History of the arbor colonies in the Wedding district

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The history of the arbor colonies in the Wedding district is closely related to the development of the city of Berlin in the formative period from the end of the 19th century. In the city, which is often referred to as the "capital of the garden pipit", the garden colonies in the Wedding district were the first and best known. These gardens, mostly made as temporary arrangements on land to be built, with simple, small, mostly self-made huts made it possible to relax in the fresh air and to supplement food through the cultivation of potatoes , vegetables and sometimes fruit . They also served as temporary to permanent housing alternatives .

Since 2001, 27 of the 31 allotment garden associations registered in Mitte have been in the former Wedding district. They cover an area of ​​about 62  hectares . There are also some colonies that are not affiliated with the district association of allotment gardeners. This means that almost seven percent of the Weddinger and Gesundbrunn area are allotments. As in Berlin as a whole, land in the allotment garden colonies has been largely owned by the state since 1989. Exceptions in Wedding are a larger colony with private parcel owners , some allotment gardens owned by Deutsche Bahn and a smaller number of privately owned parcels .

The arbor colonies often emerged as "wild" ones, later increasingly smaller open spaces parceled out by landowners and their general tenants in the period of industrialization in the north of Berlin after the establishment of the German Empire . For a long time, their areas and their names were marked as white spots on city maps. Parcel users were initially workers with their families who immigrated from the countryside to the big cities. Here they found a balance to the miserable conditions of the tenements or often an emergency shelter in times of crisis. Over time, petty-bourgeois users joined the proletarian arboreal colonists . For them, leisure time activities and hobby gardening were increasingly in the foreground over economic and residential purposes.

Early history of arboric colonies

New Holland Colony Barefoot Street, around 1911

The Weddinger arbor colonies had philanthropically motivated forerunners in the poor gardens founded in Berlin since 1833 . The Berlin strollers Julius Rodenberg mentions an example in his pictures from the Berlin life (1885) as a charity of a pastor who donated a workers' colony in the area of ​​"sandy deserts, swamps, luchen and fens". He used the term "colonists" according to its etymological origin as an agricultural area. This is also the name given by the city ​​council of Berlin after the acquisition of most of Wedding's areas and the subsequent parceling (until 1827) for the benefit of gardeners, builders and other workers. You should reclaim the inhospitable area. After 1860 their parcels were followed by allotment gardens and, with similar social hygiene goals, but also with political restrictions , allotments established by the German Red Cross .

The early allotment gardens for the poor population due to benevolent aristocratic or civic care did not become the long-term characteristic of Wedding. On the other hand, some railway gardens were created along the routes of newly built railways , up to and including the conversion of the former coal station near Wedding station from the Ringbahn, established in 1870, into a narrow colony of railway agriculture (= BLW), Wedding Group, after 1945. In the high phase of industrialization of the old Wedding through companies such as AEG , Schwartzkopff , Osram and Schering , there was a massive influx of job and apartment seekers. The inadequate number and quality of the available apartments in the tenements led to numerous allotments around the industrial facilities that were temporarily tolerated. Particularly on the woody and sandy soils around the dunes of the northern Berlin glacial valley - which is why the writer Gutzkow called it “a Sahara desert called Wedding” - primitive barracks were built. One of them, identified as the first Weddinger arbor colony with its name Schillerhöhe , had an eventful history from 1884 until it was built over after the Second World War; others, however, such as the New Holland settlement in Barfusstraße, were soon sacrificed for the construction of houses or the design of the Schillerpark . The main gateway of such "wild" settlements in earlier arboreal colonies, which faced urban developments based on real estate in the emerging Berlin suburbs, was the barren dune area of ​​the Rehberge in Wedding, after frequent deforestation of the Jungfernheide forest . There it was first replaced by the developing Rehberge Park with a colony taken over by socially better off tenants.

For the residents of the tenements built in Wedding, the arbor colonies created a remedy for the lack of fresh air and food, and for many of them also permanent housing in the arbors. Such compensation for social grievances was a good argument for bourgeois advocates of the arboreal colonies for their function as a social and economic antidote to alcoholism and pleasure addiction. Above all, however, the self-organization of the inhabitants of such colonies through the formation of associations around 1900 protected them from displacement and exploitation Soil speculators. Even before 1900, many of the Weddinger arbor colonies had come together to form associations. So the Cozy Rehberger in the later African Quarter . In 1901 an association of all planter associations in Berlin and the surrounding area was established in some arboric colonies in Wedding and in Berlin (within the city limits from 1861) . One of their successor organizations published the magazine Der Laubenkolonist from 1903 . The arbor colonies along the railway lines north of the Gesundbrunnen train station merged into the Railway and Agriculture Association. With the increasing degree of organization there was a standardization of the parcel sizes, but not yet of the arbor shapes. The parcels each consisted of about a third of cultivated areas, lawns and the wooden stalls, the name of which the French journalist Jules Huret noted in 1909 as "arbors", which was specific for Berlin.

The food shortage in World War I led to greater acceptance of the arboric colonies. In 1915, under the influence of the war economy, the War Committee of the Greater Berlin Laubenkolonien was founded . In the next year the government set up a central office for vegetable growing in the allotment garden . In 1916, the Federal Council of the German Empire also issued ordinances for the provision of urban land for garden use and for protection against unfair dismissals. At the same time, the lease prices for the parcels were officially set.

Ownership in the arbor colonies

As in public housing, urban development policy in the industrial expansion phase of the city of Berlin was characterized by the long-term transfer of the field to private landowners. The areas of Wedding affected by the spread of the arboreal colonies, as elsewhere in Berlin, were in three property areas: in urban real estate, in the area of ​​parishes and in the private property of terrestrial companies and individual owners. The real estate of the city of Berlin outweighed the other two forms of real estate, but not in the narrower area of ​​the city districts of 1861 such as Wedding. Here, social conflicts arose mainly from the takeover of the leaf colonies by general tenants who, as an intermediate instance, kept the land tenants dependent. This is particularly the case with private landowners, whose general tenants exerted economic pressure on arborist colonists through rent increases and canteens with serving monopolies. The impetus for this was, also in the area of ​​urban real estate, a tendering system for the colonies that was fixed for terms of three or six years, which made it possible to increase profits.

The detrimental social consequences, especially of the canteen operation, such as the alcoholism of many arbor colonists that it favored, contradicted the expectations of the allotment gardens. This changed only after the counter-movement against the speculative manipulation of the sizes and yields of the parcels by the general tenants, especially through the founding of associations by the arbor tenants. This was soon established by proponents of a cooperative organization of arboreal colonies, for example the secretary of the Greater Berlin Settlement Association Friedrich Coenen in 1911: "Many arbor colonists have organized themselves to promote the rational management of arbor gardens." This rationality was soon to be resolved with the abolition of the general tenant system and enforce public control in the period of the highest expansion of the arboric colonies in the Wedding district after 1920.

The property relations in the Weddinger arbor colonies of all kinds were permanently subject to their reserve function as land to be built. According to the prevailing opinion, this was also true for the city of Berlin as a private economic advantage of the expansion of allotment gardens: “If [the cities] have exposed land that is not considered for development, they cannot get a better exploitation option than the division and leasing to arbor garden enthusiasts. ”Little has changed in this function of arbor colonies as urban planning maneuvering masses in the Wedding district. For example, in the vicinity of the central Müllerstrasse against violent protests by the parcel residents around 1960, the Albrechtsruh arbor colony fell victim to road and housing planning, just like the New Holland colony earlier and, shortly before, the larger area of ​​the Schillerhöhe colony, a large social settlement of the same name Housing construction. A special case in such a lasting settlement of property claims, which otherwise only by a grandfathering clause for some time colonies like Rehberge , Togo and Sunday pleasures were limited, in the district of Gesundbrunnen the allotment Sandkrug . Their plots are privately owned by their users. Therefore, the colony did not join the Weddinger allotment garden association.

Since the 21st century, the term colony has been increasingly replaced by allotment gardens (KGA), in contrast to the earlier colonies .

Culture in the arbor colonies

Skat round in the arbor, 1930

In addition to their practical use, a characteristic culture of the Weddinger arbor colonies developed early on. In it a private Arcadia, albeit one that is not stressful for women, enriched itself with sociable values. The plots with their arbors and terraces almost always served as a recreational meeting point for families and friends. In the summer half of the year, social highlights formed in the arboreal colonies, at festivities, board and card games, in summer and harvest festivals as regular, often other collective events. Their center was usually always the canteen or the clubhouse of the colony, around which there were often playgrounds for children. Some of their names clearly indicate the weekend and holiday use of their tenants, but did not exclude the temporary or permanent use of the arbors as a dwelling.

The cohesion of the early Laubenkolonisten was perceived as more political due to the economic pressure on them and the relative homogeneity of their social profile, in a district that was called "Red Wedding" until the Weimar Republic and by the competing parties of the German labor movement was determined. At the end of the 1920s, one of her visitors sketched the arbor dwellers of the Albrechtsruh colony in the upper Müllerstrasse: "The colonists are almost only workers, class-conscious proletarians, politically trained, and at the same time farmers, proud of their` house` and their piece of land. " however, are only "farmers on notice" as dependent on lease and local building planning. Especially among the permanent residents of the parcel gazebos, a lively communicative exchange developed over the garden fences soon after they merged into colonies. As eyewitnesses later reported, this also led to actions such as collective singing in the courtyards of the tenements despite the current ban on begging. The close social cohesion took on habitually bound forms at the regular festive events and in the frequent club evenings in the club houses and was very conducive to the existence of a dense communicative network, which could also include political discussions. The publication of allotment garden magazines supported the communicative cohesion of the plot users early on, but mainly with the emphasis on their immediate practical interests.

In the design of the parcels, the limitation of the space and the economic possibilities set tight limits for the tenants. Nevertheless, an aesthetic claim was often unmistakable in the plots. The frequent naming of the residential gazebos, with their self-confident imitation of the villas in Berlin suburbs, might produce rather comical effects among bourgeois observers. In the horticultural practice, the lovingly prepared garden beds with their typical decorations, like the garden gnomes, balanced on the fine line between funny satiricals and cozy stuffiness. They left a scope for many forms of horticultural creativity and often idiosyncratic ornamentation around the arbors and in the gardens.

Arbor colonies in the Weimar Republic

After the First World War, the housing shortage also increased dramatically in Wedding. According to statistics from 1923, the district accounted for a tenth of the approximately 200,000 people looking for accommodation in Berlin. Due to the inadequate housing construction, 35,000 of them only found accommodation in barracks and apartment houses. For individuals, there was in the district of Wedding Single homes as the Local Court and homeless shelters as the Wiesenburg , in inadequate capacity. After the war and the revolution, when the arboreal colonies in Wedding had proven themselves as food reservoirs and emergency housing, the efforts of the parcel users increased in self-organization and legal security. Since July 1919, the allotment garden and small leasehold land ordinance was the first legal regulation, including protection against dismissal, that met them. Above all, however, the commercial general lease system was abolished, which had already been restricted by alcohol bans and lease restrictions.

The organizational efforts of the arborist colonists, and with them their politicization, intensified at all levels of regional authorities. This was particularly true of the Berlin workers 'districts with their high level of organization of the workers' movement. This was shown in agitationally pointed form in the 1932 film Kuhle Wampe about the tent city of that name on Lake Müggelsee. In 1921, on a reformist basis, a separate district association of the Greater Berlin Provincial Association of Allotment Garden Associations was established in Wedding . One of his goals was the establishment of permanent allotment garden colonies, which had occasionally been requested in the past. In 1930 the landscape architect Leberecht Migge criticized that only a fraction of the 2,000 hectares planned for this purpose had already been realized, which is why the “permanent allotment garden question” stood in the way of the idea of ​​“cosmopolitan greenery” in Berlin. A model case here in 1927 was the Rehberge colony, which was integrated into the creation of the Rehberge Park as a job creation measure . The shift from the term arboric colonies to allotment garden colonies since 1919, before and later often generalized as allotment gardens, also met their growing respectability in Wedding. The increasing importance of the allotment gardens soon corresponded, among other things, with their upgrading to the most important garden type in the Migges theory. Such an increase in importance, however, accompanied an increase in the expenses necessary for the parcels and, as a result, a social shift among their tenants to the area of ​​the small and middle class.

In the legislation for allotment gardening after 1919, issues relating to the protection of the population also touched upon the internal differentiation among the arboric colonies. They led to the gradual increase in permanent colonies with protection of existing ones, next to the Rehberge colony as the first Berlin colony and one of the earliest German permanent garden colony, with time intervals also at the Togo colony and other smaller facilities. As in the case of the Rehberge colony, such an upgrade was accompanied by a standardization of the regulations for the layout of the individual parcels and especially their arbours. The allotment garden colony Rehberge followed the guidelines for the external design of permanent allotment garden colonies laid down by the City of Berlin ; it was included in the planning of the new Volkspark by Erwin Barth and Rudolf Germer and, with its chessboard-like structure, formed a clear contrast to the surrounding Volkspark , which was modeled on the English landscape park . Their area of ​​118 hectares included playgrounds, fountains and closed arbors of 20 m² each  , which were not intended for permanent dwelling. Their 460 parcels had the regular size of approx. 250 m². The restriction of the arbors to only three types and even the planting of the plots were also strictly regulated.

Rehberge permanent allotment garden colony, 1930

criticism

The fixing of the rent in the Rehberge colony at a relatively high amount certainly touched a critical point in Weddinger's housing policy in the Weimar Republic . In the western part of the district, the focus of the social democratic subsidized new building was. Cooperative settlements were built in it under the direction of town planning officer Martin Wagner . Of these, the Schillerpark settlement is a UNESCO World Heritage Site of Modern Architecture. Their counterparts in the African Quarter are the Friedrich-Ebert-Siedlung by Bruno Taut and Mies van der Rohe's group of houses on African Street. Overall, the land consumption of the cooperative new building and the beginning of social housing did not prevent the arbor colonies from reaching the highest level of expansion during the Weimar period. However, there was a certain competition between the already existing arbor colonies and the new building sites for increasingly scarce land, but also because of the unaffordable rents for new apartments for most arbor tenants. In some places, the areas were directly adjacent to one another, such as the first buildings by Bruno Taut in the Schillerpark housing estate, from whose first residential blocks - designed by the architect with the intention of avoiding "poor people's art" - the view fell on the Freudental colony with its poor residents . The unease among the members of the KPD about such contradictions was allayed by individual KPD residents of the new settlement, such as the couple Hilde and Georg Benjamin, through the political party work in the arbor colony area. In 1934, a report by the National Socialist allotment garden management actually assumed that 80 percent of the plot users were communists.

The criticism of arbor colonies was less aimed at urban development problems than at their social function. The criticism of the identification of working people of proletarian origin with their parcels came from politically opposed positions. In the early days of the arboreal colonies, when their tenants began to organize themselves as associations, a bourgeois scolding saw the workers' desire for green spaces as inappropriate behavior. On the other hand, those close to the radical workers' movement in the Weimar Republic saw the same endeavor as the danger of turning away from the political struggle of the day. The cabaret texts by Erich Weinert contained similar critical motives against the parcel users derisively referred to as “Laubenkommunisten” . In contrast, the popular songs by Claire Waldoff sympathized with the arborist colonists despite all the affectionate ridicule, while their petty-bourgeois parcel neighbors appear in the modern prose and still in children's books during the Nazi era of Hans Fallada as pitiful victims of the economic crisis after 1929.

Weddinger arbor colonies under National Socialism

The relationship between the National Socialists , before and after they came to power, to the arboreal colonies on Wedding was ambivalent. For them, the tenants of the colonies were politically suspect as the vast majority of voters and members of the left-wing parties in red Wedding. Among them in Wedding was an above-average proportion of the estimated 41,000 people living in Berlin apartments after 1933. As in the neighboring district of Reinickendorf , there in the Felseneck colony, they were the target of violent attacks as early as 1933 . After the initial terror against the arbor colonists, the “renovation of the wild housing estates” formed a focus of the National Socialist housing policy from 1935 onwards. For such obvious reasons, Nazi propaganda was occasionally directed against these colonies. In contradiction to this was the claim propagated in the fascist rhetoric: "Every racially impeccable, hereditary and peasant-minded German comrade has the right to be allowed to cultivate a small piece of German land himself." The policy of the NSDAP supported the establishment of permanent colonies, however before the war there was no right of residence in them. A number of National Socialist publications with the motif of blood and soil that supported the allotment gardeners were based on their ideology. This term was also listed in the statutes of the Wedding City Group, alternating with “Folk and Customs”, as the highest reference point for allotment gardening.

The measures taken by the NSDAP in the arbor colonies were repeatedly aimed at eliminating all resistance, often with the help of their functionaries and informers. The Weddinger colonies were also affected by the fact that they were forced to become members of the new Reich Association of Allotment Gardeners and Small Settlers in Germany . The Wedding City Group was headed by a stand group leader who delivered regular reports to the state police. In a letter he complained that an allotment garden association with predominantly communist members on Müllerstrasse was headed by a former KPD functionary. The Gestapo, however, left it with a request for a list of all association members, the majority of whom had their sole residence in the colony, since the association chairman had meanwhile joined the NSDAP. Only gradually, and then completely in 1938, were Jewish members excluded from the Reichsbund. In addition, the Nazi state expropriated Jewish landowners. One of the victims of this policy in the Wedding district was the landowner of the "Papier" colony (later "Sommerglück"), Paul Hamburg, who was only reinstated as the owner of his property in 1952 in the course of reparations.

The National Socialists' aversion to the "random jumble" of arbor colonies and private parcels on the outskirts was also based on overarching motives. They saw in them "the evil expression of ruthlessly crumbling loneliness" - the contrast to an idyllic past, "with the tight expression of the 'common being'", in which they were disciplined by "wall or green". The fragmentation and the chaos of most of the allotment garden colonies, already noticed by observers at the arborist colonies, contradicted Hitler's well-known guiding principle of architecture as a “worldview made stone” with its heroic features. Speer's model of a future metropolis Germania hardly accidentally cut aisles through Weddinger's core areas and their arboric colonies. This is proven by the restricted area plan issued in 1938 following Speer's axis planning of his urban utopia. A positive exception to such a distance allowed the permanent colony "Rehberge" with its tightly organized, almost military-style operation, which made it a model facility for system-compliant residents earlier than others. The Pharus-Plan Berlin from 1944 (medium edition) ennobled their area with the socially demanding place name Neu-Westend . Immediately adjacent to the west, a large new barracks area was built from 1935 as the Hermann Göring barracks and since 1994 Julius Leber barracks .

On the other hand, the allotment garden movement could easily be reconciled with the blood-and-soil ideology of the NSDAP. The National Socialists managed to get some of the arbor colonies under control through the intermediaries they placed there, especially the Rehberge model colony . There the club leader had been a party member since 1932. This focus was positively reinforced by the nutritional-political function of the arboreal colonies during World War II. The importance of the allotment gardens as an additional source of supply increased here, in the times of the air raids on Berlin also as emergency shelters in addition to the makeshift shelters that were quickly built with forced laborers . This led to rigid restrictions on the possibilities of terminating allotment gardens and, in 1944, to the temporary expiry of leases. This use of the allotment gardens also had contradicting consequences, not least because in some cases their plots were used as temporary shelter for Jews and others persecuted by the regime. A contemporary witness reported such use of an arbor in a colony on Seestrasse (probably the Schillerhöhe ). Other cases of this type are known in the history of the resistance at Wedding, although the resistance potential of the arboreal colonies as a whole is estimated to be quite limited.

Allotment gardens in the reconstruction phase of West Berlin after 1945

Sunday in the allotment garden, 1948

After the destruction of the Second World War and the housing shortage, the use of the arbours of the Wedding allotment garden colonies as emergency accommodation continued for a few years. This was initially promoted through a procurement program for the expansion of residential houses in the district. From 1950, however, the resulting permanent housing rights were withdrawn step by step, with a few socially justified exceptions, and the continuing housing shortage was reduced by new housing programs, primarily in social housing. This was the last phase in which the shrinking of large allotment gardens in Wedding was enforced in favor of reconstruction, mostly against the resistance of the affected parcel users. Pressure was exerted on the arboreal colonies through the activation of their reserve function as building land. This was met by a slight decrease in the interest of several allotment gardeners, for whom the housing options in their arbours had exceeded the horticultural interest.

The political system confrontation that came to a head during the Cold War accompanied the special case of one of the largest Weddinger arbor colonies, the Schillerhöhe colony adjacent to Schillerpark . In July 1951, the Weddinger legal office filed a criminal complaint against 32 arborist colonists in this complex, who were suspected of "spreading rumors of undermining order in the western sectors and representing totalitarian goals". The proceedings were soon discontinued - and the question of dissolving the colony of the association was therefore irrelevant - so that the West Berlin Senate decided that the area should be “open to development”. This resulted in the largest social housing construction measure to date in the Wedding district, the Gartenstadt Schillerhöhe large estate that was created from 1955 . At the beginning of 1953, the construction department of the Wedding district had supported the "construction of a massive residential arbor" for a resident of the Schillerhöhe arbor colony in accordance with the 1950/51 housing plan with a loan. A similar fate led to the gradual demolition of the Albrechtsruh arbor colony in Müllerstraße, the existence of which had been in question since the construction of the neighboring large tram depot in upper Müllerstraße. Its construction had already taken into account the expected overbuilding of the adjacent allotment gardens in 1927. In the post-war period, the arbor colony gave way to the space requirements of the neighboring BVG building block, which was transformed into a bus depot in 1959, and a cultural center of the French sector . A few years later, a retirement home and rental houses followed in the last, rear areas of the colony.

After the reconstruction phase, the rather provisional character of the allotment garden colonies contradicted the persistence of their users. The expansion of protected areas, especially due to the considerable increase in permanent colonies, led to a slight shift in the proportion of allotment gardens in the total area of ​​the district in housing construction in the post-war period. This can also be seen in the number of allotment garden associations organized in the Wedding District Association between 1985 and 2015. In one case, relating to the Pankterrassen colony , its terrain was included in the redesign of the area along the Panke river as Pankewiesen .

The consolidation of most of the other allotment garden colonies is based on an increasingly high-profile defense of the population, mostly for ecological and health reasons. The relative distribution of the allotment gardens across the Wedding district also remained constant. More than half of their parcels are on its western edge, in the colonies of Rehberge (476 parcels), Togo (167), Plötzensee (197) and Quartier Napoléon (191). Other larger allotment gardens are located on the opposite side of Müllerstraße - such as the colonies Sonntagfreude and North Pole . In contrast, only one allotment garden colony in the Gesundbrunnen district has more than 100 parcels ( Panke , 181). The constancy of the total stock of allotment gardens is reflected in the allotment garden development plan of the Berlin Senate Department for Urban Development and the Environment 2012 (2014 update).

Development tendencies of the allotment garden colonies in Wedding and Gesundbrunnen

Since the introduction of permanent colonies, a stronger institutional definition of the association structures that had existed for a long time also prevailed in Wedding. It was accompanied by conceptual shifts. A specific problem for the African Quarter in the western part of the village arose since the end of the 20th century for the naming of the arbor colonies that existed there, which are now almost all allotment garden colonies or allotment garden associations, and the larger ones are listed with their names on city maps. Here it was the colonial context, which is viewed increasingly critically, which led, for example, to the renaming of the permanent colony Togo to the allotment garden association Togo . The new, albeit hesitant and quantitatively limited, leasing of parcels by residents of the growing district with foreign cultural roots also played a role here. It prevailed against long-standing reservations of the majority tenants in individual cases, as at the same time in other European countries, for example in the British area. After all, the homepage of the Wedding District Association of Allotment Gardeners expressly emphasizes, "Members of other nationalities find a friendly welcome here". This also corresponds to the announcements of the responsible Berlin Senate Administration.

The minority of the land tenants of foreign cultural origin, especially the descendants of Turkish immigrants - the largest immigrant group in Wedding - forms only a small, albeit slowly growing, cohort among the newer allotment garden users. Quantitatively just as momentous is a social as well as generational shift. The tenants of the Berlin allotment garden colonies, who initially came from the working class or the petty bourgeoisie, were supplemented by employees and civil servants who gradually, following the general demographic development, formed the main part of the colonists. In general, economic considerations lost more and more weight when taking over a parcel. Perhaps that also caused the relative decline in interest in Weddinger allotment garden colonies since the 1980s. However, the decline in the number of applications to take over a parcel has so far not led to more than the usual fluctuation-related vacancies.

The slow economic upturn, including in the Wedding district, after 1950 also resulted in the decline in use as residential gazebos. An exception are individual cases that are not economically motivated, for example in the allotment garden colony Sandkrug am Gesundbrunnen with its special status as an association of small landowners. In its table of allotment gardens allocated to the districts of Gesundbrunnen and Wedding in 2014 , the table of the Senate Department for Urban Development only lists a few parcel users who have been permanent residents with a permanent residence permit since 1945, the number of which is rapidly decreasing. Overall, the total area of ​​the Weddinger allotment gardens decreased from over 3000 hectares to around 2500 in 1950 to almost 2000 hectares in 1985. After that, they remained at a similar level.

With the renewed resurgence of interest in privately used green spaces in Wedding, there is a connection with the increased ecological awareness of broad, especially younger, highly educated and often socially secure people. The new interest in urban greenery, however, increasingly corresponds to newer forms of community gardens and urban gardening in Wedding. They often turn away from the regulatory claims of the allotment garden associations and the characteristic individual ownership of many arbor colonists, and in any case they form a conscious horticultural counter-model. Newer publications on urban gardening include even the older allotment garden colonies, including those in Volkspark Rehberge in Wedding, among the projects it presents because of the dissolution of rigid regulations that is noticeable in many places.

In the pluralization of lifestyles, the traditional social and institutional classifications also dissolve in the field of allotment gardens. This corresponds to a growing number of community gardens in Wedding. They include the intercultural community garden in Mauerpark and an intercultural garden of the generations next to an old people's home on Seestrasse. An intercultural community project in Weddinger Ruheplatzstraße is open to interested parties of all generations. It consists of 300 square or rectangular wooden boxes, each with different plants. In addition to social mobility, the 1700 m² project even promises local mobility. The fallow land he uses is intended for a sports hall in the district discussion. The urban gardening system called Himmelbeet is then to be relocated to the roof of the sports hall. In a tourism-related brochure by the Berlin Senate about the urban green of Berlin, the new intercultural gardens, after forests, parks, riverside paths and cemeteries, are in front of the traditional allotment gardens.

Conservation of the allotment garden colonies in Wedding

After the German reunification and the end of the Allied administration of Berlin, the need arose again to review the Berlin allotment garden for its security and further development. Initially, the Weddinger colonies also received a ten-year protection period through the decision of the House of Representatives in 1994. This led in 2004 to the allotment garden development plan of the Senate Department for Urban Development. The plan distinguished between the allotment garden colonies of Wedding at various levels of preservation along a scale of permanent protection and unsecured status. In legal terms, this classification is based on the Federal Allotment Garden Act as the highest authority. At the next level of the legal hierarchy, the zoning plan has a location-based application. Just like the allotment garden development plan based on it, it can take greater account of the historically evolved peculiarities of the allotment garden scene in Wedding.

The allotment garden development plan for Berlin, which stipulates the grading of the guarantee of existence, was updated in 2012 and again in 2014. He relates some of his classification groups to the allotment gardens in the districts of Wedding and Gesundbrunnen in the new district of Mitte: The colonies of Togo , Quartier Napoleon , Freudental , North Pole II , Grüntal , Holzweg , Panke , Pankegrund , Cameroon are among the allotment garden colonies with the highest level of security protection as permanent allotment gardens . Little Africa , Liège , Sunday joy , mountains and valleys and Humboldt . They are considered to be just as permanently secured as another group with a similarly large area, which, however, are managed as fictitious permanent allotment gardens . This presupposes permanent protection through their recording in the zoning plan as a green area. The allotment garden colonies Plötzensee , Rehberge , Eintracht an der Panke , Steinwinkel , Seestraßeninsel fall into this category . The garden colonies with permanent inventory protection form by far the dominant group in both districts of historic Wedding in terms of number and area size. A second Plötzensee colony is also considered to be highly secured by the zoning plan , although it is not actually or fictitiously designated as a permanent facility .

The colonies that are only secured for a period of time include those that are granted the status of fictitious permanent gardens, but which are marked as building areas in the zoning plan. This smaller group includes the colonies Sommerglück , Wiesengrund , Nordkap , Scherbeneck , Virchow and Wilhelm-Kuhr-Straße . Their protection period ends after the 2014 allotment garden development plan is updated in 2020. Some other allotment garden colonies that are also located on building sites according to the zoning plan but have not been granted a protection period are completely unsecured: Sankt Georg , Steegerstraße and a group of plots of the Panke colony . In view of the growing population and increasing building needs, the future of some of the allotment garden colonies in this category must be viewed as precarious. This does not apply in the same way to the allotment gardens of private owners of the Sandkrug colony outside the official preservation of the state of Berlin and the Wedding facility on the Ringbahn which is owned by Deutsche Bahn and leased by it to the railway agriculture.

  • Existing colonies

  • Colony Quartier Napoleon

  • Togo colony

  • Freudental Colony

  • Panke Colony

  • Allotment gardens Grüntal

Symbolic value of the arbor colonies

The significance of the arbor colonies in the old Wedding district went beyond their immediate value for their users and their functions in urban development. They have been accompanied by symbolic attributions since the time they were created. So in Heinrich Zille's drawings, which saw the self-assertiveness of their builders reflected in the proud construction of their primitive barracks. The Zillebuch from 1929, which he created with his help, cites them as their “ mansions ”; a cartoon gives a colony the name "Garden of Paradise". At the time of the Great Depression of 1929, the documentarists gave the Weddinger arbor colonies similar importance. For Alexander Stenbock-Fermor, the political consciousness of the arborist colonists and the tragic individual fates among them stood side by side in sharp contrast. On the other hand, Franz Hessel saw "nothing provisional or nomadic" during his walks in Wedding in its arbor colonies. To him they seemed "permanent paradises, proletarian or petty-bourgeois realms of the blessed". In historical retrospect, the epic panorama of Peter Weiss' aesthetics of resistance is reminiscent of the bearers of Weddinger anti-fascism "in the camouflage clubs of bowlers, singers, athletes, gardeners". More distanced, particularly left-wing commentators like Erich Weinert saw a dichotomy between vigorous self-sufficiency and conservative depoliticization as early as the Weimar Republic. This ambivalence continued after the Second World War in a tension between ecological progressiveness and conservative persistence, which often also found its way into party competition in election campaigns. The suspicion that allotment gardeners permanently weighed down that their empire was the “last bulwark of the German philistine” (Kaminer) is dissolving in the freer forms of communal gardens and, last but not least, hesitantly in themselves.

A shadow of the allotment garden persistence, which Hessel already emphasized, occasionally appears in later times in journalistic glosses about marginal Weddinger leafy colonies. An article about Wolfgang Herrndorf's search for a suitable place for his suicide next to the allotment garden colony along the Spandauer Schifffahrtskanal on the edge of Wedding emphasizes the strangeness of the scenery (“everything very, very neat and straight”) compared to the writer's blogs in terms of work and structure . Herrndorf was one of the few prominent public figures who perceived the Weddinger arbor colonies as residents of the district from the inside - Wedding has no allotment garden tenants like Albert Einstein (in Spandau ) or Wladimir Kaminer (in Prenzlauer Berg ). His search ended in 2013 at a bank area marked as a beautiful view on the city map, separated by a small embankment from the meticulously numbered, attractively designed parcels of the allotment garden colony “Plötzensee”. Instead of a solid social cohesion, a void of alienation is reflected in this place.

See also

literature

(newest works first)
  • Elisabeth Meyer-Renschhausen: Urban Gardening in Berlin. Tours to the city's new gardens . Berlin: be.bra-Verlag 2016.
  • Christa Pöppelmann: Hope grows here! From the arbor colony to the guerrilla garden . Hildesheim: Gerstenberg 2012.
  • Senate Department for Urban Development and the Environment: The colorful green. Allotments in Berlin. Berlin 2012.
  • Christa Müller (Ed.): Urban Gardening. About the return of the gardens to the city . Munich, 4th edition, oekom-Verlag 2012.
  • Senate Department for Urban Development: Allotment Garden Development Plan Berlin. Berlin 2004.
  • Günter Katsch and Johann B. Walz (eds.): Allotment gardens and allotment gardeners in the 19th and 20th centuries. Pictures and documents , Leipzig, Bundesverband Deutscher Gartenfreunde 1996.
  • David Crouch, Colin Ward: The Allotment. Its landscape and culture. Nottingham: Mushroom 1994.
  • Christine Roik-Bogner: Allotments in Wedding , in: Helmut Engel u. a. (Ed.): Geschichtslandschaft Berlin, III , Berlin: Nicolai 1990, pp. 417-432
  • Parcel arbor colony. Allotments between 1880 and 1930 . Berlin: Märkisches Museum 1988.
  • Bodo Rollka, Volker Spiess (eds.): Berliner Laubenpieper. Allotments in the big city. Berlin: Haude & Spener 1987.
  • Horst Farny, Martin Kleinloser: Allotments in Berlin (West). The importance of private allotment garden use in a large city. Berlin 1986.
  • Wedding is green , publisher: Wedding District Office of Berlin. Berlin, Koll 1985.
  • Rita Klages: Proletarian refuges and last places of resistance? Tent cities and arboric colonies in Berlin , in: Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt (Ed.), Project: Detection of evidence. Everyday life and resistance in Berlin in the 30s. Berlin, Elefanten Press 1983, pp. 117-136.
  • Friedrich Coenen: The Berlin arbor colony system, its shortcomings and its reforms . Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1911.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bodo Rollka, Volker Spiess (ed.): Berliner Laubenpieper. Allotments in the big city . Berlin: Haude u. Spener 1987, pp. 27-29.
  2. ^ Julius Rodenberg: Pictures from life in Berlin. Berlin: Rütten & Loening 1987, pp. 171, 173.
  3. ^ Heidrun Joop: Berlin streets. Example Wedding. Berlin: Hentrich 1987, pp. 44-45.
  4. ↑ Rollka, Spiess: Berlin Laubenpieper , pp 24-27.
  5. ^ Günter Katsch, Johann B. Walz: Allotment gardens and allotment gardeners in the 19th and 20th centuries. Pictures and documents. Leipzig: Federal Association of German Gardening Friends 1996, pp. 31–32.
  6. ↑ Karin Mahlich: The Rehberge Park , in: Helmut Engel u. a. (Ed.): Geschichtslandschaft Berlin, III: Wedding. Berlin: Nicolai 1990, pp. 446-464.
  7. ↑ Peter Schmidt: The importance of the allotment culture for the worker question. Berlin: 1897, pp. 13, 37-39.
  8. ↑ Rollka, Spiess: Berliner Laubenpieper ... , p. 33.
  9. ↑ Jules Huret, in: Christa Pöppelmann: Hope grows here! From the arbor colony to the guerrilla garden. Hildesheim: Gerstenberg 2012, p. 67.
  10. ↑ Märkisches Museum: Parzelle-Laube-Kolonie ... , p. 52.
  11. ^ Coenen: Das Berliner Laubenkoloniewesen… P. 15–26.
  12. ^ Coenen: The Berlin arbor colony ... p. 12.
  13. ^ Coenen: The Berlin arbor colony ... p. 10.
  14. ↑ Christine Roik-Bogner: Allotments in Wedding , in Helmut Engel (ed.): Geschistorlandschaft Berlin, III, pp. 420-422.
  15. ↑ Märkisches Museum: Parzelle-Laube-Kolonie ... pp. 34–41.
  16. ^ Alexander Graf Stenbock-Fermor: Germany from below. Travels through the proletarian province 1930. Lucerne and Frankfurt / Main: Bucher 1980, pp. 141–143.
  17. ↑ Lothar Binger, Susann Hellemann, Petra Hellemann: With us at the plump. Das Lebensmilieu Bahnhof Gesundbrunnen , in: The Berlin S-Bahn. Social history of an industrial means of transport . Berlin: Verlag Ästhetik und Kommunikation 1982, pp. 157–175.
  18. ^ Annemarie Lange: Berlin in the Weimar Republic. Berlin: Dietz 1987, pp. 314-322.
  19. ↑ Katsch and Walz: Allotment Gardens and Allotment Gardeners in the 19th and 20th Centuries , p. 36.
  20. ↑ Leberecht Migge: Crisis in Berlin's Green Policy? Weltstadtgrün as a communal organizational problem , Deutsche Bauzeitung 64 (1930), supplement Stadt und Siedlung , pp. 57–61.
  21. ^ David H. Haney: When Modern Was Green. Life and work of landscape architect Leberecht Migge , London a. New York: Routledge 2010, p. 204.
  22. ↑ Marks Hobbs: 'Farmers on Notice': the threat faced by Weimar Berlin's garden colonies in the face of the city's Neues Bauen housing program , Urban History 39, 2 (2012), pp. 263–284.
  23. ↑ Hilde Benjamin, Georg Benjamin. Leipzig, 3rd edition 1987, p. 160.
  24. ↑ S. Hannes Müllerfeld: Down with the garden city , in: Die Gartenstadt 8 (1914), pp. 56-57.
  25. ↑ Kurt Stechert: The villas of the proletarians , 1930 in: Märkisches Museum: Parzelle-Laube-Kolonie , pp. 7-11.
  26. ↑ Gottfried Schmitt, Roland Schwarz: The trauma of the poor district , in: Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt (ed.): The Wedding - hard on the border. Living on in Berlin after the war. Berlin: Nishen 1987, p. 11.
  27. ↑ The Nazi attack on Felseneck , in: Märkisches Museum, Parzelle-Laube-Kolonie, pp. 56–57.
  28. ↑ Christoph Bernhardt: Housing Policy and Building Industry in Berlin (1930–1950) , in: Michael Wildt and Christoph Kreutzmüller (eds.): Berlin 1933–1945. Munich: Siedler 2013, p. 182.
  29. ↑ Pöppelmann: Hope grows here , p. 98.
  30. ↑ Landesarchiv Berlin, A Pr. Br. Rep. 030-04, No. 1616, p. 9 (Statutes 1934, § 2.1), p. 26 (Statutes 1939, § 2.2.).
  31. ↑ Ibid, p. 8.
  32. ^ Roik-Bogner: Allotments in Wedding , p. 428.
  33. ^ Gerd Kuhn: Wild settlement and quiet suburbanization ; in: Alena Janatková, Hanna Kozinska-Witt (eds.): Living in the big city 1900–1939. Housing situation and modernization in a European comparison. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner 2006, p. 124.
  34. ↑ Markus Sebastian Braun (ed.): The architecture guide Berlin. Berlin: Verlagshaus Braun, 2nd edition 2005, p. 138.
  35. ↑ Joop: Berliner Strasse ... , p. 68.
  36. ↑ Landesarchiv Berlin, A Pr. B. Rep. 030-04, No. 1603, p. 11.
  37. ↑ Rollka, Spiess: Berliner Laubenpieper ... , p. 48.
  38. ^ Hans-Rainer Sandvoss: Resistance in Wedding and Gesundbrunnen. Berlin: German Resistance Memorial Center 2003, p. 310.
  39. ↑ Roik-Bogner: Allotments in Wedding , pp. 429–431.
  40. ↑ Landesarchiv Berlin, B Rep. 203, No. 10831 (February 12, 1953), np
  41. ^ Paul Schaefer: A new tram station with civil servant houses in the north of Berlin , Deutsche Bauzeitung 61 (1927), p. 617.
  42. ↑ a b KGA development plan of the Senate, 2014
  43. ↑ Claire Rishbeth: The Seeds in the Suitcase: Intercultural Connections through Planting , Hard Times. German-English magazine 95: Garden Cultures (2014), pp. 14–16.
  44. ↑ Sina Tschacher: Berlin is the capital of the Laubenpieper , in: Mieter Magazin 6/2009.
  45. ↑ The Senator for Urban Development and Environmental Protection (Ed.): Allotments in Berlin (West) , Berlin 1985, pp. 6-7.
  46. ↑ Christa Müller: Urban Gardening. Green signatures of new urban civilization , in this. (Ed.): Urban Gardening. About the return of the gardens to the city . Munich: oekom, 4th edition 2012, pp. 22–53.
  47. ↑ Christa Meyer-Renzschhausen: Urban Gardening. Tours to the city's new gardens . Berlin: be.bra Verlag 2016, pp. 44–45.
  48. ↑ Christoph Stollowsky: Plants in the box. A visit to the makers of the Weddinger Himmelbeet , in: Der Tagesspiegel : Garten (special issue) 2016/2017, pp. 14-17.
  49. ↑ Senate Department for Urban Development and the Environment, Berlin 2015, pp. 61, 65.
  50. ^ Franz Hessel : Walking in Berlin. Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 3rd edition 2013, p. 242.
  51. ↑ Peter Weiss: The Aesthetics of Resistance. Volume 1, Frankfurt / Main: Suhrkamp 1975, p. 27.
  52. ↑ Wladimir Kaminer : Mein Leben im Schrebergarten , Munich, 11th edition: Goldmann 2009, p. 9.
  53. ↑ Gerrit Bartels: A beautiful place to die , in: Der Tagesspiegel , July 24, 2016, p. 25.