Communal Living Stories - Learning how to live together

(DE) During my student days in Berlin, things often got very lively in one shared flat (Wohngemeinschaft – WG). I still have fond memories of the parties we had. And we held big dinners in our kitchen to which many guests always showed up. We had a good reputation as a hospitable gourmet WG. Even at Christmas, we didn't go home to our family of origin. We wanted to celebrate with our friends, utterly different from how we used to! However, we still had the traditional Christmas goose. We didn't want to do without that. Even the most revolutionary-minded WG members and friends did not cross this barrier. Not everything is wrong about being a bourgeois!

Learning how to live together

Openness, tolerance and generosity

But apart from that, we made a point of being as open, tolerant and generous as possible.

There were four of us living in this WG. But due to a series of events, we were sometimes double-occupied for a few months. My boyfriend had broken his leg and had to be looked after; one flatmate had a new girlfriend who liked to visit him in the phase of first falling in love and actually lived with us. Another flatmate had her boyfriend from abroad staying, who found shelter with us. As the only remaining flatmate felt like a fifth wheel, she invited her boyfriend to visit as often as possible.

We had a good and exciting time together, which was sometimes quite exhausting. For example, there were hardly any possibilities of retreating. If you wanted to drink a cup of tea in peace in the kitchen, someone was sitting at the kitchen table, typing on the typewriter and smoking, and didn't want to be disturbed either. Sharing the kitchen was only a minor problem. It became more complex in the morning when all eight residents urgently needed to use the only bathroom. Since the toilet was also integrated into the bathroom, sometimes there was a more or less desperate queue.

Household chores are distributed to everyone

As in every family, organisational things must be done in a communal flat. There are lots to do: laundry, washing the dishes, buying groceries and other daily necessities, cooking, etc. The role bearers in the family, mainly the mothers, do all this themselves or delegate something to the children or the husband. A commune does not have a mum! Consequently, everything has to be discussed, negotiated and allocated reliably. At the beginning of our WG, agreements were enough, but later a plan for assigning tasks had to be drawn up and displayed in the kitchen. It worked. Most of the time, anyway!

Despite all these little difficulties, I loved living with lots of people. And I loved having visitors from friends and family members to cook for.

I remember well that, to my great delight, my brother came to visit for a few days. Of course, he was to be fed good food during those days. A bit like home, so to speak! However, this meant I had to chop vegetables for both of us, plus the seven other flatmates. Usually, at mealtime, a flatmate arrived with another random guest, who also found a place at the table. We added a chair, put one more plate on the table and stretched the sauce with secret remedies! It all works! I liked precisely this uncomplicated behaviour. Everyone felt comfortable sitting at the big table, eating and chatting.

Household costs are shared

We also always kept the financial aspect in mind, quite pragmatically. We ate little meat, primarily vegetables! We were not vegetarians or vegans, and there was no philosophy behind it. Vegetables were the cheapest, so we could manage with our money.

We had a household fund into which we paid an agreed amount weekly. We used this fund to pay for all communal costs, from food to toilet paper, washing powder, etc. Sometimes also alcohol, when we were having a party together. But most of the time, we paid for it privately.

However, not every guest was familiar with this principle of joint household budgeting. As a result, there were some misunderstandings here.

Once we had a visit from a friend of a friend from Spain. He saw we took the household money with us when we went shopping. Yes, he thought, how practical; I'll do that too. So he went to the bakery with our joint kitty and bought a roll just for himself. Afterwards, he put the kitty back in its place and ate his roll, satisfied with himself and his understanding of this new world.

But we were not. It wasn't the bread roll that mattered to us; let him have that, but the principle. We would have asked the others if they also wanted a bread roll. But, of course, unlike our guest flatmate, each of us had paid in advance. It took us a while to understand what was probably going on inside him: You are invited and provided with breakfast and other meals as a guest. If there's no food, then you get it yourself, and that's why there's a communal household fund that you can use as a guest.

We were able to clear up this misunderstanding. From now on, he brought bread rolls for everyone. Life in a shared flat has to be learned! It was not a misunderstanding but rigorous egoism that I experienced a few years later in another WG. I had often wondered why there was always so little money in our kitty on Monday evening, even though we had all made our weekly contribution on Sunday evening. The fridge's contents in no way justified the shortfall in our coffers. Once I came home at noon on Monday because I had forgotten something and found my flatmate in the kitchen. He had gone shopping and was eating with relish a couple of rolls with expensive rosemary ham from a deli shop, of which he quickly ate the last bits when I came into the kitchen. For us, the rest of the flatmates, he had only bought a much cheaper sausage from the discount shop.

When living together, you get to know quite well the character of the individual flatmates, both the good and the not-so-good sides. In a flat-sharing community, you live closely together and get to know a lot about each other anyway. To get along with each other, you need tolerance and a certain calmness. I still remember with horror the times when I came into the kitchen in the morning and had to pull a cup and a plate out of last week's pile of dishes and wash them so I could have breakfast. Or when, as a non-smoker, I had to empty my flatmates' overflowing ashtrays standing around... But I also learned a lot about myself during my commune time. I loved and still love the memory of that communal feeling, although I now place more value on opportunities to retreat and appreciate having time to myself. And I still remember how often my calmness, tolerance and openness were tested in commune life.

The question at the Wohngemeinschaft interview about whether you have experience of living in a flat-sharing community and are flexible may sound pretentious, but it is crucial. Learning how to live together is crucial, too. (LL)