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作者

Sebastian Haumann

来源

JOURNAL OF URBAN HISTORY,Vol.48,Issue1,P.

语言

英文

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作者单位

摘要

Neue Heimat, a trade union–owned real-estate development company, epitomizes public housing in West Germany in the decades following World War II. It pioneered modernist urban design, constructed some of the most renowned housing estates, experimented with industrialized building techniques, and had a significant share in relieving the severe housing shortage in war-damaged cities. With almost 500.000 dwelling units built and rented out, no other developer left such an imprint on West German cities. But its leading role in reconstruction and the sheer size of its housing stock is only one reason for the lasting fascination with Neue Heimat. The other reason is its spectacular collapse in the 1980s. In 1982, it became known that the company’s directors had enriched themselves through financial transactions within the network of the company’s many subsidiaries. At that time, deficits were running high and many housing estates, which already had acquired a negative image, suffered from poor maintenance—by 1986 Neue Heimat filed bankruptcy. The history of Neue Heimat is often told as a tragedy: from rapid growth and social responsibility to spectacular failure and social injustice. In this, Neue Heimat seems to be symptomatic for the fate of West German public housing in general. Three new books have recently reassessed the history of Neue Heimat: Die Neue Heimat (1950-1982). Eine sozialdemokratische Utopie und ihre Bauten, edited by Andres Lepik and Hilde Strobl, who are director and curator at TU Munich’s Architecture Museum; the architectural critic Michael Mönninger’s „Neue Heime als Grundzellen eines gesunden Staates“. Städte- und Wohnungsbau der Nachkriegsmoderne Die Konzernzeitschrift „Neue Heimat Monatshefte“ 1954-1981, which focuses on the journal that the company published throughout its existence; and Neue Heimat. Das Gesicht der Bundesrepublik: Bauten und Projekte 1947-1985, edited by architectural historian and secretary of the architectural association of Hamburg Ullrich Schwarz, who in the late 1980s helped create an archival collection of Neue Heimat’s documents. Even though the concurrence of these publications is rather coincidental, they reflect a general resurgence of interest in public housing in response to the tightening of the housing market in many German cities over the last decade. Indeed, the disintegration of Neue Heimat is often seen as the end of socially responsible housing policies in Germany, as the company’s scandalous demise was frequently quoted in attempts to dismantle social housing altogether. The lack of effective policies and instruments, which were subsequently abolished around 1990, is seen as the paramount problem in coping with the current housing shortage. While all three books do include insightful analytic essays, they are not primarily conceptualized as academic inquiries into the role of Neue Heimat in post-war urban history. Instead they are directed at a broader audience and at the current debate about social housing. While Lepik and Strobl’s volume is an exhibition catalog, combining a number of rather heterogeneous essays with short accounts of exemplary building projects,1 a large part of Mönninger’s book is taken up by reprints of selected programmatic articles, which have appeared in Neue Heimat’s own journal between 1954 and 1981. Schwarz’s volume, which is the most sophisticated of the three publications under review here, also has a pronounced documentary character, featuring detailed descriptions of the Neue Heimat’s many projects. These publications clearly have a background in architectural history. All three books are beautifully illustrated, informative and thought-provoking in the best sense as they offer a nuanced interpretation of Neue Heimat’s history. In his foreword to Die Neue Heimat (1950-1982). Eine sozialdemokratische Utopie und ihre Bauten, Lepik is quite clear about the renewed interest in the company’s history and legacy. He claims the achievements and success of the early years, which have been obscured by the negative image of public housing in general and the scandals of the 1980s in particular, have to be foregrounded again to learn about future possibilities of social housing. This more positive story of the ambition to provide the masses with decent housing already started in the interwar Weimar Republic, when a number of housing cooperatives were founded that eventually merged into Neue Heimat under the auspices of the German Trade Union Federation between 1952 and 1960, as Strobl reminds us in her overview over the company’s history. Economic success rested on the concept of “Gemeinnützigkeit,” which meant that the enterprise received tax breaks and state-sponsored loans in return for the limitation of earnings, with the idea to keep rents at a feasible minimum. The company’s high ambitions were also reflected in the fact that it systematically contracted world-class urban planners and architects, such as Ernst May, Alvar Aalto, Richard Neutra or Victor Gruen. So what went wrong with public housing and Neue Heimat? The authors in Lepik and Strobl’s volume present a number of inherent and external reasons. First, the aim to keep construction costs low led to the insufficient implementation of plans, with the lack of infrastructure being a notorious problem for estates which—to reduce costs for land acquisition—were mostly located at the urban periphery. Second, during the 1960s, Neue Heimat started to expand into new fields of operation and also internationally: it founded subsidiaries for the construction and operation of civic centers, hospitals, and shopping malls, and for urban redevelopment, not only in Germany but also abroad, most spectacularly the convention center in Monte Carlo. These operations not only stood in conflict with the principles of “Gemeinnützigkeit” but were also rarely profitable. Third, planning remained technocratic and purposefully authoritarian, as Oliver Schwedes claims in Lepik and Strobl’s volume, despite the fact that Neue Heimat included the latest findings in the social sciences and propagated to built spaces that would foster communication, participation, and democratization. External challenges included not only the shifts in the socio-economic structure of West German society but also a change in the perception of housing estates, which Thomas Sieverts, himself a young urban planner in the 1960s, describes from a biographical perspective in the same volume. According to Sieverts, Neue Heimat and its building principles had simply become a “dinosaur” (p. 32) in the eyes of the younger generation. Neue Heimat was by no means the only company involved in the construction of public housing, but it was extremely well networked and able to influence public opinion and policy, as Mönniger’s „Neue Heime als Grundzellen eines gesunden Staates“ Städte- und Wohnungsbau der Nachkriegsmoderne Die Konzernzeitschrift „Neue Heimat Monatshefte” 1954-1981 documents. Neue Heimat’s success rested on close ties with politicians on the federal as well as on the municipal level, and its ability to enlist prominent planners, architects, and increasingly social scientists to support its agenda. It was entangled in the West German corporatist welfare state to a degree which allowed the company to “define” (p. 7) housing policy between the 1950s and 1970s. This capacity is reflected in the eighty articles from the journal Neue Heimat Monatshefte which Mönniger has selected and commented, some of which also appear as references in the other two publications under review. The impressive list of authors who published in the Monatshefte reads like a who-is-who of West German architecture, planning, and politics. However, this was not just a matter of mere lobbying, but a way in which Neue Heimat successfully accumulated “moral capital” (p. 10) as builder of much needed social housing after World War II, which obscured the fact that the enterprise was market-driven from the beginning. Mönninger’s selection of articles from the Monatshefte shows how the logic of economic growth went hand in hand with technocratic planning and laid the ground for Neue Heimat’s failure. Its first director, Heinrich Plett, is quoted as praising himself for the successful acquisition of loans even beyond the company’s immediate need. On this basis, the enterprise had reached a size that made it an important actor in West Germany’s economy and labor market by the 1960s. Significantly, it developed planning and construction capacities, which surpassed those of most municipalities making Neue Heimat an almost unrivaled contractor for large and complex development projects. Such development projects relied on a technocratic planning philosophy, as it was conceived of by Ernst May, whose authoritarian stance as the founding father of Neue Heimat Monatshefte Mönninger portrays in a separate chapter. The realization of the notorious technocratic visions, be it on the scale of new estates, redevelopment schemes, or mega-structures, such as hospitals or shopping malls, rested on the economic potency of the enterprise and vice versa. However, Neue Heimat’s management was unable to halt this self-perpetuated expansion, accumulating debts that increasingly exceeded the company’s capital base when returns declined in the 1970s. Mönninger’s book captures the internal logic of Neue Heimat in which success and failure were bound together. While Lepik and Strobl’s as well as Mönninger’s volumes stick to a rather narrow focus on the company and its building projects, Schwarz’s Neue Heimat. Das Gesicht der Bundesrepublik: Bauten und Projekte 1947-1985 significantly broadens the perspective. Schwarz’s introduction convincingly places the trade union–owned Neue Heimat in the history of social democratic ideals and politics as they shifted from Marxism to a pragmatic course of social advancement within capitalist society. At the same time, the company’s activities became consensual because they also fell in line with the ideal of a “social market economy,” which was propagated by the conservative Christian democrats. Peter Kramper’s essay explores how the political aim of fostering social advancement, which was the basis of the broad support and privileges for Neue Heimat, related to the company’s economic activities.2 Kramper asserts that in the 1950s and 1960s, there was a close nexus between both which legitimized the enterprise’s growth strategy. Around 1970, however, the economic realities and social expectations began to shift, while Neue Heimat’s management clung on to the idea that social advancement primarily meant material well-being for the masses, and that this could best be achieved in large-scale solutions. The failure to adapt to the new situation seemed to confirm the upcoming liberal criticism that economic activity was severely hampered by the political aims imposed on Neue Heimat. Following the introductory essays, which outline the political and economic context, the bulk of Schwarz’s volume is made up of an impressive 400-page documentary contribution by Dirk Schubert with detailed and differentiated analyses of about thirty estates, also including concise biographies of leading figures as well as contextual chapters on the guiding visions and relevant political debates. Schubert traces the estates’ histories from the planning processes with their specific economic and political background through later processes of appropriation and redevelopment until today. He also draws attention to the controversies which arose around planning ideals and their concrete implementation accumulating in the growing criticism that Neue Heimat faced in the 1970s and 1980s. Schubert’s thorough contribution is followed by chapters on Neue Heimat’s commercial buildings, international activities, and self-marketing, which do not match the analytical qualities of the chapters by Schwarz, Kramper, and Schubert. However, Schwarz’s neue heimat still is the most comprehensive attempt to reassess the history of public housing in West Germany. What is largely missing from all three publications under review is first and foremost the perspective of the people who lived in the Neue Heimat’s housing estates and who frequented its hospitals, civic centers, or shopping malls. The analyses focus on the actors who conceived and managed these structures and they largely rely on the sources which these actors created. Mönninger explicitly reflects on this, stating that “neither as subjects nor as actors [. . .] do inhabitants appear” (p. 9) in the articles published in Neue Heimat Monatshefte. Schubert similarly addresses the lack of knowledge about everyday experiences. In fact, recent research, which is not referenced in any of the three volumes, has revealed that the inhabitants’ perception diverged considerably from the narrative which is reconstructed from the planning and management perspective only. Inhabitants appear to have been rather content with the buildings and social life in the housing estates but unnerved by the ongoing problematization and stigmatization of their living quarters.3 These voices are just as relevant to judge the achievements and shortcomings of Neue Heimat as the statements of the company’s managers, planners, and their academic critics which do not only dominate the publications reviewed here, but architectural history in general. Second, an international or comparative perspective is clearly underdeveloped in the volumes. Despite the fact that Neue Heimat did operate internationally and adapted globally debated planning ideas, their broader context is not addressed in a systematic way. In particular, comparisons with social housing in other countries, with which the Neue Heimat’s history was entangled, could be helpful in substantiating the claim that the achievements of West German housing policies have to be reassessed. It would be possible to evaluate similarities with public housing enterprises in other Western European welfare states as well as differences to the Eastern Block. The comparison with public housing in the United States, where—with some notable exceptions—it was ideologically sidelined and delegated to rather weak municipal housing authorities, seems particularly instructive. When judged against the desolate situation in many U.S. cities, the Neue Heimat as a strong and well networked actor which was led by high ambitions both in terms of growth and social responsibility, did make a difference. It would be worth exploring such parallel histories of public housing more systematically. This said, all three publications succeed in presenting the history of Neue Heimat in a balanced way to inform current debates on social housing in Germany. While there are differences in the focus and analytical depth of the volumes, they all contend that despite its faults, Neue Heimat significantly contributed to the social advancement and the improvement of living conditions for millions of people. In the authors’ accounts, criticism prevails when the management’s one-sided orientation toward growth and the authoritarian attitude of technocratic planning are discussed. Still, Schwarz, for example, interprets these deficiencies as an unavoidable collateral effect of a strategy which was ultimately “an expression of an ethically [. . .] motivated utopia” (p. 11). In the end, the recent publications provoke the question whether the capacity to plan and realize social housing on a significant scale does relate to ability to expand and to the existence of close networks between construction enterprises and politics. They also raise the question to what degree technocratic or even authoritarian approaches for which Neue Heimat was rightly criticized are necessary to effective policies and instruments which are able to relieve social inequalities on the housing market. Even though Neue Heimat does not provide a model, the current debate could profit from a closer look at its history.