History of housing policy: The invention of healthy living

Each apartment should be equipped with a bathroom and toilet, balcony, loggia or terrace. Every apartment should receive light and air from both sides of the house. This demand for hygiene and health promotion, which must be taken into account in every architectural design of residential buildings, was enthusiastically received and implemented by the most famous architects at the beginning of the 20th century: Ernst May with the New Frankfurt, Fritz Schumacher with his housing estates in Hamburg, Gustav Oelsner in Altona, Walter Gropius and Hannes Meyer in Dessau, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and, above all, Martin Wagner and Bruno Taut with the non-profit organization Heimstätten AG (GEHAG) in Berlin. Because of their qualities, the Berlin Modern settlements have been included in the UNESCO World Heritage List since 2008.

Housing that maintains the health of the population is now the norm thanks to the work of the AOK and Albert Kohn, its influential director from 1914 to 1925. The second concern of “New Building” – increasing the number of required, affordable, perhaps non-profit apartments – continues to be hotly debated. The number currently desired is 400,000 apartments to be built annually. On January 16, 2024, the “Social Housing” alliance put the shortage at 910,000 apartments. Even in the late Empire there was only a shortage of 700,000 apartments. And in 1926 alone, the independent construction huts, the GAGFAH, the GEHAG, the independent building cooperatives and others built 270,000 new apartments, more than even during the so-called economic miracle of the young Federal Republic.

Structural disaster

Ten years before this construction peak, the AOK’s central organ, the magazine “Ortskrankenkasse”, declared that it was “the responsibility of the health insurance companies to carry out public relations work and provide financial aid to settlement companies and settlers, as well as to issue interest rate guarantees” in order to build health-promoting apartments to enable. Director Albert Kohn expressed the same sentiment at the health insurance conference in November 1916 in the new Philharmonic Hall in Berlin.

The draftsman and painter Heinrich Zille explained the following about the apartments of the imperial era that existed at the time: “You can kill a person with an apartment just as with an axe.” Because in terms of construction technology, the pace of the founding years meant that lime mortar was mostly too wet and much too It was built hastily: the apartments and even the entire house were moldy. Then the plaster fell off the walls. Collective toilets in the lightless backyards or halfway down the stairs were standard. Old photos, such as those by Heinrich Zille, show truly terrible conditions. In the famous book “The Stone Berlin” by Werner Hegemann on the “history of the largest tenement city in the world” these conditions were noted as late as 1930. Similar poor conditions are complained about in Hamburg with the slot and terraced house building types. According to the building regulations of the Hanseatic city, the distance to neighbors is only two meters permitted in some places! The fact that these old buildings are now traded as sought-after properties for living, working and as gastronomic areas is due to various structural advantages. However, these buildings only became hygienic through over a hundred years of drying out, war damage removal, repairs and a number of basic renovations.

In addition to the structural disaster, there was also an economic and social emergency: food cost the majority of the population around half of their income at the turn of the century. The usual rents corresponded to this price level. It therefore made sense to come together in order to be able to sublet rooms. Even beds were rented out to sleepers, voluntarily. Around 1930, a well-known graphic from the GEHAG News stated that the occupancy density of houses of the same size in London was eight people, in New York 20 people, in Vienna 50, but in Berlin 76 people – “voluntarily”, out of necessity!

Sick due to living conditions

The general local health insurance companies could not escape from their internal statistics that many of the insured cases such as chronic bronchitis, pneumonia, tuberculosis or even dysentery and cholera were due to the prevailing living conditions. There were also reports from the medical profession and hospitals that saw any sustainable recovery of their patients at risk as soon as they were back in their homes.

In the wake of these findings, Albert Kohn initially founded the “Workers’ Sanitary Commission” (ASC) in 1893. This commission was sponsored by the Social Democratic Party and supported by left-wing trade unions. Albert Kohn commissioned the poor doctors Dr. Alfred Blaschke, Dr. Paul Christeller, Dr. Karl Kollwitz – husband of the graphic artist Käthe Kollwitz –, Dr. Rafael Friedberg, Dr. O. Kayserling and others. The result was devastating. A third to half of all illnesses could be directly linked to the living conditions of the workforce.

In order to provide systematic scientific evidence to the authorities and administration on the one hand and to the lobbyists of the profit-oriented private sector, house and real estate owners, Albert Kohn expanded the “Workers’ Health Commission” into the Berlin Housing Survey. From 1902 onwards, a volume of reports was published annually with precise statistical evaluations of tenants encountered, descriptions of the apartments – and photos from the studio of Heinrich Lichte and Co. These photos still form the basis of every publication today about the housing misery of the late imperial period, the war period and the early Weimar Republic.

However, the general local health insurance companies had to limit themselves to individual housing checks and inspections, as at that time there was no legal basis for state intervention by the health authorities or housing supervision. Nevertheless, the Housing Enquete’s reports reached the educated public and policymakers. The reports also had an impact on the general local health insurance funds, which decided in 1904 to demand a thorough housing reform from the city of Berlin and the state. At the same time, the idea that the local health insurance companies themselves had to create healthy living space was gaining acceptance within the AOK.

“Ideal” building projects

In 1905, the Allgemeine Ortskrankenkasse Rixdorf, now the Neukölln district of Berlin, was able to purchase a large piece of land from a benefactor, barely a two-minute walk from the district court and town hall, extremely cheaply. It was too big for the planned settlement, so that healthy, exemplary, “ideal” housing construction was imposed on both sides. Albert Kohn supported the project based on planning by the architects Willy and Paul Kind. The building application was submitted and was blown away when it was rejected by the Rixdorf building authority. The administration simply forbade the AOK from building housing using its funds. A tip from a tax official ultimately made the construction of the “Ideal Passage” possible. The buildings between Berlin’s Fuldastrasse 55-56 and Weichselstrasse 8 can still be viewed today. AOK-Rixdorf founded the Rixdorf building cooperative “Ideal” eG with staff participation.

Albert Kohn had given the local health insurance companies another construction task: On December 21, 1907, the AOK opened its first pulmonary sanatorium in Müllrose near Frankfurt an der Oder based on designs by the architects Paul Hakenholz and Paul Brandes. From 1907 to 1908, the Buchbinder local health insurance fund, as a lender to the Paradies workers’ building cooperative in Bohnsdorf, enabled the officially required construction of the access road (today Paradiesstrasse). Only through this public road construction was the cooperative allowed to build two more multi-story apartment buildings with a total of 24 apartments. Further funding for expansions of the Paradies workers’ building cooperative in Bohnsdorf followed.

Albert Kohn had now joined the German Garden City Society. This society promoted the most progressive housing construction at the time, based on Sir Ebenezer Howard’s garden city idea. In 1911, the society invited Albert Kohn on a “social” study trip to England in order to study the most spectacular model settlements Letchwood Gardencity and Welwyn Gardencity near London and Port Sunlight near Liverpool. This trip resulted in AOK’s participation in the founding of the Greater Berlin Non-Profit Building Cooperative. The central founding members included the AOK with Albert Kohn, as well as Adolf Otto, Robert Tautz, the brothers Paul and Bernhard Kampffmeyer. The aim of this building cooperative was to build an exemplary garden city in Berlin. The nearby Berlin-Grünau S-Bahn station provided a connection to the city center, as Howard had called for for garden cities. The famous Tuschkasten settlement, now a world heritage site, was built in Grünau according to plans by the architect Bruno Taut.

The housing problem has not been solved

When the Reich Insurance Regulations were amended, the legal basis for the participation of the general local health insurance funds was created as “measures of a general nature to prevent illnesses among fund members”. “Providing healthy housing is the logical consequence of workers’ insurance,” writes the newspaper “Die Ortskrankenkasse”. According to the fourth paragraph of the Prussian Housing Act of March 28, 1918, the health insurance companies were supposed to influence development plans and building regulations. Cooperation with the housing authority was also regulated.

When the non-profit Heimstätten AG (GEHAG) was founded in the federal building of the General German Trade Union Confederation (ADGB) on April 14, 1924, it was natural for the General Local Health Insurance Fund to be one of the founding shareholders.

In addition to the AOK, there were the two large trade unions ADGB and the AfA-Bund, the General German Civil Service Association as well as trade unions from the printing and paper sector and the German construction workers’ association. There were also the building cooperatives, Freie Scholle Tegel, Ideal, the Neukölln housing association, the Berlin savings and building association from 1892 and the Paradies workers’ building cooperative. August Ellinger represented the Association of Social Construction Companies. The city of Berlin was represented by its housing welfare company. The workers’ and civil servants’ bank, the Volkssorge pension insurance company and the consumer cooperative in Berlin and the surrounding area became friendly companies of GEHAG. This economic enterprise of the labor movement, which is broadly anchored in society, is now 100 years old.

To mark the 100th anniversary of GEHAG’s founding, the Architects and Engineers Association of Berlin Brandenburg and the August Bebel Institute will bring together all existing alumni for the first time since 1924 on April 13, 2024, in order to develop ideas from the commemoration so that the qualitative and quantitative success of that time can be achieved the GEHAG (1924 to 1933 and 1952 to 1999) can be repeated in view of the current, alarming figures in housing construction.

Steffen Adam is an architect and building historian and a member of the board of the Berlin-Brandenburg Architects and Engineers Association.