Das Kommune: “food and non-food”
“I live with 26 people,” Natalia proclaims, “in the Happy House”. At 9am on a Sunday, I must either forgive her English, or my hearing. I’m sure she said 26, but we have been out all night, German beer is strong, and well, my eardrums have been perforated by techno.
She repeats: “Twenty-six.”
Oh, a commune? Ja!
Images of sixties’ free love or 80s crusty new-age squatters mince to the fore. Other senses stir, menacingly: petunia oil, for one, and dogs on string leads, yapping infinitum. Yeesh!
Berlin is fabled for squats and communes. Stroll down the industrial Kopenicker Strasse, parallel to the river in Kreuzberg leading to Mitte, past the swanky post-industrial riverside bar/restaurant/clubs of Spindler and Klatz or Watergate, and brash, near derelict squats abound, bordered by abanded shopping trolleys, rusting bikes, fenced off with makeshift metal fences draped in slogans shouting the latest political cause. “Spreefeu for alles”, “Nein A100”; “Squat the airport.”
Natalia’s commune is different. Way different. And during her guided tour of her less than humble abode, I’m distinctly impressed. For entree, it’s on the long wide boulevard of Potsdamerstrasse, in Schoneberg, the central west Berlin borough bordered to the east by Kreuzberg, and west by upmarket Charlottenberg. And it boasts a recording studio, a gym, some super-large, neat and well-equipped kitchens, and roof gardens.
Natalia has lucked out. Living a bohemian, frugal life for six months, while working “remote” in Berlin for an international fashion and arts magazine, she has ended up in a groovy commune.
How? “I don’t know.”
“Were you invited?” “Yes, but it’s not so simple. You have to pass a interview, with the committee.”
Here, in this typical Berlin Prussian townhouse block, live 26 untypical people, an array of types you’d never fathom could share life under one roof: a Swiss punk, fabled apparently in the London squatter movement of the 70s and a German air stewardess; a French artist and German communist journalist wit a penchant for DDR furniture; an Italian multimedia artist, an accountant, a carpenter, a Czech musician and a Brazilian illustrator.
Well, it’s not one roof, per se: it’s many roofs, on many levels, skirting ahigh the ubiquitous courtyard, some covered in gardens, some stretches in tiles or concrete, all housing a sprawling, labyrinthine alternative life being lived out in various rooms, mini-flats, kitchens, toilets, stairwells and grass roofs taking in numerous apartments, meandering about on various inter-connected levels, like a maze, albeit with no dead ends.
Accepted by the committee as a temporary guest, Natalia pays 180 euros a month, with minor add-ons for the internet and a charge for “food and non-food” (you know, the stuff you eat and the stuff you don’t eat, like bleach, and toilet paper, and washing-up liquid). Members have allotted roles, depending on skills – the unskilled cook, and clean. Some garden. It works like a dream, says Natalia.
She gives us the full tour. Her room peels off the first floor landing, through an unlocked two-bed “flat” she shares with the Swiss punk. How Swiss is he? “Not very.”
Her quarters are sealed off by a concrete door. “I think his old neighbour had a drinking problem,” she says. So it was divided off, with a mini-Berlin concrete wall slab.
Across the landing stands a sprawling kitchen, large enough for two big sofas and a big breakfast bar. It’s the party area, where the members on this floor, and this side of the building, share cooking and clean-up duties, and partying. Beyond the kitchen lies a back staircase, another room – “this is more private, a couple live here” – and upstairs to more rooms. Before you know it, you are on the roof, covered in grass and soil, boasting plants and vegetables, and other green stuff you smoke. Some commune stereotypes must persist.
The tour throws up a dingey ground-floor recording studio, a room covered in egg cartons, for soundproofing. Next door is a laundry room. There’s a games room, too, and a gym, equipped with treadmill, exercise bike and weights, no less. Upstairs on the fourth floor lies another secret garden, and a boiler room, and another laundry room. The Happy House is massive.
So how does it work? Natalia explains, earnestly. There’s a committee, of all 26 people, who debate goings on, events, difficulties, problems. Apparently the debates can get pretty acrimonious. One night, a drunken householder scrawled some pro-Palestinian graffiti on the living room wall. The committee met to discuss retribution: should he clean it off, leave it, or paint the whole living room? No one could decide, largely because everyone must agree.
“And if someone does not agree?” “Then we leave it.”
The commune is owned by a leftwing-minded man, who treats it much like a housing trust. All the tenants have to do is pay the rent and the bills, and they can do what they like, for as long as they like. Some people have lived here for decades. Children have passed through, too, although when they reach 18 they must pay up the rent or move on.
It seems the only reason why one would leave.
Art, Berlin accommodation, Berlin architecture, Kreuzberg, Schoneberg, apartments, berlin
Die toiletten in this old Prussian Kreuzberg apartment is bizarre. Encased in a separate room, just left by the front door, the WC is internatinally normal – long and narrow, almost an architectural afterthought.
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