the time of the Revolutions of 1848, Huber was increasingly interested in cooperative solutions to ‘the housing question’.

The absence of comprehensive state responses to the issues of education, pensions, poor working conditions, unemployment and the brutal conditions of the early phases of industrialisation, encouraged the theory and practice of self-help among groups of workers.

As industrialisation progressed, new types of workers emerged, often grouped together in large units of capital investment. They formed trade unions, mutual benefit societies and cooperatives.

These new work places of factories, docks, warehouses, steel works, railway stations and marshalling yards, construction sites and workshops generated distinctive buildings that became daily visual reminders of this new class.

The legacy of charities from the medieval period lacked the capacity to scale up to meet the demands of the expanding urban areas and rapidly increasing populations. Could cooperatives and building societies provide the necessary social fabric and practical infrastructure?

Huber studied this and concluded that while there was a self-help ethos among the workers they lacked capital. He proposed that the capital could be – and should be – supplied by the new class of industrial and finance capitalists. It was a liberal paternal approach, based on a one-nation sort of view and class collaboration rather than oppositions and class conflict.

Huber’s inspirations were wide ranging and eclectic; Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Lord Brougham, John Russell, 1st Earl Russell, Benjamin D’Israeli, Charles Dickens, George Howard, 7th Earl of Carlisle and Albert, the Prince Consort.

This curious mix of aristocratic paternalism, Utopian socialism and liberal moralism pushed Huber to more radical thinking. He came to the conclusion that land and dwellings should be held in common, based on cooperative principles.

He rejected Fourier’s concept of phalansteries and preferred the private domestic hearth to generalised communal living, but he believed that association would deliver the benefits of communal shared spaces; laundry rooms, libraries and such.

It would take some time before any of his ideas would have any practical force.

From the 1870s there was a great deal of property speculation in Hamburg resulting in the building of Mietkaserne, or rent-barracks, and Gängeviertel, alley quarters.

Housing was provided but often of shockingly poor quality, damp, mouldy, expensive and overcrowded.

These slums were concentrations of crime, disease, poverty, squalor and evidence to some of the miasmatic theory of disease.

At the same time, capital continued to accumulate and expand in the city, forming into an ever larger industrial base and conjuring up an increasingly organised and combative working class.

Some of the more forward thinking people in the city could see a large barrel of gunpowder and a shower of sparks which was burning along a fuse towards it.

From the 1880s onwards the Verein für öffentliche Gesundheitsplfege (VföG) (The Association for Public Health Care) held a series of conferences which brought together doctors, architects, engineers, sanitarians, municipal leaders and others to debate the issues of housing, hygiene and welfare. The VföG from then on was to play a significant role in the development of housing reform.

It might be imagined, foolishly as it turns out, that general improvements in urban areas would be universally welcomed. How could anyone be opposed to sanitary reform? But class societies are composed of groups with separate and vested interests. Sanitary reform would cost money. Would this mean the rich having to pay more tax?

Reform would require regulation of housing and that would reduce the number of damp basements that could be let. This would reduce profits.

Money likes to hide its selfish interests and politics rarely plays out cleanly across the stage. The actors wear masks, use double-speak and disguise their real intent. Few landlords will admit that it is greed that drives them. And so ideas were suggested that people should be allowed to do what they liked in their own homes. And if that meant sleeping on wet floors and and renting out beds to strangers that was up to them.

The German Empire was declared in January 1871. Chancellor Bismark concentrated the political power. Fearful of the workers, in 1878 he introduced the Anti-Socialist Laws that proscribed socialist and communist parties and trade unions, censored publications, prevented free association and led to large-scale arrests and imprisonments.

As the nineteenth century developed, capital concentrated and found itself in competition with capital abroad. Empires were being built and whole continents carved up by a small number of European states, including Germany and Britain.

Imperialist troops on the ground of Africa conjured up imperial ideas and a European racist supremacy. A style of monumental buildings developed with the architectural language of the antiquity of Rome and Greece. Doric, ionic and corinthian columns, pediments, grand statues of women emerging half-naked from flowing robes, well-muscled men holding up balconies and porticos. It expressed power, order, class dominance.

Bismark’s nemesis was a member of his own class; Kaiser Wilhelm II. But this is court machinations and intrigue. There was a new power upon the stage, one increasingly well organised, self-educating itself and building a socialist movement; the German working class.

This class made everything else possible; the palaces and carriages, the fine silk clothes, the war machine and the basic goods the workers themselves consumed. This was the class that delved and span and hammered metal, dug coal, built ships, operated the machines and ploughed the fields. Coerced to sell its labour into conditions of exploitation.

As capitalisation intensified, workers organisation developed. In 1889 the Ruhr miners struck work, the first mass strike in industrialising Germany. A strike by Hamburg dock workers lasted from November 1896 to February 1897. It was defeated but entered the popular consciousness. There were large strikes by construction workers across the country in 1900 and a second major strike by Ruhr miners in 1905. A mass strike wave of 1912 involved workers in a range of industries and services.

The pressure of capital trying to expand, imperialist competition, class conflict. All boiled up and spilled over into an eruption of war and revolution.

The smoke drifted away from the battlefieds, the dead numbered in millions, shattered lives, dreams ruined, new ideas of Bolshevism and bread, land and peace. Workers returned from trenches to factories and workplaces and their often rotten conditions of living. Revolution might develop further, militancy increase, ideas yet more radical.

The German ruling class desperately re-grouped, under pressure from the left and increasingly tempted by the right.

In the first phase of the revolution all sorts of concessions were reluctantly granted. Among the many reforms was the governance and management of the provision of housing.

The constitution of the new Weimar Republic enshrined housing as a right. How might this housing be built and what would it look like?

A great deal of the funding would be provided by the state and cities were given powers for urban planning, design and construction of large amounts of public housing.

And what style to use? The imperial and classical style of the pre-war period could not be the starting point. The Kaiser had gone and empire discredited. There was a new air of democratic freedom in the streets, more egalitarian, a greater sense of camaraderie and workers’ interests. There were strong currents pushing great changes in art, literature, social life, ways of seeing and ways of being.

The slums and poor housing of the pre-war Hamburg could not serve as a starting point.

The writer Ilse Frapan had described that world in her book, The Burden. ‘Monotonous streets, faceless buildings, working class alienation, being trapped without power’. Frapan lived a life worth examining. Dying of stomach cancer in 1908 she instructed her inseparable friend Emma Mandlebaum to shoot her. This Mandlebaum did. And then shot herself.

Would Fritz Schumacher have been aware of this event? He had arrived in the city in 1909 to take up the post as the building director of the city. He spent his childhood in Bogatá, Columbia and New York City. Returning to Germany he studied in Munich and Berlin and became professor of interior design at the technical university in Dresden in 1901.

Schumacher had been involved in the Der Deutsche Werkbund and Hamburg became the only city in Germany to be influenced by those ideas in the sphere of urban planning. The ambition was to change the core development of the city, not just in architecture and planning but in the whole notion of the commons in the city.

Schumacher had a significant influence on the urban planning of the city as a whole and on specific architectural projects for the working classes. He accepted that modern cities were going to be big and complex places and that theory and practice had to both adapt to these conditions and seek to influence them.

He believed that people should be at the centre of urban planning and design and that the city should be treated as a single entity in which disparate components – buildings, open spaces, housing, museums, industrial production – could be brought together to co-exist. He too, like Lichtwark and Warburg, believed that the cultural life of the city was a critical component to the success of the city.

Schumacher was a modernist and progressive thinker. He wanted Hamburg to become a lebenswerte Großstadt, a liveable city. A social transformation formed by a liberal vision. A unification of art and industry, a fusion of materialism and spiritualism. It could be called idealistic if nothing material had formed; but something concrete and physical did form and there is still a legacy of Schumacher’s vision in the city today.

In the 1920s Around 60,000 new homes for workers were built in Hamburg; on the principles of light, air and green space. Around 90 percent of the financing came from public funding. The estates were generally built in brick to provide a city-image identity, supported with schools, kindergartens, play areas, shops, services and public transport.

Hamburg was heavily bombed during the Second World War and whole areas obliterated. Arthur ‘bomber’ Harris, the person responsible for this, described it as ‘worker de-housing’. Not everything was destroyed and much was rebuilt and it feels that the core of what Schumacher set out to achieve has survived.

I spent a week in Hamburg in March 2026 to study all of this. I needed much more time to walk the streets and be immersed in research. As ever, it raised far more questions than answers. I only managed to explore a small part of the history but in the process learned a great deal.

Consider this a sampler.

Dulsberg Estate

This is a very large estate and I have not mapped it out fully. It requires more exploration on foot to determine properly its history and layout. This plaque is in Elsässer Strasse. The inscription can be translated as:

“A house in the world, a world in the house, and world and house in a gracious hand”.

Entrances through the middle of the blocks.

The use of red brick for many of the blocks creates strong visual character.

The red brick style is similar to that used in Amsterdam from 1915 onwards and in London in the 1930s.

This is Straßburger Platz on the edge of the estate.

The space for the church was designed in 1903 by Fritz Schumacher but the church itself was not built until 1935 – 37. It was largely destroyed during the Second World War and then rebuilt.

This is the southern part of the Dulsberg estate.

The estate was built between 1921 – 1931. The overall plan was by Fritz Schumacher.

The architects were Paul and Hermann Frank. Paul completed an apprenticeship as a painter and studied architecture at the Hamburg State School of Art.

There is an influence of the style of New Objectivity style architecture.

The curved wrap-around balconies give this series of blocks a modern, art deco feel.

The southern part of Dulsberg in 1929.

Dohlenweg

The Dohnlenweg estate is in the Hamburg-Barmbeck-Nord district. It was built between 1926-27 for the Angestellten-Baugenossnschaft Heimat, a housing cooperative.

The architects were the brothers Ernst and Eduard Theil who started their joint architectural practice in 1914.

The architectural sculptures were by Richard Kuöhl. His work can be seen on buildings across Hamburg.

A view into the courtyard. Access is restricted to residents. It looked like a comfortable and well used communal space.

Doorway with more Richard Kuöhl sculpture and design.

The block has a strong design which provides character and identity.

There are different sculptures above all the entrance ways providing individuality to different parts of the block

The estate is surrounded by open space, some of it in a relatively wild state that creates a semi-rural feel.

Siedlung Breitenfelder Straße / Haynstraße / Husumer Straße / Sudeckstraße

This is a series of blocks in and around Breitenfelder Straße, Haynstraße, Husumer Straße, and Sudeckstraße in the Eppendorf district.

The architects of Husumer Straße and Sudeckstraße were Hans and Oskar Gerson. The terracotta sculptures on the corners of the buildings are by Ludwig Kunstmann.

One hundred years after they were designed and built, the blocks still retain a sense of modernism and being as contemporary in the twenty first century as they were in the twentieth.

All this housing was designed in accord with the principles of light, air and green open space.

The balconies provide an extra ‘outside’ room.

This is a marker to remind me to study the history of the Hamburger Lehrer Baugenossenschaft

There is so much good quality design here. Note the short brick walls on either side of the steps. Perfect to put a bag of shopping on as one retrieves a key.

Kindergarten built into a block of flats.

Jarrestadt

The Jarrestadt estate is in the Winterhude area of Hamburg. It was built between 1926 to 1930 under the overall planning and direction of Fritz Schumacher.

The progressive ideas and ideals of the Weimar Republic housing reforms are expressed in the design, planning and architecture.

A group of ten architects were involved including Karl Schneider, Friedrich Richard Ostermeyer, Robert Friedman, Paul A.R. Frank, Otto Hoyer, Emil Neupert and Richard Ernst Oppel and others.

The Kranzhaus is within the overall Jarrestadt development. It was developed by the Allgemeine Deutsche Schiffszimmerer-Genossenschaft (General German Ship Carpenters’ Cooperative).

The architects were Alredo Puls and Emil Richter. It was built in 1930.

Leibe Licht Leben – live the light

The courtyard of the Kranzhaus

Sculpture on the Kranzhaus. I don’t know why someone would put a graffiti tag on such a building? It’s been partly air-brushed out in the photo above. If only it were as easy to get rid of that stuff on actual buildings.

School by Fritz Schumacher.

The estate is certainly well-lived in. Chairs to sit in and watch the world go by.

It’s worth taking time to walk through and around the estate.

There is considerable variety of design and use of materials.

I am giving a talk on Modern Housing at the MayDay Rooms in London on Thursday 11 June as part of the London Festival of Architecture. The housing of the Weimar Republic will be part of the theme.