Alexander Vasudevan on the largely undocumented tradition of squatting and ‘illegal living’ in Berlin…

In September 1988, an anonymous report appeared in the East German underground magazine Umweltblätter describing the plight of a group of squatters who had occupied the side wing of an apartment block at Lychener Straße 61 in the Berlin district of Prenzlauer Berg.

In the squatters own words, they had “occupied the house in order to overcome the contradiction between, on the one hand, the many vacant and decaying houses [in Berlin], and, on the other hand, a growing number of people in search of housing.”

“As squatters (Instandbesetzer),” they proclaimed, “we will resist the further cultural and spiritual devastation of the country.”

The Umweltblätter represented one of the most important and widely distributed samizdat publications that was produced in East Germany in the 1980s. It was published by the Umwelt-Bibliothek, an independent information centre that opened in the basement of the Zionskirche meeting hall in Berlin in September 1986.

The Umwelt-Bibliothek was founded by a number of prominent environmental activists including Christian Halbrock, Carlo Jordan and Wolfgang Rüddenklau and it soon became a key site within a wider network of protest and dissent. Umweltblätter was edited by Rüddenklau and was the largest and longest running dissident publication in the GDR (thirty-two issues between 1986-1989 with a print run of 4000 per issue).

While the Umweltblätter and other samizdat publications focused on issues relating to the peace and environmental movement that had sprung in East Germany in the late 1970s, a number of articles also drew attention to the illegal occupation of housing in cities such as Berlin.

But who were these squatters? What were the central characteristics of urban squatting in the GDR (goals, action repertoires, political influences)? Why did some East German squatters choose to describe themselves as Instandbesetzer, a term commonly used by Western activists? And, finally, in what way did these practices challenge the dominant model of ownership and control in the GDR and promote an alternative vision of the city?

To begin to answer these questions demands a re-thinking of the recent history of radical housing politics in Berlin. The development of the squatter movement in Berlin (Hausbesetzerbewegung) is now well known. While early experiments in alternative forms of communal living in West Berlin can be traced back to the extra-parliamentary opposition of the late 1960s and early 1970s, it is widely argued that there were two major waves of squatting in Berlin.

The first was characterized by the development of an alternative scene in West Berlin which, beginning in the late 1970s, responded to a deepening housing crisis by occupying apartments, the overwhelming majority of which were located in the districts of Kreuzberg and Schöneberg. The second was concentrated in the former East of the city a…