One of the best investments you could make in early twentieth century Germany was rental properties, and one of the best places to do this was Berlin. The city’s Mietskasernen (literally: barracks-for-rent) were as infamous for their lightless backyards and mouldy apartments as the ever increasing rents owners could charge for any kind of living space in the growing capital. In better neighbourhoods, the quality of the housing was higher, but the relentless rise in rent applied everywhere. Even in good times, working-class people found it difficult to afford a home, and the early 1930s were not good times.
The Great Depression hit Germany harder than most European countries, and its government response was about as hapless as any in the world. A state scarred by memories of runaway inflation and steeped in market ideology pursued cuts across the board in an effort to balance its books, reducing already meagre unemployment and welfare payments the moment millions more people needed them, often for the first time in their lives. As the crisis burned its way through the working classes well into the middle class, previously respectable people in what used to be secure occupations faced a stark choice – homelessness or hunger.
Failing to pay rent meant eviction, but often enough, doing so simply left no money for anything else. Welfare cuts inflicted this on the families many unemployed workers immediately while it crept up inexorably on working and middle class renters, but all knew it was coming. Violence in response was not new – in fact, there had been massive riots two generations before – but the organised response that it met with this time was.
Germany, of course, is infamous for being organised, but in the early twentieth century, the reputation was entirely justified. The Berlin rent crunch was met by a concerted effort by Communist and anarchist organisations, to the shock of the landlords. Most of our records come from party papers which are unfortunately untrustworthy, but police reports agree that attempting an eviction in working-class areas often drew large, threatening crowds immediately. Being unemployed, many men had little else to do, and even if you had police on hand, throwing a family out on the street in front of hundreds of angry, silent observers carrying sticks and bricks would take more courage than most Gerichtsvollzieher (bailiffs) had. The vocal anger in the landlords’ paper suggests this put significant pressure on their profits; One article described the situation as “untenable” as “…so-called tenants’ councils (Mieterräte) and housing protection squadrons (Hausschutzstaffeln) threatened property owners, forcing them to abandon an eviction even under the very eyes of the police…” which they saw as failing “…in a downright embarrassing manner.”
Even if the evictions were carried out, the crowd frequently proceeded to break the police seals on the door and take the evictees’ furniture back inside, daring anyone to stop them. Legally, neither had any standing, of course, but in practice, these confrontations often ended in compromises where outstanding debts were cancelled, rents lowered, or overdue repairs promised.
Of course, this kind of thing was not easily arranged in the greener, less crowded middle-class neighbourhoods new to the experience. Here, a different approach was often taken: tenants, either singly or, more effectively, as a group, withheld part or all of their rent. This Mietstreik (rent strike) put pressure on the landlord to negotiate. A respectable approach was to place the withheld funds in an escrow account pending an agreement. In an age when even well-off people often did all their business in cash, this called for organisation and support that often came from cooperative savings banks and activist lawyers. The effort was considerable, and the networks involved in it often successful at least in the short term.
To many middle-class Kleinbürger, this was an entirely new experience. Germany’s shopkeepers, artisans and clerks had enjoyed a protected status in return for their political support to the Wilhelmine order that ended with the economic shocks of the war and depression. Many blamed the new democratic institutions, but socialists and anarchists were now hoping to make inroads in a class that had been almost impossible to recruit by fostering grassroots self-help efforts.
They certainly had reason to hope. Middle-class Germans had seen the lifestyle they traditionally aspired to disappear out of reach. Servants, homeownership, investments, respectable clothing and food all became unaffordable on a workshop’s profits or an office salary. If the working-class missed a time when their wages bought small pleasures, these people had lost a lifestyle and the respect that went with it. A meal in a petit bourgeois home had been a ritual, three or maybe four courses, with a meat dish at its centre, and usually prepared by, or at least with the assistance of, a maidservant. By the early 1930s, when the Berlin electric company BEWAG published its famous ‘blue book’ Das elektrische Kochen to instruct urban housewives in the use of the new electric stoves, the recipes included main dishes such as this:
371. Spinach Casserole (Spinatauflauf)
750g spinach
1 tbsp butter, some onions, chives, salt, 1 tbsp flour
3-4 pancakes
1/4 litre sour milk or cream, 1 entire egg, 1 tbsp grated cheese, salt
2 tsp grated white bread, 2 tsp grated cheese, butter dabs
Wilt the spinach in an open pot without water, but do not boil it. Pass it through (a grinder or foodmill – durchdrehen) and sautée it in the butter with onions and flour. Season to taste with salt and chives. + Prepare pancakes from the stated ingredients. You may stack them in the casserole layered with spinach or or you can roll them up, spread thickly with spinach, cut them in slices, and arrange them in the dish. + Pour the sour cream beaten with egg, cheese, and salt over it, sprinkle it with grated bread and cheese, and dab it with butter. This casserole can also be prepared from leftover spinach combined with other leftovers.
Setting: Place on a grille at middle level
Bake: 1.2kW oven, 25-30 min. 3/3, 10 min 0/0; 1.4-12.5 kW oven: 20-25 min 3/3, 15 min 0/0
To be observed: If the spinach is too thin, stir in some grated bread
The pancakes required are described elsewhere:
263 Pancakes
4 tbsp flour, 1 pinch baking powder, 1 pinch salt, 2 eggs, 1/8 litre milk, 1/8 litre water
Sift the flour into a bowl with the baking powder, beat the eggs with the milk, water, and salt, and gradually stir the liquid into the flour, ideally with a whisk, to produce a smooth batter. Preheat the pan at setting 3, then fry thin pancakes at setting 2, the final one with no further electricity + These can be rolled up filled with jam, meat, or vegetables. This batter will yield five.
For the expense of three eggs and some assorted dairy, a meal for the family is created from what more comfortable times considered side dishes. Such recipes had existed before, of course, but they were not celebrated in public. This was the reality of a lifestyle that desperately clung to the final shreds of respectability – a proper home-cooked meal, a housewife not having to work for wages, clean shirts and a three-piece suit – to stave off the slide into proletarianism. Every piece of effort that went into processing and adorning the meal, carefully binding the spinach into a roux-stabilised filling, rolling it up in pancakes arranged in a decorative pattern, and topping it with a crust of cheese and breadcrumbs, showed the disposable labour of a Hausfrau, and we can only hope that both the budget and her culinary skill extended to the nutmeg this recipe really needs.
Nutmeg, like many other imported spices, disappeared from many cookbooks because they cost hard currency which the Reich could ill afford. The futility of this gesture is hard to overstate given the scale of other imports, but it was considered patriotic. Spicing was a private pleasure, not mentioned in polite company.
These people needed organisation and self-help to save themselves. We will probably never know how many homes the rent strikes of the early 1930s saved, but the number was not zero. Each instance helped. Unfortunately, the project ultimately failed. Germany in 1930, though technically a Republic, was already run by an authoritarian cabal deeply suspicious of all forms of self-organisation. The majority of the petit bourgeois shared their outlook and were happy to blame outsiders – foreign powers, women voters, jazz musicians, Marxists, and Jews – for the loss of the status and comfort they considered their due. The Nazi party was happy to accommodate this view. Many were leery of limiting landlords’ rights because in a properly run world, they would be owning rather than renting property, and they hoped that once Hitler was in power, that happy state could return. The Nazis quickly shut down any form of tenant organisation as well as any reporting of a housing crisis, so everything was clearly fine from that point onwards.
In the end, you could say this led to the tenant organisations achieving their goals: Postwar German governments imposed draconian housing regulation on the burned-out ruins of their cities and launched a vast public building programme. The result was a brief phase during which housing ceased to be a problem, home ownership expanded to unprecedented level, and affordable apartments were easily found. This experience continues to distort an older generations’ perception while a generation of neoliberal policy has ensured the actual urban housing market looks more like the 1870s than the 1970s today. Berlin today has no organised housing protection squadrons or rent strike committees, but its citizens voted in a 2021 referendum to expropriate housing held by large private equity investors. As of today, this has yet to be implemented or even attempted.