Abstract
This chapter explores the recent rise of forced evictions (Zwangsräumungen) in Berlin focusing on the relationship between housing insecurity and the emergence of new forms of urban displacement. While it is often argued that the elementary brutalities of forced evictions are symptomatic of a wider austerity urbanism that has recently emerged in the cities of the Global North, these are developments that must also be seen, as this chapter argues, within a much wider historical frame. The chapter thus provides, on the one hand, an overview of the contemporary logics of forced eviction in Berlin focusing on how evictions take place and the various arrangements, materialities and practices that they depend on. On the other hand, it re-positions the relationship between forced evictions and struggles over housing in Berlin within a much longer history of dispossession, insecurity and resistance.
*Excerpts from this chapter first appeared in Alexander Vasudevan, Metropolitan Preoccupations: The Spatial Politics of Squatting in Berlin (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 205) and appear with permission of Wiley (©, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd).
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Notes
- 1.
The recent attempt by city officials in Berlin to clamp down on holiday lets (Air BnB) should be seen in this context.
- 2.
The minimum size requirements of courtyards corresponded to the turning radius of the fire department’s wagons (see Ladd 1990, p. 81).
- 3.
Die Neue preussische Kreuzzeitung, 3.7.1863.
- 4.
The predicament of Berlin’s ‘Trockenwohner’ at the turn of the twentieth century featured prominently in Hans Fallada’s posthumous novel Ein Mann will nach oben (1953).
- 5.
The same story ran in a number of local newspapers, see Spenersche Zeitung, 17.5.1872; Vossische Zeitung, 18.5.1872, Beilage; Kreuzzeitung, 22.5.1872; also see Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 14,7.1872, Beilage.
- 6.
According to the Neuer Social-Demokrat, it was widely reported that the eviction of the tenant, a Herr Harstark, was based on outstanding rent payments to the landlord. His 3-year contract expired on October 1, 1872 and he had regularly paid his rent quartaliter pranumerando. The real reason for the eviction, it would seem, was that the fact that Harstark was sub-letting part of the apartment (see Nitsche et al. 1981, p. 46).
- 7.
Neuer Social-Demokrat, 1.8.1872.
- 8.
Neuer Social-Demokrat, 31.7 and 2.8.
- 9.
Spenersche Zeitung, 24.8.1872; Vossische Zeitung, 8.28, 1872.
- 10.
Die Rote Fahne, 28.12.1918.
- 11.
While the strikers boasted that over 250,000 Berliners were involved in the action, many scholars believe that a nationwide estimate of 300,000 strikers is a more plausible figure (see Rada 1991, p. 174).
- 12.
Vossische Zeitung, 14.9.1932.
- 13.
Die Rote Fahne, 1.10.1932.
- 14.
Figure quoted from Lokalanzeiger, 12.08.1933. As Florian Urban has recently argued, it is now clear that during the interwar period, the “vast majority of Berlin’s approximately 103,000 garden plots were permanently inhabited” (2013, p. 230).
- 15.
Die Rote Fahne, 30.10.1932.
- 16.
There were, however, factions in the NSDAP that did offer a modicum of support to the rent strikes especially in Berlin though these initiatives ended as they seized power in 1933.
- 17.
This chapter is a preliminary introduction to a much larger archival project that seeks to reconstruct the historical experience of eviction and displacement in Berlin.
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Vasudevan, A. (2017). Zwangsräumungen in Berlin: Towards an Historical Geography of Dispossession*. In: Brickell, K., Fernández Arrigoitia, M., Vasudevan, A. (eds) Geographies of Forced Eviction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51127-0_9
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