‘We want to live together, not alone.’ Thus read the title of a 1984 book about ‘communes today’, as the subtitle put it.Footnote 1 Loneliness: this is what an increasing number of urban critics since the 1960s across the political spectrum considered an effect of modern cities, in particular of the newly built high-rise buildings at cities’ outskirts such as Märkisches Viertel in West Berlin. Commentators depicted cities as monotonous ‘deserts of concrete’, places that were characterized by a dearth of social interaction, by isolation and loneliness.Footnote 2 Michael Ende's famous children's book Momo, published in 1973, for example, told the story of an old and beautiful city being torn down by the ‘grey gentlemen’, easily decipherable as representatives of modern, rational capitalism, only to be replaced by uniform buildings.Footnote 3 One year later, Alexander Mitscherlich, psychoanalyst and arguably the most outspoken West German urban critic, described life in modern cities in drastic words:
There are half a dozen of eight to ten-storey buildings, barely separated from the highway with its roaring noise. Disrupted construction sites, but the first tenants nevertheless have already moved in. Nobody knows each other. The place is unfriendly, does not stimulate any tendency for openness. Displeasure is visiting this new city for living (Wohnstadt)…A bunch of strangers entrench themselves in apartments. Strangeness evokes distrust and rejection…The logic of unreason spreads. Unreason on the intellectual level corresponds to the lack of love (Lieblosigkeit) on the level of feelings.Footnote 4
In particular within leftist circles, such critiques of the lonely and alienating life in modern cities were ubiquitous.Footnote 5 But leftist activists in West Germany also sought to ameliorate this perceived emotional plight of living in modern cities. In a variety of ways, they tried to render the grey, monotonous and lonely cities inhabitable. They painted walls with colourful images, organized neighbourhood festivals to overcome isolation and built adventure playgrounds for children.Footnote 6 While such activities took place in public space, leftists also attempted to develop new forms of domesticity, most notably in communes (Wohngemeinschaften, literally ‘dwelling collectives’, a term notoriously difficult to translate) that were intended to provide alternatives to the isolated life of nuclear families in modern cities.Footnote 7 In 1974, for example, West Berlin's Info BUG published an article discussing ‘neighbourhood work’, urging neighbourhood initiatives struggling against the ‘isolation of nuclear families’ and the ‘monotony, lack of colours, and disgusting boredom’ to call for ‘large apartments in social housing’. These would allow not only intellectuals but also working-class youth to ‘live collectively’ and might provide an alternative to the dearth of isolated life in the city.Footnote 8 Such calls were not limited to large cities. Activists in smaller university towns such as Heidelberg in south-west Germany similarly protested against urban renewal projects and defended the intimacy of collective living in the ‘convoluted back- and intermediate houses’ (verschachtelte Hinter- und Zwischenhäuser) of the old inner city.Footnote 9 Communards tried to create ‘islands’ of intimacy where they could feel at home in a sea of modern anonymity. In doing so, they developed what I call an ‘intimate domesticity’, that is a shared sense of belonging to a place and a feeling of familiarity and closeness with their roommates.Footnote 10 This article explores precisely how activists tried to turn their places into communal homes, what problems they encountered thereby and how they succeeded or failed.
While the first communes formed in the late 1960s in the context of the student revolts, they became a widespread phenomenon during the 1970s. All over Europe, left-wing activists including hippies and other ‘drop-outs’ moved into communes in order to experiment practically with forms of collective living, democratic decision-making or dropping out of mainstream society and finding a more ‘authentic’ way of living.Footnote 11 In West Germany, mostly groups of students moved into apartments, usually in old buildings in city centres, to live collectively. They shared a kitchen, bathrooms and often some common space; at times, they even raised children together. In some cities, a veritable commune movement emerged, with magazines and regular meetings to discuss the ambitions and problems of communal living. Of course, political scenes differed from city to city, and even within a city, individual communes differed dramatically. Yet, the goals communards tried to achieve, the problems they thereby encountered and the practices they developed resembled each other, which is why the article draws on examples from all over West Germany. Communes thus offer an ideal case to study how urbanites of the 1970s searched for a ‘richer notion of individual “life”’, as Moritz Föllmer has argued.Footnote 12 For leftist activists worrying about the alienation of modern urban life, communes seemed to provide a space to feel ‘at home’, to feel intimately connected with others as much as with a specific place. Exploring the domesticity of communes in the 1970s, this article contributes to an understanding of changing ways of urban dwelling.
After first providing a brief overview of the development of the commune movement, the article analyses the intimate domesticity of communes in two further sections. The second section discusses the highly emotional and, though this was a contested issue, political ambitions that motivated people to move into communes. Activists formed communes because they longed for feelings of intimacy that they found lacking in modern cities. Yet, achieving these emotional goals often turned out to be a difficult endeavour. It was a process of trial and error. Communards experienced moments of enthusiasm and great intimacy as much as moments of frustration and enmity. The third section of the article explores these practical attempts to create an intimate domesticity. Urban historians focusing on emotions have so far mostly analysed emotional discourses, that is, how actors such as journalists, activists and urban experts developed and popularized a specific knowledge about the city as an emotional space.Footnote 13 Indeed, this emotional knowledge about cities provides an important context in which to make sense of the commune movement. However, the article moves beyond analysing the discursive creation of a certain ‘urban feeling’. Drawing on praxeological approaches to the history of emotions that emphasize the role of bodies and spaces alike, the article seeks to understand how people tried to produce specific feelings, and how they succeeded and failed with such attempts.Footnote 14 While the article focuses on a very specific case-study, it draws attention to broader questions regarding cities as emotional spaces and to how urban dwellers intervene into the built environment to facilitate specific feelings and thereby try to make the city a place to feel ‘at home’.
The commune movement offers a particularly interesting case to explore urban emotional practices and experiences because of the detailed sources leftist activists produced. Commune activists and sympathetic social researchers such as Steve Peinemann, Johann August Schülein or Rudi Damme published detailed accounts of individual communes, programmatic texts that discussed the socially transformative potential of communes, and sociological investigations of specific topics, such as the place of children in communes. In addition, communards reflected on their experiences in magazines dedicated to communes, such as Montagsnotizen from Hamburg or KAK Info from Tübingen. These sources provide a rich basis for reconstructing not only the ideals of the commune movement, but also emotional and spatial practices of communes and their often ambivalent effects.
The emergence of communal living
The commune movement originated in the context of the student revolts around 1968, when communal forms of living gained wide public attention.Footnote 15 In West Berlin, Kommune 1 made headlines as a shocked public fantasized about sexual promiscuity and the plotting of terrorist attacks inside the commune. Communards did their best to nurture such fantasies by staging political happenings and preaching free love. Not least, they sought to overcome ‘bourgeois’ desires for privacy by abolishing individual bedrooms and instead simply placing mattresses into a collective sleeping room. Yet, real life in the commune was not characterized by promiscuous sexuality, but rather by endless discussions about personal and psychological problems. Kommune 1 was only the most famous commune. Others followed suit, such as Kommune 2, composed of leading members of the Socialist Student Union, Kommune 99, where children also lived, and the Linkeck Kommune that published an anti-authoritarian magazine of the same name, to name only some famous West Berlin examples. Short advertisements in left-wing magazines such as Agit 883, however, suggest that left-wing students also lived in communes that received less media attention.Footnote 16 Communes appealed to radical students because they offered, as members of Kommune 2 argued, an avenue for overcoming feelings of ‘isolation, for which the bourgeois family no longer offers protection’ and called for ‘revolutionizing the bourgeois subject’.Footnote 17 But such emotional hopes were soon disappointed. Writing in spring 1968 in the West Berlin magazine Linkeck, an anonymous communard complained that ‘the only topic for conversations in this apartment is the different intrigues that the various groups are planning against each other…Everyone has again his own food, everyone has to pay for his phone calls separately, everyone has his snuggery where he retreats to when he is no longer in the mood to discuss.’ Rather than developing a new way of living communally based on rational discussing, this commune simply behaved like ‘jangling old ladies’.Footnote 18
In the 1970s, urban renewal projects created the socio-economic conditions for the commune movement to spread further, above all in university cities.Footnote 19 City planners imagined replacing old apartment buildings in inner cities with modern office buildings for commercial usage, while their inhabitants were to move to newly built modern suburbs. For the moment, however, these old and somewhat decaying buildings – Altbauten, meaning blocks built around the turn of the century – were left empty. Students could rent them fairly cheaply to form their communes. In West Berlin, communes were thus concentrated in the neighbourhoods of Schöneberg, Neukölln, Moabit and Kreuzberg, the last located close to the wall, which made it even less attractive for more affluent city dwellers.Footnote 20 In other cities, too, communes tended to be located in old city centres. A study conducted by the Hamburg-based group Humanes Wohnen (Humane Living), for example, concluded that only 10 out of 84 communes were located in buildings constructed after 1948. New apartment buildings, the authors argued, were constructed ‘rigorously according to inhuman square-metre norms’, whereas old buildings accommodated their inhabitants’ needs. Hence, the authors called for a ‘struggle against the ruthless destructive restoration (Wegsanieren) of magnificent old buildings’.Footnote 21 Only in these old buildings could the experiments of collective living happen, another text in Humanes Wohnen claimed.Footnote 22 Arguably, such protests indeed prevented some of the modernization projects in inner cities from taking place, and old buildings were renovated rather than destroyed.Footnote 23
There are, not surprisingly, no exact numbers that would allow us to trace the growing popularity of communes during the 1970s. Estimates by contemporary activists and social scientists, however, suggest an explosion of communes during the mid- to late 1970s. Rudi Damme, himself a left-wing communard, estimated that around 1,000 communes existed by 1970; by 1976, that number had increased to 100,000 communes, which meant that some 400,000–500,000 people lived in them.Footnote 24 Historian Sven Reichardt estimates that by 1976 some 350,000 students lived in communes, to which one might add non-student communards.Footnote 25 Other estimates are somewhat lower, but what remains clear is that numbers steeply rose during the 1970s. The average size of communes ranged, depending on the study, between four and six members, though significantly larger communes existed as well.Footnote 26 According to contemporary social studies, roughly half of the people living in communes were students. A detailed study of communes in Braunschweig found that students mostly studied subjects in the humanities or pedagogical subjects.Footnote 27 The other half was composed of people who had finished their studies and now worked as teachers, doctors or lawyers, or of people working in non-academic social, pedagogic or medical professions. Only a small minority were workers, craftsmen or apprentices.Footnote 28 The argument that ‘communes are elitist and deepen inequality’ was thus not ‘entirely out-of-hand’, activist and writer Johann August Schülein commented.Footnote 29 Though not a majority phenomenon, these numbers indicate that communes became an increasingly popular form of urban living during the 1970s, especially amongst the young and educated middle classes.
Political and emotional aspirations: revolutionary domesticity?
When communal forms of living first gained attention in the late 1960s, commentators hoped that they might be a way to deal with the problems of urban life. In an article published in 1970, Gerti Blankenburg and Eberhard Wesche, for example, argued that communes ‘wanted to overcome both the familial tightness and isolation in the alienated relations with others in a greater collective that dwelled together, lived together, and dealt with all problems collectively’.Footnote 30 For Blankenburg and Wesche, it was the very organization of urban space that resulted in social tensions and hostility; communes, in turn, promised to foster the social relations that were lacking in modern cities:
Cooped up in tenement blocs, way too small ‘social apartments’ and over-crowded public transport, commanded and controlled by managers on the job, under surveillance by ever moralizing neighbours and relatives, the social environment has to confront the individual as hostile, [the individual] can imagine freedom only as isolated independence. But such an approach forgets that man does not have to be man's enemy, that the other man and close contact with him is a positive need, that man can live in a satisfying manner only together with other human beings, at work, in conversations or in bodily contact. Unfolding this side in the relations of individuals is the main task of a living collective, while all forms of mutual oppression are to be reduced collectively.Footnote 31
According to Blankenburg and Wesche, living in isolated core families in small apartments yielded particular feelings, such as ‘learned fears, feelings of shame and moral attitudes’, which would all disappear in a commune, where covering one's body ‘and its natural functions’ would become unnecessary. And whereas many married couples ended up just sitting in front of a TV without talking to each other, living in a larger group offered more opportunities for communication and hence such an isolated life was not likely in groups, or so they believed.Footnote 32 The spatial organization of urban life, the isolation and loneliness in small apartments as well as the over-crowded public transport system, had deeply destructive emotional consequences, this analysis suggested. Living collectively in communes thus seemed to be an alternative that might undo the damages, as it were, caused by urban life. Communes were thus both and at the same time emotional and political projects.
In the mid-1970s, several social researchers investigated what motivated young people to move into communes, and what they expected to happen there. The desire for intimate relations was still prevalent. In 1974, Gudrun Cyprian, for example, interviewed some hundred communes, more than half of them communes where children were living. Asked about their motivation to move into communes, interviewees named ‘personal development’, ‘the search for emotional backing, safety and security’, ‘rejection of bourgeois life’ and ‘overcoming isolation, desire for contact’ as their most important reasons.Footnote 33 Asked what they expected from living in a commune, 56.4 per cent stressed ‘intensive communication and emotional security in the group’, 48.4 per cent ‘advantages for my personal development’ and 38.8 per cent ‘learning collective forms of behaviour’.Footnote 34 Other surveys produced similar results. In a survey from 1971 for which 120 communards from West Berlin were interviewed, 74 per cent gave a ‘desire for communication’ as a reason, and 48 per cent claimed that ‘overcoming individual isolation’ was a major motivation to move into the commune.Footnote 35 And finally, Jürgen Korczak counted the motivations for moving into a commune amongst 216 different ‘collectives’, concluding that a ‘desire for a stronger interpersonal contact (zwischenmenschlichem Kontakt) by way of increased communication’ ranked first, followed by hopes for ‘personal development and self-realization’.Footnote 36
Individual communards expressed similar emotional desires. A man interviewed by Cyprian, for example, declared: ‘Above all, I'm looking for people with whom I can work on my fears and problems, because they have similar, solidaristic understanding of their problems.’Footnote 37 A commune member named Ulrich, interviewed by Grete Meyer-Ehlers in the early 1970s, even differentiated between people who moved in with each other merely for economic reasons, which would not constitute a genuine commune, and communes properly speaking that would start ‘where communication happens beyond the merely economic situation. It doesn't have to be political communication, but also purely humane (menschliche), personal communication.’Footnote 38 A decade later, an interviewee of Erika Spiegel similarly argued that ‘personal intimacy (menschliche Nähe), sympathy, helpfulness, the emotional backing, the sense of security (Geborgenheit), the trust and understanding’ that one could find in a commune were all reasons for moving in.Footnote 39 Members of a commune in the fictive town of Posemückel (meaning that it was a provincial city) described their motivations for moving into the commune in equally emotional terms. For example, 22-year-old Claudia wrote: ‘My motivation for moving into a commune is simply that I don't want to live alone.’Footnote 40 She had previously lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a student dorm, an anonymous urban space where she felt ‘isolated’ and missed an ‘emotional backing’ even though she liked her roommate and the general atmosphere was good. Another woman named Anja explained that she was searching for ‘feelings of security’ (Sicherheit und Geborgenheit; the latter term is difficult to translate, meaning an emotional sense of safety and belonging)).Footnote 41 A male communard named Fritz finally said that he wanted to change himself as well as his fellow communards, even though it was a difficult process given that his new job as a teacher kept him busy.Footnote 42 By moving into communes, all these examples show, people hoped to change themselves and their feelings. They hoped to create an atmosphere of personal intimacy that would allow them to express their emotions openly.
For social researchers such as Gudrun Cyprian, the emphasis on personal changes meant that political motivations played only a secondary role for young people's decisions to move into a commune. Cyprian, for example, stressed that communards ‘primarily longed for changing individual consciousness, the reestablishment of social relations that are free of power (herrschaftsfrei) and emotionally more satisfactory’.Footnote 43 Changing the social and political system came only second. Similarly, Erika Spiegel wrote in her study of communes in the mid-1980s that ‘political motives or the desire to express a certain socially critical attitude by living in a commune played almost no role’. If there was a political claim, it referred only ‘to the liberation of the individual person’, but not to the ‘liberation of society as a whole’.Footnote 44
Yet, such generalizing conclusions underestimate the debate surrounding the commune movement. There were still numerous voices that regarded their form of urban living as deeply political. Indeed, such comments regarding personal reasons for moving into communes have to be understood in the context of a widespread political critique of modern cities as isolating and alienating which implied that creating spaces for different feelings was inherently political. As a communard named Ulrike put it: ‘The way we live either supports the existing political relations (die herrschenden Verhältnisse), or it saws at the chair leg of those who rule; it is thus always political.’ For Ulrike, communes were little ‘islands’, a noteworthy spatial metaphor, where activists could live according to their desires and thus anticipate ‘a piece of paradise’.Footnote 45 Others, however, were more critical, arguing that communes enabled the ‘system’ to function and hence stabilized it.Footnote 46 Activists from Heidelberg, a stronghold of the alternative scene, for example, argued that merely living in a commune would strengthen rather than damage ‘capitalist society’, at least as long as they were not engaged in political activism.Footnote 47 Along similar lines, activists from Kiel in north Germany addressed communes that regarded themselves as political and a ‘genuine alternative to the core family’. Ideally, communes would be a place for people to work on their ‘damage’ (Kaputtheit), that is, behaviours that were ‘competitive, specifically masculine or feminine, oppressive, authoritarian, passively searching for or provoking authority, and hence in a way also oppressive’. Communes who wanted to work on these problems, the authors demanded, would have to engage in ‘deep communication’, for example about ‘existing fears or difficulties’. For communes to become politically meaningful, a ‘willingness to consider one's behaviour and feelings in close relation with social conditions’ had to exist.Footnote 48 At least for these activists, the desire to turn communes into places for intimate feelings was inherently political.
Political aspirations also mattered when it came to raising children in communes. Blankenburg and Wesche, for example, had argued that communes offered an opportunity to raise children outside of the oppressive core family.Footnote 49 Ute Straub and Barbara Schröder, two educational scientists based in Heidelberg, made an explicit case for raising children in communal contexts. In many ways, their study of ‘children in communes’ is a typical product of left-wing academic writing in the alternative milieu. It was based, as the authors noted in the introduction, on their own experience of living in communes with children, an experience that helped them learn to express their feelings towards children free of fear, which in turn also allowed them to be more open vis-à-vis adults.Footnote 50 Echoing a critique of fragmented life that was common in the alternative left, the authors argued that living collectively and sharing ‘fears and problems, happiness and sadness’ was not a ‘violation of privacy’, but ‘a possibility of overcoming our isolation’ and of ‘putting our dissected lives that are controlled by “experts” back together’.Footnote 51 Not least, putting lives back together meant overcoming the spatial separation of adults’ and children's life-worlds that characterized modern society, and overcoming the limitation of the traditional core family.Footnote 52 In a commune, the entire group and not only the parents would be responsible for raising children, they argued. Being part of a children's group would allow children to develop a sense of autonomy in conflicts with adults.Footnote 53 And in general, children's ‘social development’ would benefit from the conditions in communes, for example that adults did not act in an authoritarian manner or that gender-specific forms of behaviour played no role in communes.Footnote 54 All in all, the authors presented a rather idealistic image of children in communes that culminated in the ‘utopian’ vision that children might stay in a commune even if parents moved out.Footnote 55
Not all communards, perhaps not even a majority, cited the loneliness of life in the urban desert of concrete as a main reason for moving into communes. Yet, only against the background of the perception of living in cities characterized by monotony, boredom and a general emotional dearth do the desires to create ‘islands’ – ‘emotional refuges’ in the parlance of William Reddy – make sense.Footnote 56 Whether they considered their communes political projects or not, communards hoped to turn their homes into spaces of intimate feelings as an alternative to the isolated lives in cities and families. But establishing a feeling of homeliness in commune was a challenging process. It could be as frustrating as much as it could be highly rewarding.
The chances and challenges of intimate living
Young, usually left-leaning, students moved into communes with high aspirations. In communes, they might find the intimate domesticity they missed in lonely cities and escape from the restrictions of petite-bourgeois family life. Numerous interviews and detailed accounts published in books and magazines, often produced by commune activists themselves, provide insights as to precisely how communards tried to achieve their goals. The value of such accounts is not that they provide ‘authentic’ impressions of life in communes, but that they contain detailed descriptions of the emotional and spatial practices that facilitated moments of great intimacy as well as those of deep alienation. They are thus invaluable sources for an understanding of how communards practically created spaces of intimacy in lonely cities. Spatial arrangements and interior designs indeed played a crucial role for facilitating intimacy. Common areas and open doors should increase communication, and cosy furnishings provide the basis for physical closeness. Thus, communards developed a new form of emotional domesticity for which the traditional family played if at all a marginal role.
As the preference for old apartments has already indicated, communards looked for diverse spaces that did not resemble the monotonous new high-rise buildings in the city's outskirts. Typically, commune members all had individual rooms; in addition, common areas such as dining and living rooms, kitchen and shared bathrooms functioned as spaces for communication. Especially in larger communes, Rudi Damme noted, the apartment's layout structured communication. One commune he studied had a common area on the ground floor (kitchen and common room), whereas individual rooms were located on the first floor. According to Damme, the spatial layout did not call for communication; ‘communication has to be looked for’, because communal spaces were ‘vertically separated’ from individual spaces.Footnote 57 Indeed, a member of the commune complained that people usually retreated into their individual rooms, where they tried to keep themselves busy, but did not even consider that others were facing the same problem. It was hence possible that all seven members of the commune were at home without them even knowing about it. Another commune, by contrast, had a large floor with a dining table as communal area, whereas individual rooms were relatively small. In addition, doors were usually left open. In this commune, the outline of the apartment resulted in constant communication, even though this happened more in individual rooms than in the common area that was not particularly comfortable, as members noted.Footnote 58 Members of a commune interviewed by Meyer Ehlers similarly remarked that the common room was in bad shape and lacked furniture, hence most communication happened in the kitchen.Footnote 59 Simply designating a space for communal usage was, not surprisingly, not enough to facilitate communication and intimacy. The ‘desire for changed forms of social relations’ (Bedürfnis nach veränderten Verkehrsformen) also required a peculiar interior design.Footnote 60
While critiques of the loneliness monotonous high-rise buildings caused were common within the left, only a few authors focused on the interior space of modern apartments and how its design prevented communication and intimacy. In a rare article dealing explicitly with the interior design of communes, Richard Meng and Wolfgang Thiel suggested that communes and the way they organized and decorated the space of their apartments provided an alternative to capitalist forms of dwelling. According to their analysis, capitalist society had turned the ‘living areas’ into an ‘area for retreat’ that should protect individuals against the ‘effects of the dissected reality based on a division of labour’.Footnote 61 The interior design of apartments expressed the social isolation of capitalism, they argued. Mere objects structured social relations, and rooms were ‘arranged as a relation between things’, but did not stimulate social relations of their inhabitants. ‘The dearth of the room-cubical (Zimmerkubus) manifests itself in the form of furniture that is nothing but plastic or wooden boxes.’Footnote 62 When the commune movement emerged, communes thus also tried to challenge the sterility of the interior of bourgeois apartments and the isolation between neighbours. ‘The monotonous stagnancy of everyday life, the fetishization of things, the sterile depression (Bedrückung) and the tightness of the home were important sources for the protests’, Meng and Thiel wrote.Footnote 63
Yet, when living in communes first became common amongst political activists of the early 1970s, communards were more interested in political activism outside their own walls than in creating an alternative domesticity. Hence, an ‘aesthetic nihilism’, a ‘poverty of fantasy and lack of love vis-à-vis things (and perhaps not only them)’, characterized the interior space of early communes. Only the ‘naked use-value’ of objects mattered. In sparsely furnished rooms, the thick and heavy volumes of the Marx–Engels collected edition had to serve as tea tables.Footnote 64 This changed only in the late 1970s, when commune members sought to facilitate a ‘communication stimulating cosiness’.Footnote 65 By then, feelings had come to play a central role in leftist political thinking and practices more generally.Footnote 66 In old and new communes alike, qualities such as ‘sensibility, empathy, self-presentation’ became important.Footnote 67 Communards started arranging the interior in a way that would help stimulate feelings, not least in a bodily sense. They decorated walls with ‘blankets, cloths, photos of oneself or dear friends or self-painted pictures’.Footnote 68 ‘Personal changes and feelings’ found expression in newly painted walls with a different colour. Bookshelves that had been a status symbol for the theory-minded activists of the early 1970s tended to lose importance and were superseded by condiment shelves, indicating how bodily desires had become central for the domesticity of communes.Footnote 69
Meng and Thiel also noted how the usage of the floor changed. In bourgeois apartments, touching the floor had been taboo, they wrote. It had to be cleansed of any dirt to a degree that went beyond rational explanations. In early communes that simply wanted to break the rules of bourgeois society, the floor had turned into a ‘giant ashtray’, which made it ‘extremely useful for having parties’. By the late 1970s, communards started using the floor ‘as an additional space for self-expression’ (als einen zusätzlichen Raum für die eigenen Lebensäußerungen). By ‘sitting, lying, chilling or walking barefoot’, people appropriated the floor. Sitting on the floor was ‘anti-hierarchical’ and a way to overcome ‘isolation’, as there was no predetermined seating order. ‘It [i.e. appropriating the floor] opens new sensual and communicative possibilities.’Footnote 70 Arranging the interior space of apartments in a particular and cosy way, these observations suggest, was meant to facilitate a feeling of intimacy both between human beings and between the inhabitants and the objects they lived with. And according to Meng and Thiel, this worked.
To foster a sense of intimacy, communication that went beyond usual small talk was crucial. A woman named Dora from Tübingen, whose commune had just dissolved, formulated this call for communication most radically. Living in a commune, she argued, required various ‘learning steps’, and to make these steps, it was necessary to ‘deal with all problems of living together in a constant conversation amongst all members’. This ‘constant dialogue’ would dissolve individuals’ ‘private sphere’. Because difficulties in personal relations between individual group members affected the entire group, it was necessary, Dora argued, to ‘discuss them collectively’. In communes, members would get to know the ‘total person’, as the ‘entire human being’ mattered, and not just specific aspects of a personality as on the job. Hence, ‘emotionality, humanity’ were as important as the ability to do the dishes or repair broken items.Footnote 71
Typically, communes tried to arrange the interior space of their apartments in a way that would encourage communication, for example by creating common areas and keeping doors to individual rooms open. Most communards met daily, if only briefly in the kitchen or in front of the bathroom. For some, this density of personal interaction was worrying, as it could turn into a form of ‘control’, but others contradicted: ‘I don't agree, because otherwise, you would live again in a sort of isolation. That's something you have to learn. To be tolerant in this matter.’Footnote 72 A woman named Ulrike, who had kept a diary of her everyday life in a commune over the course of a week, related a ‘somewhat familial feeling’ to ‘open doors’ and talking to a roommate in her own room.Footnote 73 Members of a commune in Bonn, interviewed for Wir leben zusammen, nicht allein, made similar points. The seven communards, three women and four men, all emphasized that the commune provided them with ‘emotional support’ and was a ‘fixed pole’ (ruhender Pol), even though some noted that the emotional ties were not the tightest.Footnote 74 For one woman, the commune and the emotional support it provided constituted a veritable ‘ersatz family’, not least because she had massive conflicts with her real family.Footnote 75 Another communard stressed that living in a commune was more ‘personally intense’, because one's behaviour was reflected by six other people.Footnote 76 Many of the commune members stressed how important communicating was, though most people avoided discussing personal problems in the entire group and instead turned to individuals. One of the women even called the commune a ‘communication point’.Footnote 77 Not least, the commune's spatial layout helped to create a sense of intimacy. The commune had a large common room, but used it rather rarely, except for group meetings and exceptional dinners. Yet, they had another common space: the kitchen and bathroom. Indeed, the bath could be reached only via the kitchen, which meant that there was not much privacy in the bathroom. And since there was only one bathroom, communards had to share it frequently.Footnote 78 One communard even claimed in passing that people frequently sat together in a bathtub, which helped in solving conflicts.Footnote 79 Spatial arrangements, the example shows, facilitate not only communication, but also bodily intimacy.
At least some communards seem to have succeeded in learning ‘new forms of social interaction’. A communard interviewed by Jürgen Korczak, for example, declared that living in a commune, people had to learn to be more considerate and responsive to others. ‘It starts with when it's your turn to do the shopping, that you think, what does someone like to eat, that Abu likes sausages, on so on. You do feel and think about other people here. Or something nice happened to you, and you come home and can talk about it with everyone. Things that are otherwise impossible.’Footnote 80 Living in a commune could have a personally transformative effect, as a man named Knut claimed. The commune had facilitated ‘lots of emotionality and openness’ in him and had helped him change his ‘feelings and values’, even though he was not able to specify how they had changed.Footnote 81 A member of another commune described how she was in a process of finding herself and that having someone to talk to in the commune provided her with emotional stability.Footnote 82 Some communes even explicitly aimed at solving their ‘individual problems’ collectively, not least by seeking therapeutic advice.Footnote 83 And while the extreme ‘compulsion (Zwang) for total communication’ that had characterized the early commune movement, when individual psychological problems were discussed ad nauseam, had been ‘scaled back to an acceptable degree’, as Jürgen Korczak noted in 1979, communards still wanted to learn to communicate ‘openly and honestly’. In one case, Korczak reported, learning how to do this in the group had actually helped a couple to stay together.Footnote 84
Openly addressing feelings helped facilitate a sense of emotional belonging in a commune. Expressing emotions was not only a way to convey how one felt, but also a way of producing and altering these very feelings. The communards from Posemückel, for example, kept a commune diary, where individual members also wrote about their feelings. Communard Heribert used the diary to ‘admit’ that he felt ‘really good’ in the commune, and would like to hug his roommates. His roommate Tina simply wrote: ‘Oh, it's such a good feeling not to be alone.’Footnote 85 When the communards felt ‘emotionally good’, they were also more eager to do the necessary housework. The condition of their house was thus a good indicator for the ‘group feeling’, they claimed.Footnote 86 But their diary also noted problems in the commune, and how they were solved. Tina, for example, commented that the atmosphere was not ‘relaxed’, but she could not explain why she felt that way and how she could thus address the issue. But admitting her feelings to the commune diary, she elicited a response. At first, a housemate claimed that she could understand Tina's problem, then a second housemate named Anja confessed having aggressive feelings as well. But then Anja talked to Tina, and as a result felt ‘soooo good’, and Tina responded: ‘Hey Anja, I'm feeling like that, too, I feel soooo good about you, yay!’Footnote 87 Notably, only women in this commune were so explicit about their feelings, while the three male roommates first had to learn to verbalize their feelings. Indeed, they had all joined a men's group, even before moving into the commune, where they wanted to overcome their ‘anti-emotionality’.Footnote 88 Living in communes should foster feelings of belonging, but such feelings had to be learned, within and outside of communes.
Shared meals were key moments to create the sense of domesticity, reminding communards indeed of the family home, though without the pressure of having to be present. Communard Ulrike, for example, observed that she did not have to count how many plates she needed when all commune members were present, she simply knew she needed six plates. It was a ‘feeling of being complete’, just like at home.Footnote 89 A man named Frank from Hannover even suggested that communes should have shared candlelit dinners, a setting that could have ‘phenomenal effects’. ‘Such collective experiences facilitate a fearless and joyful atmosphere, where fantasy and communication can develop in ways that go beyond the regular group meeting.’Footnote 90 Activists in the commune movement even published a cooking-book for communes.Footnote 91
Developing a sense of intimacy had also a bodily dimension. Many communards described that seeing each other, or even visitors to the commune, naked was totally normal.Footnote 92 The Posemückel communards, for example, wrote that they had, from the very beginning, a desire to ‘show much about ourselves, that is to get to know each other in a bodily way’.Footnote 93 They often slept in the same room, but without getting physically close, until one Saturday morning, when they all ended up in the bed of a communard. The evening before, three of them had talked about their fears and hopes, and then fell asleep together. The next morning, two more members joined them, and they ended up cuddling and singing revolutionary songs. And finally, the sixth communard brought breakfast to the bed where all picnicked. ‘It's only us six in this half-dark room, and we let the bottle of wine go around, and feel good, so close to each other, it's so good not to be alone anymore’, communard Annette wrote.Footnote 94 Even the men in the commune had learned to cuddle with each other, something they had not been able to do before moving in.Footnote 95 Actual sexual relations within the commune, however, remained brief episodes.Footnote 96 Along similar lines, Ulrike reported how she shared her bed with a (male) roommate. ‘I want it to be always that cuddly and warm.’Footnote 97 Her roommate Knut noted that it was totally normal to walk around naked. For Ulrike, this nudity and cuddling had the potential to be a first step to integrate sexuality into communal life in a way ‘that tries to be truly free’.Footnote 98 But bodily intimacy was not limited to cuddling and potential sexuality. Ulrike, for example, described how the communards danced in the kitchen, illuminated only by candles. ‘Being able to romp around feels good, without being controlled by anyone’, she wrote, even though she missed ‘a bit the us-feeling’.Footnote 99
These examples show how communards succeeded in turning their apartments into emotional homes. But such positive accounts should not detract from the many problems communes were facing, not only in terms of finding suitable apartments, but also and more importantly in developing viable forms of communal living. Time and again, magazines and books carried reports about groups falling apart.Footnote 100 Even some of the communards in Bonn, who generally felt at home in their commune, realized that they might not live forever in a commune. Once he was ready to have a child with his partner, Martin noted, he would not necessarily stay in the commune.Footnote 101 Indeed, many communes were less stable. On average, Rüdiger Pohl calculated, communards stayed for a mere 18 months before moving on, often into another commune. Frequently, interpersonal problems resulted in a commune breaking apart, but the transition from student life to having a stable job that often involved moving to a different city also meant that there was a constant moving in and out in communes.Footnote 102 For some communards, this was highly frustrating. A woman named Erika, for example, felt ‘exploited’, because she had invested time and energy into solving problems with roommates who then simply disappeared.Footnote 103
The high fluctuation rate was, some activists noted, a sign that conflicts within the group were not solved and that communards were unwilling to engage in a process of personal transformation. A woman from Hannover, for example, noted that many communards accepted themselves as ‘incredibly damaged individuals’, but gave up on any attempt to change things.Footnote 104 The group from Kiel mentioned above linked the problems in communes to how individuals were socialized in capitalist society. In their eyes, living in a commune should initiate ‘permanent emancipative processes’ that would ‘at least partially undo the damages of socialization’. In the context of a commune, they explained, it would be an emancipation of the ‘psychic constraints of capitalist society’. To give an example, they described a seemingly ordinary scene from communal life. A woman had cried because her boyfriend was not at home, and had told her (male) roommate about the situation. The next morning, the woman was still crying at the breakfast table. Seeing this, the roommate asked: ‘Oh, your Erich [the boyfriend] is still not home?’ And the woman ran crying to her room. What might seem like a personally insensitive behaviour was, the group from Kiel analysed, an expression of a ‘mercantilist behaviour’ as the woman's problems were simply individualized, but not collectively dealt with in the commune.Footnote 105 Whereas these communards sought to develop ways to stabilize communes, others regarded the ability to move out as a freedom and flexibility that traditional families lacked. They envisioned that several communes might form an ‘alliance’ so that members could ‘rotate’ between different communes.Footnote 106 Had such an arrangement been put into practice, which, it seems, never happened, it would have institutionalized a key characteristic of communes: they were not about creating a stable, long-term home, but a temporarily limited and in a way fluid home, as people continued to move in and out.
Communards, these examples show, struggled to make their apartments a place where they could feel at home in cities where they had no longer felt at home. They furnished their rooms in ways that made them feel comfortable and ‘warm’, they created common areas and pursued open door policies to foster personal interaction, and often had little inhibition in showing themselves naked in a commune. In many cases, these spatial, communicative and bodily practices succeeded in creating the feelings of intimacy communards longed for. But communes were always experiments, and often, these experiments failed or succeeded only temporarily. Communes could become an emotional home, until people developed new interests, found a job in a different city or decided to raise children in more traditional family settings. For young urban dwellers seeking to make choices about their ‘elective affinities’ without losing a sense of being at home, communes were ideal if difficult solutions.
Conclusion: making the city a home
When mostly left-wing students in the 1970s moved into communes, they hoped to create domestic spaces of intimacy that provided an alternative to both traditional family life and the seemingly anonymous and isolating cities. Moving into communes was, indeed, only one way of making the city a more joyful place to live. Urban activists also painted colourful murals and organized neighbourhood festivals that should foster a sense of belonging in and to a city. At times, communes indeed turned into places where people felt at home. The interior layout and design helped facilitate communication between communards and thus a sense of deep intimacy. But at times, such experiments also failed, and too much proximity could result in frustrations and people moving out rather than a sense of belonging.
The study of communes in West Germany raises larger questions about cities as emotional spaces and about feelings of belonging in an urban context. It draws our attention to how urban dwellers, in this case a rather specific group, seek to create a feeling of being ‘at home’ in the city both in domestic and in public spaces. To understand this production of an emotional space, a variety of factors need to be considered, as the case-study presented here has suggested. Of particular interest are ways of intervening in and interacting with the built environment that makes up the city, with material objects and technologies; we need to inquire how various groups of urban actors try to change both the interior design and the exterior cityscape in order to encourage communicative or bodily practices that might yield specific feelings.Footnote 107 Yet, these practices also need to be understood in the context of a specific knowledge about the city and urban feelings. Crucially, claims about cities as producing nothing but loneliness and boredom should not be taken at face value. Rather, we need to inquire which kinds of practices such a knowledge encourages – such as moving into communes. To understand how the city can become a ‘home’, we might then explore a range of spaces, from pubs to stadiums, from parks to shopping districts.Footnote 108 All these arguably were and are spaces where people can feel at home in their city. And not least, it would be important to pay attention to multiple and potentially conflicting emotions. For some, it may be a sense of security that is vital for feeling at home, while others might lose this feeling without the sense of excitement in dangerous spaces. Living in communes, that is, was then only one way of emotionally dwelling in a city; it would be worth exploring others.
