1.5 million in the East, a 1983 law in the West — the two gardens that division made

That small gardens survived on both sides of the Wall is well known. Our earlier country report on Germany drew the contrast in a single paragraph: in the East a food source supplementing the planned economy, in the West a place of weekend leisure and horticulture. But that summary drops the thing that matters. The gardens survived on both sides for different reasons. What protected the eastern gardens was one organisation and a party line; what protected the western ones was a single statute and the numbers and dates written into it. An organisation can be dissolved. A statute moves only through an amendment procedure. What survived 1990 and what did not follows from that difference.

Within this series, today's remit is the contrast between law and organisation. Day two took up the allotment ordinance of 1919, day four the Nazi reorganisation of the movement. Today follows the forty years in which both lineages walked separate roads because the country was split. The material is the VKSK's membership and plot counts, sections 1, 3, 5, 9 and 14 of the Federal Allotment Garden Act, the Federal Court of Justice's 2004 judgment, and then section 20a as inserted by the Unification Treaty together with the 1994 adjustment act. It is a day of figures and section numbers — but the reason German gardens are hard to clear is written nowhere else.

The VKSK's predecessor was the allotment garden assistance body set up under a regulation of 23 November 1948 by the Free German Trade Union Federation (FDGB). It was granted charitable status on 20 March 1950; in 1952 the SED Politburo approved its separation from the FDGB and the formation of the VKSK, and a central association constituted itself on 16 October. On 11 May 1953, however, the SED Central Committee rejected it and pushed the structure back down to district level. The VKSK as a centralised independent organisation only actually came into being, after a Council of Ministers regulation of 22 April 1954, at the founding congress held in Leipzig on 28–29 November 1959. As the name says, it bound allotment gardeners, settlers and small livestock breeders into one body.

The scale shows in the figures. Membership stood at roughly 850,000 in 1962 and about 1.49 million in 1988. By 1989 it covered more than 830,000 plots across some 60,000 hectares, through about 17,500 local branches and around 3,000 branch clubhouses. The German Federal Archives' finding aid for the VKSK records (DY 14) estimates that about 3.5 million East German citizens were in regular contact with the organisation. It had just three chairmen across its life: Karl Stein (1959–70), Herbert Uhlendahl (1970–88) and Horst Laschinski (1988–90). Three chairmen in thirty-one years says a good deal about what kind of body this was.

What the VKSK held together was not only vegetable plots. Inside the organisation sat specialist sections for poultry, rabbits, ornamental birds, exotic birds, canaries, fur animals, goats and dairy sheep, pedigree dogs and cats, and bees. According to the Federal Archives finding aid, members produced eggs, meat, furs, honey, fruit, vegetables and flowers, and whatever exceeded their own consumption was bought up by the state, contributing substantially to supplying the population. The eastern allotment, in other words, was not a registry for a hobby but a production unit wired into the supply plan. Holding a plot was also a practical way of getting scarce fresh goods into the household.

The system pushed the gardens along too. The GDR Civil Code, passed on 19 June 1975 and in force from 1 January 1976, granted citizens usage rights over state-owned land and made those rights both transferable and heritable — the legal ground on which the weekend dacha spread. And after the SED adopted a new programme at its Ninth Party Congress on 22 May 1976, social recognition and support for allotment gardeners visibly strengthened. Seven years before the West wrote its statute, in other words, a party congress was doing the same job in the East.

Here is where East and West part. What protected the eastern garden was a party line and one organisation carrying that line down to the ground. Neither plot size nor shed size nor rent was fixed in the way a federal statute fixes things. Protection worked as long as the organisation worked, and would vanish with it. That is exactly what happened in 1990. The moment the VKSK dissolved, the East's 830,000 plots had nothing left holding them up — which is why the western statute had to be brought in.

The West chose a statute rather than an organisation. The Federal Allotment Garden Act (Bundeskleingartengesetz, BKleingG) was enacted on 28 February 1983 and, as section 22 provides, came into force on 1 April that year. Section 1 defines the allotment: a garden for non-commercial horticultural use — above all the winning of garden produce for one's own needs — and for recreation, situated within a site made up of several individual gardens and shared facilities. Section 1(2) then excludes a garden used by the owner or their household, a garden attached to a dwelling, a garden granted with employment, land contractually restricted to particular crops, and Grabeland, where only annuals may be grown. The drafting decides first what an allotment is not.

The numbers are in section 3. Subsection 1: an allotment should not be larger than 400 square metres. Subsection 2 permits a simply built shed (Laube) of up to 24 square metres of floor area including a covered seating area, and adds that by its construction — its fittings and interior in particular — it must not be suitable for permanent dwelling. Note the difference in force: subsection 1 uses the guiding formula soll nicht, should not, while the 24 square metres of subsection 2 is a ceiling that may not be exceeded. Two numbers side by side in one section, with different strengths. The 400 is a benchmark; the 24 is a line.

The rent ceiling sits in section 5(1): the most that may be demanded as rent is four times the locally customary rent in commercial fruit and vegetable growing. The ceiling is not a market price for building land but an agricultural rent multiplied by a factor. Section 5(3) lets either party give notice of an adjustment towards that ceiling, but the change takes effect only from the first day of the payment period following the expiry of three years, and the tenant may terminate if the landlord raises the rent. People can tend the same plot for decades regardless of income — the earlier report stated that as a fact; this subsection, together with the termination rules below, is why it is true.

A rent cap alone would leave a landowner free to end the lease and put the land to another use. This act keeps the land because it tightens the other side: termination. Section 9(1) limits ordinary termination to six grounds. First, breach of duty — continuing non-horticultural use despite a written warning, for instance. Second, reorganising the site: changing plot sizes, improving paths, creating recreational space. Third, the owner or a member of their household wanting to garden the land themselves. Fourth, planning law permitting another use where continued horticultural use would cause substantial economic disadvantage. Fifth, promptly putting the land to the other use fixed in a development plan. Sixth, land needed under a planning approval procedure or the land procurement act. That the list is closed is itself the protection.

The procedure is finer still. Section 9(2) allows termination to take effect only on 30 November. For the first ground, notice must be given by the third working day in August; for grounds two to six, by the third working day in February. For grounds five and six alone there is a faster route: notice on the third working day of any month, effective at the end of the following month. Subsection 3 bars termination on grounds three and four where the lease runs for a fixed term. Section 11 then entitles the tenant, when terminated on grounds two to six, to compensation for plantings and installations they brought in or took over for payment. Whoever clears a garden must wait for the date, serve the paper, and then pay.

The decisive one is section 14. When a permanent allotment — a Dauerkleingarten, defined in section 1(3) as an allotment on land designated for permanent allotments in a development plan — is terminated on ground five or six of section 9(1), the municipality must provide or procure suitable replacement land, unless it is unable to meet the obligation. Clear a garden for housing or a road and the municipality must, as a rule, build a garden again somewhere else. The cost of rebuilding a garden is loaded onto the cost of developing. If one had to name a single reason fields remain in German cities, this replacement-land duty does more work than the rent cap.

The one-third our earlier report described — roughly a third of the plot expected to be given over to fruit and vegetables — appears nowhere in the law. It comes from the Federal Court of Justice's judgment of 17 June 2004, case III ZR 281/03, headed: price control of allotment rent in the accession territory — the concept of an allotment site. This, in other words, was a rent dispute in the former East Germany. The fourfold ceiling of section 5(1) applies only if the land is an allotment site. So the question of how much vegetable growing makes an allotment is not a question of appearance or of spirit; it is a question of how much the landowner may charge.

The facts are from Thuringia. The claimant owned a plot of 6,129 square metres, of which 525 lay inside the site of the defendant association, which sublets parcels to its members. The site comprises 20 parcels, 17 of them gardened. The claimant argued that on 3 October 1990, the day accession took effect, those parcels had been overwhelmingly ornamental gardens, so the site had no allotment character and the rent was not bound by section 5(1). Suhl Local Court (30 January 2003) and Meiningen Regional Court (1 September 2003) both dismissed him, but the Federal Court of Justice set the appeal judgment aside and remitted the case.

The court then laid down three holdings. First, an allotment site does not require that at least half its area be used for winning garden produce for one's own needs, fruit and vegetables above all. Second, it suffices that such use substantially shapes the character of the site. Third, that is as a rule to be assumed where at least a third of the area is used to grow garden produce for one's own needs — though particular circumstances, such as an atypical parcel size, topographic peculiarities, or soil quality that partly rules out growing useful plants, can justify a different assessment. Two things deserve attention. The third is measured across the whole site, not each parcel. And it is a rule of thumb, not a statutory figure, and moves with the circumstances.

The procedure ran like this. In the East a new Association of Garden and Settler Friends (VGS) was formed on 7 July 1990, and the VKSK itself, at an extraordinary congress in Berlin on 27 October 1990, resolved to dissolve with effect from 31 December that year. The organisation ends there; its district federations turned into individual garden clubs and joined the all-German federation of garden friends. The legal side was handled by the Unification Treaty of 31 August 1990. Annex I, chapter XIV, section II, number 4 provided that after section 20 the following section 20a be inserted, and together with an accompanying law of 23 September 1990 it wrote transitional provisions into the Federal Allotment Garden Act. Section 20a, number 1: allotment use relationships established before accession took effect and not yet ended are governed from that moment by this act.

What matters is that the western numbers were not simply dropped on top. Section 20a, number 2, provides that a use contract concluded before accession is to be treated as a lease for a permanent allotment where the municipality owned the land at accession or acquired it later. Many eastern gardens landed in the strongest protective category without any procedure at all. Number 6 grants a grace period, raising rents towards the ceiling in three steps in 1994, 1996 and 1998, with arrears payable in instalments. Number 7 permits lawfully erected sheds that exceed the size limit, and the keeping of small livestock in allotment areas, to continue. Number 8 keeps valid any right of permanent residence in a shed acquired before accession, subject to reasonable additional payment to the lessor. The West's two lines — 24 square metres, no living in the shed — came with exemptions for the East from the very start.

Gardens that were not allotments — dachas and weekend recreation plots — were caught by a different law. The Adjustment of Contractual Obligations Act of 21 September 1994 came into force on 1 January 1995, covering contracts concluded in the former GDR for allotment use, recreation or leisure, and for garages and other structures not serving residential purposes. Its section 23 stages the protection. Until 31 December 1999 the landowner may not terminate at all. From 1 January 2000, only for housing construction or a use fixed in a development plan. From 1 January 2005, also for the owner's own recreational or allotment use, where exclusion would be unreasonable. From 4 October 2015, under the general rules. But where the user had turned sixty on 3 October 1990, no termination is permitted during that person's lifetime. Unification was processed over twenty-five years, by dates written into statute.

Retrace today's path. It began with an observation: the same small garden was protected by different machinery in East and West. In the East one vast organisation held the gardens together and they functioned as the far end of the planned economy's fresh-produce supply. In the West a single statute, passed in 1983, fixed area, use, rent and termination procedure in numbers and dates. From there the article went down into the clauses, found that the termination rules and the replacement-land duty do more to keep the land than the rent cap does, established that the one-third rule is not statute but a judicial rule of thumb born of a rent case in the East, and finally followed how unification in 1990 was handled through two separate procedures: dissolving an organisation and inserting a section.

Three things worth restating, with figures and names. First, the scale in the East: the VKSK, founded in Leipzig on 28–29 November 1959, counted about 850,000 members in 1962 and roughly 1.49 million in 1988, and by 1989 held more than 830,000 plots on some 60,000 hectares through about 17,500 branches. Second, the statute in the West: enacted 28 February 1983 and in force from 1 April, with section 3 setting 400 and 24 square metres, section 5(1) capping rent at four times the local commercial fruit-and-vegetable rate, section 9 fixing 30 November as the only termination date, and section 14 imposing the replacement-land duty on municipalities for permanent allotments. Third, the procedure of unification: the treaty of 31 August 1990 inserted section 20a, preserving the East's oversized sheds and existing residence rights, and the adjustment act of 21 September 1994 protected the gardens that were not allotments, in stages, until 4 October 2015.

The uncertainties belong on the record. First, output in the East: the Federal Archives finding aid records that eggs, meat, furs, honey, fruit, vegetables and flowers were bought up by the state and contributed to supply, but annual quantities could not be verified here. Second, the counts do not reconcile. More than 830,000 plots on some 60,000 hectares in the East alone in 1989 sits oddly beside the roughly 960,000 plots on 44,000 hectares for all of Germany reported by the Federal Institute for Research on Building, Urban Affairs and Spatial Development (BBSR) from its 2017–18 study — the areas invert. The likely reason is a difference in definition, in how far dachas and recreation plots are counted, but that has not been confirmed. Third, causation. The five eastern states excluding Berlin hold only 15 per cent of Germany's population yet more than half its allotments, at four plots per 100 inhabitants (five in Saxony) against 0.5 in the western area states. Whether that is the VKSK's legacy or a matter of housing type and spare land is not something this article separates out. A Bundestag report of 23 June 2021 (hib 826/2021) records that the roughly 1.3 million parcels of 1990 have fallen to about 900,000, with some 65,000 standing empty. Statute made gardens hard to clear; it could not make people come.

Today's place in this series is the end point of the thread called protection by law. Day two took the 1919 ordinance, day four the Nazi reorganisation, and today the contrast between an eastern organisation and a western statute. What has been established so far is that what kept the gardens was not individual enthusiasm but clauses and organisations. Tomorrow, day six, goes outside that. The Munich foundation anstiftung links a thousand community gardens — more than 400 of them intercultural — that belong neither to the Federal Allotment Garden Act nor to the club structure. Their land is provisional, on one-year leases, with no rent cap and no replacement-land duty. Can a network hold what a statute cannot? Read tomorrow against the strength of section 14 as set out today, and both the weakness and the strength of that answer come into focus.