Museumswohnung WBS 70

The WBS 70 Museum Apartment is located on the ground floor of an occupied prefabricated building on Hellersdorfer Straße, showcasing a complete GDR apartment from 1986 across 61 square meters. Wall unit, color TV, and even the salt shaker are still in place. A Hellersdorf resident, who knows the prefab building from personal experience, guides visitors through the three rooms.

WBS 70 Museum Apartment: A Prefabricated Building Apartment from 1986

The WBS 70 Museum Apartment is located in Hellersdorf, on the ground floor of a very ordinary residential block on Hellersdorfer Straße, a five-minute walk from Cottbusser Platz U-Bahn station. From the outside, nothing indicates that a museum is hidden behind the door on the right, and that’s precisely its charm, as people still live in the same layouts all around. The apartment was opened in February 2004, and the owner is the “Stadt und Land” housing association. Three rooms over 61 square meters, then costing 109 Marks in rent per month, were considered a coveted home in the GDR because they offered district heating, hot water, a private bathroom, and a balcony. In Hellersdorf alone, around 42,000 apartments of this type were built, and for Marzahn, Hohenschönhausen, and Hellersdorf combined, the government planned 91,400 new apartments in just over ten years. The term WBS stands for Wohnungsbauserie (Housing Construction Series), and the number 70 for the design year.

From Salt Shaker to Wall Unit: Living in a Prefab Building

Inside, time has stood still in 1986. In the living room, there’s a wall unit with a glass collection and color TV; in the kitchen, patterned curtains hang over the countertop; in the bedroom, there’s the typical bedspread; and even the salt shaker on the table and the radiators on the wall are part of the original furnishings. A large part of the furniture was donated by tenants from the neighborhood, which is why there are no museum-quality showpieces here, but rather items that were genuinely used. Wolfgang Sawatzki, a resident of Hellersdorf, personally guides visitors through the rooms and recounts how daily life in the prefab building functioned. The apartment type itself was designed by architects Wilfried Stallknecht and Achim Felz in 1970 and assembled from six-meter-long prefabricates, so an apartment could be erected in about 18 hours. The WBS 70 Museum Apartment is considered today to be Berlin’s last fully original GDR prefabricated apartment. Thousands of apartments of the same type still stand all around, where people live normal lives.