About us

Since 1972, living, working and culture have belonged together at Forum Kreuzberg: six buildings, around 190 people, plus workshops, studios, a theatre and a kindergarten. The buildings belong to the community and are managed by it. What grows here has followed the same pattern for more than fifty years. A need comes up, people get together, a project starts. That is how the kindergartens came about, how the new building with its lift was added when the founding generation grew older, and how the Vorratskammer, the small organic shop in the house, opened in 2019.

The following pages explain how it all fits together: the history since the founding, the buildings and courtyards, the organisation with its seven legal entities, and the working groups where the everyday work happens. If you would rather see it in person, we offer guided tours on architecture and co-operative living.

What sets Forum Kreuzberg apart from other housing projects is that people actually live together. Around 190 people share not only buildings and courtyards but also responsibility, take an active part in shaping their neighbourhood and stick together when it matters.

Community life is organised through working groups that look after everything, from the gardens to the energy supply, from allocating flats to running the common room. Anyone who wants to join in finds a way in quickly. Add to that courtyard parties, neighbourhood evenings, political discussions and shared projects. The Forum sees itself as part of the neighbourhood, not as a closed enclave.

Three people talk about what living and working here means to them. The films were made in 2019.

Forum Kreuzberg is a housing co-operative in Berlin-Kreuzberg, a few steps from the river Spree. Around 150 adults and 40 children live in six buildings around Köpenicker Straße and Eisenbahnstraße. Alongside them are 36 commercial units: workshops, studios, a theatre, a kindergarten, a doctor’s practice and a small members‘ shop.

In 1972 the teacher Michael Wilhelmi and fellow campaigners from the 1968 movement bought a pair of houses with a factory building in what was then the border zone, in sight of the Wall. Their idea was to live, learn and work on their own terms, all in one place. Out of that grew a block in which the third generation is now growing up.

What has stayed is the claim to manage the buildings themselves and to keep the housing permanently off the market. The land belongs to the non-profit Förderverein, the co-operative lets the flats to its members. Nobody can sell them, nobody can speculate with them.

What guides us

The founding impulses came from Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy, in particular from his idea of the threefold social order: freedom in cultural life, equality in legal life, solidarity in economic life. Many of the institutions in the house grew out of that source over the years, from the Orientierungsjahr and the Freie Volkshochschule through the anthroposophical and artistic foundation year and the Waldorfkindergarten to the teacher training seminar. You do not have to be an anthroposophist to live here. But three principles from that tradition still shape everyday life, and they are written into the statutes: self-help, self-management, self-responsibility.

In practice this means the members are tenants and landlords at the same time. Decisions are taken at the general meeting, the everyday work is spread across around 18 working groups, from courtyard maintenance to the energy supply. The Forum handles about 70 per cent of its shared tasks itself, which comes to two or three hours a month per member.

A village in the city

People here know one another. Children move between the courtyards, older residents stay part of daily life instead of disappearing from it. The Forum sees itself as an answer to a city in which neighbourhood is often a matter of chance and loneliness is growing. It is not an idyll. Where 190 people decide things together there is friction, there are long meetings and there is the occasional argument. That is part of self-management too.

Diese Seite auf Deutsch