Unfinished Collapse: Provenances of the Am Strom 53 Houses

Abstract: The provenance of the half-timbered house Am Strom 53 in Warnemünde, Germany, is noteworthy not only for the brief tenancy by Edvard Munch between 1907 and 1908, but because its four-hundred-year-plus itinerary as a property object charts an intricate trajectory through Northern Germany's shifting property regimes: (pre)feudal, Hanseatic, fascist, communist, and neoliberal. Drawing on archival and on-site investigations, the article reconstructs how Am Strom 53 has reproduced, resisted, and short-circuited these changing regimes of ownership for the better part of five centuries. Taking a cue from recent theories of infrastructure as "that which repeats," the article proposes that provenance research gains critical purchase when the legal infrastructures that define property relations break down. This opens apertures onto the patterned repetitions that, at different historical junctures, have sustained and conditioned relationships to buildings as property. In the case of Am Strom 53, one such aperture is opened by the slow, sputtering collapse of the property form known as the house mark : an ancient legal symbol that has periodically resurfaced to haunt both the house and the German property system at large.