308
LEIPZIG.
doorway which gives admission to each front house, and is large enough to
permit the passage of a fire-engine from the street to the back houses if
necessary.
Passing from the consideration of the tenement houses to that of the
tenements themselves, there is found to be little if any variation of type.
In respect to the number of rooms of which their dwellings most frequently
consist, the working classes of Leipzig are more favourably situated than those
of any of the other large cities included in the present inquiry, except Bremen,
which occupies among German towns the unique position of having the onefamily
house as distinguished from the tenement system of housing. Among
all the towns visited, in which the tenement system of housing prevails, Leipzig
is the only one in which working-class families were found to be most frequently
occupying so many as four rooms. The evidence in support of this figure is
partly statistical and partly based on local expert opinion. It may be well to
note here that the official housing statistics hitherto published by the Municipal
Statistical Office afford no safe basis for conclusions as to the number of rooms
which usually constitute a dwelling, for in these, as in the corresponding
statistics of most other German municipalities, the heatable room only has been
treated as the unit of housing accommodation, and other habitable rooms have
been neglected. In the housing census undertaken in Leipzig in December,
1905, however, all habitable rooms have been counted, and the examination of
the whole of the schedules for two typical working-class districts, kindly
undertaken for the purposes of this report by Professor Dr. Hasse, the director of
the Statistical Office showed the following results :—
Number of Rooms in Dwelling.
District Schleussig
(Western Suburb).
Number of Workingclass
Dwellings.
District Neuschönefeld
(Eastern Suburb).
Number of Workingclass
Dwellings.
Both Districts together.
Number of Workingclass
Dwellings.
One room
Two rooms
Three rooms
Four rooms
Five rooms
Six rooms
Total
8
30
159
333
84
11
625
20
20
272
341
47
4
28
50
531
674
131
15
704
1,429
It is seen from the above that of the 1,429 typical working-class dwellings
dealt with, 074 (the largest group) consisted of four rooms. It is important
to add that in all the tenements to which this Table relates the whole of the
rooms were occupied exclusively by the family, none being let to lodgers.
The preponderance of the four-roomed tenement as a working-class
dwelling is also shown by returns furnished for purposes of the present inquiry
by 195 workmen’s families, stating, inter alia, the number of rooms occupied.
Of these 195 families 120 were renting four-roomed and only 58 three-roomed
tenements. Though limited in scope the data obtained through these two
independent channels afford adequate confirmation of the opinions previously
expressed by representative workpeople, and by an official of over 30 years’
experience of housing conditions in Leipzig, as to the predominance of the
four-roomed tenement.
Each of the four or five storeys of any working-class tenement house
contains, as a rule, either (a) three tenements of 4 rooms each ; (6) two
tenements of 4 rooms and one of 3 rooms, or (c) two tenements of 4 rooms.
A feature common to all modern houses, working-class or other, is the
provision of a separate vestibule or corridor for each tenement—a convenience
to which great importance is attached. It would seem, however, as if, in a
three- or four-roomed dwelling, an unduly large proportion of the total
available space is sacrificed for the sake of this outward sign of " gentility,”
with the result that the kitchen and one of the bedrooms are invariably very
small. The height of the rooms is usually three metres, or about 10 feet.
