BEYOND CLICHÉS: Homeless People and their Social Relationships, Past and Present
by Prof. Dr. Britta-Marie Schenk, 2024
Homeless people are commonly viewed as dirty, lonely and lacking in social relationships. Per Christian Brown paints quite a different picture. In the interviews he conducted for his previous project mein Heim (My Home), homeless people in Berlin talk about their lives and work as bottle collectors, casual workers, dog walkers or beggars.(1) The interviewees describe how they organise their everyday lives, such as the search for easily accessible, free shower facilities. And they pursue their own goals: to earn money, to provide for themselves, or simply to live their lives. This is thought-provoking. For these people are rarely concerned with ending their homelessness immediately. Contrast this perspective with the EU’s goal of ending homelessness by 2030, and you can but conclude that this objective falls far short of what homeless people themselves are striving for. Are institutions like the EU, national authorities but also aid agencies fighting a losing battle?
This impression is reinforced by problematic assumptions about homeless people’s lifestyles, especially their social relationships. On the one hand, academic studies claim that homeless people are lonelier than others, because they are often cut off from physical, social and emotional contacts.(2) On the other hand, the homeless people Brown interviewed do not feel lonely at all. Quite the contrary, Foxxy says that she was lonely before she became homeless, explaining that it was only on the streets that she found friends who accepted her for who she was. Heiko, Manuell and Jan also talk about their circle of friends. Who is right, the studies or the homeless people?
There is no doubt that some homeless people live alone and feel lonely. But there have always been those who do not live alone. A glimpse into history reveals that both homeless women and men found strength in friendships, relationships and their family on the street, as evidenced by interviews and articles, records from shelters and police reports.
Heidelberg, 1977: Police officers were compiling comprehensive case files on so-called city vagrants, the local homeless people. In them, the officers stated: “Vagrants live in groups. They sleep together in parks, doorways or abandoned houses. They also go begging together, share the money and buy liquor for DM 1.50 each.”(3) This illustrates two things: Even in the 1970s, homeless people did not always live alone, and they formed living and working communities.
Couples have also been living on the streets for a very long time. In 1987, the Berber-Brief, a newspaper by and for the homeless, published a list of demands addressed to politicians and shelters. One point concerned the segregation of women and men in shelters, which was common at the time: “It must be possible for couples to spend the night together.”(4) And in 1992, street social workers in Stuttgart gave voice to a married elderly man whose story gives us an insight into married life on the streets: “Now she can’t get up anymore, can’t get up anymore. [...] I have to get up every night and do her things. Now she has a long stick that she uses to tap on my sleeping bag when she has to go to the toilet. Now the toilet up there is open again, now we can go up there and do our business, and the fountain is up there, too, it’s working again, and we can wash ourselves there.”(5) These examples show that couples were widespread on the streets – with all the challenges that entailed. The notion that all homeless people have always lived alone does not hold true, neither in the present nor the past.
Another aspect that casts doubt on the assumption that homeless people are lonely is their life in shelters. Here, they were and are certainly never alone. Photographs from the early twentieth century of the overcrowded dormitories of “Die Palme”, a shelter for the homeless in Berlin, show homeless people packed cheek to jowl on wooden bunks.(6) And Paul Grulich, who was homeless in Berlin in the 1910s and wrote a report about it, preferred the less comfortable sleeping spot in a disused third-class railway carriage. He explained: “I had my chamber to myself and slept a hundred times better than in the shelter.”(7) There, Grulich could sleep alone and undisturbed, without the moaning, sighing, and talking of fellow homeless people – and without fear of being robbed in his sleep. Grulich found privacy and security on the streets, not in the shelter. Erhard tells a similar story: He does not like to go to shelters because they are too crowded, he cannot sleep and he is afraid of losing his belongings. So there is no loneliness in shelters, but rather a lack of privacy.
But even sleeping outdoors is no guarantee of privacy. Brown’s photographs of sleeping homeless people in his current exhibition show that public space is, in a sense, the homeless person’s bedroom. Things are different for Manuell, a homeless man in Berlin whom Brown hired as a project assistant. Hidden in the undergrowth by the Wannsee, Manuell has built a home consisting of a large tent, a communal hut with cooking facilities and an outhouse. He shares this place with another homeless man who also has his own tent. There is no doubt that they live in privacy – and this challenges another prevailing academic and popular assumption about homelessness. The police tolerate this small settlement because it is quiet, as Manuell puts it – the homeless give the neighbours nothing to complain about. To keep it that way, Manuell is careful not be recognised as a homeless person. Do homeless people have to be invisible and inaudible to build a home?
Per Christian Brown’s projects paint a multifaceted picture of homeless people, their social relationships and how they organise their work, of solidarity and conflicts. Just like people who live in an apartment, homeless people want to manage their daily lives in a self-determined way. Homeless people are a complex social group – and they are part of our society. Instead of proposing to end homelessness, we should listen to homeless people themselves and learn about their perspectives on the world. That is exactly what Per Christian Brown’s exhibition achieves.
by Britta-Marie Schenk Ass. Professor of history with main focus on contemporary history University of Lucerne, Switzerland
(1) The interviews in the project „mein Heim“ are available online: https://www.meinheim.org/.
(2) From a psychologic perspective see Ami Rokach: Private Lives in Public Places. Loneliness of the Homeless, in: Social Indicators Research 72 (2005), p. 99-114, here p. 104; from the perspective of history as a science: Fay Bound Alberti: A Biography of Loneliness. A History of an Emotion, Oxford 2019, p. 170-171.
(3) Main state archives Stuttgart: EA 8/501 Bü 62/8: Polizeidirektion Heidelberg/Abtl. II/ Kriminalpolizei: Stadtstreicherunwesen in Heidelberg from 22. August 1977.
(4) Main archives from von Bodelschwinghschen Stiftungen Bethel 12/06: Berber fordern! 1987.
(5) Manfred E. Neuman/Willi Schraffenberger: Platte machen. Vom Leben und Sterben auf der Straße, Stuttgart 1992, p. 47.
(6) See the photo from a women’s dormitory in Berlin’s city shelter in: Diethart Kerbs: Im Obdachlosenasyl. Bilder aus dem städtischen Obdach „Die Palme“. Berlin 1894-1932, Berlin 1987, p. 26.
(7) Paul Grulich: Dämon Berlin. Aufzeichnungen eines Obdachlosen, Berlin 1907, p. 61.