A Berlin address stops at the front door. The street and the number get the post as far as the building; after that a letter is delivered by surname, because flats in Berlin carry no numbers of their own. Everything else a listing tells you, the VH 3. OG li after the street name, is a set of directions through a building type that shaped the city in the nineteenth century.
The house numbers run in a horseshoe
Older Berlin streets are numbered in a loop. The numbers climb along one side of the street, turn at the end and come back down the other, so number 1 and the highest number face each other at the same end, and the building opposite number 40 can be number 130.
The system is called Hufeisennummerierung, horseshoe numbering, and Berlin still uses it on most of its older streets. Streets laid out in the twentieth century mostly use the odd-one-side, even-the-other pattern familiar everywhere else.
Check the number on the building before you cross. The far side of a long street can be a ten-minute walk from the number you want.
Front house, side wing, back house
The classic Berlin tenement, the Mietshaus, is a block of several buildings sharing one street entrance. The Vorderhaus, the front house, faces the street and holds the largest flats. Behind it a Seitenflügel, a side wing, runs down one or both sides of a courtyard, and across the back sits the Quergebäude or Hinterhaus, the transverse building or back house.
A deep plot repeats the pattern. A second courtyard opens behind the first, sometimes a third, and the last building on the plot is often called the Gartenhaus because it once backed onto a garden. Some courtyards held workshops & small factories, the Gewerbehöfe, which is why a courtyard in Kreuzberg can hold a printing works behind a family flat.
Listings abbreviate all of it. VH is Vorderhaus, SF is Seitenflügel, QG or HH is the building across the back, GH is Gartenhaus. A listing reading QG 2. OG re points you through the street door, across the courtyard, into the back building and up two flights to the door on the right.
Why the courtyards are the size they are
The courtyard house is the product of two nineteenth-century rules. The Berlin building code of 1853 required every courtyard to measure at least 5.34 metres by 5.34 metres, the space a horse-drawn fire pump needed to turn, and nothing more, so developers built to that minimum.
James Hobrecht’s expansion plan of 1862 then laid out wide streets around enormous blocks and said nothing about what went inside them. The profitable way to fill a deep plot was buildings behind buildings around one minimal courtyard after another.
The result was the Mietskaserne, the rental barracks. The term was already in use in the nineteenth century, and Werner Hegemann’s 1930 polemic Das steinerne Berlin made it the standard verdict on the era. A century on, the same buildings are what most people mean by an Altbau, and a rear-courtyard flat that was once the cheapest on the plot is prized for the quiet.
Which floor is which
German floors start counting one above the ground. The Erdgeschoss, EG, is the street-level floor; the 1. OG, the first Obergeschoss, is the floor above it, which an American would call the second. A flat listed as 3. OG is three flights up, and in an Altbau with high ceilings that’s a long climb with the shopping.
Two further levels sit between the pavement and the first floor. The Hochparterre is a raised ground floor, half a flight up from the street, built to lift the best rooms above the mud of the road; the Souterrain is the half-basement below it, with windows at ankle height.
In the old front houses the floor above the Hochparterre was the Beletage, the fine floor, with the tallest ceilings, the most stucco and the balcony. At the top, DG is the Dachgeschoss, the attic floor, often a later conversion with sloping ceilings and the summer heat that goes with them.
Left, right and middle
The last part of the code is the door. li, re and mi stand for links, rechts and mitte, and they describe the position of the door as you arrive on the landing. Two flats to a floor is the standard Altbau layout, so li and re cover most cases; mi appears where a landing has three doors, or where a large flat was split in two.
The bell panel and your surname
Your name on the bell panel & the letterbox is what makes the address work. Post is delivered by surname, so a name missing from the letterbox means letters returned to sender, including the one from the tax office with your tax number in it.
If the flat is sublet or the bell still shows the previous tenant, write c/o and their surname in your address until the label changes, and ask the Hausverwaltung, the property manager, for new labels. The registration office asks for none of this. The Anmeldung form wants the street, the number & the postcode; the floor and the building are between you and the postman.
The Berliner Zimmer
One room exists only because of this building type. The Berliner Zimmer is the large room at the corner where the front house meets the side wing, and because it sits in that corner it has a single window, angled into the courtyard, and it’s dim at any hour.
In the original layout it was the room the family passed through to reach the wing. In a modern listing it’s often the living room, and a listing that mentions one is telling you the flat turns the corner of the building.
Kiez, Ortsteil, Bezirk
A Berlin address ends in a postcode; a Berliner’s description of the same place ends in a Kiez. Between the two sit the twelve Bezirke, boroughs, in place since a 2001 reform merged the earlier twenty-three, each with its own Bürgeramt & its own town hall.
Below the borough sits the Ortsteil, the district, which is what a local means by Prenzlauer Berg or Moabit. Below that, and on no official map, is the Kiez, the few streets around your own front door.
Reading a listing end to end
Take a listing that reads Musterstraße 12, VH 2. OG li. Find number 12, remembering it can sit across from a number in the hundreds; enter the street door; stay in the front building rather than crossing the courtyard; climb two flights past the Hochparterre, if there’s one, to the second landing; ring the bell on the left.
Nothing on that route is written on a door. That’s why the abbreviations exist, and why the first thing to check when you view a flat is the name on the bell.