From Wülcknitz family houses

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The von Wülcknitz family houses on Gartenstrasse in Berlin-Mitte were a complex of rental apartments that were built by Baron von Wülcknitz between 1820 and 1824 to take advantage of the housing shortage at the time. They were a focal point of social misery and are considered to be the forerunners of Berlin's tenement barracks . In 1881/82 they were torn down and replaced by the usual houses, some of which are still there. Numerous publications denounced the grievances there at the time.

location

They stood on the site on which the houses at Gartenstrasse 108 to 115 are today (at that time the houses in Gartenstrasse 92, 92a, 92b), i.e. on the area in front of the Hamburger Tor between Torstrasse and the west side of Gartenstrasse almost up to today's Tieckstrasse ( Map view ). The houses were called Long House, Transverse House, School House, Small House and Merchant's House . The largest of them, the Long House, was 63 m long, a good 18 m high and had 30 one-room apartments on each of the lower four of the six floors. It was roughly where houses 108 to 111 are today. The builder, whose full name was Royal Chamberlain Heinrich Otto von Wülcknitz, came from the Bernau area and had inherited the site from Major Hans Heinrich von Wülcknitz on October 16, 1815. First he had set up a lumberyard on it, where he stored the wood felled in his inherited forests for sale. He also built his own house there - for example in the area of ​​today's house no. 113. The quality of the houses and the living conditions were poor. The basement of one of the five houses was already rented when the first floor was being worked on. The basement ceiling was still so wet that the water dripped down. The authorities intervened following a complaint.

description

The apartments consisted of a series of individual rooms of the same type, each with two windows, so-called parlors, which were generally 21 square meters in size. Due to the high rents, several families also shared a room. In the approximately 400 rooms of the family houses - the information fluctuates - between 2,200 and 3,000 people lived. Thus, each resident had an average of 2.2 m² of living space. Since various residents, namely weavers, also worked here, the area where the loom stood had to be deducted. For such a gathering of people in a very small space, the responsible doctor for the poor stated in a petition "that it is to be feared that a malignant disease will break out". Finally, a document drawn up by the poor doctor in 1828 demanded that only one family should live in a room. Due to the plight of many residents, however, the decree issued as a result could not always be complied with: In 1855, two families in one room were not uncommon. Anyone who did not pay their rent on time was expelled immediately.

The shared toilets were a particular problem. As early as 1825, the responsible city council had criticized that the "cuttings are open and pollute the air". According to a police report from 1828, there was one toilet for every 50 residents. It was not until 1841 that a second toilet was installed in the merchant 's house. The sewage from the family houses flowed in open gutters into a cesspool at the "Long House". It was not until the beginning of the 1840s, in connection with the construction of the Szczecin train station , which required a paved road connection to the city via Gartenstrasse, that a drainage channel for domestic sewage was also laid to the Panke .

As early as September 1824, the magistrate's confidential monthly newspaper report to the king reported in detail about the conditions in the family houses. The king, Friedrich Wilhelm III. , thereupon instructed the Minister of the Interior to pay special attention to the family houses and, if necessary, to put an end to grievances through appropriate orders. A third newspaper report to the king also contained a detailed report by the poor doctor Dr. Thümmel, which was printed in 50 copies for use by the responsible authorities. These reports led to several official requirements against von Wülcknitz, against which the latter defended himself. For their part, the authorities were particularly concerned that such a concentration of owner-occupied households could endanger public order or that infectious diseases would spread across Berlin from here. Finally, Wülcknitz insulted the police. In 1829 he was sentenced to a six-week prison term for this. Because he realized that he could not generate the expected profits with the family houses, he gave up. He took out heavy mortgages on the houses and went to Paris with the capital . His creditors are said to have lost almost all of their money.

Later owners

After von Wülcknitz, the landowner Dr. Heinrich Ferdinand Wiesecke owner of the family houses. He had considerable problems with the rent arrears, not least caused by the poverty caused by the cholera epidemic that hit Berlin in 1831 and especially the area around the family houses. Since Wiesecke expelled a number of tenants from the apartment because of the rent arrears, the first verifiable tenant uprising in the family houses took place in August 1831. When Wiesecke discovered that there was no business to be made with the houses, he took out heavy mortgages on the houses like his predecessor and went with the money to Paris, where he is said to have worked as a homeopathic doctor. From 1832 to 1835 the family houses were under the administration of the Berlin Chamber Court . In the years 1834 to 1836, the latter sold three of the houses to Friedrich Wilhelm Heyder, secretary at a judicial council , one after the other at very good prices ; the last two houses, numbers 92 and 92b, were auctioned off by him .

In 1872 the family houses were sold, initially to the Deutsche Central-Bauverein, which, like many other stock corporations , had been founded at that time as an investment opportunity for the French reparations payments arriving in Berlin due to the war of 1870/71 . The family houses became a coveted object of land speculation . From 1875 to 1877 they were owned by the merchant Hermann Geber , at that time one of the great Berlin property speculators, then from 1877 to 1880 by the consul Friedrich Poll zu Stettin . From this it was acquired in 1880 by the trading company J. & S. Haberland, originally a prosperous manufacturing company in Spandauer Strasse , which had increasingly shifted to real estate transactions . In 1881 she set about tearing down the family houses and clearing the property for new development. She divided the property into 13 parcels and sold them to various building contractors, to whom she granted the necessary building loans. The price of the parcels was based on the maximum expected rental income. In 1882 five- to six-storey apartment buildings were built, as they were built on a large scale around old Berlin. Today's houses at Gartenstrasse number 108 and 110–111 date from this period and are under monument protection . Part of the area, namely the northern and the entire hinterland, was acquired by the city of Berlin and used to expand the 1st community school that already existed there and to build a house for rectors .

Bettina von Arnim's Book of Kings

In the 1840s, the then emerging critical press increasingly dealt with the family houses, which saw them as an exemplary case of the social situation of the newly emerged proletariat . In 1842, for example , a very critical article entitled The Berlin Family Houses, probably written by the writer Karl Gutzkow , appeared on the front page of the Rheinische Zeitung , whose staff included the then 24-year-old Karl Marx . The family houses became best known through Bettina von Arnim , who published the book This book belongs to the king in 1843 . The 65-page appendix contains the most detailed information on the living conditions in the family houses. They were made on behalf of Bettina by the young Swiss teacher Heinrich Grunholzer. After these “experiences of a young Swiss”, a total of 130 people lived in the 32 rooms he visited, 71 of whom were children. Particularly common consequent later statement was quoted: "Kreuzweis is the room a rope stretched in every corner housed a family where the ropes intersect, a bed is the still poorer, they maintain communal." The Book of Kings caught in the literary world of that time caused a sensation. The Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV. , To whom the book was dedicated and who is said to have been “in tremendous anger” about it, had it forbidden immediately. It was reissued in 1921, 1982, 2008 and most recently in 2009 on the 150th anniversary of Bettina's death. It is now also available as an e-book . Bettina herself valued Grunholzer's protocols, which were originally intended only to support her statements, as the most important of her book. They are considered the first social report in German literature.

Reform efforts

The accumulation of poor, sick and, in some cases, morally depraved people in family houses drew public attention. So-called edification hours were established as early as 1827 . The association of Christian men opened a free school in one of the houses in 1828 and tried to counteract the danger of the children being completely neglected. Beginning in 1828 taught the strong pietistic -oriented Friday night company, mainly consisting of nobles around the time very influential Gerlach brothers , an arms-free school , which had to visit the family houses the children. A detailed report on the newly founded school appeared in the yearbooks of the penal and correctional institutions, institutions of education, poor welfare and other works of Christian love in January 1829. In 1844 Johann Hinrich Wichern , the reformer of the Prussian prison system and “father of the Inner Mission ”, also dedicated an “extensive visit” to the family houses about which he had read in Bettina von Arnim's book of kings. He reported about it in detail in his diary. Victor Aimé Huber , professor at Berlin University and editor of Janus. Yearbooks of German convictions, education and deeds developed his ideas about "inner colonization" on the basis of study trips. For the first time, the English cottage was juxtaposed with the barracks , embodied by the family houses. His thoughts, published in Janus , appeared in a separate work on internal colonization in 1846 . From then on, the question of “cottage or barracks” became the standard in the discussion of housing reform. In 1846, two very critical books about Berlin appeared independently of each other, each of which also denounced the family houses in detail. It was about the book Berlin in its latest time and development by the publicist Friedrich Saß (around 1817-1851) and the two-volume work Berlin by the writer and journalist Ernst Dronke , who was sentenced to two years imprisonment for this book. Both books were banned immediately.

The conditions improved over the years, but apparently not very sustainably. The publication Das Berliner Voigtland, published in 1862 , a print from the Sunday paper for Inner Mission published in the Diakonenhaus in Duisburg , continued to give a very negative verdict. It emphasized the "lust for pleasure" that goes hand in hand with poverty, spoke of "work shyness and fornication", the "prevailing irreverence", the "revolutionary and socialist desires of the masses" and the "world of criminals living here". The book The Dark Houses of Berlin by Gustav Rasch was written in a completely different style, the first edition of which appeared in 1861 and detailed the conditions in the family houses. But this also shows that the situation has not fundamentally changed since the early years.

Representations in the literature

Based on the first French newspaper serial novel Les Mystères de Paris by Eugène Sue , which appeared in German translation in 1843 with great success under the title The Secrets of Paris , three Berlin Sue imitations came out in the following year, the Voigtland and specifically the family houses as criminal and proletarian quarters made the scene of the action: The Mysteries of Berlin by August Braß (1818–1876) in two volumes, then The Secrets of Berlin. - From the papers of a Berlin detective, anonymous, finally Mysteries of Berlin by Rudolf Lubarsch (under the pseudonym L. Schubar) (1807–1883). The family houses were also mentioned in the upscale literature. The Berlin aesthetics professor Theodor Mundt , writer and publicist, went into a chapter on family houses in his novel Carmela or the re-baptism, published in 1844 . There they are referred to as the “pyramids of Berlin pauperism ”, but also that they have recently begun to make family houses the subject of a “romanticism of poverty”. But then just did Mundt's wife Clara (1814–1873), who wrote under the pseudonym Luise Mühlbach . In 1846 she published a novel in Berlin. The main plot of the three-volume novel of over 1,133 pages takes place in the family houses into which the impoverished Baroness von Hermfeld moves with her three daughters. In the novel, poverty is transfigured into an idyll; only the poor are really free and happy with it. In 1860 the novel appeared fifteen years ago in a revised and shortened version shortened to 743 pages under the title Berlin , the three volumes being combined in one book. The family houses are likely to have become known throughout Germany through this novel, as Luise Mundt's works were among the most widely read entertainment literature at the time and were literally devoured by the large public lending library. Both versions can now be read as eBooks.

In 1849, Louise Aston , a champion of the democratic revolution and women's movement , published the novel Revolution and Contrerevolution , in which the family houses are also one of the scenes. Family houses also found their place in more recent literature. In the book by Margitta-Sybille Fahr Pitaval Scheunenviertel, published in 1995 , which depicts the famous criminal cases of the Scheunenviertel according to the French causes célèbres et intéressantes of the 18th century , one of the crime stories told there is entitled: Heinrich Wiesecke - A rental shark from Saxony- Anhalt in the "Vogtland". The family houses under their builder von Wülcknitz and above all under his successor Wiesecke are described on over 20 pages. She describes him as a "usurer from Magdeburg" and a "ruthless speculator".

meaning

The importance of the former von Wülcknitz family houses can be judged from the fact that they were the subject of a research focus set up at the University of the Arts in West Berlin: Theory and history of building, space and everyday culture. As a result, the first volume of an extensive work on the history of the Berlin tenement house appeared in 1980 with the title Das Berliner Mietshaus 1740–1862, in which the von Wülcknitz family houses are dealt with in an unusual depth and breadth in six parts. They represented a previously unknown concentration of residents on a piece of land and at the same time formed the first large-scale speculation by a private entrepreneur on the housing market. From the very beginning, they received the greatest attention and - depending on their attitudes - were demonized or played down. In summary, it says: "As these discussions about the exemplary case assume an ever more principled character, the family houses acquire outstanding importance for the entire later development of workers' housing construction - not only for Berlin."

Others

As an example of the contradictions in building in Berlin, the American RWB MacCormack, professor of ethnolinguistics, writes in his work Mitten in Berlin - Feldstudien in der Hauptstadt , published in 2000 : "The first tenements were built on Gartenstrasse, of all places."

literature

  • The Wülcknitz family houses in Gartenstrasse. In: City Center Berlin eV (Ed.): Searching for traces in the Rosenthaler Vorstadt - history and stories of a neighborhood. Berlin 2003, pp. 12-15.
  • Andreas Robert Kuhrt: A journey through Ackerstrasse. Berlin 2001.
  • Hans-Jürgen Mende , Kurt Wernicke (Ed.): Berlin Mitte - Das Lexikon. Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-87776-111-9 .
  • Diether Huhn : From Wedding to Gethsemane and other walks in Berlin . 3rd edition 1999 (the walks took place in 1997). ISBN 3-7338-0228-4
  • Margitta-Sybille Fahr: Heinrich Wiesecke - A rental shark from Saxony-Anhalt in the 'Vogtland'. In: Pitaval Scheunenviertel. Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-355-01453-2 .
  • Rudolf Skoda: The "Voigtland" - houses and housing conditions of the urban poor in the Rosenthaler suburb of Berlin 1750-1850. (Editor: "Interest group for the preservation of monuments, culture and history of the capital Berlin" in the Kulturbund der GDR. Berlin 1985, first published in 1968 as a dissertation).
  • Johann Friedrich Geist , Klaus Kürvers : The Berlin Tenement House 1740–1862 - A documentary history of the "von Wülcknitz family houses" in front of the Hamburger Tor, the proletarianization of the north of Berlin and the city in the transition from residence to metropolis. Volume 1, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-7913-0524-7 .
  • Anonymous: The secrets of Berlin - From the papers of a Berlin detective. Reprint. Verlag Das Neue, Berlin 1987, ISBN 3-360-00070-6 (with afterword by Paul Thiel).
  • Eduard Kuntze : The Voigtlande jubilee or history of the foundation and development of the Rosenthaler Vorstadt near Berlin 1755–1855. Berlin 1855.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Geist, Kürvers: The Berlin tenement house. Volume 1, p. 76 ff.
  2. ↑ Geist, Kürvers: The Berlin tenement house. Volume 1, pp. 93/94.
  3. ↑ Geist, Kürvers: The Berlin tenement house. Volume 1, pp. 95-109; Rudolf Skoda: The "Voigtland". Pp. 62-65, 84ff.
  4. ↑ Geist, Kürvers: The Berlin tenement house. Volume 1, pp. 99-101
  5. ↑ Geist, Kürvers: The Berlin tenement house. Volume 1, pp. 125ff., 149.
  6. ↑ Rudolf Skoda: The "Voigtland". Pp. 66-67.
  7. ↑ Geist, Kürvers: The Berlin tenement house. Volume 1, pp. 150-163.
  8. ↑ Geist, Kürvers: The Berlin tenement house. Volume 1, pp. 164-169.
  9. ^ Official Journal for Berlin. No. 23 of May 29, 1997.
  10. ↑ Geist, Kürvers: The Berlin tenement house. Volume 1, pp. 517-523.
  11. ↑ Geist, Kürvers: The Berlin tenement house. Volume 1, pp. 207-210.
  12. ↑ Geist, Kürvers: The Berlin tenement house. Volume 1, p. 9, 192–199, in it the entire report by Grunholzer from the original of the Königsbuch (there p. 534–598) on p. 9–25
  13. ↑ Geist, Kürvers: The Berlin tenement house. Volume 1, pp. 26, 214-231, 238-245.
  14. ↑ Geist, Kürvers: The Berlin tenement house. Volume 1, pp. 200-213, 259/260, 317-319.
  15. ↑ Geist, Kürvers: The Berlin tenement house. Volume 11, pp. 372-450, 507-510.
  16. ↑ The Secrets of Berlin. Pp. 20, 424ff., 430.
  17. ↑ Mundt: Carmela or re-baptism , pp. 197-210
  18. ^ Geist / Kürvers: Das Berliner Mietshaus , Vol. 1, pp. 253/254; Franz Brümmer, in: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, Volume 22 (1885) http://www.lexikus.de/Muehlbach-Luise-(1814-1873)-Biographie
  19. ↑ Geist, Kürvers: The Berlin tenement house. Volume 1, pp. 249-271; Aston: Revolution and Contrerevolution , pp. 121 ff. 145 ff.
  20. ↑ Geist, Kürvers: The Berlin tenement house. Volume 1, p. 124; Diether Huhn: From Wedding to Gethsemane , pp. 130-133
  21. ↑ p. 53