A Women's Berlin

If histories of Berlin mention women and building, they usually refer to the Trum-merfrauen, or rubble women, who after 1945 literally put the city back together again. Berlin's Town Hall was rebuilt largely by female hands and honoured women's labour with a bronze Trummerfrau, who stands today at its entrance. Although she is portrayed as a heroic figure, the Trummerfrau is an accidental builder who salvages rather than constructs. Accounts of women as intentional and even visionary builders in Berlin are difficult to find; the professional female builder photographed in 1910 balancing on a ladder above the Town Hall is thus suspended in a narrative vacuum (Figure 7.1). This essay chronicles a lesser-known history of builders’ tools and the female body in Berlin. ¹ It explores a feminization of Berlin in the years leading up to the First World War: specifically, how women made their gendered presence felt in the architectural spaces of the city. I focus on interventions in the built environment by women architects and their female patrons that gave form to a vision of a new feminine urban experience. The metropolis was reconceived – and partially rebuilt – as the birthplace and sphere of a new collectivity of modern, urban women. Because this phenomenon was largely a bourgeois response to the industrial metropolis, my account centres on educated middle-class women (Bildungsbürgerinnen). ² In the city's alienating potential – the unmooring of the individual from traditional social ties – these women saw an opportunity to create new communities of selfconsciously modern women actively engaged in the making of their metropolis. Figure 7.1 A woman builder making repairs to the roof of Berlin's Town Hall.

Illustrierte Frauen-Zeitung 38, 2 (1910): 17

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