Single People and Mass Housing in Germany, 1850–1930

(No)Home Away from Home

Erin Eckhold Sassin

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501342738
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Unsettling traditional understandings of housing reform as focused on the nuclear family with dependent children, Single People and Mass Housing in Germany, 1850-1930 is the first complete study of single-person mass housing in Germany and the pivotal role this class- and gender-specific building type played for over 80 years-in German architectural culture and society, the transnational Progressive reform movement, Feminist discourse, and International Modernism-and its continued relevance. Homes for unmarried men and women, or Ledigenheime, were built for nearly every powerful interest group in Germany-progressive, reactionary, and radical alike-from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1920s. Designed by both unknown craftsmen and renowned architects ranging from Peter Behrens to Bruno Taut, these homes fought unregimented lodging in overcrowded working-class dwellings while functioning as apparatuses of moral and social control. A means to societal reintegration, Ledigenheime effectively bridged the public-private divide and rewrote the rules of who was deserving of quality housing-pointing forward to the building programs of Weimar Berlin and Red Vienna, experimental housing in Soviet Russia, Feminist collectives, accommodations for postwar "guestworkers, " and even housing for the elderly today.

1

Adolph Kolping’s Revolution

Catholicism, the Artisan Question, and Housing “Wild” Youth

Located on the corner of Cologne’s St. Apern Strasse and Helenenstrasse the Kolping Jugendwohnen Köln-Mitte, or Kolping Youth Home of Central Cologne, appears to be a typical mid-priced hotel, complete with single and double occupancy rooms ranging over six floors, a fitness center, and WiFi access. Instead, it offers residents not only a place to sleep and socialize but also “socio-educational support” and (a Catholic) community far from home—and stands on the exact site of the very first purpose-built Catholic residence for youth, the home of a movement that over 160 years before similarly promised the young men of Cologne “rooms with a future.”¹ Predating and deeply informing later experiments by municipalities and secular groups,² as well as less ambitious efforts by other religious groups, the homes (alternately termed Gesellenheime, Kolpinghäuser, and Ledigenheime) built by the Verband katholischer Gesellenvereine (Organization of Catholic Journeymen’s Associations) for a largely, though not exclusively, Catholic residency number among the earliest interventions in housing for single people,³ and the first for apprentices and journeymen.⁴

The founding of this movement can be traced to a single figure and very specific set of circumstances. In 1851 the Catholic priest Adolph Kolping (1813, Kerpen-1865, Cologne) founded the Verband katholischer Gesellenvereine, or the Association of Catholic Organizations for Single People, “the oldest German social reform organization concerned with the working class.”⁵ He did so in response to concerns that artisans were losing both social and economic standing in industrializing Germany, (purportedly) leading to a decline in the quality of goods produced.⁶ While the latter would have problematic economic ramifications for allied German design industries and their global competitiveness—a concern that sharpened in the last decade of the nineteenth century, spurring the creation and redesign of governmentally supported applied arts schools and eventually the formation of the German Werkbund—it was the dislocation of a previously important social group that was profoundly troubling to Kolping. Much as leading figures of the British Arts and Crafts movement, such as John Ruskin and William Morris, blamed the decline of working conditions, the quality of products, and the moral and physical poverty of individual workers on the alienating effects of industrial labor under capitalism, the decline of the German artisan as a group was shorthand for a larger issue, a profound discomfort with capitalist modernity and its effects.

Long before the consecration of the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony and Georg Fuchs’s celebration of his foundational role, the German artisan had played a significant and symbolic role in the public consciousness. Even in the eighteenth century he represented the ideal of Germanic self-sufficiency and hard work, leading Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to recommend state support for the education of arts, crafts, and trades practitioners as early as 1776.⁷ In the middle of the nineteenth century, and in a society rapidly becoming unrecognizable, the artisan, as “producer, educator, and the head of a family,” stood as the model for a fully integrated and healthy society.⁸ By the beginning of the twentieth century, following the influence of the Arts and Crafts movement, the German economist Werner Sombart positioned the artisan, who united both technical and artistic skill, as a “model of the fully-developed, well-rounded personality,” something increasingly rare in the industrial age.⁹

Yet, despite his symbolic appeal, the artisan was in dire peril from the beginning of industrialization, not least because the entire preindustrial artisan estate (Handwerkerstand), which had traditionally encompassed “small and large master artisans together with their journeymen and apprentices,” was increasingly fractured.¹⁰ As the numbers of journeymen and apprentices increased in comparison to master artisans over the first decades of the nineteenth century, opportunities for the formers’ economic independence decreased, and more problematically, this overabundance absolved masters of the role they had traditionally played in the training, education, and housing of these young men.¹¹ This is to say, masters increasingly looked to their own needs, rather than those of their dependents, leading to a breakdown in solidarity among segments of the skilled crafts population.¹²

In addition, as early as the 1840s, Prussian politicians began to position the entire (albeit internally fractured) preindustrial artisan estate (Handwerkerstand) as endangered and increasingly susceptible to socialism and revolution.¹³ This was particularly troubling, as the artisan estate was a key component of the middle estate (Mittelstand)—ultimately part of the emerging lower middle class or petit-bourgeoisie, at least according to Marx—and a means to hold both the bourgeoisie and the working class in check.¹⁴ By the turn of the twentieth century, the decline of the previously proud, independent, and self-sufficient craftsman served as both symbol and warning. He was heralded as the exemplifying traditional German practices and values, while illustrating their failure to flourish in the modern age. While simultaneously providing a bulwark between the social classes in increasingly unstable times, he posed a threat to society and nation.¹⁵

Yet, the capacity of the artisan estate to “strengthen or break” society had been identified a half century before, and a potential—or at least partial—solution had been found.¹⁶ In the 1840s, Roman Catholic Priest Adolph Kolping—who had himself been an apprentice in his youth—wrote that the main cause of the declining craft tradition, and relatedly, the status of the artisan, was directly attributable to the increasingly dire living conditions of the journeyman or apprentice.¹⁷ Traditionally, a master artisan not only provided his journeymen and apprentices with a place of vocational training but also housed them and provided an education in the social and moral values of the artisan estate.¹⁸ By the middle of the nineteenth century, these domestic habits were changing. As Donald Olsen has written, “masters no longer ate at the same kitchen table with their journeyman, and their children no longer shared a bed with their apprentices.”¹⁹ Social lines—symbolized by increasing physical distance—were beginning to harden, with dangerous consequences.

Without the direct and day-to-day oversight and guidance of their masters, Kolping feared the future of the artisan estate was becoming unmanageable, disrespectful, and irreligious.²⁰ In particular, Kolping identified one practice that both deeply troubled him and served as a potential site of intervention, the unregulated lodging of young artisans with working-class families (termed Schlafstellenwesen), and what he termed “wild” lodging in common lodging houses.²¹ A description of the latter—from as late as 1908—is as follows:

The subhuman lodgings were located in the basement near the bake house and served four individuals. The [room] is 3 meters high, 3 meters wide, and 5 meters long . . . there is one [very small] window in the room leading to the courtyard . . . the walls of the room are wet. There is no source of heat, nor is the room lit. The toilets are not located inside the building, but in the courtyard, and are in an unclean condition. The room is not lockable from either inside, nor outside . . . and many mice disturb the residents’ sleep.²²

Unfortunately, unregulated lodgings like those described above were a nearly unavoidable fact of life for the German apprentice or journeyman in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Instead of the respectable surroundings of the master’s home and the gentle guidance of his master in matters both professional and personal,²³ the future of the artisan estate was forced into a housing situation and social milieu far from respectable and home-like. The unregulated lodging house, or even worse, unregulated lodging with families, held the young man accountable to and cared for by no one, besides perhaps the barkeeper at his local pub (Kneipe) or tavern (Wirtshaus). ²⁴

Kolping posited that the miserable external circumstances of his life drove the young artisan to the pub and the street, exposing him to dangerous elements in society, with detrimental effects on his inner character.²⁵ Foreshadowing turn of the century cultural critics who blamed societal discord on the “rootless” nature of modern life (and the modern city in particular), Kolping claimed that artisans were “flit(...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Lodger Problem and the Crisis of the Modern Age
• 1 Adolph Kolping’s Revolution: Catholicism, the Artisan Question, and Housing “Wild” Youth
• 2 Beyond the Company Town: Industrialists House the Roving Male
• 3 Making the Municipality a Home: Appropriate Luxury for All
• 4 The Woman Question and the Housing Question
• Conclusion: Weimar Twilight and Continued Relevance
• Bibliography
• Index
• Plates
• Copyright