I’m grateful for my living arrangements after almost nine years of living in Hamburg. Renters are clinging to their apartments for dear life – that’s just the nature of how competitive housing is in Germany’s big cities right now. People rent for the long, long term and primarily only find a new place when their circumstances have changed: baby, new relationship, broken up with partner, leaving Germany altogether.
And I’m especially grateful for not having to check WG-Gesucht every day, as I did when I was flat-hunting and trying to work out a) what was over my budget, b) what seemed like a scam, and c) what was meant by “Zweck-WG.” Looking for flat shares when I first moved, many room criteria would be labelled “Keine Zweck-WG!” You can even filter for this option when you check on flat-share aggregator websites such as WG-Gesucht.
A Zweck-Wohngemeinschaft (“purpose flat-share”) – pronounced “Tsveck-vay-gay” – is a flat-share set-up, in which co-tenants share a flat without the intention of really becoming more than co-tenants. It’s efficiency at its best: you cover your rent; I cover mine. We share a roof over our heads but lead separate lives. We’re not looking for friendship, just someone to share the bills with. The limited conversations with each other might just be about agreeing on cleaning responsibilities and whose shelf belongs to whom in the fridge.
When I went digging through Reddit threads to read about Zweck-WG experiences, I came across this particular bleak Zweck-WG account (translated from German): “It feels like I could be lying dead in the kitchen and my flatmates would only get annoyed that I didn’t take the bins out. I fell down the stairs a while back and screamed the place down, and although everyone was at home, nobody took a second to poke their heads round their bedroom doors to check if I was still alive.”
This is Germany – there are rules
The cliché certainly is that in a Zweck-WG you’ll constantly find passive-aggressive reminders that you didn’t take the bins out or pay the bill on household items you didn’t agree to pay for.
The Zweck-WG isn’t unique to Germany, but it seems to be the only nation that has coined a term for this pragmatic living arrangement. I haven’t found another country in my research that codifies its shared living arrangement with such specificity, even if the concept is global.
Zweck-WGs are no doubt practical for professionals living in any big city. This is especially true for those who are new arrivals and need to settle into their new job, earn some money and decide whether they like the city, while not having to figure out the bureaucracy involved with being a solo tenant in a country where you might not speak the language yet. I will say though: it’s difficult (though not impossible) to secure a solo tenancy without German employment history or a German credit score, which is why flat-sharing is often the easier option for internationals arriving to work and live in Germany.
I was accused of facilitating a Zweck-WG environment back in 2019 in what was to be my final flat-share. I was commuting daily to Ahrensburg, just outside Hamburg, working extra hours on top and spending a lot of time at the gym. I came home one day to an intervention, whereby my head tenant sat me and a fellow flatmate down and told me she had been complaining that I wasn’t doing enough things with her like cooking or hanging out. It was embarrassing being scolded for being “told on” for being an accidental “Zweck-WG” perpetrator, when I had no idea she was feeling this way.
Flat-share politics are always tricky, but it turns out that in Germany, you really have to make an effort to stick to the rules of whether you are a Zweck-WG or not.
A category for everyone
If you’re moving to Germany and are navigating new customs, just pay attention to how you filter your search results on flat-hunting websites. In fact, I’ve just explored WG-Gesucht for the first time since 2019, and there are far more filters for flat-shares than I can remember. I really only remember “Keine Zweck-WGs”. Now I can see a whole host of filters beyond the simple Zweck-WG/Nicht-Zweck-WG binary: from women-only or men-only to veggie/vegan, professionals-only, internationals welcome, LGBTQIA+, WGs with kids and single parents.
This expansion of categories fascinates me – I can imagine the flat-hunting feeling a little more inclusive compared to when I was hunting and going through pains to say I’m English but I promise I can speak German. I am social, but I like my own space and often find socialising in German after work and gym on a weekday draining.
But I am past my flat-sharing days (I hope) and have outgrown them. I learnt a lot. I spoke a lot of German and most definitely saved money in the early years of my career. I eased myself into the bureaucracy of tenancy without being solely responsible for it and shared fond memories with my flatmates during the lockdown of 2020.
If you’re looking for flatshares in Germany, look out for this “(Keine) Zweck-WG” tag. You now know what it entails.
You just have to decide: Do you want to be friends with your flatmates (recommended if you’re moving to a new city) or do you just want a comfortable and pragmatic mutual setup with other tenants that you split the bills with?
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Read more about housing in Germany here in Dispatches’ archives.
See more from Sara here.
Sara Vordermeier
Sara Vordermeier is a Hamburg-based freelance writer and editor specialising in sports, technology and culture stories from her life abroad. Her professional writing experience spans more than seven years in the fields of content marketing, organic search trends and journalism.
