Rooms on Fire: Single Women and the Ledigenheim in Early 20th-Century Germany
Rooms on Fire: Single Women and the Ledigenheim in Early 20th-Century Germany
In Rooms on Fire, the early twentieth-century German Ledigenheim—purpose-built housing for the unmarried—is examined as an architectural case study of how modern subjectivities were produced through space. Against the backdrop of Berlin’s rapid industrial growth and housing shortage, as well as the controversial “lodger problem,“ the study explores how the Ledigenheim emerged as a typology combining minimal private rooms with shared amenities and institutional oversight. Focusing on the women’s Ledigenheim in Alt-Moabit, Berlin, (1908), the study asks how its spatial organisation, operational logics, and public representations mediated women’s transition towards independent living outside parental and marital households. Drawing on architectural plans, institutional records, women’s magazines, photographs, association reports, newspapers, and diary fragments, the thesis reveals what the archive shows and what it systematically obscures about women’s everyday lives behind closed doors. The thesis argues that women’s Ledigenheime must be understood as a paradoxical threshold where regulation and possibility coincide. Designed to secure respectability through supervision and moral norms, these institutions nevertheless enabled forms of self-determination and collective life, such as committees, courses, lectures and social gatherings, that could foster durable networks and new social roles. By situating Alt-Moabit within feminist housing reform debates concerning housing care, rationalised housekeeping, collective facilities and residences for single employed women, the project reimagines a marginalised housing type as a historically specific laboratory for negotiating autonomy, care and non-normative domesticity—questions that remain urgent today.