The Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape

by Brian Ladd

From the 1860s to 1914, the typical apartment building was five stories high, with a facade fifty to a hundred feet wide, decorated in whichever ornate historicist style was in fashion at the time of construction. Behind the massive front facade lay a narrow courtyard, enclosed—often on all four sides—by additional wings of the building. The largest buildings had wings on each side of the courtyard, which were connected in back by a transverse wing parallel to the street facade. On smaller lots, one side or the rear of the courtyard might face the walls of neighboring buildings, but each building’s courtyards were accessible only through archways connected to its own street entrance (fig. 25). On particularly deep lots, there might be a second or even a third courtyard behind the first one. (The handful of buildings with five or six courtyards became famous, but were not typical.) Most apartments thus faced courtyards rather than the wide streets. Apart from the few streets of medieval provenance, Berlin was a city of wide streets and deep blocks. In contrast to a medieval city like Paris or a row-house city like London, the poor usually did not live on narrow lanes and alleys. Instead, they lived on courtyards. This kind of building was a distinct Berlin type, although it influenced tenement designs in other cities. Because of the depth of Berlin blocks and the large size of building parcels, the tenements were enormous. A single building typically had a hundred or more r...