Berlin

Unhealthy and unsightly though they undoubtedly were, the Mietskaserne were by no means mere repositories of gloom; they were centers of genuine social, cultural, and economic vitality. Many an invention was born in those cramped courtyards, which also served as informal stages for popular theater and musical performances. The painter Heinrich Zille would later capture both the misery and liveliness of this scene in his famous drawings of Berliner Hinterhöfe. As land values increased after 1871, the Mietskaserne spread from the proletarian districts of Wedding and Luisenstadt to the wealthier districts of Charlottenburg, Schöneberg, and Wilmersdorf. The average number of inhabitants per building lot in the city rose from forty-five in 1860 to sixty in 1880. By contrast, in the 1870s Paris had twenty people per lot, and roomy London only eight. Berlin was on the way to becoming Europe’s Barrakenstadt par excellence.

Despite increasingly squalid conditions, housing costs in Berlin shot up dramatically in the wake of national unification (as they would again in the early 1990s). Between 1871 and 1873 Berliners were typically paying three times what they had paid two years earlier. Theodor Fontane experienced as a renter the darker side of Berlin’s boom. His landlord at Hirschelstrasse 14, where he and his family had lived for nine years, sold the house to a banker in October 1872. The banker increased the rent threefold, though the building was a refuse-strewn wreck, its courtyard “looking like it could infect the entire neighborhood with typhus.” Indignant, Fontane moved his family into cheaper quarters at Potsdamerstrasse 134c, but this was not much of an improvement. It was so dilapidated and dirty that cockroaches and other vermin occupied “every nook and cranny.”

In shifting quarters to obtain a lower rent, Fontane was hardly alone: 38 percent of Berlin’s renters moved at least once in 1871; in 1872 the figure rose to 43 percent. City streets were perpetually clogged with carts bearing the belongings of families in search of affordable housing. This constant coming and going took its psychological toll. A Berliner who counted himself among the “orderly people” reported his shame at having to move around “like a nomad” from one hovel to the next, each worse than the last. He concluded that the old adage that poor lodgings could “kill like an ax” was wrong; rather, they killed “like opium or some slow-acting poison that lames the mind and will.”

With the steady increases in rents, more and more Berliners became homeless. Some of them found temporary places in public or private shelters, but by 1872 these institutions were turning people away because of overcrowding. Many cast-outs became Schlafburschen—temporary lodgers who rented a patch of floor in someone’s apartment for a night or two. But this makeshift arrangement was unworkable for larger families, who were obliged to camp out like Gypsy clans under bridges or on construction sites. Sensing a profit in such desperation, packing-carton manufacturers advertised “good and cheap boxes for habitation.” Huge shanty towns sprang up around the Kottbus, Frankfurt, and Landsberg Gates. Occasionally the police moved in and burned out the squatters, pushing them on to other encampments. In summer 1872, when dozens of homeless families rioted against such treatment, mounted soldiers rode in and cut down the demonstrators with their sabers.

Homelessness, destitution, and urban-nomadism, for all their appalling visibility, were hardly the dominant motifs in Boomtown on the Spree. The defining elements were breathtaking commercial expansion, material excess, and municipal hubris. Germany’s economic boom of the early 1870s derived primarily from three factors: the elimination of remaining internal tariffs; the liberalization of rules governing banks and joint-stock companies; and a sudden infusion of 5 billion gold marks in war reparations from France. This last factor was especially important: it translated into two carats of gold for every man, woman, and child in the country. Imperial Germany was born with a golden spoon in its mouth.