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

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СКАЧАТЬ was appointed to draw up plans for huge districts to house the newcomers. It took Hobrecht four years to produce the Generalbebauungsplan (general development plan), a quintessentially Prussian piece of work which was brilliant, meticulous, all-encompassing, and fundamentally flawed. The police president, who ran the city in much the same way as the préfet de la Seine ruled Paris, could have rejected the plans outright, but the combination of the relentless wave of people coupled with the demands of burgeoning industry for cheaply housed labourers encouraged him to make disastrous decisions which turned the ‘Athens on the Spree’ into the biggest working-class slum on the continent.²⁶ As the peasants huddled in their tent cities, huge barracks were built within the city walls which would soon house them like virtual prisoners.

      Nobody else in Europe noticed when Hobrecht was appointed in Berlin as all eyes were on Paris, and the architect Baron Haussmann. When Louis-Napoleon lived in exile in London between 1838 and 1840 he had been much impressed by the new developments around Regent Street which he passed when visiting his mistress in St John’s Wood.²⁷ Back in Paris he appointed Haussmann to copy the London style and, guided by the motto ‘air, open prospects, perspective’, Haussmann created a city of such beauty and spaciousness that it has never been equalled.²⁸ The Rue de Rivoli, the Champs-Élysées, the Place Vendôme, and the Place de la Concorde became the envy of Europe and were copied around the world just as Versailles had been before. The burgomaster Anspach attempted to Haussmannize the lower part of Brussels; in Mexico City in 1860 Emperor Maximilian opened the most bizarre imitation of the Champs-Élysées called the Paseo de la Reforme, which was designed to join the Aztec city to the palace of Chapultepec. Most Italian cities were given Haussmannesque main roads to connect the centres with the new railway stations, including the Via Nazionale in Rome and the Via Independenza in Bologna. The 1864 reconstruction of Florence was a slavish copy of Haussmann’s style; even the Vienna Ring was influenced by him.²⁹

      Not all of Haussmann’s contemporaries appreciated his work. Delvau spat that Paris ‘is no longer Athens but Babylon! No longer a city but a station!’ For him the city of Balzac had been destroyed; Paris was now little more than a ‘tasteless circus’. Sadly, Hobrecht was another of Haussmann’s critics, but for different reasons. For him Haussmann’s Paris was not well organized or efficient, and it could not possibly house enough people. There would be little room for glorious boulevards and spacious avenues in his grand plan.

      For centuries architects from Alberti to Le Corbusier have tried to create ideal communities for human beings, and for just as long the disorderly and difficult creatures have refused to conform to their ideas. Frederick the Great was the first to make this mistake in Berlin when, as early as 1747, he passed a Housing Law which allowed property speculators to build ‘ideal three-storey apartments around Leipziger Platz. As Werner Hegemann fumed in his 1930 work Das steinerne Berlin (Berlin in Stone), these cramped buildings became the most despised houses in Berlin: ‘Frederick the so-called Great was too busy composing French poems with Voltaire to 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 СКАЧАТЬ