Communal Living Stories - The Idea of Living in a Commune in Berlin in the 70s and 80s

(DE) Athens, May 2017.

I am 63 years old, and I am sitting in the kitchen of a large 4-room flat in the middle of the Greek capital, staring at the mountain of dishes piled up in the sink and on the shelf. I carefully pull a cup out of the pile of plates as if playing Mikado and rinse it. Then I enjoy my cup of tea before heading off to work.

At the time, I was working as a volunteer in a house for refugees from Syria and Afghanistan. The aid organisation had organised a cheap flat for us volunteers, near the refugee accommodation. Seven of us lived together in this flat for a few weeks. My flatmates were young women in their early 20s, and I could almost have been their grandmother. They came from Spain, Portugal, the USA, England, and Mexico. They all wanted to help make the refugees' lives a little easier. My flatmates were kind and helpful people, and we had a good time and a lot of fun. The only thing that didn't work out well was the washing up and the cleanliness, as this morning in the kitchen showed. An all too familiar scenario!

I felt transported back to my communal living days in Berlin 30/40 years ago. And that had to do with the mountain of unwashed dishes and the fact that sharing a home with strangers was a challenge then, as it was in 2017.

Living together in a community

Why does someone do this to themselves? What are the advantages of a shared apartment? What expectations do the flat-sharing members have of this form of living?

There are many different answers to these questions. Practical and financial reasons! More fun and less loneliness! Opposition to the nuclear family, the bourgeoisie and the narrow-minded! In the 70s, when I had my first experience of communal living, all the reasons applied somehow.

Living conditions in Berlin in the 70s

I moved to Berlin in 1977 to pursue my Abitur (A-level and university entry qualification) as a mature student. Unfortunately, the state student grant of 600 DM was low. Moreover, the tuition fee for the school of 150 DM per month tore a big hole in my purse. Therefore, my options for finding a place to live were severely limited.

Fortunately, there were still many unrenovated cheap flats in Berlin, mostly with coal heating. My first place to live in Berlin-Moabit was a one-room flat with a kitchen, coal heating, no bathroom, and an outside toilet, which I shared with my old neighbour. It wasn't luxurious but cheap: 77 DM cold rent per month. In winter, of course, you still had to get coal for heating. That was the standard of living one could about afford as a student in Berlin at that time.

You could get used to the tiled stove if you had a regular lifestyle and added coal in the mornings and evenings. But the only washing facilities in the kitchen and the outside toilet took some time to get used to. Especially at night, I was reluctant to leave my safe flat to go to the toilet. It cost me an effort every time to open my flat door and scurry across the corridor, hoping that I wouldn't run into anyone. Sometimes, usually on Fridays, I had to climb over our drunken neighbour when he couldn't make it up the last few steps to his flat one floor above me and was sleeping off his drunken stupor on the stairs, snoring.

That and the desire to no longer live alone led me to look for other options.

My classmates were in a similar situation. Some lived alone like me, others with partners.

Different forms of communal living

Some, however, lived in some form of shared or communal accommodation, in German called 'Wohngemeinschaft', or short WG. For example, people who were strangers lived together and shared the rent and utility costs for a large flat. Or friends had got together to form a community. Most of the time, the WG members were of the same age, were in similar life situations and had similar interests. There were also flat-sharing communities with children as an alternative concept of living and raising children to the traditional bourgeois nuclear family. Others tried out new alternative ways of living. Some of them broke radically with all kinds of conventions.

This was the case, for example, in the WG of one of my classmates, where I often went for group work. Their flat had functional rooms. There was a communal room with a kitchen where people spent most of their time. Then there was a communal bedroom where each of the six residents could retreat to a corner or a niche to sleep. There was no provision for privacy or retreat. One was always in company. As the offspring of a large family, this was not entirely foreign to me, but even I had to get used to the constant presence of strangers. What I couldn't get used to, however, was that bathrooms and toilets had no doors. Even during these intimate activities, the community should not be excluded. Presumably, it was about getting rid of petty inhibitions and feelings of shame and freeing oneself from them. But I felt put on display, and although I could sometimes endure this briefly as a guest in case of need, I would probably have suffered from chronic constipation in the long run. So that was not mine.

I also remember that some friends had rented two floors in an old unused factory and, with a lot of effort, converted it into an adventurous living space. They broke through the ceiling between the two flats, one above the other, and connected them with a rickety ladder. In this way, they had created a closer connection than ordinary neighbours have in an apartment building. Other friends of mine, together with a group of friends, had occupied an empty house in Berlin-Kreuzberg and renovated it more or less makeshift to make it habitable. There they lived with their children and had geese and chickens in the backyard in the middle of Berlin. In Berlin in the 70s and 80s, anything was possible. I enjoyed visiting this community, but I also enjoyed returning home.

Interviews for a place in the WG

To become a member of a WG, you either had to know people who knew where a room in a WG was about to become available, or you had to become active yourself and find friends with whom you wanted to live and look for a flat.

Some communities advertised in relevant papers such as district newspapers or posted a notice at the school or university. If you wanted to apply for a room in their WG, you had to go through an interview process to introduce yourself, like at a job interview. I also went through a few of these somewhat nerve-wracking rounds of interviews. You sat across from the assembled flatmates, usually in the kitchen, and tried to appear as witty, clever and likeable as possible, which is not easy when you're facing a front of suspiciously lurking strangers and being critically eyed from top to bottom. But, after all, everyone wanted to find out if you could and wanted to live together. So a typical introductory sentence at an interview for a room in a shared flat was, for example, 'I am experienced in flat-sharing, tolerant and flexible.....'

I was lucky in my first search for a place in a commune. A couple of young women at my school had found a flat and were looking for a flatmate. We knew each other and had similar interests and circumstances, so it worked out.

Community life with the greatest possible independence

In the 20 years that I've lived in Berlin, I've moved house thirteen times. But that doesn't mean I'm a particularly unsettled person, nor is it an indication of the unsuitability of communal living. It was my lifestyle during that time. I was often on extended study trips abroad, and it was not always possible or desirable to sublet my room for months at a time. So when I returned, I often stayed temporarily with friends until I found a suitable place to stay again.

During my time in Berlin, with few exceptions, I always lived in a WG, first as a student and later as a professional woman. Communal living was a pragmatic form of living in various phases of life. To a certain extent, the community in a shared flat was non-committal. People did not plan a long-term future together. Instead, they valued communal living with the greatest possible independence. If needs changed, one could always pack one's bags and leave. Such an attitude was favoured by the fact that often the tenant in charge did not give notice when moving out, but others took over the rooms or the flat. The tenancy agreement remained in the hands of the first tenant, who confidently assumed that the subtenants would reliably take over the tenant's duties, meaning paying the rent. The administrative act of giving notice and signing the tenancy agreement could be spared. Rent increases when tenants changed were also kept low as a result. Nowadays, I find it challenging to imagine living with many people. I need more privacy than I used to, and I also want to have more tranquillity. Possibly a matter of getting older. Nevertheless, I always think back fondly and sometimes longingly to my communal living times, my friends and our shared experiences.

A few experiences and memories of communal living are described under the heading communal living stories. We want to invite more people to share their stories here.

(LL)