Citizens Quarter

This article describes the permanent housing of the standing army in private houses. The forced, temporary admission of soldiers, especially in the event of war and troops passing through, is called billeting .

The permanent accommodation of men and officers of the standing army in private houses of a garrison is referred to as citizens' quarters . The accommodation in the citizens' quarter came about with the rise of standing armies in the absolutism of the 17th century. The neighborhood providers were compensated for the provision of living space, in some cases there was also an obligation free of charge, which was, however, alleviated by time restrictions based on the rotation principle. Due to the rental income and the help of the soldiers in the housekeeping, the provision could be quite attractive for the lodging providers.

When the soldiers were accommodated in the citizens 'quarters, the soldiers' weapons and equipment were stored centrally in arsenals and armories , as was supplies in magazines . Stables and wagon sheds housed horses and teams, but horses were also often housed in private stables. Nevertheless, the civil quarters for foot troops were more common than for the cavalry or mounted artillery, as these troops were only housed in smaller towns because of their space requirements, which then offered too few private quarters. Accommodation in the Bürgerquartier was generally only used for single soldiers. In some Prussian garrisons there were soldiers' rooms for married soldiers and their families.

In the second half of the 19th century, the citizens' quarter was replaced by the complete barracking of at least the crews. On the one hand, this was due to the emergence of general conscription , which made distributed accommodation for the mass armies increasingly impractical. In addition, there were hygienic and political reasons that made distributed accommodation in large cities appear risky for both the military and the state leadership. In addition, industrialization and the strengthening of state financial strength gave the states the opportunity to create sufficient barracks.

literature

• Beate Engelen: Soldiers' Wives in Prussia: A structural analysis of garrison society in the late 17th and 18th centuries . LIT Verlag, Münster 2005, ISBN 978-3-8258-8052-1 .
• Olaf Kersten: Garrisons of the NVA and GSTD: On the use of the military locations from 1871 to 2010 . Köster, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-89574-750-2 . (In particular the chapter on the historical outline of the development of garrisons from citizen quarters to barracks , pp. 9–37.)