‘Community is the One True Capital’: Ideologies of Urban Self-Build Groups in Anke Stelling’s Berlin Novels

Abstract

In a wide range of discourses, self-organized collective and communal living arrangements are frequently described as ‘utopian’ forms of housing. These arrangements are understood to be ‘utopian’ either in the sense that they come close to an imagined ideal of social and operational organization, or in the sense that they clearly diverge from existing societal norms at times even seeking a spatial distance and seclusion from the rest of society.¹ Such collective endeavours do not only contrast with the neoliberal individualization and atomization of contemporary Western societies; thanks to their cost- and resource-efficient sharing of facilities, they also appear to offer some solution to increasing economic precarity, accelerating climate change and a persistent housing crisis.²

Collective housing has consequently turned into a recurring element of political and planning measures concerned with sustainable urban development (SUD) in Europe. Such measures are aimed at supporting public forms of collective housing (retirement homes, refugee or workers’ accommodation, for example) as well as facilitating the formation of self-organized and privately-owned collective housing projects (also referred to as ‘intentional communities’ or ‘co-housing’). In the political context, collective housing is often presented as ‘an innovative answer to today’s environmental and social problems, a way to build a better society, to reintroduce into urban life relationships based on solidarity, sharing, toleration’.³ These are values and ambitions that are also explicitly shared by many self-organized collective housing projects.⁴ However, as Lucy Sargisson and Lyman Tower Sargent note, ‘[t]here is a fluid and ambivalent relationship between ideals and reality, expectations and experience in most intentional communities. […] When the everyday does not cohere with a community’s wider vision of a good life, it creates profound discomfort and has destructive power.’⁵ Recent research has also shown that certain private forms of collective housing are in some respects similar to gated communities and can contribute to housing segregation, gentrification and the displacement of low-income population groups.⁶ Considering the fact that several European cities now allocate substantial resources to support the formation of privately owned co-housing projects in the name of SUD, there is an apparent need for further investigation of the possible discrepancies between the ideological – and at times even utopian – motivations for, and the actual outcomes of, urban private-collective housing.⁷

As a complement to studies of this issue in sociology or urban planning, this article contributes to the discussion by analysing literary discourse. Literature has a long history of drafting utopian models of society in which urbanity holds a special position.⁸ A central feature of literary utopias as well as of urban utopian housing projects in real life is a certain degree of estrangement from the norms and conventions of mainstream society.⁹ In its exemplary way, literature gives rise to hypothetical social realities and scenarios that can further the discussions and the understanding of existing social phenomena, such as the effects of urban private-collective housing in this case. I will focus my investigation on two recent Berlin novels by Anke Stelling that both prominently feature a form of private-collective housing, namely the city’s much-discussed self-build groups.

The author lives in a self-built housing project in the Prenzlauer Berg district herself, as do the protagonists of her novels Bodentiefe Fenster [Floor-Length Windows] (2015) and Schäfchen im Trockenen (2018; a translation into English by Lucy Jones with the title Higher Ground was published in 2021). Sandra, the protagonist of Bodentiefe Fenster, calls the co-housing project where she lives her ‘Utopie’ [utopia], implying that this kind of living arrangement represents an absolute ideal for her.¹⁰ At the same time, she struggles with disillusion and frustration over the fact that it has proven difficult for her and her neighbours to remain committed to their ambitious social, ecological and egalitarian ideals. Schäfchen im Trockenen continues the treatment of this theme, but from a different angle. The protagonist, Resi, decides against joining the self-build group that most of her friends are a part of. When she begins to openly criticize the ‘Wichtigtuerei’ [self-importance] of the building project and what she perceives as the group’s ideological double standards, her friends react by ostracizing her.¹¹ The two novels thus offer an internal as well as an external perspective on private-collective housing in contemporary Berlin. The publication of both novels was followed by considerable attention and critical debate about housing issues and privilege. Bodentiefe Fenster was one of the titles on the longlist for the prestigious German Book Prize in 2016 and Schäfchen im Trockenen was awarded the equally prominent Leipzig Book Fair Prize in March 2019.

In the analysis of these texts, I will attempt to uncover the causes of the tension between the utopian vision and its implementation in the depicted housing projects. I am also interested in the narrative forms and devices that Stelling has chosen to illustrate the issues outlined above. Two overarching questions will be: what existing ideological discourses on private-collective housing are reflected in Stelling’s Berlin novels, and what new (counter) discourses do they develop?

From alternative utopia to super-gentrification: The emergence of self-build groups in Prenzlauer Berg

The novels under discussion are both set in Prenzlauer Berg, a nineteenth-century residential area in former East Berlin that has become known as the epitome of the rapid post-Wall gentrification in Berlin.¹² Before 1989, the state-owned housing stock in Prenzlauer Berg was subject to extensive disinvestment and was thus in a dilapidated state when the German Democratic Republic (GDR) collapsed. During the first decade after the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990, much of the housing stock in East Berlin was (re)privatized and large-scale renovation and modernization were gradually initiated in Prenzlauer Berg through private investments and public funding programs.¹³ Due to the city’s high expenditure, the loss of jobs and an ensuing exodus of taxpayers as well as a ‘worst practice urban governance’, Berlin faced a severe fiscal crisis around the turn of the millennium that prompted radical austerity politics.¹⁴

The precarious situation of the 1990s and early 2000s nevertheless brought opportunities as well. Students, artists, writers and activists squatted in vacant buildings and profited from the low rents, the freedom from social restraints and the makeshift creativity that the city – and former East Berlin especially – offered at the time. The protagonists of Stelling’s two novels were among the many young West Germans who settled in Berlin in the early 1990s, as was the writer herself. Prenzlauer Berg was already home to groups of well-known East German writers and artists before 1989, among them the legendary Prenzlauer-Berg-Connection, which constituted countercultural spaces and some creative freedom in an otherwise totalitarian system. While this myth of freedom was undermined through the post-reunification revelation of some of the members’ involvement with the GDR State Security Service (Stasi) as so-called informal collaborators, explaining why their pre-1989 activities had been tolerated by the state, 1990s’ Prenzlauer Berg still retained the aura of an urban utopia for (counter)culture and alternative lifestyles that has fed into the popularity and subsequent gentrification of the area.¹⁵

Collective living arrangements have a long history in Berlin and abounded in post-Wall Prenzlauer Berg due to the squats and the many empty family apartments. The relatively low price of land and the availability of lots also made new-build co-housing projects possible.¹⁶ The government of the insolvent city quickly realized the potential benefits of such arrangements, and introduced publicly funded support for collective housing projects, both to make squats legal and to further intergenerational and socially inclusive housing.¹⁷ Private-collective forms of housing now make up a small but slowly growing share of the housing market in Berlin. At the beginning of the 2000s, there were more than 350 ongoing co-housing projects in the city. Around the same time, housing shortages and rapidly rising rent levels began to affect the inner city.¹⁸ As it grew more difficult to find affordable rental housing, collective housing projects provided their members with an opportunity to stay in the inner city at a reasonable price. As one of the many ways of organizing a co-housing project, the self-build group model created a particular buzz in the early 2000s; between 2007 and 2010 the number of such projects went from thirty-six to a hundred and the phenomenon was amply covered in different news media.¹⁹

The members of a self-build group typically pool their resources to pay for a lot as well as for the design and the construction of a residential building, usually including several common areas like a garden, a common room, a guest room, or even premises on the ground floor that can be let to businesses. In some cases, the members are actively involved in all stages of the building process, whereas most self-build groups in Berlin commission an architect and/or a building contractor to plan and produce ‘high-quality housing with above average technological standards’.²⁰ Several self-build projects in Berlin have been initiated, designed and inhabited by well-known architects, thus contributing to the fame of the phenomenon. While the formation of a self-build group is open to anyone in theory, the success of such a project depends highly on the members’ knowledge of laws and regulations as well as their ability to make best use of available state supports.²¹

Private-collective housing projects can also be defined by their self-selection of members and their formal delineation of common rules and values.²² The ideological nature of rules and values can vary greatly from project to project. According to Florian Urban, Berlin’s self-build groups are characterized by ‘left-leaning views’, as well as by an ‘ecological awareness’ and ‘a belief in neighbourly contact and the qualities of urban life’.²³ As a case in point, the Leuchtturm [Lighthouse] cooperative in Prenzlauer Berg, formed in 2009, considers their project to be a ‘Beitrag zu einer positiven Veränderung der gegenwärtigen gesellschaftlichen Situation’ [contribution to an improvement of the current state of our society] by offering an intergenerational and socially mixed living space ‘das über die übliche Form von Nachbarschaft hinausgeht’ [that goes beyond the usual form of neighbourhood community].²⁴ The construction as well as the daily management of the building were designed to reduce the use of building material, water and energy. Sargisson and Sargent argue that such collective attempts to live ‘the good life’ can be designated as a ‘lived utopianism’, the everyday actions of their members constituting ‘politically significant acts’.²⁵

The ideologies surrounding self-organized collective living can also express themselves through the group’s economic decisions. In a German context, private-collective housing projects normally take the legal form of a condominium with separately owned apartments, or of a cooperative or limited company in which the members are shareholders. While an apartment in a condominium or a share in a limited company can be sold freely at market value, cooperative regulations usually prevent their members from selling their shares with large profits and thus often have what Florian Urban calls ‘a more leftist underpinning’.²⁶ Regardless of their legal form, private-collective housing groups rarely make speculative investments; instead, their financial decisions are generally based on a wish to create a good life for themselves and their community while maintaining private economic autonomy.

The members of Berlin’s self-build groups share a set of demographic traits in that they typically belong to the middle-class, have children and often work in the creative sector.²⁷ Several studies have shown similar social, ethnic and ideological homogeneities within other collective housing groups. Jo Williams notes that while a certain overlap in attitudes and values – ‘especially towards community and socializing’ – is beneficial for social interaction and cohesion among the members of a co-housing group, social and ethnic diversity constituted an important resource for the north American projects in her study.²⁸ In contrast, Francesco Chiodelli and Valeria Baglione argue that many private-collective housing projects display a disproportionate social and ethnic homogeneity that can be related to the self-selection of members: ‘despite the good intentions of some cohousers, the principle of the self-selection of cohousing residents according to informal principles could lead to the same results of exclusion typical of other kinds of private residential communities (such as gated communities and retirement communities)’.²⁹

Chiodelli and Baglione also question the contribution that co-housing projects make to the wider urban community. Contrary to the SUD discourse and the ideological motivations of many self-organized collective housing projects, Chiodelli and Baglione consider ‘a lack of physical and relational integration with surrounding neighbourhoods’ to be a common characteristic of existing co-housing and recommend that city governments do not invest in private-collective housing unless a more general positive outcome can be guaranteed.³⁰ In a similar vein, David Scheller and Håkan Thörn observe how ‘self-built cohousing essentially enables middle-class people to transfer cultural and social capacities through collective effort into an economic commodity with high ecological standards’ in Hamburg and Gothenburg.³¹ This transformation of cultural and social resources into a material asset in many cases entails gentrification. However, the city governments can motivate their investments in this form of housing as the social engagement of some self-build groups and the presence of comparably well-to-do members of the middle-class in the inner city constitute ‘a driving factor for economic growth’.³²

Considering the dominance of the middle class in Berlin’s private-collective housing projects, the public support for this type of housing could thus be contributing to the residential segregation and gentrification that has transformed previously socially mixed neighbourhoods in former East Berlin. In Prenzlauer Berg, members of the middle class, tourists and real estate investors soon followed the students and artists, displacing more than seventy-five percent of the existing tenants up until 2010.³³ It has been debated whether Prenzlauer Berg more recently may even be experiencing a wave of ‘super-gentrification’ that is also displacing middle-class residents.³⁴ Around 2015, the surge of co-housing projects started to slow down as fewer affordable lots become available in the inner city.³⁵ However, the demand for collective housing is high and German authorities still provide support for the formation of private-collective housing projects. Existing self-build projects as well as other forms of co-housing thus continue to put their stamp on the image of Berlin and social life in the city, at the same time as housing shortages, displacement and gentrification affect the lives of many residents. In the following analysis of self-build groups in Stelling’s novels, the ambiguities of private-collective housing outlined above will be the focus of my attention.

Inside the self-build group: ‘Bodentiefe Fenster’ (2015)

The self-built co-housing project in Bodentiefe Fenster is founded on ideological principles. Sandra, the protagonist and narrator-focalizer of the novel, has joined the project with her husband Hendrik, as the core ambition of the project corresponds to their own ideals – to offer a balanced alternative to the isolation of modern city life by creating ‘so viel Nähe wie möglich, so viel Distanz wie nötig’ (BF, 53, 75) [as much closeness as possible, as much distance as needed]. Sandra has a working-class background, having grown up in leftist circles where the idea was instilled into her that an egalitarian and communitarian society was achievable and would be realized by her own generation. The collective lifestyle that she and Hendrik lead is thus meant to be the embodiment of the political ideals of her parents’ generation (BF, 25, 49), which is repeatedly underlined by quotes from political songs and slogans from Sandra’s childhood. In an inner monologue, Sandra summarizes the common values of her self-build group as follows:

Wir haben versucht darauf zu achten, dass unsere Gruppe nicht zu homogen ist, dass auch Ältere, Kinderlose, Schlechtverdienende und Nichtakademiker dabei sind und wir trotzdem alle Entscheidungen im Konsens treffen, trotz der unterschiedlichen Interessen.

Wir haben das Grundstück einer Stiftung überschrieben, um es ein für alle Mal dem Markt zu entziehen; wir sind gegen die Bildung von Wohneigentum und wollen stattdessen genossenschaftlich wirtschaften – weil die Gemeinschaft das wahre Kapital darstellt in dieser von Profitgier und Entsolidarisierung geprägten Gesellschaft. (BF, 15)

[We have tried to make sure that our group is not too homogenous, that the elderly, people without children, low-income earners and those without a university education are included and that our decision-making is nonetheless based on consensus, despite our different interests.

We have signed the plot over to a foundation in order to withdraw it from the market once and for all; we are against private property ownership and instead choose to base our economy on collective principles – because in this society, shaped by greed for profit and loss of solidarity, community is the one true capital.]

The idea that economic capital can be replaced with community – essentially Bourdieuan social capital – has a long tradition in utopian thought as well as in housing communities.³⁶ While the members of Sandra’s group retain their own private economies, the project is influenced by this idea in several other ways. By choosing the legal form of the not-for-profit cooperative, the group wants to counteract the prevalent commodification of housing in Berlin. In order to level income differences, the group adopts a ‘Selbsthilfe’ [self-help] model that enables less affluent members to compensate for their smaller financial share by helping with the construction of their own apartments. This applies to Sandra and Hendrik, who have precarious working lives in the creative arts as a writer and a filmmaker respectively (BF, 74, 86).

The selection of the members of the project is made according to a guiding principle of social diversity, although the ‘versucht’ [tried] in the quote above suggests that this principle may not have been fully implemented (BF, 15). Ethnic diversity does not seem to have been actively considered by the group and is also not a part of their everyday social environment; as Sandra later declares, there are no ‘Migrantenkinder’ (BF, 204) [migrant children] in her daughter’s school in gentrified Prenzlauer Berg.³⁷ Sandra and her fellow residents are involved in the daily management of the co-housing project through the regular full meetings of the residents’ group. When Sandra’s friend Isa visits the project, she admires how the residents can help each other out in their daily lives and how the social network of Sandra’s two young children is not limited to their nuclear family (BF, 15).

However, some of these good intentions have turned out to be difficult to put into practice. Three years into the project, Sandra is increasingly frustrated and disillusioned by the realities of her living arrangement. In a matter-of-fact, documentary style, she observes how the residents’ group keeps making exceptions to their principles and repeatedly ends up in detailed discussions about the interpretation of their common rules. In a description of one of their full meetings, a long discussion about responsibilities and tolerance turns into an argument about garbage routines (BF, 138–49; see also 116). The tensions between intention and outcome are also evident as Sandra thinks back to the early days of the project, when the group decided on how the premises on the ground floor of their building should be used:

Uta wollte auch die Gewerbefläche im Erdgeschoss nicht an ein Gewerbe vermieten, sondern sie den Trinkern vor Kaiser’s als Treffpunkt und Wärmestube zur Verfügung stellen, konnte sich aber damit im Plenum nicht durchsetzen. Wir haben stattdessen an einen Biobäcker vermietet, das ist auch irgendwie links und sozial. (BF, 90)

[Uta also didn’t want to let the premises on the ground floor to a company, but rather to let the drinkers in front of Kaiser’s supermarket use it as a meeting place and warm room. She wasn’t able to convince the group of this idea, however. We decided to let the premises to an organic bakery instead, which is somehow also leftist and socially-minded.]

This discussion is indicative of the project’s rather weak connection with the surrounding neighbourhood. The group’s intention to contribute to social diversity in Prenzlauer Berg becomes secondary when they are directly confronted with what they perceive as social problems and potential risks. The target group for the organic bakery would be likely to be well-to-do members of the middle class, which implies that the decision to let the premises to the bakery mainly caters to the gentrifiers in Prenzlauer Berg. Sandra’s somewhat ironic description of this decision as ‘auch irgendwie links und sozial’ [somehow also leftist and socially-minded] indicates that she is aware of the contradiction between the ideological position of the group and their actions.

The ‘bodentiefe Fenster’ [floor-length windows] in the title of the novel are a recurring symbol of the double standards of the group. Their building meets high environmental standards regarding heating and water consumption and has modern design features that are typical for new-build housing in Berlin (BF, 15). The three-pane windows were installed to reduce the need for heating in the winter and, according to Sandra, their size was never up for discussion in the planning phase, even though there were controversies within the group about most aspects of the project: ‘über Geld und Geschmack, Transparenz und politischen Anspruch. Über alles eigentlich, außer über die Fenstergröße’ (BF, 53) [about money and taste, transparency and political aspirations. About everything, really, except for the size of the windows]. While being a trendy feature of modern-day architecture, Sandra contends that the floor-length windows complicate the furnishing of the apartments and require frequent cleaning or perhaps, for some of her more affluent neighbours, the services of a cleaner (BF, 52). For Sandra, the floor-length windows are an element of a bourgeois aesthetic and lifestyle that has never been questioned by the group members. Thus, the windows also stand for the lack of communication in the group and the gradual breakdown of the ideological motivations for the project.

The community in Sandra’s housing project has transformed from ‘das wahre Kapital’ (BF, 15) [the one true capital] to a burden. Sandra despairingly describes how the neighbours now know too much about each other (BF, 83, 117), frequently fight about how to raise their children (BF, 75, 76, 81), constantly compare and compete (BF, 14, 117), are never fully open about their feelings and opinions (BF, 54, 93, 95–96, 117) and have started avoiding each other altogether (BF, 83). The plenum is supposed to be a democratic forum of an administrative character but, contrary to this intention, it has now turned into the only regular common event and the only opportunity to strengthen the everyday community that Sandra yearns for. Her utopia is crumbling and she feels deprived of the agency needed to turn this development around. There are several reasons for the breakdown of the community in the co-housing project, to her mind; many of the members work a lot and their children are in full-time daycare, the elderly prefer to meet separately in their own apartments and all of the members also have other friends (BF, 53). The main reason, however, is perhaps that the political ideals that motivated the project are not their own (BF, 101). It has become painfully clear to Sandra that she and her neighbours ‘in unterschiedlichen Welten leben’ (BF, 231) [live in separate worlds] and do not have a common ideology to fall back on:

Meine Gruppe ist nicht meine Gruppe, wir haben keine gemeinsame Utopie, wir haben ein Haus mit bodentiefen Fenstern, und das Einzige, was von den Slogans meiner Kindheit übrig bleibt, ist die Behauptung, dass ‘Gemeinschaft’ etwas Positives sei, dabei hindert sie uns daran, überhaupt etwas zu tun. Weil wir uns niemals darauf einigen werden, was genau, und es unfair ist, wenn Einzelne vorpreschen.

Wir sind auf den Begriff ‘generationenübergreifend’ reingefallen und werden sie also niemals loswerden, die Lebenslügen unserer Mütter, ihre unheilvollen Strategien, sich Selbstverwirklichung einzureden. (BF, 148–49)

[My group is not my group, we don’t have a common utopia, we have a building with floor-length windows, and all that remains from the slogans of my childhood is the claim that ‘community’ is something positive. At the same time, this prevents us from doing anything at all, as we will never settle on what exactly to do and it is unfair when individuals assert themselves too much.

We fell for the ‘inter-generational’ concept and now we will never be able to get rid of the lifelong lies of our mothers, their disastrous strategies for making themselves believe in their own self-realization.]

For some time, Sandra has tried to convince herself ‘[d]ass man aber was zusammen machen könnte, wenn man wollte, ist auch schon sehr viel wert’ (BF, 53) [that the fact that we could do something together if we wanted to is also worth a lot], but the internal contradictions and ideological erosion of the co-housing project ultimately affects her mental health to the extent that it breaks down (BF, 229–37). While Sandra notes that it might be best for her and her family to leave the project (BF, 101), she also recognizes the problems that this would pose due to the rising rent levels in Prenzlauer Berg: ‘Ohne dieses Haus können wir uns den Bezirk nicht mehr leisten’ (BF, 125) [Without this house, we can’t afford to live in this district anymore]. When she asks Hendrik if it was a mistake to ever join the self-build group, he shakes his head and says: ‘Ich wusste nicht, wie sehr das Gesetz gilt, dass Gemeinschaft durch Ausgrenzung entsteht. Wir wussten allerhand noch nicht’ (BF, 235) [I didn’t know how true it is that community arises through exclusion. There were all sorts of things that we didn’t know yet].

Outside the self-build group: ‘Schäfchen im Trockenen’ (2018)

The gentrification of Prenzlauer Berg is an important element of the plot in Schäfchen im Trockenen as well. Like Sandra and Hendrik, the protagonist Resi and her husband Sven live under rather precarious circumstances, as Resi is a freelance writer and Sven is an artist (ST, 13). In addition, they have four children under the age of fourteen. Housing in Prenzlauer Berg has become unaffordable for them, but, fortunately, Resi’s friend Frank sublets his old rental apartment to them on an open-ended basis (ST, 12). Four years before the events of the novel, Frank and several other childhood friends of Resi’s had moved into a self-built housing project that goes by the name of ‘K 23’. As teenagers, Resi and her friends had had the idea of forming a collective housing project in order to ‘Gemeinsam leben und arbeiten und Kinder großziehen’ (ST, 72) [‘live and work and bring up the children together’ (HG, 69–70)], as Resi summarizes. Resi decidedly designates herself as a leftist (ST, 19) and she describes the social milieu where she grew up in West Germany as ‘[l]inke Kreise, idealistische Kreise, in denen auch diejenigen, die Privilegien besaßen, von einer gerechteren Welt träumten: zumindest für uns Kinder’ (ST, 92) [‘leftist people, idealists who, even if they were privileged, dreamed of a world that was more just, at least for us children’ (HG, 89)]. These political ideals were transferred to Resi and her friends, who perceived themselves as equals despite their different social backgrounds and financial resources.

However, since the self-build group was formed, these differences have gradually started to matter. As Resi and Sven lack the financial means to join the housing project, one of the group members offers to share his large inheritance with them to cover their share. While this offer is a one-off opportunity for them to acquire a permanent home of their own in gentrifying Prenzlauer Berg, Resi and Sven still decide to turn it down to avoid being too closely involved with their friends economically (ST, 69–71). In hindsight, Resi realizes that her background also prevented her from taking the offer; coming from humble conditions, she is used to providing for herself and takes pride in her independence (ST, 75–76).

After this episode, Resi grows increasingly frustrated with the resignation, the gender inequalities, the bourgeois lifestyle and the absence of self-criticism that her self-build group friends are gradually falling into. She asks herself: ‘War nicht unser Traum ein anderer gewesen? Ein Haus zu besetzen, anstatt es zu besitzen? Anders zu leben, zusammen zu leben?’ (ST, 64) [‘Didn’t we have a different dream? House-squatting rather than home-owning? To live differently? To live together?’ (HG, 61)]. The private-collective K 23 project contrasts with this dream in several ways. The building was designed and built by Ulf, Resi’s ex-partner, and his new partner Carolina, who are both architects. The design and the materials of the building are exclusive, the façade is light beige and looks like ‘Vanilleeis’ [‘vanilla ice cream’] and the common garden only has plants with delicate leaves: ‘[…] wenn die K 23 eine Burg ist, dann sieht man es ihr von außen nicht an’ (ST, 64–65) [‘if K23 is a castle, then it doesn’t look like one from the outside’ (HG, 62)]. As Resi returns home from the housewarming party of the K 23 building, she reflects:

Danach bin ich heim, und mir war nicht ganz wohl. Der Sekt, die Mousse au Chocolat, die ständig notwendige Begleitung, nein: Bändigung der Kinder – das war doch falsch, das genaue Gegenteil von dem, was wir uns gewünscht hatten. Wir hatten uns verabredet, nicht so zu werden wie unsere Eltern. Sogar mit unseren Eltern hatten wir uns dazu verabredet! […]

Ich durfte nichts sagen. Es war ihre Sache. Es war ihr Haus: die ‘K 23’.

Wehe, ich ließ durchblicken, dass schon der Name mich nervte, diese Wichtigtuerei, die Ulf und Carolina vielleicht brauchten fürs Portfolio, die aber über- und umsichgriff [sic], bis niemand mehr von dem ‘Haus’, sondern alle, selbst die Kinder, nur noch von der ‘K 23’ sprachen – als sei es eine Institution wie die ‘K 1’. (ST, 62–63)

[Afterwards at home, I didn’t feel very well. The champagne, the chocolate mousse, and the constant supervision – no, restraint – of the children didn’t go together, after all. In fact, it was precisely the opposite of what we’d wanted. We’d agreed not to become like our parents. We had even agreed on it with our parents! […]

I was supposed to keep my mouth shut. It was their business. It was their house: K23.

Woe betide me if I let show that the name alone bugged me with its self-importance, which Ulf and Carolina may have needed for their portfolio, but which soon got out of hand and spread like wildfire, so that no one referred to ‘the house’ anymore, but only to ‘K23’, as if it was an institution, like ‘Kommune 1’. (HG, 59–60)]

By contrasting K 23 with the legendary socialist Kommune 1 in 1960s’ West Berlin, Resi points to the ideological differences between these projects; in their youth, her friends were also convinced by the idea that the nuclear family structure and the dominant, bourgeois way of life must be overcome, but, in silent agreement, they have now started to lead a much more conventional middle-class life (ST, 58). As in Bodentiefe Fenster, the parent generation of the protagonist is reproached for having imposed their utopian ideals on their children without making sure that real equity prevailed – and without openly acknowledging that the underlying class differences remained despite their ambition to subvert them. When the ideological and financial divide between her and her self-build-group friends becomes apparent, Resi realizes that the privileged among their parents would have needed to share their resources to balance out the inequalities instead of dreaming about an egalitarian society and leaving the implementation to their children (ST, 92–93).

Resi’s attempts to express her frustration over the K 23 are either met with silence or with the assumption that she is jealous of her friends. Resi’s name is derived from the Greek term parrhesia (ST, 259), meaning to speak boldly to those in power, which characterizes the style as well as the content of the novel. When a magazine editor asks Resi to write a piece about the self-build boom in Prenzlauer Berg, she writes openly about ‘[…] wie es sich anfühlt, als drittletzte im Bezirk nicht Teil einer Baugruppe zu sein’ (ST, 89) [‘how it felt to be the third from last person in my district not to be in a building group’ (HG, 87)] and notes, among other things, that many of the self-built projects have ‘durchscheinende Materialien, die dennoch der Abschottung dienen’ (ST, 91) [‘transparent walls that still serve to segregate people’ (HG, 88)]. Her friends take her article very personally and stop inviting her to the K 23. This reaction makes Resi realize that it has become more important to them to guard their middle-class privileges – that is, ‘ihre Schäfchen ins Trockene zu bringen’ (ST, 93) [‘making it to higher ground’ (HG, 91)] – than to remain faithful to their idealist world-view.

Resi then proceeds to write a novel that chronicles the development of people like her friends from left-wing idealists to bohemian bourgeois, which causes a veritable uproar (ST, 27) (much like Bodentiefe Fenster did in real-world Berlin in 2015). The novel is also the final straw for Frank, who terminates the rental agreement as well as his friendship with Resi (ST, 12–13, 21–22, 27). The concept of parrhesia includes an element of risk, as the one who speaks boldly to those in power has something to lose by doing so. While the others have looked after their own material and social interests, Resi has continued to believe that equity and fairness will compensate for her having ‘einen brotlosen Beruf und vier Kinder, eine Mietwohnung, die selbstverständlich nicht mir gehört, einen liebenswerten, aber ebenfalls broterwerbslosen Mann’ (ST, 54–55) [‘a low-wage job and four children, a rented flat that obviously doesn’t belong to me, an adorable but equally low-earning husband’ (HG, 52)]. She now finds herself not only outside her friends’ self-build project, but also without a home for herself and her five family members. In a passage towards the end of the novel, Resi goes to the K 23 at night and climbs on top of a garbage container to have a look at her friends’ secluded living space:

Das Haus spricht zu mir. Von Wohlstand und Wärme, Sicherheit und Seriösität [sic] […]. Die Fassade brummt beruhigend. Die Fassade hält das Haus zusammen und mich wie alle anderen Außenstehenden davon ab, durchzudringen zu den Bewohnern. Das ist okay. Dazu sind die Fassaden da.

Kommt raus ihr Feiglinge und fickt euch!

Ich habe nichts, das ich werfen könnte, könnte vielleicht auf den Rasen scheißen, denn unter mir liegt der Garten in nächtlichem Frieden und herbstlichem Absterben, aber erstens muss ich nicht und zweitens würde’s niemand merken, wär’s gar willkommener, gottverdammter Dünger. (ST, 208–209)

[The building is saying something to me. Something about wealth and warmth, security and seriousness […]. The façade hums comfortingly. The façade is holding the building together and preventing me and all the other outsiders from getting inside. That’s okay. That’s what façades are for.

Come out, you cowards! Fuck you!

I have nothing to throw. Perhaps I could take a shit on the lawn. Because lying below me, in nocturnal peace and autumnal decay, is the garden. But first of all, I don’t need to go, and second, no one would notice. It would even be welcome, as fucking fertilizer. (HG, 214)]

Although a part of the urban fabric of Prenzlauer Berg, the building here seems like a fortress that seals its residents off physically and allows them to reduce and choose their social interactions with other neighbours and city dwellers. Resi is no longer able to get through to her friends with her message – not even if she were to resort to something as drastic as defecating on their lawn. Their privileged social position also provides the background for the discussion that Resi imagines taking place among the members of the K 23 about to whom they should let the empty apartment on the ground floor of their building. Resi calls this discussion an ‘Elendscasting’ (ST, 192) [‘misery contest’ (HG, 196)] as she imagines the group magnanimously agreeing at the outset that someone who is in dire need and especially deserving should get it. Nevertheless, Resi cannot imagine that a proposal from one of the members to let to refugees would be met with anything other than bigotry, scepticism and the remark that the prospective tenant must be a person ‘der zu uns passt’ [‘who suits us’] (ST, 200; HG, 204). In this passage, the self-selection of group members is presented as a manifest obstacle to diversity and integration.

Conclusion

As the analysis of Stelling’s novels Bodentiefe Fenster and Schäfchen im Trockenen has shown, private-collective urban housing projects are complex social and economic endeavours. The formation of such projects in contemporary Berlin relies on the knowledge and financial resources of their (in most cases middle-class) members, the administrative and financial support from the local authorities and the availability of affordable housing units or lots. Due to favourable conditions in the early 2000s, a substantial number of self-build housing projects were initiated and completed before the commodification of housing and the gentrification of inner-city areas such as the formerly dilapidated Prenzlauer Berg slowed the co-housing surge down. The two novels thematize this development by indicating that the protagonists, being precariously-employed freelance writers and mothers, married to men who are artists, can no longer afford to move elsewhere in Prenzlauer Berg or neighbouring areas. Sandra and Resi are both committed to the leftist ideology of tolerance, solidarity and equity that they inherited from their idealist parent generation in West Germany. Integral to this ideology is that their everyday lives should be organized collectively so as to reduce the centrality of nuclear family structures, as well as their climate impact and income inequalities.

A major theme of Stelling’s two novels is the disillusion that Sandra and Resi experience as they come to realize that their neighbours and friends no longer share their values and their utopian visions of everyday community and solidarity. This ideological shift is epitomized by the self-built housing projects in the novels. As Sargisson and Sargent argue, the ‘lived utopianism’ of such projects is nearly always connected to controversies and must therefore be regarded as constant work-in-progress rather than an attainable end goal:

[…] it is a multilayered and complex series of simultaneous events, a complicated and messy process of trying to make daily actions cohere with a wider project. […] Trying, getting things wrong, and learning to do things differently next time are all important parts of this process.³⁸

Sandra’s and Resi’s frustrations do not mainly stem from the conflicts that they experience in relation to their self-build group neighbours and friends, but from the inability or unwillingness of the group members to acknowledge and discuss the contradictions of their projects openly and to possibly change their ways.

The reasons for this stalemate appear to be at least partly systemic. Sandra and Resi belong to a group of overworked middle-class parents who do not seem to be able to overcome the pressures of individualized neoliberal competition and consumption. Rather than addressing questions of principle and ideology, the group discussions repeatedly stall at the level of individual particularities. According to both Sandra and Resi, the egalitarian ideals of their West German leftist milieu also prevent them and their peers from taking individual initiatives and criticizing each other. The self-build group neighbours and friends are thus not held accountable for their inconsistent actions by anyone other than Sandra and Resi, it seems, and react by questioning and ostracizing them both. Sandra and Resi’s attempts to start discussions and speak openly about these issues are repeatedly thematized and are also reflected in the blunt, matter-of-fact style of both novels.

However, the views of the two sole narrator-focalizers of the novels are never opposed by any other characters’ perspectives on the events of the plot. As the focus of the protagonists’ associative inner monologues lies entirely on the relations within their own social group, they rarely explicitly reflect on the influence that their own actions have had on other groups or the wider urban context. This is especially striking as they and their peers were likely among the early gentrifiers in East Berlin in the 1990s. While they were attracted by the ‘urban utopia’ of Prenzlauer Berg that would allow them to turn their ideological visions into reality, they do not acknowledge their own role in the accelerating gentrification process that may have contributed to making their political efforts and their envisioned way of life impossible. This is indicative of the situation in post-reunification Berlin and especially in formerly East German districts such as Prenzlauer Berg that have gone from being disinvested, socially mixed areas to bourgeois or even super-gentrified. As the formation of private-collective housing projects similar to the self-build groups in the novels requires their members to have substantial economic, social and cultural capital, the public support for such projects has been criticized for catering to the middle class and consequently for leading to ‘planned gentrification’ and displacement of low-income population groups.³⁹ While both novels are concerned with rising rent levels and the lack of affordable housing, this is only to the extent that these issues affect the protagonists. In consequence, there is no mention of the extensive displacement of former GDR citizens from gentrifying inner-city areas in either of the novels.

Despite, or perhaps thanks to, the limited narrative perspective of one single, middle-class character in each novel, my literary material provides ample food for thought concerning the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion as well as the ideologies and realities of private-collective housing projects. The exclusion of other perspectives on the events of the plot effectively illustrates the privileged and segregated social position of the protagonists and their peers. This position is underlined by the two parallel passages that render how the self-build groups in the respective novels decide on how to use the empty premises in their buildings. Contrary to their original ambitions and the opportunities that arose to contribute to social diversity and integration, the groups prefer to let to business owners or tenants who belong to the same social group as they do. The bonds that they formed with their friends early in life and the transmission of their parents’ ideological objectives to them seem to prevent openness and to spark class anxiety. This impression is reinforced by the spatial seclusion of the self-build groups in their sustainable and exclusively designed shared buildings that allows them to distance themselves from other social groups and from uncontrollable or unwanted aspects of urban life in general. As Chiodelli and Baglione note, this may be a part of the intrinsic logic of private forms of collective housing: ‘Cohousing communities run the risk of auto-segregation from the surrounding area, due to their functional and relational self-sufficiency.’⁴⁰

The ecological and egalitarian objectives of the depicted housing projects, shared by many of their real-life counterparts, partly intersect with the discourse on sustainable urban development. Financial and administrative support for this form of housing has often been motivated as a means of creating affordable and inclusive housing for different social, ethnic and generational groups. In Bodentiefe Fenster, however, Sandra views the ‘community’ and ‘intergenerational’ concepts critically. For her, community has come to stand for overregulation, a reluctance to act and internal competition, while the intergenerational aspect of her housing project equals not being able to free herself from the unrealistic ideals of her parent generation (BF, 148–49). In Schäfchen im Trockenen, even an act of protest, such as defecating on the self-build group’s lawn, runs the risk of being neutralized and reinterpreted as constructive – i.e. as fertilizer – due to the ecological framing of such projects (ST, 208–09). The novels thus develop a critical discourse on private-collective housing that connects to individual as well as wider social perspectives. Due to this critical point of view, limited to only one censorious character, the two novels (especially Schäfchen im Trockenen) read as polemical satires of the self-build groups in super-gentrifying Prenzlauer Berg.

These groups provide their members with high-quality yet affordable housing but have not fulfilled their originally articulated utopian ideals. The discrepancies between the ideologies and the realities of the depicted self-build projects not only lead to potential conflicts within the groups, but also to the exclusion of differently-minded others and a lack of integration into the surrounding neighbourhoods. Stelling’s literary representations of private-collective urban housing projects are thus in line with the conclusions of certain critics: this form of housing is not necessarily the answer to social problems such as housing segregation, social and ethnic homogenization and the lack of housing for low-income population groups. The promotion and public support of private-collective housing in Berlin thus come close to a ‘social whitewashing’ and could even constitute a gentrification strategy that feeds into a reinforcement of existing middle-class privileges. In conclusion, the realization of socially progressive or even utopian ideas through urban collective housing projects will most probably remain difficult as long as other structures work against them – gender and class inequalities, urban segregation, discrimination and neoliberal logics of individual competition and consumption.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript and the editors of the journal for their insightful comments and suggestions, as well as the Åke Wiberg foundation for funding a part of this research.

Footnotes