Single home
A single home is a structural accommodation for unmarried workers, employees, miners, artisans, soldiers, students, day laborers , usually with low incomes who, due to the prevailing housing shortage are looking for a cheap place to stay.
Establishment and purpose
The single dormitories were intended to curb the sleeper population, which was considered hygienic and morally questionable. The bourgeois reformers blamed the sleepers for the devastating overcrowding of many workers' apartments and for the associated endangerment of families. Women had no access to the accommodation if it was a facility for men, which is why those for men were popularly called bull monasteries . In addition to the living rooms, the facilities in the homes included a canteen, shared sanitary facilities (washrooms, toilets, partly bathing facilities), administrative and common rooms. The canteen was supposed to provide the residents with inexpensive food, also to discourage them from visiting restaurants, which often led to excessive alcohol consumption. In addition, most of the men at that time had little knowledge of household issues and were therefore unable to provide food for themselves. In later times, however, kitchens were also set up for common use by the residents.
The homes were often built near industrial plants in order to keep the workforce to the factories. But they also served as a control and were intended to make it more difficult to organize workers in unions . Other single homes were run by the church and were only open to members of the denomination in question . Appropriate spiritual care was part of the offer, but was also intended to prevent moral misconduct.
In the song from Geiseltal , which Karl-Boy Simonsen (1914–1994) wrote in 1933, it says:
- When the day ends, work out
- And fades the evening sunshine
- Did we, the digging column, ahoy,
- On the bike to the single home.
- Meta brought us the food there,
- (Funded by the industry).
- We didn't have time to love
- The work ruined us.
history
Single homes had been built since the late 19th century and operated until the 1960s, as the housing shortage persisted after the Second World War . Today the facilities in Munich and Hamburg are the last single homes still in operation in Germany . The rest are mostly converted into refugee homes, student dormitories, retirement homes, hotels or residential buildings.
Examples (selection)
Former, converted single homes
- Berlin-Charlottenburg: Single home for men, Danckelmannstraße 46–47 (under monument protection)
- Berlin-Moabit: Single home for men , Waldenserstraße 31 (under monument protection)
- Breslau (Wrocław): House 31 in the Werkbundsiedlung Breslau
- Darmstadt: Single dormitory on Mathildenhöhe (under monument protection)
- Dinslaken-Lohberg: Miners' dormitory of the Lohberg colliery , Stollenstrasse 1
- Dortmund-Eving: Eving colony welfare building (under monument protection)
- Essen: Krupp-Ledigenheim, today's office building West (under monument protection)
- Essen: Kaiser-Wilhelm-Ledigenheim , Weberplatz (significantly changed, under monument protection)
- Werdohl: today's town hall (under monument protection)
Existing single homes
- Hamburg: Single home Hamburg
- Munich: Single home Munich
Individual evidence
- ↑ Early industrialization ( Memento from June 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Nostalgic things about the famous Geiseltal fossil deposit
- ↑ Dormitories at Danckelmannstrasse 46 & 47 in the Berlin State Monument List
- ↑ http://www.berlin.de/ba-charlottenburg-wilmersdorf/ Bezirk/lexikon/ ledigenheim.html
- ↑ Single home for men in the Berlin State Monument List
- ↑ https://www.ledigenheim-lohberg.de/das-haus/