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“Bremer Höhe”

This is where an idea lives on – in the Wilhelminian-style houses made of red clinker brick between Buchholzerstrasse and Greifenhagener Strasse, Schönhauser and Pappelallee. It is the idea of ​​the social reformer and intellectual pioneer of the German cooperative movement Victor Aimé Huber who around 1850, together with his wife Auguste, had 15 country houses and gardens built for wage-dependent families. They called the settlement “Bremer Höhe” because his father-in-law, Hieronymus Klugkist, a senator in Bremen, provided part of the funding.
Generally, with the advancement of industrialization housing shortage became more of a problem and the notorious, narrow tenements shot up. They consisted of many successive backyards that only needed to be big enough for a fire engine to turn there. The tenants already moved in when the plasterers were still working on the scaffolding; for this the Berlin idiom soon invented the word “Trockenwohnen” (i. e. drying a house by living in it). In order to save money, the residents rented parts of their apartment to so-called sleepers who, when they went to work, made the warm bed available for the next one. Up to 30 people thus lived in a single, mostly cold and damp apartment.
Meanwhile, the “Bremer Höhe” retained a living concept that seemed almost paradisiac. Since the small houses were soon outdated by industrialization, the “Berliner Gemeinnützige Baugesellschaft” (Berlin Housing Society for Public Welfare), co-founded by Huber, built a complex of stately Wilhelminian-style houses with high living comfort and green courtyards used for self-supply by the tenants.
After these buildings were a state-owned property and and later part of a public utility housing enterprise, the current tenants founded the housing cooperative of the same name in 1999 and bought the houses with the “Bremer Höhe” medallion on the facade – turning it once again into a refuge as Huber intended.