Tenant Trouble: Resisting Precarity in Berlin’s Märkisches Viertel, 1968–1974

Abstract

At the heart of this article is a detailed reconstruction of the complex history of activism in the Märkisches Viertel in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The satellite estate on the outskirts of West Berlin was the largest housing project in West Germany in the 1960s and, for many residents, a space of increasing marginality and insecurity. During the same period, the neighborhood became a new “front” for student activists, who collaborated with local residents on a series of grassroots community initiatives. The article retraces the new forms of political action that brought students and residents together in the Märkisches Viertel while highlighting the different ways in which residents made sense of their own precarity. In so doing, the article seeks to recenter our understanding of precarity as a geographically grounded process rooted in long-standing patterns of exploitation, displacement, and vulnerability. It also connects a renewed interest in the everyday political geographies of activism, solidarity, and resistance with a historico-geographical commitment to the archive as a theoretically generative space. At stake here, as the article concludes, is a commitment to advancing our understanding of critical pedagogies and the challenges that accompany the development of emancipatory modes of geographical practice.

本文详尽地重建了1960年代末至1970年代初发生在Märkisches Viertel的激进主义的复杂历史。在1960年代, 位于西柏林郊区的卫星房地产是西德最大的民居项目。对于许多居民, 这里也是一个日益边缘化和不安全的空间。在同一时期, 该社区成为学生激进分子的新“阵地”, 他们与当地居民合作开展了一系列的基层社区活动。本文追溯了发生在Märkisches Viertel的卷入学生和居民的新形式政治活动, 强调了居民对动乱的不同理解方式。由此, 本文试图将动乱重新理解为一个源于长期剥削、驱逐和脆弱性模式的地理过程。针对历史地理领域关于激进主义、团结和抵抗的日常政治地理的研究, 以及做为理论生成空间的档案, 本文将两者联系起来。正如文章结论所述, 这关乎到推动对批判教学法的理解、关乎到解放地理实践的模式研究上的挑战。

La esencia de este artículo es una reconstrucción detallada de la compleja historia del activismo en el Märkisches Viertel, a finales de los años 60 y principios de los 70. La propiedad satélite ubicada en los bordes del Berlín Occidental fue el proyecto de vivienda de mayor envergadura de la Alemania Occidental en los años 1960 y, para muchos residentes, un espacio de creciente marginalidad e inseguridad. Durante el mismo período, el barrio se convirtió en un nuevo “frente” para estudiantes activistas que colaboraron con residentes locales en una serie de iniciativas comunitarias de base. El artículo vuelve sobre las nuevas formas de acción política que aliaron estudiantes y residentes en el Märkisches Viertel, mientras relievaban las diferentes maneras como los residentes daban sentido a su propia precariedad. De tal modo, el artículo busca reorientar nuestro entendimiento de la precariedad como un proceso de base geográfica, arraigado en patrones de explotación, desplazamiento y vulnerabilidad, de vieja data. Conecta, también, un interés renovado por las geografías políticas cotidianas del activismo, la solidaridad y la resistencia con un compromiso histórico–geográfico con el archivo como espacio teóricamente generador. Lo que aquí está en juego, como concluye el artículo, es un compromiso de avanzar en nuestro entendimiento de las pedagogías críticas y de los retos que acompañan el desarrollo de modos emancipadores de la práctica geográfica.

Key Words:

• Berlin
• geographies of precarity
• housing justice
• spatial politics
• urban activism

关键词:

• 柏林
• 动乱地理
• 住房公正
• 空间政治
• 城市激进主义。

Palabras clave:

• activismo urbano
• Berlín
• geografías de la precariedad
• justicia de los planes de vivienda
• política espacial.

On 10 April 1974, a group of local activists based in the Märkisches Viertel, a large and recently established housing estate on the outskirts of West Berlin, sat down to reflect on their accomplishments over the past five years. The meeting had been organized by Helga Reidemeister, a social worker and filmmaker who had been working with residents in the neighborhood since 1968 (Silberman 1982). Reidemeister was one of many students who, inspired by the emergence of a new extra-parliamentary opposition (Außerparlamentarische Opposition [APO]) in West Germany, had become involved in a series of collaborative self-help projects that connected students to the local community (Gribat, Misselwitz, and Görlich 2018).

In the case of the Märkisches Viertel, this was a community marked (and increasingly stigmatized) by high and rising rents, an insecure and unskilled labor market, poor infrastructure, inaccessible health care, a lack of social services, and an acute undersupply of kindergartens, schools, and youth centers. The construction of the Märkisches Viertel had been part of West Berlin’s First Urban Renewal Program initiated by then-Mayor Willi Brandt in 1963. Scheduled for completion in 1974, the estate had become the largest housing project in West Germany, with plans for more than 17,000 units and a population of 50,000 residents. Whereas early press reports quoted local politicians and planners, who described the new satellite estate as a carefully measured and “deliberate [urban] experiment” and the “most stimulating example of Berlin’s urban development,” the new residents of the Märkisches Viertel, many of whom had only recently been “decanted” from inner-city tenements slated for demolition and regeneration, often told a rather different story (Krüger 1970).

The small group of neighborhood activists who sat down with Helga Reidemeister in the spring of 1974 had all been involved in long-standing struggles around housing and infrastructure. They were also all part of another kind of urban experiment that was the main subject of their meeting. By the late 1960s, the Märkisches Viertel had become a laboratory for alternative forms of organization and representation that treated the city, the neighborhood, and the built form as both the setting and stage for new political ideas and practices that were rooted in wider struggles around social services, housing, and urban regeneration (Brown 2009, 7). Drawing inspiration from the organizational methods of the Black Panthers in the United States, activists working in the neighborhood tested a broad repertoire of political practices and direct action techniques (rent strikes, “public” happenings, eviction resistance networks, etc.; Höhn 2008). These activities were first initiated by a group of architects and urban planning students at the Technische Universität Berlin (TU-Berlin) and soon encompassed a five-year research scheme on “social pedagogy” that was set up at the Pädagogisches Hochschule ([Institute of Education] Autorengruppe “Märkisches Viertel Zeitung” 1974).

By the spring of 1974, many of these activities and projects had been running—off and on—for over five years and it was an “assessment” of their impact and significance that brought a group of activists together to meet with Reidemeister. As they reflected on their own involvement in these projects, the activists recounted how they welcomed them as “real self-help” in terms of “what we do here.”¹ Their initial enthusiasm, as they recalled, was quickly tempered by “an invasion of students” who claimed to speak on behalf of the community (Lange et al. 1975, 11). As one resident noted, “What really bothers me today is that, from the beginning you didn't know what it was about. … It all became clear to me later that there were to be books about us, documentaries to be made and films planned.”²

The residents also complained that they were “manipulated” and “used” by the students, who played activists off against each other to satisfy their own agendas. Reidemeister was sympathetic to the concerns raised by the residents and insisted that they should see themselves as active political subjects who were writing their own history. The residents were more circumspect and reluctant to describe their own political practice, “with all its defeats and failures” in these terms. “We tore each other up,” one activist concluded, “while they [the students] shook hands. … The [political] base that we built up was never successful. … When we created such a base, we had good practices. That was all broken by them.” “What could have developed from our side,” they added, “never materialized.”³

It is this largely forgotten history of political struggle—and the working-class subjects at its heart—that forms the main focus of this article. The article offers a detailed reconstruction of the complex history of activism in the Märkisches Viertel in the late 1960s and early 1970s as seen from the perspective of its residents. Although it acknowledges the experimental practices adopted, in this context, by planners, politicians, and activists, respectively (Bowie 2016), it places particular emphasis on a parallel and understudied history of protest and resistance. West Berlin was a key center of student activism in West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s (Brown 2013; Vasudevan 2015; Häberlen 2018) and yet, as this article shows, struggles over housing in the Märkisches Viertel and the wider significance of these oppositional geographies remain underresearched. Combining recent work on the New Left in West Germany (Slobodian 2012; Brown 2013; Reichardt 2014; Häberlen 2018) with a growing body of geographical scholarship on solidarity, radical housing politics, and the lived experience of housing insecurity (García-Lamarca 2017; Kelliher 2018; Simone 2018; Lancione 2020; Roy et al. 2020), the article focuses on the new forms of political action that brought students and residents together in the Märkisches Viertel. It highlights the different ways in which residents in the Märkisches Viertel made sense of their own precarity while retracing the alternative social infrastructure that helped them to navigate and, in some cases, contest an uneven and marginal urban context. At stake here, it concludes, was a struggle for the right to a different city but equally for the right to envision a city where one’s dreams and visions—as well as actions—were taken seriously (Madden and Marcuse 2016).

To address this challenge, this article offers a more expansive reading of the everyday urban politics developed by tenants in the Märkisches Viertel in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Echoing the work of the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, it strives to account for their actions and words as they were left to us. It was Rancière, after all, who famously impugned traditional Marxist accounts that kept the “poor” in their place to the benefit those who would represent them and speak on their behalf (Rancière 2011). For Rancière, the struggles of workers—and the poor more generally—rarely, if ever, matched the categories of political theory and practice that were conferred on them (Chambers 2012). Emancipation, he argued, did not mean the seizure of the workplace but rather, for workers, the “right to think” and occupy a space—a social terrain—that was denied to them (Ross 2007).

Following Rancière, the main aim of this article is to reflect on the actions of marginalized urban residents and their capacity to shape and change the “material of theory itself” (Rancière 2012). The article not only retraces the history of grassroots organizing in the Märkisches Viertel; it also follows the experiences and stories of tenants living in the neighborhood, stories of precarious lives that were, more often than not, rendered as disposable, unworthy of serious scrutiny, and susceptible to erasure, stories that highlight what tenants actually did, the practices they developed, and the ways in which they understood the city as a site of political action.

These are stories that possess their own largely neglected archive. “An archive,” as historian Arlette Farge (2015) reminded us, “presupposes an archivist, a hand that collects and classifies” (3). In this case, it was Reidemeister who, between 1968 and 1974, recorded and transcribed a series of conversations between local residents and student activists including the meeting that took place on 11 April 1974. The conversations began as a way of documenting how residents felt about their urban environment but soon became a source of a much broader conversation about their relationship to the students with whom they worked and the wider sense of precarity that shaped and structured their lives, not to mention the ways in which these experiences were later imagined and represented. The transcripts of these archives—over 1,500 pages of typed manuscripts—are held in the APO-Archiv at the FU-Berlin alongside a wider repository of materials (magazines, flyers, posters) on the struggles in the Märkisches Viertel in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

This article is born out of these materials.⁴ These materials not only offer a geographical rereading of the New Left in West Germany and the role that cities played as key sites of political organization and action. They also remind us of the protests that erupted in the Märkisches Viertel and the often fragile geographies of connection, engagement, and solidarity that emerged between student activists and local residents. More than this, though, they allow us to reflect on the nature of activism and the role that alternative forms of archiving play in making accessible the various efforts of ordinary tenants to challenge the categories and structures imposed on them while articulating an alternative vision of shared city living. These are efforts that not only help us attend to the lived and felt realities of housing insecurity as they were embodied and performed (Lancione 2020). They also seek to advance our understanding of critical geographical pedagogies and the enduring possibilities for reproducing and inhabiting urban space in more emancipatory ways.

Spatializing the New Left in West Germany

In January 1968, an anonymous report, “The Housing Question in West Berlin,” was circulated among a group of students in the Department of Architecture at the TU-Berlin in West Berlin. The report drew attention to a growing housing crisis in the city and the “relatively high proportion of [its] population living in more or less open poverty.”⁵ The report followed the structural transformation of the housing market in West Germany, focusing, in particular, on the relationship between market liberalization and the pressures that many tenants in West Berlin faced. It documented the impact of rising rents and forced evictions, which were becoming increasingly commonplace as many residents struggled to find affordable housing. It also speculated on the role that housing insecurity could play in politicizing tenants in a city with a deeply sedimented history of social activism.

For many West Berliners, the housing question was, after all, nothing new. As numerous studies have shown, the built fabric of the city was a product of recurring cycles of creative destruction that had not only condemned significant numbers of people to misery and insecurity, but also prompted many to seek alternative forms of housing (see, e.g., Vasudevan 2015). The late 1960s represented, in this context, an important—if understudied—chapter in a more expansive history of urban protest. This study seeks to address this omission. It argues that the fight for affordable housing in West Germany must be seen in relation to a growing corpus of work on the emergence of new social movements during this period. Much of this work has been characterized by a commitment to marking the geographical dimensions of these struggles. Although a number of authors (Brown 2013; Reichardt 2014; Häberlen 2018) have adopted a broad plenary and increasingly transnational approach to the extra-parliamentary opposition and the vast number of alternative practices and projects it encompassed, the anti-authoritarian revolt in West Germany was also—from a geographical perspective—an intensely local affair rooted in neighborhood struggles over housing, work, education, and social welfare (Brown 2013; Vasudevan 2015).

New attempts have, therefore, been made to reconstruct the range of extra-parliamentary groups and the oppositional geographies they cultivated in cities and towns across the country. This includes the various Marxist–Leninist and Maoist cadre parties, the so-called K-Gruppen, as well as the “rank-and-file groups” (Basisgruppen) that turned to local neighborhoods and other institutions (clinics, schools, factories, youth centers, etc.) as a source of new initiatives and solidarities (Arps 2011). As numerous studies have shown, it was, in particular, West Berlin—with its subsidized economy, large number of students, and lack of mandatory military service—that became the crucible for a wide repertoire of political practices that shaped and were, in turn, shaped by the city’s built and symbolic fabric (Brown 2013; Häberlen 2018; see also Vasudevan 2015).

The analysis offered here seeks to extend and recenter the critical geographical framework intimated by these studies. It connects the so-called transformation of space heralded by the New Left in West Germany—the radical reimaging of everyday life, the assembling of an alternative public sphere, and the development of a vast network of subcultural scenes and practices—to a more mundane, albeit expansive, spatial politics rooted in a wider struggle against social inequality and marginality (Brown 2013). The article thus challenges a common thread within New Left historiography that has tended to fetishize culture over political economy and structural change.

Such perspectives have, for the most part, ignored the major crisis of capitalist accumulation that plagued the West in the late 1960s and culminated in the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1973. In West Germany, the recession of 1966 and 1967 had already brought an end to the so-called economic miracle of the postwar era and, with it, a return to economic instability and turbulence (Arps 2011). From 1969 to 1973, profitability in the West German economy, especially its manufacturing sector, declined sharply (Brenner 2006). Rising workplace militancy and a series of wildcat strikes only exacerbated the fragility of the postwar economic consensus and was responsible for a major restructuring of the labor market. For many West German workers, the future was increasingly precarious and insecure (Roth 1974).

It is perhaps unsurprising that the kind of “cultural revolution” routinely invoked by student activists in West Germany in the late 1960s was also, in the words of Schneider (1969), writing in the journal Kursbuch, an “economic-political revolution” (1). This was a revolution that undoubtedly challenged long-standing structures of oppression and domination, but it equally prompted many students to “leave the universities” and, according to Negt and Kluge (1993, 90) engage in “infrastructural work” with and on behalf of groups that were often exploited (factory workers, precarious tenants) or stigmatized (institutionalized youth, psychiatric patients, migrants, precarious workers, etc.; Brown 2013). Although Negt and Kluge were quick to herald the “antagonistic spirit” of student protesters, they also came to recognize the growing challenges that activists faced in navigating a new “panorama of disorientation” produced by an economic system with expansionist impulses that had increasingly shifted to the everyday realities of “lived existence in the Federal Republic” (quoted in Fore 2014, 18, 19). To Negt and Kluge, the material displacements and exclusions that produced estates such as the Märkisches Viertel also reflected the emergence of new political subjectivities.

The alternative infrastructure imagined and developed by activists and tenants in the Märkisches Viertel must therefore be seen in the context of this new social laboratory and the wider precarities it would come to produce. At stake here is a geographical understanding of infrastructure that recognizes its “capacity to configure alternative modes of being and living in the city” (Lancione 2020, 276). Although geographers have remained largely marginal to the study of New Left activism in West Germany, they nevertheless offer a rich conceptual vocabulary for examining how emancipatory forms of urban politics are assembled and shared as both a critique of modern urbanity and a fight for decent affordable housing (Vasudevan 2015; Roy 2017; Safransky 2017; Huron 2018; Ferreri 2020). Recent geographical work on housing activism and radical politics has provided, in this context, useful theoretical and historical directions for making sense of the anti-authoritarian revolt and the kind of actions initiated by activists and residents in the Märkisches Viertel (Gibbons 2018; Maharawal and McElroy 2018; Lancione 2020; Roy et al. 2020).

The recent revival of critical housing scholarship has also yielded a more nuanced approach to the study of urban precarity and its long-standing relationship to uneven geographical development and the urbanization of capital (Munõz 2018; Harris, Nowicki, and Brickell 2019; Lancione 2020; Noterman forthcoming). This article seeks to advance the case for a historical geography of urban precarity that sets out to characterize and contextualize struggles over housing insecurity and social marginality in West Berlin. At the same time, it does not seek to advocate an all-encompassing and rigid theoretical template for the study of precarious urban life. Nor does it seek to project a totalizing vision of precarity and its relationship to contemporary labor regimes back onto historically grounded experiences of insecurity and vulnerability. Rather, the modest theoretical focus that it develops is contingent on practices that were immanent to the context out of which they first emerged, in this case, local struggles over housing inequality in West Berlin.

Although the main impulse for these actions came from student activists who saw “direct action” and “militancy” as a means to extend their struggles into a wider social sphere, it also depended on a highly romanticized understanding of working-class obstinacy and resistance that treated its subjects as objects of political organizing (Geronimo 1992). In reality, workers and other marginalized groups proved in many ways impervious to the efforts undertaken by students to mobilize them (Brown 2013). These were groups that organized on their own terms as in the case of migrant workers in car factories or youth groups who set up their own autonomous social centers (Arps 2011). For residents living in West Berlin’s Märkisches Viertel, this was a struggle over basic needs and desires and in direct opposition to the enduring sense of alienation and precarity that many felt.

As this article has already suggested, this was also a struggle that possessed its own rich archive. To read it today is to undertake, in the words of Farge (2015), a “roaming voyage through the words of others, and a search for a language that can rescue their relevance” (123). It would be misleading, therefore, to understand these materials as historical sources that simply delivered up an urban reality to be dissected, examined, and studied in terms far removed from the context out of which they emerged. Rather, the article addresses these archival remainders as “active components of the social worlds in which they were produced” (Callaci 2017, 12). It builds on a growing body of geographical scholarship that draws attention to the role of archives as important sources of understudied and often neglected histories that challenge long-standing historical silences (Moore 2010; McGeachan 2018; Burgum forthcoming; Vasudevan forthcoming). More important, perhaps, it recognizes the archive—in this case the recorded actions and reflections of ordinary tenants living in Berlin’s Märkisches Viertel—as a site constitutive of an urbanism shaped by displacement, insecurity, and marginality. This is an archive that was purposefully constructed as a modest record of lives shaped by division and precarity yet marked in equal measure by anger, desire, and endurance. In “inhabiting” this archive—precarious in both its form and content—this article advances an optic that highlights the role that archives might come to play in critical urban studies and in historizing (and reorientating) our understanding of key concepts such as infrastructure and precarity. In so doing, it responds to recent calls for new methodological approaches to housing justice while paying particular attention to the everyday geographies of tenant activism and the spatial politics that were forged through them (Roy et al. 2020). This is a politics rooted, as the next section shows, in the transformation of West Berlin in the postwar years and the displacement of many of the city’s working-class residents.

A Brave New Concrete World?

In 1972, the German literary magazine Kursbuch ran a special issue on housing struggles in West Germany. The magazine, edited by the writers Hans-Magnus Enzensberger and Karl Markus Michel, had established itself as a major mouthpiece for the New Left in West Germany and the first article in the issue on “Planning, Building, Living” was a series of transcribed fragments that had been collected by Reidemeister. Reidemeister had been working with residents since 1968, and the recordings published in Kursbuch were some of the first to be made. They documented the increasingly negative reaction of local residents to their new living arrangements in the Märkisches Viertel, a housing estate on the northern outskirts of West Berlin. As one resident complained, “The architects who messed up this crap here—man, they should take a look around.” “The apartments,” they added, “are anti-social.” “Whatever you look at,” another concluded, “is a problem which is rooted in our political system” (Reidemeister 1972, 1).

As a number of historians have recently argued, this was a system with an architectural imprimatur that favored a “social authoritarian” model of redevelopment and the widespread demolition of older tenement housing (Bodenschatz, quoted in Hilbrandt 2021, 45; see also Pugh 2014). Many architects, planners, and politicians—operating in an increasingly charged geopolitical context—advocated a program of postwar reconstruction that envisaged West Berlin’s “moral rehabilitation” through the creative destruction of an older working-class city and the dismantling of its everyday geographies and their enduring social meaning (Vasudevan 2015).

Advocates for the spatial transformation of West Berlin in the postwar period not only elevated a modern vision of clean healthy living at the expense of an older damaged version of the city; their proposals also served as a catalyst for the urban regeneration of West Berlin in the 1960s. In 1963, Mayor Willi Brandt launched the city’s official 1963 Urban Renewal Plan, which called for the further demolition of run-down inner-city neighborhoods and the construction of the city’s first “satellite estates.” Brandt’s announcement came in the wake of the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, which left the city isolated and reliant on subsidies from the West German government (through the so-called Berlinförderungsgesetz and later the Berlin-Hilfe-Gesetz). The construction industry, in particular, was supported by a generous system of tax breaks that encouraged large-scale redevelopment (Pugh 2014).

The construction of large housing estates on the outskirts of West Berlin offered a new spatial fix for the city’s developers, who initiated a major program of relocation, displacement, and dispossession that involved the prospective demolition of more than 56,000 dwelling units in the inner-city districts of Neukölln, Kreuzberg, Schöneberg, Tiergarten, and Wedding and the resettling of over 10 percent of the city’s population on the outskirts of the city. Plans for the development of the Märkisches Viertel were, in this context, already well-established in the 1950s as officials set their sights on West Berlin’s largest remaining allotment settlement and the 12,000 inhabitants who still lived in largely self-built shacks (Urban 2013). In 1962, a group of prominent architects that included Werner Düttmann and Georg Heinrichs drafted a pilot plan for the area that fed directly into the 1963 Urban Renewal Program. Groundbreaking work on the Märkisches Viertel began in 1963 with the first residents moving in a year later.

The project involved the building of more than 17,000 housing units; 15,043 were owned by state-operated landowner and developer GeSoBau. The developers promised improved housing for the neighborhood’s new residents, who were made up of four different groups. The first were the Umsetzmieter (transfer tenants) or Sanierungsopfer (victims of regeneration) who had been displaced and forced to relocate to the Märkisches Viertel from inner-city neighborhoods such as Wedding, Kreuzberg, and Neukölln. Second was a group of homeless residents who had been living in shelters and other temporary forms of accommodation. They had been discharged and transferred by respective city districts to the Märkisches Viertel. Third were the former residents of the informal settlements that had been bulldozed to make way for the new estate. Finally, there were a number of young families who moved to the district in search of their first home (Hasselmann 1972; Autorengruppe “Märkisches Viertel Zeitung” 1974). Overall, one in six families in the Märkisches Viertel were receiving social welfare assistance (Reinecke 2014).

Early press reports praised the housing development, as did some of its new inhabitants, who welcomed their modern surroundings, especially when compared to the rundown tenements or makeshift informal dwellings in which they had been previously housed. “It was,” in the words of one new tenant, “a new life especially when you thought back to the inhuman shed in which we formerly lived. But that was only the first impression” (Lange et al. 1975, 58). As the transcripts collected and published by Reidemeister highlighted, many tenants soon voiced concerns about the marginal and increasingly precarious nature of their housing. This was further supported by a 1972 study by geographer Karl-Heinz Hasselmann, which showed that over 50 percent of the district’s residents were unhappy with their new homes. More than 26 percent complained about the transport connections, with some residents commuting upwards of two hours a day. A further 23 percent singled out high rents and another 14 percent highlighted the development’s lack of spaces and services for children and young people. The same study concluded that over a quarter of residents were preparing to move out of the neighborhood. Although many families were receiving social welfare support, they were often unable to meet the cost of rising rents and were threatened with eviction (Autorengruppe “Märkisches Viertel Zeitung” 1974). In the words of one exasperated tenant, “If we get a rent increase, I will simply take my furniture and shelves and sit down in the middle of the street. I will block traffic and say very firmly: ‘I can’t pay the rent!’” (Reidemeister 1972, 10).

What became, therefore, an increasingly permanent sense of precariousness was a vicious circle. Rising rents forced many families to commute long hours to secure suitable jobs. Others traveled back to their old neighborhood corner stores to shop and seek out existing social connections and networks. As one resident complained, “There is nowhere for us to meet. We crouch in mouse holes.” Others lamented the poor quality of children’s playgrounds, which were “decidedly smaller than the spaces allocated for parking” (Reidemeister 1972, 2, 3). The lack of social welfare and community services, in turn, meant that children were often placed in day care in neighboring districts while many women were forced into unskilled temporary work to meet the costs of social reproduction (Lange et al. 1975).

At the same time, a 1974 report by two doctors working in a clinic in the Märkisches Viertel showed that the insecurity felt by many neighborhood residents had a major impact on their health. Residents rarely suffered, on the one hand, from the kind of illnesses associated with the poor and damp living conditions that many had encountered in the city’s old tenement blocks. The doctors’ report showed, on the other hand, that more than 70 percent of their patients had been diagnosed with a range of psychosomatic disorders that they concluded were “closely related to the particular circumstances of the neighborhood.” According to the same doctors, it was the economic difficulties that many residents faced that played an important role in their health. “The constant fear,” they noted, “of being unable to meet basic financial needs was not without its effects on the well-being of residents” (Lange et al. 1975, 53, 54).

It is perhaps unsurprising that many local residents began to agitate in opposition to the circumstances they encountered in their new homes. In July 1968, a packed community gym was the site of the first major protest in the Märkisches Viertel. The meeting was attended by the district mayor as well as local officials from GeSoBau. Although efforts were made to appease an increasingly restive audience, residents ultimately made it clear that they were willing to escalate their actions (Lange et al. 1975). They were, by this point, supported by a group of young architecture and planning students who were highly critical of housing policies in West Berlin and the alienating environments that such policies, in their eyes, produced (Bowie 2016). It is, moreover, against this backdrop that students and residents began a collective—albeit strained and often highly divisive—experiment in resident-led planning and self-organization.

A Laboratory of Architectural Activism?

The arrival of students in the Märkisches Viertel in the late 1960s was a subject that would come to dominate conversations between residents and Reidemeister, who was herself part of the first wave of activists working in the neighborhood in 1968. “The mistake,” one local activist later told Reidemeister, “was already made when the students first came here. They should have made it clear what their ideas were and how they wanted us to work together in order to get us on the political path; in other words, not just as [research] assistants who provided us with a lot of organizational and informational support, but rather as collaborators working directly with us.” In another recording, a resident mused on their initial reaction to the students. “I was thrilled,” they recalled. “Now there are people who can show us how to do something … we went straight to the students and spat on our own hands. On the one hand we overran ourselves … and on the other hand we, of course, overran the other people in the neighborhood. We were really crazy” (Lange et al. 1975, 119; italics in original).

The emergence of new grassroots initiatives between ordinary residents and student activists in the Märkisches Viertel—and the solidarities and tensions that were recorded and painstakingly transcribed by Reidemeister—remain one of the most significant if often overlooked chapters in the development of the anti-authoritarian revolt in West Germany (Brown 2013). For the New Left, the space of the university had quickly become a key terrain of political action and, by 1967, students across West Berlin had already established an alternative Critical University that ultimately framed the struggle within the university as a struggle “in other social areas” (AStA der FU-Berlin 1968, 3). At the Technische Universität (TU-Berlin), an Architecture and Society working group was set up by students in architecture to focus, in the first instance, on the relationship between professionalization and “awareness-raising in a practical political sense” (Gribat, Misselwitz, and Görlich 2018, 327). The formation of the working group was a direct response to the teaching of architectural design and urban planning. It prompted many students to call for a “problem-oriented mode of study” that would examine and challenge an urban renewal process in West Berlin that they saw “as a purely economic system of control.”⁶

The working group also provided a blueprint for Aktion 507, a collective of young architects who first met in room 507 of the Faculty of Architecture at TU-Berlin to challenge the planning policies that had been adopted by the city. The collective was inspired by an increasingly critical attitude in West Germany toward modernist planning and regeneration and was, in turn, responsible for a groundbreaking exhibition during the 1968 Berliner Bauwochen (Berlin Building Weeks). The Festival was supported by the West Berlin Senate, which allocated more than 18,000 DM to showcase the work of a new generation of young architects (Bowie 2016). Aktion 507 decided to use the money to produce a radical counterexhibition that would offer a “critical reflection on the current building activity and production processes in Berlin.” In the exhibition Diagnose zum Bauen in West-Berlin (A Diagnosis of Development in West Berlin), Aktion 507 documented the impact of displacement and relocation on inner-city residents and the sociopsychological effects of living in newly constructed satellite estates with little if any social infrastructure. They also used the exhibition as a forum for discussing urban renewal with tenants and for creating new spaces of connection and solidarity with marginal communities affected by urban development and renewal.⁷

The impact of Aktion 507 has received renewed attention in recent years (Bowie 2016), and, as this article argues, their actions were part of a much larger conversation in the late 1960s about the nature of activism and political organizing in West Germany and the relationship of student activists to the communities in which they worked and the alternative spaces they sought to produce. To students in architecture and urban planning as well as other social scientists, the Märkisches Viertel represented, in particular, a laboratory for new collaborative forms of research on housing, infrastructure, and social reproduction (Reinecke 2014). A number of initiatives were set up in the Märkisches Viertel including a working group on housing struggles (Mieten und Wohnen) that brought students together with residents as well as other tenant groups across West Berlin. The group proved to be short-lived, as residents found that the combination of early morning shifts and endless evening discussions was unsustainable. It was succeeded by a tenant protection agency (Mieterschutzbund) as well as other efforts to set up and run tenant-led councils in the neighborhood (Reichard 2008).

Although many of the residents who became involved in the discussions and meetings recorded by Reidemeister were active in Mieten und Wohnen and the Mieterschutzbund, it was a new five-year project at the Pädagogische Hochschule (PH) that ultimately transformed the estate into a major field site. Funded by the Volkswagen foundation and led by C. Wolfgang Müller, a professor in social pedagogy, the project had three main aims: (1) to enable students to gain “practical experience” in the sociopedagogical field inside and outside of social institutions, (2) to work with local residents in developing their own self-help projects in housing as well as a range of other infrastructural “demands,” and (3) to educate and politicize residents on the relationship between housing and “capitalist exploitation” (Lange et al. 1975, 77). Taken together, the project focused on the development of a “dialogical relationship between researchers and residents” that would act as a counterpart to conventional research methods in which the very objects of study were simply used as “research material” (Lange et al. 1975, 78).

The program initiated by the PH involved more than 100 researchers who developed a number of collaborative initiatives with local residents. For the most part, they were organized around a specific project or set of goals that placed particular emphasis on grassroots organizing and community self-empowerment while seeking to compensate for the lack of social infrastructure in the neighborhood. One major project, for example, involved the planning of a self-organized kindergarten that would offer an alternative and socially committed curriculum to counter the long waiting lists and outdated pedagogical methods that many parents living in the Märkisches Viertel faced.⁸ A closely related initiative focused on the construction of an adventure playground for children, which soon became a model for other city districts. Another project led to the establishment of a children’s theater that presented and explored issues that affected people living in the estate (Ebert and Paris 1976). An alternative youth center was also planned (Reichard 2008).

One of the key objectives of the PH project was to “reconstruct the communication structures of old working-class districts in predominantly proletarian new-build neighborhoods” (Lange et al. 1975, 77). A core project, in this context, was a monthly magazine, the Märkisches-Viertel-Zeitung (MVZ), which was set up in June 1969 as a “newspaper produced by residents for residents” (Autorengruppe “Märkisches Viertel Zeitung” 1974, 63). MVZ was planned, written, and produced by a team of students and residents serving, in their own words, as a “mouthpiece” for the local community.⁹ It published numerous articles on housing-related issues and helped to coordinate resistance within the neighborhood to rising rents and forced evictions. It also ran practical self-help articles regarding the cost of consumer goods and other advice for residents with relatively little disposable income. There were features on the lack of local infrastructure as well as pieces on workplace organizing and other transnational struggles (Vietnam War, Black Panther Movement, etc.).

MVZ was not the only major initiative that focused on questions of communication, representation, and consciousness-raising. A group of students closely connected to the Deutschen Film- und Fernsehakademie (dffb, or the German Film and Television Academy) began in the late 1960s to film various political activities and discussions in the Märkisches Viertel. The group, which included Max Willutzki, Christian Ziewer, Cristina Perincoli, and Helga Reidemeister, was responsible for a series of films that documented the struggles of local residents who, in many cases, played an active role in their production (Drechsler 1980). Willutzki and Ziewer created a series of short agitational documentaries—or Kinogramme—that were intended to recruit and politicize local residents. Perincoli and Reidemeister adopted a different ethos that highlighted the experience of women in the neighborhood who had often been silenced within various activist groups but whose actions were a source of empowerment and social recognition.

The films that were produced in the Märkisches Viertel in the early 1970s also amplified wider tensions between residents and students, the vast majority of whom did not live in the district. One family complained to Reidemeister that “they are always making films about us, not with us” (Silberman 1982, 44). At the same time, many residents welcomed the use of tape recorders in meetings because it offered them an opportunity to express themselves, whereas the students, Reidemeister later recalled, were uncomfortable with the kind of criticism they received and how it was documented. They nevertheless defended their actions, which they saw as part of the making of an alternative public sphere that not only dramatized the everyday insecurities and struggles of local residents but helped to educate them—through the development of a repertoire of action, practices, and skills—on the nature of their marginalization. Some students were more reflexive, recognizing that their efforts demanded a more dialogical approach. “We think about actions,” one argued, “that are not our own. … Students need to know and understand the situation of workers, workers need to understand the situation and problems of students. This can only happen in dialogue” (Lange et al. 1975, 117).

These efforts to foster greater cooperation and collaboration were met with considerable skepticism—even hostility—by residents in Märkisches Viertel, who criticized the way in which students claimed to speak on behalf of the community (Lange et al. 1975, 11). “We are not experimental rats,” one resident complained. Another lamented the politics of representation mobilized by student activists: “Everyone thinks they can represent the working class but they have no idea of ​​the needs of the working class.”¹⁰ Residents were deeply suspicious of the students who simply “came along” and “could do as they wanted.” As one pointedly noted, “The workers know that the students are being trained to be incorporated later into the very oppressive apparatus to which they are subjected every day. If the workers have developed a distrust of the intellectuals, it is because they believe and worry that they are being ‘studied’ so that they can be even better exploited” (Lange et al. 1975, 129).

For their own part, the same residents were not only aware of the challenges they faced in articulating their own needs and desires but, as the remainder of this article shows, they worked hard to foreground and center their own lived experiences—and the daily insecurities, rancours, and struggles that they carried with them—as a way of imagining a different kind of urban politics.

Tenant Trouble

In the spring of 1970, a brief paper was circulated by a small group of activists working in the Märkisches Viertel. The group were responding to the brutal eviction of more than 100 activists and local residents who had occupied an empty factory hall in the neighborhood to protest the recent closure of an after-school club and the lack of “free spaces” for young people.¹¹ “The situation in the Märkisches Viertel,” the group concluded, “is such that although apartments are being built and made ready for occupancy … the lack of associated social facilities remains striking.” The strategy paper attempted to clarify the “priorities of political work in the Märkisches Viertel” and the growing need for a militant “revolutionary” approach to grassroots organizing.¹² One of the principal advocates for the new approach and an author of the unpublished paper was the journalist Ulrike Meinhof, who only two weeks later would take part in the breakout of Andreas Baader, an event that led to the formation of the Rote Armee Fraktion (Red Army Faction [RAF]).

Even as Meinhof’s role within the group served to reinforce the status of the Märkisches Viertel as an important new “front” within the anti-authoritarian left in West Berlin, the paper was itself widely criticized by local residents. One prominent community activist, Irene Rakowitz, offered a close and sympathetic critique of the paper. For Rakowitz, the paper was right to trace the connections between the housing policies adopted by the senate in West Berlin and wider geopolitical imperatives. At the same time, she cautioned the “RAF comrades” who, in her own words, lacked “revolutionary patience.” “This patience,” she continued, “distinguishes a communist in the first place. It will always be a driving force in the day-to-day struggles of the oppressed.” Rakowitz concluded that it was, in fact, the connection between “theoretical insight” and “grassroots practice” that would help to galvanize residents in the Märkisches Viertel, though she also warned activists that the kind of crushing insecurity that many workers faced in the neighborhood represented a major barrier to political mobilization (Lange et al. 1975, 86, 91).

Rakowitz’s commentary was later published in a collection edited by a group of residents that included many others who had been involved in a range of struggles and student-led initiatives in the Märkisches Viertel. Much of the primary material for the book was derived from the recordings made by Reidemeister between 1968 and 1974. As the residents themselves argued, the book did not offer a new genre of working-class writing, nor did it seek to romanticize their struggles or paint them as exemplary “proletarian heroes.” Rather, for its authors, it represented “an expression of practical class analysis ‘from below,’” a process of “mutual self-help,” and an attempt to show “how political awareness and solidarity-based action could be developed in response to housing misery.” “When you,” in Rakowitz’s own words, “start to shake the existing order, some things will break! It is with this in mind that we wanted to make the book available to people” (Lange et al. 1975, 8, 9).

The strategies and tactics developed and undertaken by local residents showed that, in their own eyes, “change was possible” and that they were able to assert themselves as political subjects with desires, needs, and demands based on their own specific experiences (Lange et al. 1975, 9). Residents routinely recalled the forms of sociability that had shaped the communities from which they had been displaced and saw their actions as part of a wider effort to carve out a space of substance and meaning that was of their own making.¹³ Residents were therefore keen to celebrate their successes, however modest, although they also stressed that their actions were designed to mobilize other residents who were either skeptical or indifferent to the efforts of their neighbors. They often bristled at the order of representation mobilized by their student counterparts, which had, in their eyes, little to do with the everyday experiences of the neighborhood’s working-class tenants and risked fixing their actions within an “unquestioned field of categories and identities (Frank 2015, 249).¹⁴ In this context, the residents pointed to at least three main matters of concern that shaped and structured their disagreements with the activists working alongside them: the question of language and political communication, the gap between political theory and everyday practice, and the enduring precarity that had become the main horizon of experience for people living in the neighborhood.

For many residents, it was the language used by student activists that quickly became a major source of agitation and insecurity. As one neighborhood activist complained, “the little man … doesn’t dare to open his mouth. He thinks: ‘Man, I want to say this and that. … I understood this and that. Now I can really engage.’ But he doesn’t dare to engage. He thinks: ‘The way I speak—my language.’ And he is afraid that he will be laughed at or something” (Lange et al. 1975, 96). Other residents often described the Berlin dialect that they used as the “language of the worker” and that this was a “nervous, irritable idiom”—with its own rhythm and syntax—that reflected their own precarious circumstances in ways that students could make little sense of (Lange et al. 1975, 93).

In the case of MVZ, local residents criticized their student counterparts and drew particular attention to the tone and style in which the newspaper was produced. In a 1974 open letter to the team running the newspaper, they argued that as a “group of people residing in the Märkisches Viertel … we want to represent ourselves and our own situation in this newspaper. … Who besides the inhabitants of the Märkisches Viertel knows the situation and our concerns and struggles better than us? … It is we who are in a position to find the [appropriate] form and language.”¹⁵

The question of language was also, in the eyes of residents, closely connected to their own understandings of political theory and practice and what they saw an unwillingness on the part of students to engage with “the experiences that people have.”¹⁶ As one resident insisted in a December 1971 meeting of residents who were also part of MVZ’s editorial team, “We want to have a working-class newspaper here, which is produced by workers. We are not interested in anything else! With all this theoretical stuff, no worker can at present begin to engage with it. … And we do not want to endlessly bang on about Vietnam. It should definitely be in our newspaper, but not all the time.” In an earlier meeting, the same resident argued, “When you start with Marxist-Leninism, people do not understand. But, if you explain why there is no children’s playground, this is a form of political education and a way to get the people involved in the work of the struggle.” The students, they concluded, have “only theory to offer.”¹⁷

It would be tempting, in this context, to detect, in the words of residents in the Märkisches Viertel, a form of militant particularism and a crude separation between what they understood theory to mean and the practices, tactics, and strategies that they had developed in their everyday struggles around housing and infrastructure. After all, in their own discussions, residents repeatedly criticized the students who came to the neighborhood with their theories, their “very high politics,” their “big phrases and big slogans.” At the same time, though, many were also quick to predict the disappearance of the working class as a meaningful political subject.¹⁸ Others were equally reluctant to describe and reify their own working-class background—its practices, routines, and social commitments—as a singular embodiment of resistance and solidarity tout court, or even as an expression of the “good life” yet to come. “If ‘in practice,’” as one resident speculated, “I just focused on myself as a worker, that is not socialism.”¹⁹

In the end, many residents were at pains to acknowledge the constraints and limitations that shaped their understanding of political theory while advocating a more practical approach to grassroots community organizing. In almost every meeting or session recorded with Reidemeister, residents highlighted their own (double) precarity and their experiences of increasingly unaffordable housing and employment insecurity. “This is one of the main points,” one resident argued, “which the students don’t get: that, every day, we have to hang on to our own petty shit. We are up to our ears in it!”²⁰ Another remarked that one of the challenges that they faced in mobilizing tenants was that the people who “cannot raise the rent are terribly afraid of GeSoBau [housing association] and are scared of losing their apartment” (Lange et al. 1975, 154). As a third acerbically noted, “Our problems are never resolved because the worker is the last pig on God’s earth. We are simply forced to work until we no longer can.”²¹

The material insecurities experienced by residents meant that many simply lacked the time to do much else other than work. As “precarious” workers, they were also “out of time” when it came to organizing their lives according to their own needs and wishes (Apostolidis 2019, 6). “All of this hits you in one heap,” a prominent neighborhood activist concluded. “From morning to night, day after day, not even on Sundays, do you have any freedom of thought. And that leads, one day, to resignation and a realization that you are still stuck.” “The time, the time to find the money is too much,” he added. “After eight or ten hours, you’re done and there is no longer time for solidarity” (Lange et al. 1975, 180, 192).

Residents in the Märkisches Viertel were acutely aware, therefore, of the conditions of precarity that shaped and structured their everyday lives and that there was simply “no space, no room to breathe.”²² Many also insisted, however, that the very nature of their precarity and the material circumstances that produced it were, in fact, politically constitutive and that the arrival of student activists in the neighborhood had “woken” them up. As Rakowitz later noted in a conversation with Reidemeister, “This is not a hobby, but an imperative, my work, my political work outside the home” (Lange et al. 1975, 220, italics in original).

This was “work”—from grassroots organizing to direct action resistance—that brought residents and students together to carve out new oppositional geographies in response to rising rents and forced evictions. From community projects to alternative communication structures, from adventure playgrounds to local newspapers, an alternative infrastructure was designed and developed to highlight the plight of local residents while creating a political space in which their demands could be articulated and shared. It also produced a political rupture that, for a brief moment in the early 1970s, challenged the stigmatization of the city’s working-class residents and the conspicuous place of insecurity and marginality to which they had been (quite literally) consigned.

This was, in turn, a rupture that found common cause with the French philosopher Jacques Rancière, whose own engagement in the 1970s with radical social history and working-class archives centered on an understanding of “the political” as a break or fracture from the normal state of things. Politics, as he reminded us, “only occurs when political subjects initiate a quarrel over the perceptible givens of common life” (Rancière 2004, 7). It consists, he argued, “in refiguring space, that is in what is to be done, to be seen and to be named in it” (Rancière 2010, 37). In the case of Rancière, it was the dreams and visions of nineteenth-century workers in Paris that became a major theoretical touchstone for his reflections on the historical logics of political subjectification. The wishes and desires of tenants living in West Berlin’s Märkisches Viertel were, of course, different than those of Rancière’s proletarians, although they produced their own rupture with the world of New Left activism while representing themselves as subjects capable of articulating their own forms of dwelling, organization, and solidarity.

Rancière (2004, 7) was also at pains, in this context, to remind us that the political is itself precarious and its subjects are “always on the verge of disappearing” or being reincorporated into dominant orders of representation. The recordings collected by Reidemeister must therefore be seen as an attempt to archive and hold onto this “narrow space” in a way that “will neither cancel out nor dissolve these lives” (Farge 2015, 121). The recordings ultimately show—from the moments of agency they captured to the rough grain of everyday life they exposed—how activists and residents working in the Märkisches Viertel came together in a “space” in which they collaborated but equally debated, argued, and, in many cases, fell out. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that, by the mid-1970s, wider political interest in the neighborhood had already begun to subside. Many residents were burned out and exhausted from the struggles that they had been involved in. Others had been forced to move out of the neighborhood and many student activists had taken up new political causes. Yet, although these struggles might have been short-lived, they represented a significant moment in a more expansive history of housing insecurity and protest in Berlin (Bernt, Grell, and Holm 2014; Vasudevan 2015, 2017). At stake here, as this article concludes, were important lessons for how we come to understand the making of urban politics and the various struggles of ordinary Berliners to secure affordable housing and the right to imagine, represent, and assemble a city on their own terms.

Conclusion

At the heart of this article is a reconstruction of the brief history of tenant activism in the Märkisches Viertel, a large estate in West Berlin that was constructed between 1968 and 1974 and came to house thousands of residents who had been displaced from inner-city neighborhoods slated for demolition and regeneration. The article argues that the Märkisches Viertel became a key front in the extra-parliamentary opposition that erupted in the late 1960s and in the city of West Berlin, which had itself come to occupy an important place within a wider and more expansive geography of dissent and protest.

No longer satisfied with the curricula they challenged or the campuses on which they agitated, student activists began to work with local residents in the Märkisches Viertel on a number of self-help initiatives designed to overcome the growing stigmatization that many residents associated with their new homes and the increasingly precarious circumstances in which they found themselves. The article therefore offers a thick description of the alternative practices and spaces that were set up in the Märkisches Viertel to address the housing insecurity that many of its inhabitants experienced and the lack of social infrastructure that characterized the new estate. More important, it shifts attention to the actions and words of local residents and how they came to understand themselves as political subjects capable of addressing their own needs and what it means to “live in the displaced and displacing city” (Lancione 2019, 218).

The article develops, in this way, a geographical reading of the New Left in West Germany that centers on the role that working-class tenants played in the making of an alternative urban imagination. Although marginal groups were often recognized by the extra-parliamentary opposition for their “revolutionary potential,” workers were still largely seen as objects of political organizing to be represented and spoken for by activists who were keen to translate their “theoretical work” into meaningful political aims and objectives (Brown 2013, 265). At stake here, in contrast, is an example of the productive power of the worker—however fragile and modest—to actively refuse and resist the terms on which its own precarity and subjugation was predicated.

This is a history of refusal that foregrounds the role that archival remainders play in narrating struggles over housing injustice. It also speaks to wider conceptual concerns. The article’s reframing of precarity as a historically grounded process routed in long-standing patterns of exploitation, displacement, and vulnerability opens up new avenues for geographical research on housing insecurity and the conceptualization of the urban as a key site of political action. These are, moreover, questions that reflect a renewed interest in the everyday political geographies of activism, solidarity, and resistance, as well as a historico-geographical commitment to the archive as a theoretically generative space. In drawing debates in urban geography, political geography, and historical geography together, the article also seeks to advance our understanding of radical pedagogies and the “people and places” engaged in emancipatory modes of geographical practice and the very real difficulties posed by precarity as both a structure of experience and a source of political organizing (see Osborne 2018).

With its granular focus on the history of tenant-based activism and the actions and words of working-class Berliners, this is a project that, in the end, demands a critical ethos that is attentive to an everyday reality that produces its own interpretive field. The recordings made by Helga Reidemeister in the Märkisches Viertel not only highlight how local residents negotiated their own experiences of working life. They also, ultimately, raise important questions surrounding the impact of the academy on urban activism and why we might want to remember these practices in a contemporary context in which our cities have become “increasingly inequitable and precarious places” (Osborne 2018, 145). It is with the enduring urgency of this project—both its historical significance and the fragile collective urban futures that it presumes—that this article therefore concludes with the words of Irene Rakowitz reflecting in 1974 on “the experiences of my life … the attempts to fight against all these things, and the temporary resentment over the failure of even the best approaches to solidarity with others workers in the MV.” “All of this,” she added,

Has pointed the way to me. It is absurd to run around, alone and detached from the entirety of the working population, aimlessly and without perspective … to build a new world in which every person can live according to their abilities and where everyone is given according to their needs, that is the historical task of the working class. I belong to it, and so it is my determination to participate in the fulfillment of this task. Nobody should say that these are impossibilities or simply dreams. … Let us fight for what they want to deny us—a decent life. (Lange et al. 1975, 218–19)

Acknowledgments

This article would not have been possible without the assistance of the archivists at the APO-Archiv in Berlin and Ulrike Groß in particular. I also thank four anonymous reviewers for their immensely helpful comments and Professor Kendra Strauss for her generous editorship in guiding this project. Any errors or omissions are, of course, mine alone.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (RA15AZ).

Notes on contributors

Alexander Vasudevan

ALEXANDER VASUDEVAN is Associate Professor in Human Geography and Fellow at Christ Church at the University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3QY, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. His current research focuses on radical politics and precarious urban living. He is working on a project on the history of the antipsychiatry movement.

Notes

1 Freie Universität Berlin, Universitätsarchiv, Archiv Außerparlamentarische Opposition und soziale Bewegungen (APO-Archiv), Boxfile 1294a, MV-Protokolle, 1968-1974, “Protokoll des Gesprächs vom 10. April 1974,” p. 3.

2 APO-Archiv, Boxfile 1294a, MV-Protokolle, 1968–1974, “Protokoll des Gesprächs vom 10. April 1974,” p. 3.

3 APO-Archiv), Boxfile 1294a, MV-Protokolle, 1968–1974, “Protokoll des Gesprächs vom 10. April 1974,” p. 10.

4 Some of these materials were published (Lange et al. 1975), although this accounts for only a fragment of the original recordings. Transcripts were consulted, transcribed, and converted from Berlinerisch into High German before being translated into English by the author.

5 TU-Berlin, Fachschaft Architektur, “Die Wohnungsfrage in Westberlin,” p. 12 (see https://www.mao-projekt.de/BRD/BER/VDS/Berlin_VDS_TU_Arch_1968_Wohnungsfrage.shtml).

6 TU-Berlin, Universitätsarchiv (TU-Archiv). Ad-hoc Gruppe, Hochschuldidaktik, Brochure, “Arbeitspapiere zur Umstruckturierung der Arch-Fak,” p. 13; Brochure, Aktion 507, “Manifest. Austellung: Diagnose zur Bauen in West-Berlin,” 1968, p. 46.

7 See Brochure, Aktion 507, “Manifest”; TU-Archiv, Akz 2015/8, Abtleilung 1, Ordner I.2, G. Friedmann, “Zur Geschichte der Studentenbewegung an der Fakultät für Architektur der TU Berlin,” December 1970, n.p.

8 APO-Archiv, Boxfile, 1297, Berlin Mieter, “Elterninitiativgruppe im Forum MV e.V.”, pp. 119–25.

9 APO-Archiv, Boxfile 1294b, MV Zeitungen, Märkisches Viertel Zeitung, “Warum machen wir diese Zeitung?” Nr. 0, June 1969, p. 12.

10 APO-Archiv, Boxfile 1294a, “Redaktions Sitzung der MVZ, Dez. 1971,” p. 10.

11 Rote Presse Korrespondenz, “Polizeiterror in MV.” 2, 64 (1970), p. 11.

12 No author, Vorläufiges Strategie-Paper, MV (see http://www.trend.infopartisan.net/trd0813/mv_strategie_1970.pdf).

13 APO-Archiv, Boxfile 1294a, “Gespräch am 3. August, 1974,” p. 3.

14 APO-Archiv, Boxfile 1294a, “Redaktions Sitzung der MVZ, Dez. 1971,” p. 10.

15 APO-Archiv, Boxfile 1294a, “Offener Brief an der MVZ und ihre Leser,” n.p.

16 APO-Archiv, Boxfile 1294a, “Redaktions Sitzung der MVZ, Dez. 1971,” p. 10.

17 APO-Archiv, Boxfile 1294a, “Redaktions Sitzung der MVZ, Dez. 1971,” p. 3; “Gespräch, Mai 1971,” p. 1.

18 APO-Archiv, Boxfile 1294a, “Gespräch am 3. August 1974,” p. 5.

19 APO-Archiv, Boxfile 1294a, “Sitzung, Juli 1971,” pp. 9, 10.

20 APO-Archiv, Boxfile 1294a, “Sitzung, Juli 1971,” pp. 1..

21 APO-Archiv, Boxfile 1294a, “Wo sind die Forschungsgelder geblieben? Gespräch, November 1971,” p. 3.

22 APO-Archiv, Boxfile 1294a, “Sitzung, Juli 1971,” p. 19.