Backyards in Prenzlauer Berg
Conditions in Berlin’s backyards were often precarious, characterized by gloom, confinement and cold, dampness and poor hygiene. They were already a topical sociopolitical issue at the time. Unemployment, cramped living conditions, lack of future prospects, unresolved social problems “tormented and worried me,” Käthe Kollwitz wrote about them in her diaries. The plight of children and mothers are her constantly recurring motif.
Backyards Kastanienallee 12, Berlin, 2007 Heinrich Zille: Backyard of a tenement (Scheunenviertel in Berlin), 1919
When the internationally known architecture critic Werner Hegemann, who actively fought against the misery in the Berlin tenements, asked Kollwitz for a poster in 1912, Kollwitz drew a backyard scene, which she described to her son Hans in a letter as follows: “And now I make a few characteristic Berlin children standing in a backyard, a girl who has another child on her arm – as you often see quite weak toddlers dragging their siblings around. And a boy playing at the drain hole. On the wall the familiar sign, “Playing in the courtyards and stairwells is forbidden.” Thus was born the chalk and brush lithograph “For Great Berlin.” The poster announcing a gathering hung only briefly; Berlin police chief Traugott von Jagow banned it as “inciting class hatred.”
(Private collection Switzerland)
Kollwitz repeatedly visited families – patients of her husband – who had to live in poor backyard apartments and captured their misery with a pencil. In the meantime, almost all of these original old, dark backyards have disappeared. Still largely unchanged is this one on Schönhauser Allee, with three backyards, two rear houses and a depot building.
