Berlin Address Books: How to Find Out Who Lived in Your Building

Sooner or later it happens in every Altbau. You are carrying shopping up the fourth flight of stairs, you look at the worn step, the old tiles, the brass hooks by a door nobody uses, and you wonder who climbed these stairs in 1910. Who lived in your flat, what they did for a living, and whether the back house across the courtyard was there at all.

In Berlin you can usually find out, and much of it is free and online. The Berlin address books list the city house by house for more than a century, the city keeps old aerial photographs of almost every block, and the building authorities hold the original plans. The catch is that every source covers different years, and there is a gap right in the middle of the 20th century where the trail goes cold. This is the order I would search in, and what each record can and cannot tell you.

What the Berlin address books actually list

The Zentral- und Landesbibliothek Berlin has digitised the city's address books, which appeared from 1799, at first in irregular years and from 1822 once a year, until 1943. Most people only use the name part, where you look up a person. The part you want is the street section. In many years the book also lists every street, every house number, and under each house the owner, the property manager and the registered tenants, usually with their job.

That is the whole trick. You do not need a name to start. You need your street and your house number.

The 1799 address book, Brüderstraße. Even the first edition is sorted by street and house.

My move: open the street section of one year, find your number, and write down every name. Then go back ten years and do it again. The year your house first appears with tenants is close to the year it was finished. When the owner's name changes, a page or two later in the name section usually tells you who the new owner was and what they did.

Two things that cost me time the first time. The older books are printed in old German type, so read slowly, and keep the ZLB's notes on using the address books open in a second tab. And streets have been renamed many times, so search under the name your street had back then, not today's. The Landesarchiv Berlin has the official street directories of 1876 to 1919 and of 1930 as PDFs, which tell you the old names.

The gap between 1943 and 1954

Here the trail breaks. The last address book is the 1943 edition. The war, the bombing and the division of the city followed, and the next useful lists are the telephone books, which the ZLB also has online: West Berlin from 1954 to 1991, East Berlin from 1955 to 1989. West Berlin also printed a city directory with a street part in some years from 1957; the digitised run ends in 1970.

Phone books only list people with a phone line. In East Berlin few private flats had one, so an empty result there proves nothing. After 1991 there is no public list of who lives where at all, because registration data is private. For the late 20th century, the building itself is your best record.

Your block from above in 1928

For the question "what did my street look like", the aerial photographs are the best free source Berlin has. In 1928 the city had almost the whole of Berlin photographed from a survey plane at a scale of 1:4,000, and the Geoportal Berlin publishes those flights under an open licence, along with later ones from around 1938, 1953, 1954 and a run of digital colour photos since 2004.

Chamissoplatz in Kreuzberg in 1928. Count the wings around each courtyard.

The same ground in 2026. This quarter came through the war with little damage, which is why it still matches.

Put the two side by side and count the wings around your courtyard. A missing side wing or a flat modern roof between old ones is often a war gap that was filled later. If your house is newer, you see what stood there before it, which is part of its story too. I liked this comparison so much that I made Your Berlin Street in 1928, a print of your own street in 1928 with the same spot today right below it.

Your street from the 1928 survey flight above the same spot today. My Berlin street print, printed to order.

The building file: the one record that dates the house

Address books tell you who lived there. The Bauakte, the building file, tells you about the house itself: the original plans, sections and facade drawings, the permit, the builder, and every later conversion, from a bathroom added decades later to a new flat in the attic.

For a building that still stands, the file sits in the Bauaktenarchiv of your district's building authority. The Service Berlin page sets out the rules: you need a legitimate interest, which owners, people with the owner's authority and property managers have. You bring a land register extract no older than six weeks and ID, and if you are not the owner, a written authority from the owner that also allows photos or copies. The fee starts at EUR 36, with about EUR 25 per file. Book an appointment first.

Front house, side wing and back house often went up in different years, which is why Berlin's courtyards look so mixed. As a tenant, ask your Hausverwaltung before anything else. They often hold copies of the main plans, and they are the ones who can sign the authority for you.

A courtyard off Wilhelmstraße in Kreuzberg. The building file shows which of these wings came first.

If your building is gone and something newer stands on the plot, look at the Landesarchiv instead. It holds about 120,000 building files, mostly for buildings that no longer exist, the oldest from around 1750. Its digitised card index is sorted by street and house number, again under the street name that was valid at the time, and you order a file by email to read it in the reading room.

Who lived here between 1933 and 1945

For these years there is one more source, and it is not easy to read. The Stolpersteine database lists people who lived at Berlin addresses and were persecuted by the Nazi regime, many with a short biography, searchable by street and district.

Stolpersteine in front of Handjerystraße 37 in Friedenau. Each stone names one person who lived in the house.

If you have never looked closely at the stones themselves, I explained how to read the Stolpersteine in a separate post. Search your street, not only your house. The stones in front of a building only mark the people somebody has already researched, and the address books of the 1930s often show more names at the same number. If you find someone, the Koordinierungsstelle Stolpersteine Berlin is the place to ask about a stone.

Which record covers the year you want

The sources overlap in a pattern that is hard to keep in your head, so I put them on one timeline. Type the year you care about, say whether the building still stands, and the tool puts the records in the order I would try them, with what each costs. You can also open the Berlin House History Finder on its own page.

How I would spend one evening on my own building

Start with the free sources, because they answer the most questions for the least effort.

• Twenty minutes in the address books. Pick 1910 or 1930, open the street section, find your house and copy the names. Then go back in steps of ten years until the house disappears.

• Ten minutes with the aerial photos. Find your block in 1928 and today and count the wings.

• Five minutes in the Stolpersteine database for your street.

• One email to your Hausverwaltung asking whether they have the plans, and whether they would sign an authority for the building file.

After one evening you will know roughly when your house was built, who lived on your floor before the First World War, and whether your courtyard looked the same in 1928. That is more than most people in the building know, and it changes the way you climb those stairs.

Image credits

Source and licence details for the 1 photograph used in this article.

A courtyard off Wilhelmstraße in Kreuzberg: Gunnar Klack, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.