Ein Lebensabend hoch über den Höfen
At 90 years of age, Petra Schauf is the oldest resident of the Hackesche Höfe. We visit her in a small attic flat with a view over the rooftops of Berlin-Mitte. In the late 1990s, this was exactly where she wanted to live – and she is still delighted to call it home.
Petra Schauf welcomes us in good spirits and with an alert gaze – even though she had a bad fall a few days before our visit. Bruises cover half of her face – which has retained its beauty even in old age. In her barrier-free flat, she prefers to move about without using the walking frame standing ready nearby.
A Home with a Backstory
Petra Schauf, who was born and has been living in Berlin for most of her life, moved from the western part of the city to the Hackesche Höfe in 1998. That decision had deep roots reaching back to her childhood.
During the Second World War, Schauf’s family was bombed out of their home and allowed to choose replacement furniture from a warehouse. It was only much later that she learned from her mother that these were ‘Jewish furniture’ – furniture belonging to Jewish families who had been deported to extermination camps. This realisation moved and shaped her deeply. It sparked a lifelong interest in the history of German Jews.
After the reunification of the city, this interest drew her to Mitte, to the Spandauer Vorstadt, once the heart of Jewish life in Berlin. In the 18th and 19th centuries, it had become the preferred residential area of the city’s Jewish community; around the New Synagogue, numerous other Jewish institutions were established.
For forty years, Petra Schauf worked as a secretary at the Free University of Berlin before retiring at sixty. Before the Berlin Wall was built, she befriended people living in the eastern part of the city and witnessed how some of them were persecuted or imprisoned for years because of their opposition to the regime. Her friendships and ties to East Germany endured throughout the decades of division.
At the Free University she also met a circle of young men active in the student council, many of whom would later rise within Berlin’s CDU, including Eberhard Diepgen, who would go on to become Governing Mayor. One of his colleagues – unfortunately already married, and later to serve as Senator of the Interior – became her great love and the father of her son.
Petra Schauf, who as a teenager had marched ‘behind the red flag’ with the socialist youth organisation, the Falken, joined the CDU – and has remained a loyal member ever since, for fifty-five years.
The politicisation and student unrest of the late 1960s, which she experienced first-hand at the university, only reinforced her conservative outlook – even though she remembers the then leader of the revolutionary students, Rudi Dutschke, as “a friendly young man.”
After taking early retirement in 1998 for health reasons, Petra Schauf wanted to downsize. She also hoped to move from Charlottenburg to Mitte – to the neighbourhood she had read so much about and which is so closely connected with Jewish history in Berlin: the Spandauer Vorstadt.
One day, as she was strolling through the Hackesche Höfe, a man approached her and said, “Madam, may I help you?” He could indeed – he worked for the property management company at the time. And so Petra Schauf effortlessly found a new home in her desired location: a one-room flat that had served as accommodation for craftsmen and construction workers during the renovation of the courtyards.
In the 1990s, moving to the other side of town was still a big step. “My friends in Dahlem thought I was mad,” she recalls, amused.
But Petra Schauf has never regretted the move. She felt at home in the Hackesche Höfe from the very beginning – and well looked after by the property management company. When walking became more difficult, they offered her, unprompted, a new flat – in the only building within the courtyards equipped with a lift. She still lives there today – happy to be able to stay in the Hackesche Höfe despite her limited mobility.
From her small balcony, she can see far across the rooftops of Mitte. ‘I spend the whole summer here,’ she says, letting her gaze wander over the city.