Berlin tenement house

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Berlin tenement house. Encounters and Conversations is the first book by Irina Liebmann . It was created in 1980–82 and contains documentary and biographical stories about the residents of an East Berlin apartment building.

Content and structure

In 1980, the author visited all the apartments in a typical East Berlin apartment building in Prenzlauer Berg for several months and had conversations with the residents. She wrote a text for each apartment (as well as for the commercially used rooms: a laundry shop, a bakery, a photo laboratory and a workshop for awnings and truck tarpaulins) in which the apartment is described, the course of the conversation is described and the life of the residents is told becomes. This creates a panorama of different parts of East Berlin society: young and old, families and single people, students, workers, artists. As a reader, you not only get an insight into the everyday life of GDR citizens, their memories and future plans, but also into the housing situation in the GDR, the practice of apartment allocation by the municipal housing administration and the structural condition of a typical East Berlin old building.

The texts are arranged according to the arrangement of the apartments: first the front building, then the transverse building, from the ground floor up to the fourth floor. The house itself is described in more detail in several sub-texts: the facade, the staircase, the courtyard, the basement used as an air raid shelter during the war . After Liebmann had written the texts, she visited the residents again in 1981 to show them their respective text. In an appendix, which is headed as an addendum , it summarizes what has happened in the lives of the residents in the meantime.

Editions and translations

The book was published in 1982 by Mitteldeutscher Verlag in Halle / Saale . There were later editions in the Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt (1990), in the Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag (1993) and in the Berliner Taschenbuch-Verlag (2002). In 1992 and 1993 there were translations into Italian ( Condominio berlinese , translated by Giulia Ferro-Milone) and into Dutch ( Huurhuis in Berlijn , translated by Carlien Brouwer).

Web links