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Homeless man in Lueneburg, March 2018
Photo:
Philipp Schulze / picture alliance / dpa
There are no precise figures on how many homeless people there are in Germany.
But you know that they exist and that winter is coming.
And there are no precise figures on how many apartments will be vacant in the long term.
But you know that they exist.
You notice where the journey is going.
You could add one and one together.
Why doesn't this happen?
You can already read something from the unavailability of reasonably accurate figures for both phenomena.
The fact that homeless people are not easy to count is often explained by laypeople by saying that it is hardly possible to count people if they keep changing their whereabouts and are also possibly ashamed.
That is partly true, but on the other hand there are, firstly, attempts to count people, most recently in January 2020 in Berlin, and secondly, it has long been possible for the social sciences to scientifically investigate people's properties of shame, such as addictions or experiences of violence , even if you still have to assume a dark field in addition to the numbers determined.
Margarete Stokowski, arrow to the right
Photo:
Rosanna Graf
Born in 1986, was born in Poland and grew up in Berlin.
She studied philosophy and social sciences and has been working as a freelance writer since 2009.
Her feminist bestseller "Unterrum frei" was published in 2016 by Rowohlt Verlag.
In 2018 "The Last Days of Patriarchy" followed, a collection of columns from SPIEGEL ONLINE and "taz".
In Germany, the number of homeless people has not yet been recorded in any official statistics.
There are only estimates.
According to a resolution by the Bundestag in January, central statistics on homeless people in communal or emergency shelters should be available from 2022, although this is not the same group as the homeless group.
"It is part of the mechanism of rule to forbid the knowledge of the suffering that it produces," wrote Adorno, and that sometimes means quite banally: We don't even want to know how many people lack something fundamental like an apartment or a room .
The phenomenon of homelessness does not explain why the number of homeless people is not known.
It is explained by the common logic of capitalism and neoliberalism, which implies that poverty must be punished because it is likely to be self-inflicted and too much charity would make people lazy.
The number of currently vacant apartments is also not precisely known.
In Berlin, for example, it is theoretically forbidden to leave an apartment unannounced for more than three months.
In practice it doesn't mean very much.
For 2018, the percentage of empty apartments in Berlin was given as 0.8%, which sounds like little at first, but that is almost every hundredth apartment.
And: There are enough options for homeowners to leave their apartments empty without being noticed.
Because property is an obligation according to the Basic Law, but you don't want to be that strict.
Tellingly, homeless people have rarely been in the news during the corona crisis, although there is constant talk about staying at home.
Sometimes it was about them in individual charity campaigns, when people tied bags with donations in kind to so-called gift fences.
That was a little trend in spring, but less now.
There have been isolated efforts to accommodate the homeless in hotels, most recently in Hamburg, interestingly, by the rare combination of left and CDU.
Now, homeless people in Berlin-Mitte have rightly tried to occupy an empty house, and although poor people are always asked to take the initiative, that was not right.
The initiative, which takes care of eight vacant apartments on Habersaathstrasse, is called "Leerstand Hab ich Saath" and pointed out on banners that were attached to the house, among other things, that "Stay at home" is not possible if you don't have one "home" has.
The police ended the operation in the house, which the owner plans to demolish at some point, without much hesitation.
"The self-determined end to homelessness is punished, the years of misappropriation of living space is guaranteed with expensive police operations," said the spokeswoman for the initiative, Valentina Hauser, in the "taz".
District Mayor Stephan von Dassel wrote on Twitter that it was "good to draw public attention to the vacancy rate".
But: "A property can only be confiscated if the authorities cannot organize a roof over their heads for homeless people in another way."
Almost at the same time, the Berlin Senate Department for Integration, Labor and Social Affairs tweeted: "This season, #Berlin will again have 1000 emergency overnight places available for homeless people."
But even the short Berlin counting action in January, the result of which was generally criticized as inadequate, counted almost 2000 homeless people.
It is estimated that there are three to five times as many people.
That means: there is not enough space in the front and back.
It's not a study, but every homeless person you currently meet on the street and with whom you exchange a few sentences says that it has been particularly tough since the pandemic began.
The mere fact that fewer people go to party means fewer returnable bottles on the street and therefore less income.
Some stick their mug, in which they collect money, to a stick to keep a distance.
Many facilities that helped before the pandemic, such as the food banks, had to close temporarily.
It is already the case that the options for taking care of yourself and staying healthy depend on how much money you have, see the prices for simple disposable masks without self-protection and those for FFP2 masks.
"If health costs something, then it is only a basic right for the rich," said author Nicole Schöndorfer in her podcast recently.
For homeless people, this means that they will have to rely on the benevolence of individuals for so long as long as there are no political solutions that address the problem on a larger scale.
One such solution would be to convert vacancies into accommodation, at least for the period of the pandemic.
What would the problem be, except that a few rich people would be briefly patronized, while poor people - see Hartz IV - happens permanently?
The benevolence of individuals to help the homeless is there.
The writer Karen Köhler has been collecting donations for a homeless person in Hamburg on Instagram and Twitter in the past few days.
She didn't share a lot of information about the person, "T.", actually just this: "T. came to Hamburg from Vienna two years ago, she is a good-hearted person who says she took a wrong turn a few times."
Within eight days, she collected 2,700 euros in donations, bought a simple cell phone for the person and secured accommodation for them.
"Tonight she sleeps in a bed for the first time in a long time," she wrote on Instagram.
You probably can't do this for every single homeless person, but it's an example of how pretty much can be done in a fairly short amount of time, and if it gets for a writer with less than 3,500 social media followers, it should be for politics go too.
Otherwise it will be the case again this winter that homeless people will freeze to death on the streets as soon as the temperatures drop, while many apartments are empty.
There will then be short reports in the news about so-called "cold deaths", but when it comes to this, these people will not have died from the cold, but from a policy that protects capital better than life.
If the temperatures remain mild and nothing fundamentally changes politically, climate change will have done more for the homeless in Germany than politics.
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