As an antidote to the substandard tenement apartment, the ideal of the “small house” (<em>Kleinhaus</em>) was ubiquitous in housing debates in Germany before World War One. Denoting a modestly sized two-story family house aligned with the street, it had its origins in the Middle Ages, during which it was constructed to serve the humble domestic needs of urban craftsmen who lived and worked in thriving trade cities including Lübeck, Bremen, Hamburg, Augsburg, Nuremberg, and Ulm. For modern promoters of low-density alternatives to the tenement, the <em>Kleinhaus</em> was an ideal model for mass appropriation. Unlike foreign and untranslatable dwelling models like the “villa” and the “cottage,” the <em>Kleinhaus</em> conveyed something that was both urban and quintessentially Germanic. It was thus enlisted by housing reformers to strengthen local cultural identity whilst raising the standards of the nation’s housing stock. This article examines the significance of the <em>Kleinhaus</em> in fostering dialogue between the fields of architecture and planning, and considers its embeddedness in a wider project of cultural nationalism in pre-war Germany.
In late-nineteenth-century Berlin, the rapid growth of tenements ( Mietskaserne) housing the city’s expanding lower class population provoked a strong moral reaction from bourgeois social reformers in Germany, who railed against the perceived social disorders found therein. This essay explores the less understood moral terms upon which the problem of mass housing was articulated in response to the growth of the tenement system in Berlin, from the city’s first housing crisis in 1871 to the first widespread photographic inquiry of Berlin’s dwelling conditions in the first decade of the twentieth century. As this essay shows, debates on housing reform were not confined to bourgeois circles of social and public health expertise—they pervaded popular literature and formed an important part of a broader social imaginary that gave meaning to the urban environment and the task of nation-building at large.
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