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Campaign Report: Tenants’ Unions in Germany, Part Two
M. Nowton
June 18th, 2026
A report from M. Rowton on tenant union organizing in Germany through the Kampagne für eine Sozialistische Partei (KSP). Part 2 of a series of reports on tenant organizing across different countries.
Editor’s note: This report is part of a series of reports examining tenants’ union organizing in different national contexts. The previous report on tenants’ organizing in Chicago can be found here.
When I first speak to Maximilian, it’s the start of February. The winter, which in October felt as though it would be a cold one, has turned out to be unusually mild. As I walk home from work, London is blanketed by a thick gray cloud, which swallows the tip of the Shard building.
Below me, the shapes of men working atop one of the new riverfront buildings appear and disappear, their oversized shadows cast onto a screen behind them, thrown there by sparks from the beams they are cutting.
I agreed to call Maximilian at seven, but I ended up leaving work later than planned. Some drama unfolding in the corridors of our civil service clients meant I had to rewrite a report I sent them last week so it would, in their words, “better reflect the policy team’s current focus.”
As I make it to my bus, a misty rain begins to fall. It’s getting dark, and I wonder whether I’ll have to call Maximilian while walking through the park next to my house. I’d rather not. Even a little rain is enough to send my cracked smartphone into a spasm. As it turns out, I’m lucky. The bus arrives in front of the park earlier than expected, meaning I’ll make it home on time.
I find myself reflecting on what’s been happening around the park over the last few years. The skyline has changed dramatically since I moved here in 2020.
Back then, there were only two major landmarks visible on my walk home. The first was the Shard building. The second, looming closer, was the shell of a brutalist council building: a decaying behemoth scheduled for demolition for the better part of a decade, yet somehow still standing behind a fence, armed with metal spikes and security cameras.
Now these landmarks are joined by new-build high-rises, surrounding the park like a massive, unevenly constructed wall.
I make it through my front door at 7:10 p.m. The flat is unusually quiet. My wife has gone to visit her cousin, leaving behind a pot of now-lukewarm stew and the faint smell of burning incense.
Not quite hungry enough to eat yet, I take off my coat and head into the living room that doubles as my office. When I call, Maximilian is still on his way home from work — which must mean he’s finished late, since Germany is an hour ahead of the UK.
“I don’t have much battery,” he confesses, “but we can talk until I run out.”
Feeling the pressure of time, we quickly cover the background of the KSP and the development of tenant organizing in Germany. It becomes clear that the context in Germany is very different from that of Campaign for a Socialist Party (CSP) members in Chicago and the United States.
One thing Maximilian is keen to make clear from the start is that, although KSP activists play a central role in the organization, the tenants’ union itself operates as an independent entity from the campaign.
“From the beginning,” he says, “the union brought together tenants with a wide range of political views, including many who are not sympathetic to socialism. That political breadth is part of what makes the project meaningful and strong.”
The most noticeable difference is that tenants’ organizing appears to be a central focus of KSP activity in Germany. By contrast, in the United States, my impression is that tenants’ organizing has taken a back seat to organizing around immigration and deportation defense.
As Maximilian explains the history of the KSP, I begin to understand why.
“When the KSP started out back in 2018,” he recalls, “it felt like a quiet moment in German politics — the tail end of the Angela Merkel period. But the housing crisis was just emerging as a political issue. Rents had spiked, and tenants’ protests were becoming common. It seemed like a natural area for us to explore.”
“What we found,” he says, “was that tenants’ organizing was dominated by two kinds of actors. On the one hand, you had the Mietervereine, a group of large, bureaucratic tenant associations with roots going back to the 19th century, now closely tied to the state regulatory system.”
“And on the other hand, you had the newer protest movements, whose focus was mainly on demanding state solutions: stronger regulation, tighter rent controls. That sort of thing.”
The early organizers decided that the KSP would need to operate independently from both.
“Our idea was to help tenants organize using their own resources as a group,” he tells me. “Mostly that still meant using legal rights, but we wanted to break the individualization of the tenants’ rights movement, and the dependency on the state, to show tenants they could organize to solve problems collectively. That’s what led to the founding of the tenants’ union.”
I ask Maximilian how this was initially meant to work in practice, and what role the KSP imagined for itself to avoid being absorbed into either the Mietervereine or the newer protest movements.
“At first,” he says, “we imagined a kind of division of labor. There was dissatisfaction with the old organizations, people felt they couldn’t really deliver, but that’s still where most legal expertise exists. We thought we could build trust and strength among tenants, while referring people to the tenant associations for legal advice.”
“But these organizations are extremely overstretched. We found very quickly there was pressure on us to provide legal advice ourselves.”
As we talk, it becomes clear how powerful the German legal system governing tenancy is, which, Maximilian notes, is more developed than in most other European countries. From the beginning, activity is shaped by this legal framework to a greater extent than in the American context, where organizing remains relatively informal.
“In 2019 we founded the first ‘club,’” Maximilian says. “In Germany it’s very important to create one of these legal entities, because it prevents a single person from being legally targeted or sued.”
By “club,” he means a Verein, a registered association, apparently a standard legal arrangement for grassroots organizing in Germany. Forming a Verein allows the organization to open a bank account, collect dues, hire lawyers and formally represent tenants — all mechanisms intended primarily to protect members.
Another major factor shaping tenant activity in Germany, Maximilian explains, lies in the structure of the rental sector itself.
“The rental sector here is dominated by very large corporate landlords,” he says. “Some private, some state-owned. They often manage what we call settlements, large housing developments with hundreds or even thousands of tenants.” It’s these large settlements, he points out, that became the primary focus of KSP organizing.
Maximilian was among those who helped establish activity in Frankfurt, where organizers first began reaching tenants in these developments.
“At first we struggled to reach people — leafleting didn’t work out so well,” he tells me. “Eventually we started talking to people outside local supermarkets, inviting them to meetings to discuss their problems. That turned out to be surprisingly successful. At our first meeting, 20 or 30 people showed up.”
The group’s first major campaign followed shortly afterward. It centered on contaminated drinking water in a large settlement owned by one of Europe’s biggest corporate landlords. The water system had been colonized by Legionella, bacteria capable of causing a severe form of pneumonia.
The company repeatedly applied cheaper, temporary fixes instead of replacing the contaminated pipes. As a result, the bacteria kept returning.
“The first priority,” Maximilian recalls, “was making tenants aware of the problem. We used membership fees to pay an expert to test the water, then published the results and shared them throughout the settlement.”
Tenants coordinated complaints, demanded transparency from the landlord, pushed for rent reductions and involved local authorities. Sustained pressure forced the issue into the open, eventually compelling the landlord to commit to partial infrastructure repairs.
At this point, Maximilian’s battery runs out. A shame, I think to myself, because I had more questions. But about 10 minutes later, he rings me back. “I don’t have much time left,” he says. “But let’s cover as much ground as we can.”
We shift the conversation forward in time. Rather than continuing chronologically through the early campaigns, we jump ahead to 2020 — the moment when the pandemic arrived and disrupted everything.
“Tenant organizing,” Maximilian tells me, “is a game of trust and fear.”
Tenants worry about retaliation from landlords, organizers worry about legal exposure and both depend on relationships built slowly through repeated in-person contact. “Everyone involved has something to lose,” he explains.
When the pandemic began, those relationships suddenly became harder to sustain.
“The German state restricted in-person meetings very heavily,” Maximilian says. “For organizing purposes, that was extremely disruptive.”
Without the ability to meet face-to-face, much of the union’s activity stalled. The slow, patient work of building trust between tenants ground to a halt. For a time, the organization existed only in name, with minimal activity.
Yet the period after the pandemic produced a reversal.
“When the pandemic first struck in 2020, we had roughly 20 active members,” Maximilian observes. “By 2023 that had grown to around 100. And by 2025, we were at roughly 400. Within a few years, I think we could reach 1,000.”
Growth has brought a geographical shift too. In the early years, Frankfurt was the center of activity. Now organizing has spread south to Munich, where Maximilian lives. From there, the union has begun coordinating activity across multiple German cities.
These increases in membership appear closely connected to the organization’s early victories and the visibility they generated. Successful campaigns, even partial ones, gave the union credibility among tenants who had previously been skeptical that collective action could deliver results.
One of the biggest areas of focus, Maximilian says, has been what are known as “service charges.”
I’m familiar with service charges from the UK context, where they have caused a minor scandal among younger homeowners — particularly those buying into “shared ownership” developments that have started appearing around the park near my flat.
In theory, service charges cover cleaning, trash collection, security systems, heating and other shared building costs. In practice, however, they are often opaque and difficult for residents to challenge.
Maximilian tells me that Germany is facing a similar issue, amplified by the fact that renting from large-scale landlords is much more common there than in the UK. “The inflation crisis pushed these service charges up a lot,” he says. “And often, tenants cannot even tell what services they are paying for.”
Under German law, tenants have the right to demand that landlords provide detailed documentation showing how service charges are calculated. “Tenants can demand proof of the costs,” Maximilian explains. “But many people don’t know that.”
For the union, this has opened up a significant opportunity for organizing. “If you demand proof of the costs, and the landlord does not provide it,” he says, “then tenants can organize to withhold part of the rent.”
The same principle applies to repairs. If a landlord fails to fix damage in a building, such as broken heating systems, mold or leaking pipes, tenants have the legal right to reduce their rent proportionally until the repairs are completed. But exercising these rights individually can be risky.
This is where the collective structure of the union becomes crucial.
“Again,” Maximilian reminds me, “this is a game of fear and trust. To organize something like withholding rent, people need to believe that they can win.” And increasingly, the union has been able to demonstrate that it can produce results.
Compensation has been secured in some buildings where landlords failed to carry out repairs, and rent reductions have been coordinated across groups of tenants facing the same problems. These victories — sometimes small in financial terms — appear to have played an outsized role in convincing other tenants that participation is worthwhile.
Union activity has also begun spreading into a new type of housing environment: large developments owned not by private corporations, but by state-owned housing companies. According to Maximilian, these landlords can be surprisingly aggressive.
“Because of austerity,” he explains, “the state companies can be very hard as landlords. In some ways they behave worse than the private corporations.”
Organizing these developments has become one of the union’s next major frontiers. “Around 2024, with the move into these state-run settlements, we started getting more public attention,” Maximilian recalls. “We were on TV for the first time.”
Listening to Maximilian describe this trajectory, I find myself thinking again about the Chicago case I explored in my previous report. The contrast is striking, almost the reverse.
In Chicago, the CSP organizer I spoke with emphasized avoiding direct conflict with landlords where possible, and working quietly through existing community organizations rather than building new ones. Much of the activity remained informal and deliberately low-profile.
In Germany, by contrast, tenant organizing began outside existing institutions and has gradually grown into a formal organizational structure. Rather than staying hidden, the union has become highly visible, publicly confronting landlords and attracting media attention.
Success in Germany, however, has also brought pressures that the Chicago organizations have not yet had to confront.
“The first real attack,” Maximilian tells me, “came from one of the large private landlords. I think part of it was that we had organized two groups across their buildings in two different cities,” he adds. “That brought us to their attention as a potential problem.”
The main trigger for the attack was likely a press statement issued by the union criticizing the company for failing to carry out repairs in several buildings.
“They went after us legally,” Maximilian recalls. “We received a letter telling us we needed to retract the statement and pay a fine — which was more money than the union had. They gave us five days to respond.”
“I think it was designed to crush us,” he concludes. “And it could have worked. At the time, the union as an organization still had very limited capacity. There were only two or three of us who could organize the defense. We were desperately looking around for an attorney.”
As Maximilian sees it, the psychological dimension of such attacks is not accidental.
“The fear and trust I talked about before — it applies to organizers as well. Legal attacks are scary for people organizing the activity. Obviously, they are designed to have that effect.”
Eventually, the union managed to find a lawyer willing to represent them. The company withdrew its claim, but the episode still inflicted damage. “We lost about 1,000 euros,” Maximilian admits. “For a small organization that’s a lot of money.”
He suspects that might’ve been part of the strategy. “Maybe they thought they could bankrupt us with legal costs.”
I ask Maximilian whether there were further attacks from landlords. He surprises me by saying that the next one came not from a landlord at all, but from one of the Mietervereine, the old tenant organizations. “This one was even worse,” he says. “It got really nasty.”
The conflict arose in a large housing settlement in Munich, where the union had been organizing tenants around inflated service charges. By Maximilian’s account, a large Mieterverein attempted to bypass the union and negotiate directly with the landlord.
“They tried to split off our members and take control of the action,” he tells me. “I think they saw us as a potential disruption. Maybe they thought we were going to steal their members.”
Part of the tension stemmed from the union’s own criticism of the traditional tenant associations. “We told tenants to be careful about trusting them,” Maximilian says. “And they obviously didn’t like that.”
What made the episode particularly striking, as Maximilian describes it, was its timing.
“Just before the attack I thought we were sorting things out. I had a fairly friendly conversation with them, and I mentioned that I was going on holiday in a few days.” That, he says, was exactly when the legal action arrived.
“They essentially argued that we were legal competitors,” Maximilian explains, “and that by criticizing them to the tenants, we had committed slander.”
The union received a legal notice giving them only two or three days to respond, accompanied by the threat of a large financial penalty that again could have crippled the union. I ask Maximilian how the experience felt. “It was unpleasant — very unpleasant.”
While relations with some of the older organizations had always been somewhat strained, he says he never expected such an aggressive move. “The fact that they waited until they knew I was on holiday, that was particularly shocking.”
Once again, the union assembled the funds for legal representation. This time the process was easier, since they had already established a relationship with a lawyer during the earlier dispute. The attack was ultimately beaten back.
Even so, I can hear from Maximilian’s tone that there is still bitterness about the event.
“It was surprising how underhanded it was,” he says. “But in a way it was an important learning experience. We learned something new about reality.”
By this point we’ve been talking for several hours. In the background I can hear my wife returning from visiting her cousin. “We should talk again,” I tell Maximilian. “Yes,” he replies, “it might take a couple of conversations.”
Reflecting on our discussion, I realize I want to understand more about the union’s internal structure — how membership works, how decisions are made and how activity is coordinated across multiple cities.
Heading to the kitchen, I find my wife sitting at the table on the phone with her mother, who usually calls at this time. “Have you had dinner?” I ask. She gives me a silent thumbs-up and I ladle my now-cold stew into a little green bowl.
Putting it into the microwave, I stand there for a moment watching it turn.
Outside the window, the rain is still falling.
This report was contributed by Campaign Reporter M. Nowton (submitted April 1, 2026).
If you’d like to join the Kampagne für eine Sozialistische Partei (KSP) or follow their work, email 2019ksp@gmail.com or visit their website: https://kampagnesozialistischepartei.de/ or Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kampagne_sozialistische_partei.
If you’d like to join the Campaign for a Socialist Party (CSP), become a Campaign Reporter, or read more of our reports, please email us at campaignforasocialistpartyUSA@gmail.com or visit our Substack: https://campaignforasocialistparty.substack.com.
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