People in the apartment block in the 50s - Part 2
- titanja1504
- Jul 28, 2023
- 17 min read
Updated: Aug 9, 2023
The women in our street
(DE) I feel as if only women lived in the apartment blocks of my childhood in the 1950s. Of course, this is a distorted perception because there were five married couples in our house alone, except for my grandmother and her neighbour, who was also single. So they certainly existed, the husbands and fathers. But they were not present in my everyday life as a child.
In my perceived memory, the women, who all seemed to be more or less the same age as my grandmothers, dominated the image of my everyday surroundings.
Even young women like my mother you didn't meet daily while shopping or at the kindergarten door.
Where were they, the men? Where were they, the very young women?
In terms of society as a whole, it is not a purely subjective picture that women outnumbered men, especially those born between 1900 and about 1925. The war resulted in 22.35 million men compared to 25.35 million women in 1955. This ratio was probably also reflected in the microcosm of our apartment block.
But the war is only one reason for the dominance of women in everyday life from a child's point of view.
According to the role model of the 1950s, men went to work and earned money, while women stayed at home as housewives to take care of the household and raise the children.
This was not entirely true for my parents' generation, i.e., those born in the 1930s. Especially in the working class, both parents tried to earn money to be able to afford things. The children were left to their grandmothers, who were partly relieved by the kindergartens primarily run by nuns, especially in Bavaria.
The young women in my family had jobs. My mother worked as a trained textile saleswoman in a specialist shop, and my aunt was a production line worker in a factory, although she would much rather have been a seamstress. But there were not enough apprenticeships. My godmother worked as an assistant in a printing shop. Only one of the three women gave up her job when she got married and thus corresponded to the contemporary role model. She had become the wife of a bank employee, and in these circles, it was not customary for women to work. The other two had married workers and focused on building a life of prosperity.
Incidentally, until well into the 1960s, the two working-class families could afford much more than the bank clerk's family. Social status and role models were indifferent to many of this generation in this milieu. The new standards were consumer-oriented.
The absence of men and the working population generally can also be explained by the typical working hours at that time. In the early 1950s, people worked 48, even 49 hours a week. Additional overtime was the order of the day. That meant at least 8 hours a day, six days a week. That left only Sunday for family and recreation.
Women of the war generation remember
Against this background, it is not surprising that mainly women in their 40s to mid-50s made up my grandmothers' circle of acquaintances. This was their generation with whom they shared collective experiences.
They had shared memories of the war and post-war period when they had been young wives and mothers and had steered their families through these difficult times. Some of them were now war widows with almost grown-up children, such as Grandma's friend from the house next door, whom I called Auntie Fest. Others cared for their war-disabled husbands like my paternal grandmother did. Some built a new life with their husbands who had returned home, as long as they did not have to look after their grandchildren, as was my maternal grandmother's task.
Depending on their familiarity, these women either sat together in the kitchen or stood together in the street; they often began to talk about "the hard times". And if I could listen, a vast landscape of memories spread before me.
Tales of psychic experiences
Particularly eerie were the strange psychic experiences during the war.
A woman woke up in the middle of the night because the picture of her husband, who was fighting at the front, had fallen off the wall for no apparent reason. A sign!? A message of death!?
The same question arose for the one who suddenly heard her husband's voice while washing up in the middle of the day. Very close! More a cry than a word!
And indeed! A short time later, the news arrived: Fallen at the front. They noted the date of death, which matched the date of the mysterious experience.
Also, those women whose husbands were missing looked for signs that could tell them whether they were still alive.
These stories were primarily hearsay. But this belief in psychic connections with their husbands probably helped women to keep fear and helplessness at bay during the war. One probably felt less helpless if one believed in being able to sense disaster coming up. It meant keeping a little bit of control.
This was a strategy that women did not want to let go of now because times were changing, but the memory of loss, danger and doom was still very present. My paternal grandmother, for example, focused on card reading and thus tried to gain an insight into fate.
In this context, the not at all supernatural but sombre homecoming story of a neighbour was often told, which everyone in the block had witnessed immediately after the war.
The wife of this neighbour, who had gone missing during the war, was very beautiful, and so an equally beautiful Russian soldier, probably a major, had fallen in love with her after the end of the war. The two became a couple. But one night, the missing husband returned from captivity and had to realise that he was no longer welcome at home. A Russian soldier had taken his place. He had cried bitterly all night in the backyard and then disappeared forever.
Horrors of the post-war period
The immediate post-war period seemed to have brought great suffering. Many people died in the typhus epidemic caused by contaminated water due to the bombed water supply, weakened by malnutrition and hunger at the end of the war and in the immediate post-war period.
While my father's whole family, except for himself, was close to death, the typhus epidemic hardly raged in my mother's family, even though they lived on the same block. Why? My mother's family was supplied with enough healthy and fresh food by relatives in the country. My father's family did not have such relations; therefore, his little six-year-old sister died of typhoid fever while his mother was more or less in a coma and received the last rites. When she recovered, her little daughter was dead and buried. A shock she never got over. It was a grief that many must have shared with her at that time.
But life still held another challenge for the residents of the blocks of flats.
1945 the war was over; the bombing nights and days were finally over, and the houses were still standing. What a blessing!
But then the American occupation forces decided that the residents had to leave their flats within 24 hours. There was no further explanation or even justification.
Explanation of the document „Wohnungszuweisung“: This letter shows that my maternal grandmother only received the official housing allocation for this room with kitchen in 1949. But she had already been accommodated there in 1945, after she had had to vacate her flat in the housing block. From 1949, the residents were able to move back into their flats. The bureaucratic mills of the post-war period had nothing to oppose the chaos.
While Ukrainian displaced persons systematically replaced Messerschmidt employees suspected of being Nazi supporters in the Hermann-Göring-Siedlung, the later Ganghofer Siedlung, which belonged to the Messerschmidt-Werke, the blocks where my families lived could not be so clearly assigned to Nazism.
Presumably, accommodation was needed for the liberated forced labourers and concentration camp prisoners until they could or had to return to their home countries. Functional apartment blocks were more suitable for humane accommodation than the Nazi barrack camps.
However, for the surprised German inhabitants, this meant finding accommodation in the bombed-out city with relatives, friends, or acquaintances who could free up a little space.
After all, my mother's family consisted of a mother with three adolescent children, and my father's family consisted of a sick man, a weakened mother and two teenage children. It wasn't enough to fold out the sofa bed!
But something always works, so both families found shelter until they were allowed to return to their flats in the block in 1949.
The women remembered in their accounts what a fiasco their return had been.
The Russians and Poles who had taken up residence had trashed everything and lived like vandals. They were even washing potatoes in the bowls of the water closets because they were unfamiliar with such things.
Of course, stories like this fueled the racist Nazi propaganda of the Russian or Slavic subhuman, which still haunted Germans' minds after the war.
A gentle Polish guy conquers prejudice
Prejudices about Russians and Polish people survived the Nazi era and could only be changed slowly and with difficulty.
A little story about this is the love story between my father's older sister, Inge, and her Polish husband, Walter. Walter had been a prisoner of war in a camp in Regensburg. Immediately after the war, he met the young, self-confident German Inge on the street. The two fell in love. The relatives were up in arms. Even my grandmother, who was certainly not a Nazi, disapproved of this union.
A Polish man! That was out of the question! They bitched and moaned until my grandfather tried to force his daughter not to continue the relationship. But it didn't help! She was a stubborn woman, always had been. But then Walter asked for a talk with his Inge's father, as my grandfather often told me in tears. This young gentle Polish man asked him why he and Inge were not allowed to love each other and that he was a good man who honoured the family.
And as people often are, when they meet discriminated people in person and have good experiences, they throw their prejudices overboard, especially for this one person. From then on, Walter was held in high esteem and was lovingly cared for by the family. For my father, he was a fatherly role model. And, of course, everyone was very much in agreement with the marriage.
Unsurprisingly, Walter would have liked to stay in Regensburg with his Inge. But my wise aunt was not deceived. A Polish worker would never have a chance in Germany; that was how she assessed the situation. So she insisted on emigrating to Australia. She was already pregnant when they set off via Naples in 1949. However, she had to conceal her condition because pregnant women were refused passage.
In the end, it all worked out. I always loved this story.
Gloomy images from the Nazi era
Of course, the women also touched on the dark images from the Nazi and wartime periods in their reminiscences.
However, certain events were only talked about in hints, and when I asked, the adults changed the subject. There was talk of nightly processions of emaciated figures being driven through the streets towards the city's southern edge. "Anyone who wanted to could see them," my paternal grandmother would interject.
Sometimes they recounted that the Gestapo picked someone up because he had spoken at the pub before 01 September 1939 about the war coming soon. It was suspected that he had been taken to Dachau.
There was talk of emaciated Polish people who, as prisoners of war, had to do clean-up work after the bombing raids and were sometimes given food to eat.
Another time there was talk of a Cathedral preacher, Maier, whom they had hanged, right at the end.
I only discovered who that was and who "they" were later.
When people spoke of camps, prisoners of war, old Nazis, the fanatical block warden on the corner, the Gestapo and the SS, they usually only hinted at them. These topics were only addressed and discussed within the family, if at all. The fear of denunciation was still deeply ingrained in people's minds, and not without good reason. In the 1950s, after the half-hearted denazification and at the beginning of the Cold War, NSDAP members and office-holders of the Third Reich were reinstated in public authorities and politics. The old networks were back in place. For example, the fact that my paternal grandmother had to appear before the Gestapo because a neighbour had denounced her was a typical story only within the family circle. She was accused of making disparaging remarks about the NSDAP and Adolf Hitler. But my grandmother would not be intimidated!
She would not be told to shut up. She told the Gestapo man. "Then send me to the concentration camp and my children too! We'll get something to eat there too!
"What naivety! What recklessness!" the whole family was still moaning in the 1950s. But she sat grinning, even though she knew by then that staying in a concentration camp would have been a mortal threat.
People laugh about it afterwards
Strangely enough, the stories from the last days of the war, when the women and their children either sat in the air-raid shelter or had to organise food, were exciting and funny.
At every coffee klatsch, people told of how my maternal grandmother went berserk after spending two days and nights in the air-raid shelter in Karthaus (the building of a psychiatric clinic, then called a sanatorium and nursing home) with the other women and children of the neighbourhood and her own three children. Against all odds, she broke out of the cellar covered in soot and made her way home with her children. She didn't care about anything: "Fuck the Nazis, the block warden, the bombs and everything! I'm going home now!"
The women at the kitchen table laughed tears when they remembered this.
My paternal grandmother couldn't stop laughing when she talked about her nightly wood theft at the end of the war.
There was nothing… that's how the story always began. But to be able to heat and cook at least a little, wood was needed. The bombed-out houses in the neighbourhood had perfectly useful logs. But taking them was strictly forbidden. That was looting. And looting was punished severely!
In desperation, she joined forces with a friend. One night, they stole one of these logs and dragged it to the entrance of the house. The question was how to get the stolen goods into the cellar without the neighbours, who could denounce her, finding out. The way through the hallway was too risky. But pushing the bulky item through the cellar window might be possible. So they put the log down on the wall of the house, slipped into the cellar, opened the window and very quietly cleared space for the valuable piece. Everything had gone well. No neighbour had woken up to see what was going on. Quietly, very quietly, the two tiptoed back up and reached for the log. But there was nothing there! The heavy wooden log they had stolen had itself been stolen. Just as quietly and secretly as they had stolen it themselves!
Things are looking up!
These women and their children had been a kind of fated community in their housing block during the war. They then struggled to make ends meet in their makeshift accommodation in the post-war period from 1945 to 1949. Many returned to the housing block as war widows, with their now complete families, or as single welfare recipients.
But new residents also arrived. Before separate blocks for the families of displaced persons and refugees from the eastern territories were built in the mid-1950s, some of these families also squeezed into the small flats in our street. Despite the cramped conditions, they considered themselves lucky to have been awarded a small rented flat.
The displaced persons and refugees were not held in high esteem by their neighbours in the block of flats then. I sometimes heard the neighbours rant: "They all had a "Rittergitl" (a mansion house)," people mimicked them disparagingly, "and now they get much more support than we do! After all, we lost a lot too!" People eyed these "foreign Germans" (most of them had to leave their estates behind as the Russian occupiers took them at the end of the war)* with suspicion, kept their distance, remained superficially polite and friendly, and then forgot envy and resentment during the reconstruction and economic miracle.
In fact, in 1955, "Volkswohnungen für Flüchtlinge" (People's Apartments for Refugees) were built by Stadtbau GmbH in the courtyard area of the blocks opposite, which caused some frowning among the old-established residents because it was not only refugees who were desperately looking for housing at that time.
At the beginning of the 1950s, the housing shortage in Regensburg was still severe, but more and more young couples could move into their own small flats somewhere in the city. People renovated and built as much as they could. My parents, for example, could rent a small two-room flat near the railway station after they married in 1955. They got the deal because my father, an electrician and skilled craftsman, could renovate the apartment. If at all possible, other young couples probably also made such "deals".
My uncle, who was a carpenter, obviously showed less negotiating skills. Therefore, he had to live with his wife and son in grandma's bedroom for about two more years.
Consumer society develops with its social differences.
Very slowly, one child after the other left the house, or rather the home, in the 1950s. The parents, or even just the mothers, stayed behind. They now had their flat to themselves. And not only that! It was no longer sheer survival at the centre of all endeavours but rather enjoying something for oneself!
Wages were still meagre, but young people, in particular, took every opportunity to earn a little extra money, even by moonlighting. The older people and the non-manual workers, who did not have this option, saved specifically for new purchases.
Some women supplemented their husbands' wages by cleaning, tailoring, ironing or working as unskilled labourers in factories and other enterprises. At that time, the economy needed such workers. The problem was not only the labour market. There was another hurdle for women.
Unmarried women could decide to earn money, but wives had to give their husbands permission in the 1950s. Many workers didn't need a bank account because they received their salary in pay envelopes. But if a wife wanted her own bank account, she also required her husband's signature for that.
But this oppression of women, which is outrageous from today's point of view, was not an issue with the neighbours in our block of flats. On the contrary!
As a child, I did not understand what Mrs XY, who lived with her husband and often leaned out of the window, meant by saying that she had to let him have his way again today because she had treated herself to a new pair of shoes. However, the surrounding neighbours laughed with her about this situation, albeit restrained but quite understanding.
Participation in the beginning economic miracle, mainly associated with consumption, was for some more and for others less possible.
A new piece of furniture here and there! A new radio or, later, even a TV set! A bicycle, a motor scooter and finally, the first car! An Isetta, perhaps or a VW Beetle or even a Karmann-Ghia? These were the goals mainly of the younger generation, who worked hard for them and often left the upbringing of their children to others.
Slowly, in the 1950s, the social differences became visible. As a welfare recipient, my maternal grandmother depended on her children, whose children she looked after. Therefore she could not earn any extra money, remaining at the mere subsistence level. The generous pensions of war widows and war invalids made new purchases possible.
This distinction could be seen, for example, in their clothing. According to the fashion of the 1950s, ladies who could afford it occasionally went to the café or at least for a stroll in the city in finely coordinated clothing. Even in summer, a light coat was part of the ladylike outfit. It was accompanied by a little hat and a little bag matching the shoes. And, very significantly, gloves were worn in winter and summer if elegance was essential. A self-respecting lady, such as my paternal grandmother and the neighbour "Aunt Fest" or my mother, had several pairs of gloves in her wardrobe.
Most apartment block residents at that time presented themselves in a fashion-consciously ladylike manner during Sunday walks, as if they didn't have their apron hanging on the hook in the kitchen, which they wore exclusively at home to save the good pieces in the wardrobe.
With my not-exactly well-to-do maternal grandmother, the difference between Sunday and workday clothes was insignificant. She had a single hat and a lot of much cheaper headscarves that she put on when she went shopping or, which was rarely the case, to church or, more often, to the cinema. Such a square headscarf was folded into a triangle, placed over her hair and tied under her chin. When shopping, she usually wore a light or warm coat over her apron, depending on the season. On Sundays, she wore a dress, skirt, and blouse under her coat. That way, you were always dressed smartly and not carelessly. At least, that's how my maternal grandmother saw it.
I never knew her to be envious of her better-off and better-dressed neighbours. I don't think she cared about being poor. The only thing that bothered her was that she had to rely on her children for support.
But she had also made a big mistake during the war. So the family would recall resignedly, but only when grandma wasn't around.
My grandmother never spoke of it, but she would have had a chance during the war to become a war widow and thus be provided for. A young man adored her very much and asked her to marry him. But she wanted to give him time to think it over, as she would bring three children into the marriage. She would say yes at the next home leave if he still wanted to. But instead of coming back on home leave and marrying my grandma, he fell at the front. The chance of happiness or at least a pension was gone. At least, that's how the family members saw it.
It sounds a bit cynical, but I suspect that in this extreme period of reconstruction and intense consumerism, people afforded themselves a little less sense of romance and sentimentality.
Nevertheless, my grandmother was sociable; everyone liked her because of her sense of humour. But close friendships did not tend to exist in the neighbourhood. People didn't want to let anyone look into their family affairs. The attitude of keeping up appearances, keeping problems to oneself and not giving rise to gossip and rumours, typical at the time, was still deeply rooted in our neighbourhood in the 1950s.
No lack of social contacts
What the women in our block of flats liked to do, in any case, was socialise extensively. This had nothing to do with friendship but was simply part of ordinary neighbourly care in an apartment block.
People talked to each other at every opportunity and enjoyed it. Today one would say everyone got a healthy dose of social contact.
Apart from family members, reciprocal visits to each other's flats happened only among a few close acquaintances. For example, my maternal grandmother's direct neighbour would quickly come over. Even the resident in the neighbouring house, whom I called "Auntie Fest", would sometimes drop by and say hello. She would sit with us in the kitchen for a while. Usually, such a visit developed spontaneously. Grandma was looking out the window when "Auntie Fest" came home elegantly dressed from a stroll through town. "I'll be right over. I just have to take off my stockings (and the suspender belt, of course). It's more comfortable!" she announced. Shortly afterwards, even in the cold season, she stepped out of her front door barefoot in her slippers, walking down the street, and there she was at our door. Later, we received invitations to watch television at her place.
But apart from these visits, there were plenty of opportunities for a chat or even more extended conversations. The women had to leave the flat all the time to do something.
Since there were hardly any refrigerators, they went shopping every day. Supermarkets in today's style were still unthinkable. There were specialised shops: a butcher, a baker, a dairy shop and a tiny grocery shop. Potatoes, like coal, were ordered in bulk and stored in the cellar. In summer, people ran to the cool cellar several times a day, where butter, milk, eggs, pickled fruit and home-cooked jam were stored alongside potatoes, coals, and preserves.
Every week a different tenant had to clean the stairs on Saturday. And that took quite a while because a few words had to be exchanged with everyone who came by. Otherwise, it would have been impolite on all sides. People met in the hallway, in the cellar, in the laundry room or on the street and got talking.
But there were also specific communication strategies.
My maternal grandmother wasn't the only one who stood leaning on a cushion at a wide-open window in the summer when the weather was nice to watch the people on the street for a while. But of course it didn't stop at looking. A greeting, a remark, a question about how they were doing... and off they went! Time flew by, and after one or two hours, the window was closed again, satisfied with the pleasant conversations.
At that time, it was impossible to perish in isolation in one's apartment in a block of flats.
It would simply have been noticeable if you hadn't kept running into a neighbour.
Today, in 2023, I have lived for 16 years in a three-storey apartment building from the 1930s in Munich and rarely see my neighbours. I don't know three of the eight parties personally. The residents of the neighbouring houses are mostly strangers with whom I have never exchanged a word. Families with children meet in the playground in the courtyard, but not all of them return my greeting when I pass by.
I know there are other house communities where the residents consciously and proactively try to be a "community". But it is not a matter of course.
In our apartment block in the 1950s, however, such a conscious act of neighbourly care would not have been necessary. Everyone was addressed mercilessly and as a matter of course. Anything else was considered rude or unfriendly, or even arrogant and conceited. (TA)
*Germans had fled the Eastern territories during the war when the Red Army advanced. After 1945, Germans were expelled from the former German eastern territories or from German-occupied areas of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Russia.
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