The Industrious, the Laboring, and the Sunken: Berlin’s Mietskaserne and the Housing Question

Abstract

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.