Investigation

Naunynstraße 2019 — The Word Missing from degewo’s Notice

In late 2019, degewo — one of Berlin’s state-owned housing companies — sent a multi-page modernisation notice to tenants in a Kreuzberg block on Naunynstraße. On page 6, the document spoke of the “demolition and disposal of possibly hazardous building components”. The word “asbestos” did not appear. A Berlin court had ruled, two years earlier, that landlords must inform tenants about known asbestos contamination — back to the asbestos ban of 1993.

A modernisation notice with one word missing

The block in question sits in the Mariannenkiez, a central quarter of Berlin-Kreuzberg with significant social housing and steep rent increases — the taz reported in December 2019 that rents on this block were rising by an average of around €1.45 per square metre, with individual increases of up to 28 percent. The modernisation notice that arrived in the residents’ letterboxes at the end of 2019 was long; the local left-leaning daily described it as a lengthy document that needed to be read closely to make sense of. The point that mattered most to the tenants was buried inside.

On page 6, the notice said that the “demolition and disposal of possibly hazardous building components” (in the German original: „ev. schadstoffhaltiger Bauteile“) would be carried out by certified specialist firms according to applicable technical rules. The word Asbest — German for “asbestos” — did not appear. Nor did Asbestsanierung (asbestos remediation). The notice named a contingency and a generic category, but not the specific substance.

Sebastian Bartels, then deputy managing director of the Berliner Mieterverein (the Berlin Tenants’ Association), called the form of the notice “difficult to understand”. He also noted that degewo had not offered the tenants an information meeting — remarking, in a December 2019 taz piece, that this was something “even Vonovia” (Germany’s largest publicly listed private landlord) did by then.

What tenants only learned under pressure

The anonymous tenant voice quoted in the Berliner Mieterverein’s magazine MieterMagazin describes the next step plainly. The tenant asked — “on the advice of my legal counsel at the Berliner Mieterverein” — whether the “possibly hazardous components” meant asbestos. No concrete answer at first. Only after the tenants signalled they would commission their own independent expert did degewo disclose the facts and promise access to the measurement protocols.

The threshold can be read off this single document: degewo did not write the word “asbestos” on the notice, did not write it on first enquiry, and wrote it only when the tenant replied with legal counsel and the threat of an independent expert. Below that threshold, what tenants got was a contingency and a generic category.

A 2018 court ruling that forbade exactly this

On 17 January 2018, the Berlin Regional Court (Landgericht Berlin) had ruled, in case 18 S 140/16, that as a professional landlord, degewo should have recognised — at the latest with the German asbestos ban of 1993 — that asbestos-containing building materials can cause health damage to tenants when disturbed. From this the court derived an independent duty to inform tenants, regardless of whether any damage had already occurred (BeckRS 2018, 4147; see also the German-language case-law overview).

The judgment had been obtained by Sven Leistikow, a Berlin tenancy-law attorney who represents more than 200 tenants in asbestos-related matters. In the MieterMagazin, Leistikow summarised the consequence in a single sentence: „Where asbestos is present in a residential building, this must be communicated to the residents.“

Between that judgment and the Naunynstraße notice lay almost two years. Almost two years in which the wording on this notice was not updated. On the document the Kreuzberg tenants held at the end of 2019 it said: „possibly hazardous building components“.

According to the same MieterMagazin piece, citing a Senate response to Green-party MP Andreas Otto, 48,746 publicly owned Berlin apartments were registered as either contaminated by or suspected of containing asbestos at the end of 2020. Of these, 18,880 belonged to Gewobag and 18,007 to degewo — the second-highest figure among all of Berlin’s state-owned housing companies. By December 2025, degewo’s figure had risen to 23,883 confirmed or suspected apartments (see the Beck-era totals; primary source: parliamentary record Drs. 19/25 368, total of ~58,847 LWU apartments).

18,007 apartments in late 2020. One block of those sat on Naunynstraße. On the letter that went there, the line read: „possibly hazardous building components“.

What degewo was simultaneously claiming in court

Between 2018 and 2021, an unrelated case ran in parallel: a legal-aid application by a degewo tenant from a different block, the PKH proceedings before AG Wedding (case 14 C 250/19). In that proceeding degewo — represented by a mandated crisis-law firm — argued that it had fulfilled its disclosure and duty-of-care obligations. The corresponding written submission is dated 27 June 2019.

In the same months in which that line was being put in writing before a court, a different modernisation notice from the same landlord sat in letterboxes in Kreuzberg. Its wording was: „possibly hazardous building components“. What a party claims about its own practice is tested by its concurrent real-world conduct — not by later self-report. The Naunynstraße notice is dated, archive-grade, and documented in two independent Berlin publications.

The pattern: three addresses, more than a decade, the same script

The Naunynstraße is not an isolated case. It is one date in a sequence that runs to the present day and that we document on the case files page:

Three addresses. More than a decade. Three documents in which the relevant word is either missing or arrives late. The pattern reaches across different districts, different building stocks, and different boards of management.

A wider European pattern

The gap between what social landlords know about asbestos and what they tell tenants is not unique to Berlin. In London, on 20 February 2025, the Housing Ombudsman made a severe maladministration finding — its most serious category — against One Housing, a major London social landlord. The investigation followed a leak and a collapsed ceiling in the home of a resident and her child; repairs took 14 months, and the landlord did not have accurate, up-to-date records of asbestos in the property. The Ombudsman then ordered a wider review of the landlord’s asbestos record-keeping. That review unearthed over 800 incorrect entries on the landlord’s asbestos register: properties listed as no-risk where no data existed, and properties listed as high-risk where outdated data had never been removed.

Different country, different system, different document — but the same gap between what a social landlord holds in its records and what its tenants are actually told. Naunynstraße 2019 belongs to that wider European story.

What tenants can do when their notice says ‘possibly hazardous’

If you live in a Berlin apartment built before 1993 and receive a modernisation notice with wording such as “possibly hazardous building components”, “contaminated materials”, or “hazardous remediation”, three steps are worth taking:

  1. Ask in writing. A short email or registered letter (Einschreiben) asking explicitly: do the components named in the notice contain asbestos? Demand the answer in writing, with date, signature, and reference to the landlord’s internal record.
  2. Request the measurement protocols. If the landlord itself speaks of hazardous-substance remediation, there are internal surveys or expert reports. Tenants have an information interest — the Berlin tenant rights guide explains how this can be pursued in practice.
  3. Get advice. The Berliner Mieterverein or a tenancy-law specialist with documented asbestos cases. Since 1 January 2026, German hazardous-substance law (GefStoffV) presumes the presence of asbestos in any building built before October 1993, until proven otherwise — a baseline that strengthens the tenant’s position. The EU dimension is covered in our analysis of the EU Asbestos Directive 2023/2668; the cross-border benchmark in our France/Poland comparison.

The tenant who takes that step writes a letter containing the word that did not appear on the notice: Asbest. With that letter the ball is in the landlord’s court. The written reply — or its absence — becomes evidence for any later dispute.

Sources