House of Friendship, 20 years on

I haven’t written a newsletter for you for quite a while. Giving up my job has opened up a rich tapestry of activities to me and writing is just one of them, painting, gardening and travelling are others. But what has consumed vast swathes of my time recently is the research for a One-Place-Study on the house I live in, in Berlin.

It started because I read a post by Paul Chiddicks describing his village from the point of view of an old tree in the centre of it. It got me thinking about the trees on our avenue: 600 very big, 150 year-old plane trees that have seen much history. They were the main attraction when we thought about buying this house.

But then I got to thinking about the house itself and what history are in these walls. Built around 1886, it has witnessed war (twice) and regime change, it was once a home for families, a military administration, a house of culture and of friendship.

So I’ve set up a One-Place-Study page on Wikitree and begun researching local history and the lives of the people who lived here. You can read what I’ve done so far here.

At the same time as researching the history of the house, we've been planning our 20th anniversary of living here. Tomorrow is the big celebration, although we’re all nervously comparing weather apps, as rain is forecast. Lots of it. Normally, I would be happy for any rain to water my greedy garden, but for once I recall the rhyme “rain, rain, go away, come again another day”, like we used to chant as kids in England.

On every break from sprucing up the garden (where did that saying come from, I wonder?), I’ve been putting together a best-of collection of photos of our house community, to project on the wall when it gets dark. Hoping people will stay that long, as the temperature doesn't look super enticing. If not, I’ll show it indoors.

Let’s go back just 20 years. I’ll be bringing you a few stories of what happened in the history of this house before that, but this is my story. And the photos tell a fabulous story of friendship, and love.

My husband and I had heard of how groups of people were buying up cheap property in Berlin and doing them up into flats. Rents were going up again and we were tired of shelling out monthly with no return. So we decided to buy a flat. And like others, we didn't want to buy something in a house that was owned by someone else; we liked the idea of a community.

Puschkinallee 5 was being sold by the Berlin trust for managing city- or district -owned houses, the Liegenschaftsfonds. Since shortly before reunification it had been parKHaus, a place of experimental art, theatre and film, and a basement club, called the Jazzkeller.

Because the house had been expropriated by the Soviet administration in 1945, relations of the owner’s family, Gaus/von Tauchnitz, had reclaimed its ownership, as many were doing, and had succeeded in getting half of the house back. That's another story that I’ll get to another time. Berlin was in its “Arm, aber sexy” (poor, but sexy) phase at the turn of the century. By that I mean 1999-2000. And they were selling off a lot of old property that was needing serious renovation that they couldn't afford. Long story short, there was no money to buy the von Tauchnitz family out, and the family also didn't want to buy the other half of the house. So it was decided in 2002 to close parKHaus and sell it.

A sad day for local culture, but lucky for us. We rapidly found a group of families, several from our son’s Kindergarten (he was four year's old at the time) and put in an offer for the house. By today’s standards it was ridiculously low, but we were all on really tight budgets. We had to form a GbR (a company under civil law) to buy it, and guarantee each other’s mortgages. That was an enormous trust “deposit”, as we barely knew each other at the beginning.

I would love to upload some of the photos of our community of seven families, 25 people of whom 11 were children. All but two of the kids were under the age of five. But due to data protection, you'll have to make do with the written word and pictures of the house.

Sure, the house and it's history is fascinating. But when we started renovating it, we had the idea we were not just building a house, but a community. And so our common history began.

The photos show a living and loving community, pictures of families wearing filthy work clothes, taking a well-earned break to eat pizza in the garden, sitting on crates and hastily knocked-together tables. Pictures of us stripping paint and wallpaper off walls, sanding woodwork, building dividing walls, choosing tiles for the roof, or the colour for the facade. Meetings upon meetings to decide what to buy together (costs less) and what to do differently, or how to deal with the restrictions from the listed building department (Denkmalschutzamt), what kind of windows to put in, what kind of plumbing, the list is literally endless.

Somewhere in there the bank refused to pay out the second installments. We had bought the house in August 2004, but the bank wanted the official documents from the Grundbuchamt (land registry) before giving us the rest of the money. The builder’s bills were coming in and we had run out of money. Luckily one family had a reserve that they lent us to tide us over. But for several weeks we had to keep our financial straits secret, in case the builders got wind of it and downed tools.

A year after buying, the families started to move in. That's when most photos got taken. It was a magical time, especially for the kids, who had gelled together already during the building phase. But now they lived there, they spent all day in the garden together, or if the weather was bad, they chose a flat to invade with tons of muck from the garden on their shoes. The parents had to stop them at the doors and make them take all their shoes off to protect their newly sanded floors. The hallway was then blocked by a mountain of little shoes and coats, and the flat was turned upside down, Lego flying everywhere, until the hoard decided to invade another flat because their toys were more interesting.

The sandpit was the most frequented place of all. Whole settlements were built and destroyed, like a sand version of the popular board game “Siedler von Catan”. And water fights were common, some with water pistols, but often just with watering cans or spray bottles. A great game was a combination of sand and water: a “volcano” built of sand with a garden hose strategically placed underneath, so that water exploded at great pressure out the top when the tap was turned on full.

The photos show enormous creativity and community, laughter, games and endless parties. Missing are the conflicts and disagreements (often about the kids), the heartbreaks, the illnesses and tragedies. I will not write of them here, they still leave barely-healed scars.

Some people have since left the community, for whatever reason, and yet it's core remains strong. New families are joining, ready to move in next month. We are a mixed bag, three generations, various nationalities and diverse in many ways. Our common understanding is anti-racist and pro-diversity. We are a 20-year old community in a House of Friendship. And we are joined by the love for this house and it's magnificent garden.