Berlin room
A Berlin room is a living space that connects the front building with the side wing of a building or the side wing with the rear building. It is a large room that, despite its size, only has a single corner window that overlooks the courtyard and therefore gives little light, especially on the lower floors.
The Berlin room is a special feature of the Berlin tenement house in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The passage room was intended as a reception and lounge area. “In noble families it served as a dining room, as a music or library room. If the living conditions were narrower ... it sometimes formed the living room and study of do-it-yourselfers in one. ”In the back rooms there was usually the long corridor with the entrance box, which indicated whether the doorbell was ringing at the front or supplier's door from the "rule" from the living rooms in the front area. Next to the hall were the kitchen, the toilet (if not separate in the back stairwell) and the servants' quarters.
The room, later called the Berliner Zimmer, is said to have come from the pen of Karl Friedrich Schinkel , who favored it for the sake of using the available living space. This space made it possible to make better use of the area between the front building and the side wing , but this did not meet with the affection of the Berliners. A magazine wrote: “He does not practice his ingenuity very much in the houses of the citizens” [as before in Klein-Glienicke and Charlottenhof , i. B.] "The fact that Schinkel pays no attention to anything other than the façades is a serious sin against those unfortunate people who then take up residence in such houses."
The Berlin police chief, his building assessor James Hobrecht and the property speculators are also alleged to have caused the massive use of the Berlin room in tenement building. The building police order of 1853 specified the construction of the front and rear buildings in large blocks, instead of inner corridors so many backyards and side wings and thus many corners were created.
Friedrich Engels , who had visited the workers' leader Wilhelm Liebknecht in Kantstrasse in 1893 , wrote in a letter: “Here in Berlin the 'Berlin Room' was invented, with hardly a trace of a window, and in it the Berliners spend most of their time . The dining room (the parlor that is only used on large occasions) and the salon (used more elegantly and seldom) face the front, and the bedrooms face the courtyard. "Engels disliked the Berlin room very much:" All of them the rest of the world is an impossible shelter of darkness, of stifling air, & of the Berlin philistine feeling comfortable in it. Thank you very much! "
literature
- Hans Erman : World history in Berlin - histories, episodes, anecdotes. Publishing house for international cultural exchange, Berlin (West) 1960.
- Walter Kiaulehn : Berlin. Fate of a cosmopolitan city. Verlag Biederstein, Munich 1958, p. 82 ff.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Markus Ackeret: Dirty corner and heart of the old Berlin apartment . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung of August 13, 2016, p. 8.
- ↑ Quoted from Erman (1960), p. 216.
- ↑ Maritta Tkalec: cupboard, dining table, sideboard This is what lies behind the legendary “Berlin Room” . Berliner Zeitung on April 18, 2017, accessed on April 19, 2017.