German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism

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G ERM A N CIT IE S AN D B O U RG E OI S M O D E R N I S M , 1890–1924

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German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism, 1890–1924 M A I K E N U M B AC H

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With ofﬁces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Maiken Umbach 2009

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Umbach, Maiken. German cities and bourgeois modernism, 1890–1924 / Maiken Umbach. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–19–955739–4 (alk. paper) 1. Cities and towns—Germany—History. 2. City and town life—Germany—History. 3. Modernism (Aesthetics)—Germany—History. 4. Material culture—Germany—History. 5. Architecture—Germany—History. 6. Middle class—Germany—History. 7. Germany—Social conditions—1871–1918. 8. Germany—Social conditions—1918–1933. 9. Germany—Politics and government—1871–1918. 10. Germany—Politics and government—1918–1933. I. Title. HT137.U49 2009 307.760943—dc22 2009010607 Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in and bound in the UK on acid-free paper by MPG Biddles Ltd, King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–955739–4 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Acknowledgements I would like to take this opportunity to thank the many people who have helped me write this book. My ﬁrst debt of gratitude is to my students and colleagues at the University of Manchester, who listened to, commented on and criticized many of my historical ramblings, in classrooms, research seminars, over coffee, and during long, wine-fuelled dinner parties. As I cannot list them all here, the names of Patrick Joyce, Stuart Jones, Stefan Berger, Matthew Jefferies, Leif Jerram and Bertrand Taithe must stand for many others: each with a radically different perspective, they all inﬂuenced this work in different ways, although I am sure each of them will ﬁnd much to criticize in the ﬁnished account. Equally important to the long-winded intellectual evolution of this book were colleagues and friends from further aﬁeld, who provided advice on the actual manuscript, or shaped the ideas that inform it. It is impossible to thank them all, but I do want to single out some particularly inspirational individuals. They are Alon Conﬁno, Michael Saler, Bernd Hüppauf, Geoff Eley, Paul Betts, Celia Applegate, Christopher Clark, Andrew Bonnell, Katja Zelljadt, Kevin Repp, Katherine Pence, Jennifer Jenkins, Andy Daum, David Blackbourn, Mary Fulbrook, Tim Blanning, Joachim Whaley, Hagen Schulze, Dieter Langewiesche, Nebahat Avcioglu, Nick Baron, Chris Otter, Dorothee Brantz, Thomas Lekan and Nigel Rothfels. I also beneﬁted from several visiting fellowships while working on this book, which helped expose my thinking to new inﬂuences, and which were kindly offered by the Humanities Research Institute of the Australian National University in Canberra, the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard, the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, the German Department of University College London, and the Berliner Kolleg für Vergleichende Geschichte Europas. For a book this long in the making, it is hardly surprising that the research that went into it was supported by the generosity of a whole range of bodies and institutions. A small research grant from British Academy, research leave funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board, a Philip Leverhulme Prize, and the ESRC-funded Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) at Manchester, all provided vital ﬁnancial support that enabled me to take time off from teaching duties and concentrate on the research, thinking and writing that made this book possible. I also wish to thank the staff of the various archives and libraries where I conducted my research: the Werkbund Archiv in Berlin, the Document-Center Berlin, the Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, the Bunderarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde, the Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Harvard University Library, the Staatsbibliothek Berlin, the Staatsund Universitätsbibliothek Hamburg, Cambridge University Library, the John

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Rylands University Library in Manchester, and the British Library. Aspects of Chapter 2 appeared in articles published in Representations and the American Historical Review, aspects of Chapter 3 in National Identities. Many other individuals inﬂuenced my thinking along the way. To my parents, Horst and Elke Umbach, I owe a special debt of gratitude, for unfailing emotional support over many decades, for their unwavering enthusiasm for all my academic projects, but most of all, for teaching me how to appreciate and interpret images and architecture. Joachim Voth encouraged me to widen my academic horizons, and without him, I would never have got round to organizing fascinating academic visits to Australia, the United States and Spain. A born-again economist largely immune to the charms of cultural history, he offered much constructive opposition to my work. David Laven, my husband, has been my most patient historical interlocutor, his unremitting empiricism notwithstanding. He stayed up for several nights correcting the ﬁnal version of the manuscript, much to the detriment of the completion of his own. That he saw ﬁt to adorn the pages with caricatures of ‘iconic houses’ and historians falling into ‘teleological traps’ may have slowed his progress somewhat. Together, I am sure we drove our editors at Oxford University Press, Christopher Wheeler and Matthew Cotton, to despair; they are to be commended all the more for their patience, efﬁciency and generosity. This book is dedicated to my children, Caspar Horst and Vincent Peter Umbach Laven.

Contents List of Figures 1. Introduction

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2. The Sense of Time: Configuring History and Memory in the City

27

3. The Sense of Place: Representing the Local in the Modern City

64

4. Nature and Culture: Greening the City

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5. The Designed Object: Commercial Culture and the Global Market

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6. Liberal Governmentality and the Spatial Politics of ‘B¨urgerlichkeit’

168

7. Conclusion and Epilogue: Bourgeois Modernism and National Socialism

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Bibliography Index

223 247

List of Figures 1. Strafgerichtsgeb¨aude (Criminal Court), 1879, ‘Forum of Justice’ (Sievekingplatz), Hamburg. Photo: MU.

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2. Hanseatisches Oberlandesgericht (Hanseatic High Court), 1903, by Lundt and Kallmorgen, ‘Forum of Justice’, Hamburg. Photo: MU. 38 3. Clio and other allegorical f igures, detail of Oberpostdirektion (Post Off ice Headquarters), 1883, Stephansplatz, Hamburg. Photo: MU.

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4. Justicia, by Arthur Bock, detail of Hanseatic High Court, Hamburg. Photo: MU. 40 5. Allegories representing the three Hanseatic cities, by Arthur Bock, park in front of Hanseatic High Court, Hamburg. Photo: MU. 42 6. Haus Scholvien, 1904, by Lundt and Kallmorgen, Hamburg, detail of fac¸ade. Photo: MU.

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7. Oberpostdirektion, Hamburg, detail: column in the fac¸ade. Photo: MU.

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8. Hans Vredeman de Vries, Das ander Buech, Gemacht auf die zway Colonnen, Corinthia und Composita, Antwerp, 1565, plate 12.

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9. Haus Kirdorf, 1901, by Lundt and Kallmorgen, for the Rhenish-Westphalian Coal Syndicate, Hamburg. Photo: MU.

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10. Haus Freudenberg, 1907, by Hermann Muthesius, Berlin-Zehlendorff, from: Hermann Muthesius, Landh¨auser, Munich, 1912, f ig. 237, p. 155.

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11. Haus Freudenberg, rear view with terraced garden. Photo from the Stoedtner-Archiv No. 72529, reproduced with kind permission of Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.

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12. Crematorium, 1906, by Peter Behrens, Hagen-Delstern. Photo: MU.

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13. Crematorium, rear view. Photo: MU.

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14. Wireless Transmission Station, 1906, by Hermann Muthesius, Nauen. Photo: MU.

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15. Town Hall, 1885, collective design by the ‘Hamburger Baumeisterbund’, Hamburg. Photo: MU.

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16. Trade Union Hall, 1905, by Heinrich Krug, Hamburg, illustration from Hamburger Gewerkschaftskartell, ed., Ein F¨uhrer durch das Hamburger Gewerkschaftshaus, Hamburg, 1914, p. 6.

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17. Oberschulbeh¨orde (Education Authority Headquarters), 1911, by Fritz Schumacher, Hamburg, drawing by the architect, from: Moderne Bauformen: Monatsheft f¨ur Architektur und Raumkunst 11 (Stuttgart, 1911), p. 549.

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List of Figures

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18. Haus Salomon Bondy, 1908, by Hans and Oskar Gerson, Hamburg-Othmarschen. Photo: MU.

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19. Doorway of apartment block, Haynstraße 3–4, 1923, by Hans and Oskar Gerson, Hamburg. Photo: MU.

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20. Haus Muthesius, by Hermann Muthesius, view from the Rehwiese, from: Hermann Muthesius, Landh¨auser, Munich, 1912, ﬁg. 251, p. 167.

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21. Johannes Ludovicus Mathieu Lauweriks, Perspective drawing of houses on the Stirnband, advertising prospectus for the Hohenhagen housing colony, 1912. 103 22. Villa Hohenhof, 1907, by Henri van de Velde, designed for Karl Ernst Osthaus, Hohenhagen. Photo: MU. 104 23. Prospectus for the Garden City Hellerau near Dresden, 1911, featuring streets nos. 2, 3, 4 and 19, with houses by Hermann Muthesius. 116 24. Factory building with gatehouse, Deutsche Werkst¨atten, 1909, by Richard Riemerschmid, Hellerau. Photo: MU.

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25. Hamburg Stadtpark, 1911, overall conception by Fritz Schumacher. Aerial view photographed in 1925, by kind permission of bildarchiv-hamburg.de. 123 26. Water Tower (now Planetarium), 1915, by Oscar Menzel, Hamburg Stadtpark. Photo: MU. 123 27. Canalized Alster river, overall conception by Fritz Schumacher, 1911, Hamburg, view of granite wall at Alsterkr¨uger Kehre. Photo: MU. 126 28. Canalized Alster river, view of basin with pavilion. Photo: MU.

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29. ‘Diana on a deer’, 1910, by Georg Wbra, Hamburg Stadtpark. Photo: MU.

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30. Negro with spear and shield, bronze statue in front of Afrikahaus, headquarters of Woermann shipping line, 1898, Reichenstraßenﬂeet, Hamburg. Photo: MU. 133 31. Entrance gateway of Hagenbeck’s Tierpark, 1907, with sculpture of a Nubian by Rudolf Franke and animal sculptures by Josef Pallenberg, Hamburg. Photo: MU. 135 32. Putto or Genius adorning garden fountain, by August Henneberger, Haus Bondy, Hamburg-Othmarschen. Photo: MU.

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33. Apulian Volute-krater, c.330–300 bc, attributed to the Painter of Berlin F3383, detail of neck (obverse side). Reproduced courtesy of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Photo Archives. 138 34. Advertisement for Sussex Rush-Seated Chairs, from the Morris and Co. catalogue, 1900.

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35. Wardrobe, 1682. Reproduced from: Konrad H¨useler, Hamburgisches Museum f¨ur Kunst und Gewerbe: Bildf¨uhrer, Hamburg, 1938, p. 85. 159

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36. Interior with so-called ‘machine furniture’, by Richard Riemerschmid, exhibit at the Third German Arts and Crafts Exhibition, Dresden, 1906, from: Dresdner Hausger¨at: Preisbuch, section ‘Einrichtung I’, Dresden, 1906, p. 18. 160 37. Diesel locomotive, by Walter Gropius, for the Prussian state railways, 1913, from: Die Kunst in Industrie und Handel, Jahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbundes, Jena, 1913.

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38. ‘Der Grus/La reverence’, by Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki, in the series ‘Natural and Affected Acts of Life’, from: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki, Der Fortgang der Tugend und des Lasters: G¨ottinger Taschenkalender, G¨ottingen, 1779, plates 9 and 10. 170 39. Hermann Muthesius, ‘Musikzimmer’, woodcut, from: Almanach: Velhagen und Klasings Monatshefte, Year One, Berlin, Bielefeld, Leipzig, Vienna, 1908, p. 225. 175 40. Hermann Muthesius, ‘Musikzimmer’, contemporary photograph from: Hermann Muthesius, Landh¨auser, Munich, 1912, ﬁg. 259, p. 171.

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41. Georg Friedrich Kersting, ‘The Elegant Reader’, 1812. Weimar, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen. Photo: MU.

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42. Haus Hermann von Seefeld, 1904–5, by Hermann Muthesius, Berlin. Photo: MU. 185 43. Haus Alfred Mohrbutter, 1912, by Hermann Muthesius, Berlin. Reproduced by kind permission of the Architekten- und Ingenieur-Verein zu Berlin (AIV). 187 44. Haus Dr Robert Ren´e Kuczynski, 1913–14, by Hermann Muthesius, Berlin. Photo: MU.

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45. Haus Jacob Tuteur, 1923, by Hermann Muthesius, Berlin. Reproduced by kind permission of the Architekten- und Ingenieur-Verein zu Berlin (AIV). 189 46. Farbenschau pavilion, 1914, by Hermann Muthesius, for the Werkbund Exhibition at Cologne, from the ofﬁcial catalogue Die Deutsche Werkbund-Ausstellung, Cologne, 1914.

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47. Weissenhof housing colony, Stuttgart, contemporary postcard advertising the opening of the exhibition in 1927.

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48. Am Kochenhof housing colony, Stuttgart, from: Moderne Bauformen: Monatsheft f¨ur Architektur und Raumkunst 32 (November 1933), p. 657. 202 49. Haus Michaelsen, 1923, by Karl Schneider, Hamburg, photograph showing both the sloping main roof and the ﬂat-roofed North-Western corner turret, the latter of which was depicted in Walter Gropius, Internationale Architektur, rev. edn., Munich, 1925. Photo: MU. 205 50. Chilehaus, 1922–4, by Fritz H¨oger, ‘Kontorhaus District’, Hamburg. Photo: MU. 210

List of Figures 51. Chilehaus, detail: arcades by Richard Ku¨ohl. Photo: MU.

xi 212

52. Apartment block Breitenfelder Strasse 80, Haynstrasse 29–33, Husumer Strasse 37, Sudeckstrasse 2–6, 1924–6, by Hans and Oskar Gerson, Hamburg-Eppendorf, detail: niches with sculptures by Ludwig Kunstmann. Photo: MU. 213 53. Ballinhaus, 1922–4, by Hans and Oskar Gerson, ‘Kontorhaus District’, Hamburg. Photo: MU.

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54. Proposed high-rise building for Elbe riverfront development, 1937, by Fritz H¨oger, Hamburg, reproduced by kind permission of the Kunstbibliothek Berlin.

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55. Konstanty Gutschow, plan for Elbe riverfront development, with separate sections for ofﬁcial buildings (to the left) and ‘private’ (commercial and domestic) buildings to the right. From: Konstanty Gutschow, Elbufergestaltung Hamburg: Erl¨auterungsbericht, Hamburg, 1939, unpag. 220

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1 Introduction

This is a study of a distinctive brand of modernism, which emerged in early twentieth-century Germany. Its supporters deﬁned themselves as bourgeois, and acted as the self-appointed champions of a ‘modern’ consciousness, which they believed qualiﬁed them to tackle the many challenges facing the young and rapidly industrializing German nation-state. ‘Bourgeois modernism’ may not have been a mass movement, but it deﬁned the collective persona and the aspirations of a milieu whose members were at the peak of their social and political conﬁdence. Thus, bourgeois modernism became what we might call the hegemonic doctrine of the Wilhelmine era, and continued to inﬂuence the Weimar years in crucial ways. What is more, it also left an important mark on German history well beyond the early twentieth century. Yet its success was not that of an ideology. Indeed, ideologically speaking, German bourgeois modernism was powerfully challenged, even beleaguered, from the moment it was invented. Its principal impact was not in the realm of ideas, but in what we might call the infrastructure of German social life. Its power was vested in a certain way of being and doing—in other words, it became a dominant social, administrative and political praxis. Out of all proportion to their actual numbers, bourgeois modernists exercised inﬂuence: as ofﬁce holders in the governments of the individual German states, as an army of ‘experts’ working in municipal and regional administrations, as social activists in countless voluntary associations, as the most conspicuous consumers of their age, and, last but not least, as private individuals in their own homes, bourgeois modernists transformed the material world around them in ways that shaped the experience and meaning of modernity for decades, perhaps centuries, to come. The physical fabric of social life thus created, from the domestic interior to the planning of entire cities, became the trajectory through which bourgeois modernism acted upon consciousness and behaviour, with (almost) irreversible consequences. This book aims to capture some of the deﬁning features of this movement, its psychological, cultural and political parameters. In doing so, it builds on a rapidly growing body of literature on the successes of the German Bürgertum in this era, which quite possibly constitutes the single most dramatic process

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Introduction

of revision in modern German history over the past decades. None of this literature disputes that bourgeois modernism had many enemies, many of them very vocal: these characters populate the pages of intellectual histories of the said period. Critics, both on the right and the left of the political spectrum, often dismissed bourgeois modernism’s ‘cultural’ focus as windowdressing, disguising the fact that really mattered: the middle classes’ failure to win real political power from reactionary and mostly aristocratic elites. Yet to deduce from this that bourgeois modernism made no political difference is to misconstrue the nature of the political during this formative phase of modern governance in Germany. To be sure, the Emperor had powers exceeding those of the head of state in most Western democracies, and the general staff of the Prussian army continued to be dominated by conservative aristocrats. Yet the decisions made by the Emperor and his advisers, albeit fateful in the year 1914, mostly had a very limited impact on the day-to-day lives of ordinary Germans. This was a time when direct government ‘from above’ was gradually supplanted by a social management of conduct that worked in less visible ways. It is a process which has widely come to be studied under the heading of ‘liberal governmentality’, and much of this study will be devoted to exploring the applicability of this largely Anglophone interpretative paradigm for the German context. The detractors of bourgeois modernism long set the tone for professional history-writing, too. For almost half a century, the overwhelming majority of historians portrayed the German middle classes as losers in a power struggle, in which feudal elites and heavy industry joined forces against the threats of socialism and organized labour. The weakness and splintering of the liberal parties in the German national parliament has been seen as indicative of a structural weakness of the German bourgeoisie, compared to their analogues in other Western countries. For the Wilhelmine period, Hans-Ulrich Wehler spoke of a veritable ‘de-bourgeoisiﬁcation’ of German society, and Hans Mommsen diagnosed a ‘dissolution of the German Bürgertum after 1890’.¹ Others pointed to the feudalization of the lifestyles and values of the German middle classes as ¹ Variations of this argument are developed in the contributions by Jürgen Kocka, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Hans Mommsen and Rainer Lepsius in Jürgen Kocka, ed., Bürger und Bürgerlichkeit im 19. Jahrhundert, Göttingen, 1987. Its ﬁrst iconic expression was Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Das deutsche Kaiserreich, 1871–1918, Göttingen, 1973; since then, it has been modiﬁed, for example in his Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, iii: Von der deutschen Doppelrevolution bis zum Beginn des ersten Weltkrieges, 1849–1914, Munich, 1995. Yet the notion of a weak or underperforming bourgeoisie still lingers, and Wehler restated it in his ‘A Guide to Future Research on the Kaiserreich? Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870–1930’, Central European History 29/4 (1997), pp. 541–72; and ‘The German Double Revolution and the Sonderweg, 1848–79’ in Reinhard Rürup, ed., The Problem of Revolution in Germany, 1789–1989, Oxford, 2000, pp. 55–65. His view was challenged by Geoff Eley, ‘Introduction: Is There a History of the Kaiserreich?’ and ‘German History and the Contradictions of Modernity: The Bourgeoisie, the State, and the Mastery of Reform’, in idem, ed., Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870–1930, Ann Arbor, 1997, pp. 1–42 and 67–103. A seminal study of bourgeois reform activism of the Wilhelmine period is

Introduction

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symptomatic of their political capitulation before the old elites.² These elites, themselves remnants of the feudal order of a bygone age, were concentrated in the antechambers of power at the imperial court, and in the Prussian army.³ Its members, historians argued, simply refused to adapt to socio-economic transformations, indeed, even to acknowledge their existence. As a result of this ‘blocked modernization’, German development took a qualitatively different route from that of ‘normal’ Western countries. When this Sonderweg theory was ﬁrst formulated, its proponents saw themselves as a critical avant-garde, who took Fischer’s famous attack on the image of the ‘benevolent conservatism’ of the Second German Reich onto a new analytical plane.⁴ It was not the experimental climate of the Weimar years and the political polarization it produced, they suggested, that was ultimately responsible for the rise of the ‘Third Reich’, but the anti-modern legacy of the Second Reich, which came to be embodied by a cast of reactionary lawyers and bureaucrats, who undermined Weimar democracy. The proponents of the Sonderweg thesis wanted to teach Adenauer’s conservative post-war Germany a political lesson. Yet their work has since become the object of a new historical revisionism. The most important critics of the Sonderweg model, David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, argued that such an approach ‘let capitalism off the hook’. They re-focused attention on the social problems of the inter-war period, but also emphasized how these were connected to what they called a ‘silent bourgeois revolution’, which had taken place in Wilhelmine Germany, and left its profound mark on the economy and social mores, as well as political, legal and administrative institutions.⁵ In the wake Kevin Repp, Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity: Anti-Politics and the Search for Alternatives, 1890–1914, Cambridge, 2000. ² On the cultural politics of feudalization, see Ute Frevert, Ehrenmänner: Das Duell in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, Munich, 1991, translated as Men of Honour: A Social and Cultural History of the Duel, Cambridge, Mass., 1995. ³ Carl Schmitt’s concept of the antechamber of power has been applied to an analysis of the political structure of the Prussian court, albeit for a slightly earlier period, in Brendan Simms, The Impact of Napoleon: Prussian High Politics, Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Executive, 1797–1806, Cambridge, 1997, and his Struggle for Mastery in Germany 1779–1850, New York, 1998. The classic account of military inﬂuence on German decision-making and the army’s role as the truest embodiment of the state and ordained protector of national interest is Gordon Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army, 1640–1945, New York, 1955. ⁴ Fritz Fischer famously suggested that the political elites of Wilhelmine Germany had systematically driven Europe into the First World War, in his Der Griff nach der Weltmacht: Die Kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland, 1914–18, Düsseldorf, 1961. Subsequent historians, expanding on this theme, suggested that this decision represented a necessary deﬂection of the social tensions that had built up during Germany’s ‘blocked modernization’. Karl Dietrich Bracher ﬁrst proposed this view, and it achieved iconic status in Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s Das deutsche Kaiserreich, 1871–1918, Göttingen, 1973. ⁵ Most notable among these are David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany, Oxford and New York, 1984; Richard Evans, Rethinking German History: Nineteenth-Century Germany and the Origins of the Third Reich, London and Boston, 1987; and, more recently, Eley, Society, Culture, and the State,

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Introduction

of this revision, a new generation of cultural historians have emphasized the modernism, not the traditionalism, of German bourgeois culture in the period from 1871 to 1914. Some of these studies are devoted to what we may call the social history of Wilhelmine politics.⁶ Others, focusing more on intellectual history, have taken issue with Fritz Stern’s view of Wilhelmine Germany as driven by a politics of cultural despair, portraying, if not as altogether progressive, in terms of ‘light and dark, backward and forward’.⁷ Particular attention has been devoted to what was at the time called ‘ethics reform’, a bourgeois project for revitalizing the public sphere in non-partisan ways.⁸ And ﬁnally, a new type of cultural history has drawn attention to the role of the locality as a site for progressive bourgeois reform.⁹ Of course, none of these scholars would dispute that the German experience of industrialization, urbanization, etc., was more abrupt than that of Britain, which is most frequently invoked as the Western prototype. Yet it now seems that for contemporaries, this chronological compression served to dramatize, not dilute, the experience of modernity. Dramatic economic and social transformations went hand in hand with the development of a distinctly modern consciousness, which is here referred to as modernism. In other words, the modernism that was deﬁned and constituted in Wilhelmine Germany denotes ﬁrst the perception of modernity, and second a set of cultural and political strategies employed to interpret and master the changes brought about in this way. Wilhelmine Germany became the site for a series of modernist experiments, both cultural and political, which shaped notions of the modern in ways which, if less spectacular than those of the inter-war years, were at least as profound. As Repp has suggested, not only Weimar pp. 1–42, 67–103. See also Volker Berghahn, ‘The German Empire, 1871–1914: Reﬂections in the Direction of Recent Research’; and Margaret L. Anderson, ‘Reply to Volker Berghahn’, Central European History 35/1 (2002), pp. 75–82 and 83–90; and James Retallack, ‘Ideas into Politics: Meanings of Stasis in Wilhelmine Germany’, in Geoff Eley and idem, eds., Wilhelminism and its Legacies: German Modernities, Imperialism and the Meanings of Reform, 1890–1930, New York and Oxford, 2003, pp. 235–52. ⁶ Exemplary works of this kind are Eley and Retallack, Wilhelminism and its Legacies; YoungSun Hong, ‘Neither Singular nor Alternative: Narratives of Modernity and Welfare in Germany, 1870–1945’, Social History 30/2 (May 2005), pp. 133–53; and Dennis Sweeney, ‘Liberalism, the Worker and the Limits of Bourgeois Öffentlichkeit in Wilhelmine Germany’, German History 22/1 (2004), pp. 36–75. ⁷ Suzanne Marchand and David Lindenfeld, ‘Germany at the Fin de Siècle: An Introduction’, in idem, eds., Germany at the Fin de Siècle: Culture, Politics, and Ideas, Baton Rouge, 2004, pp. 1–34, quote p. 10. Another exciting new intellectual history of this period, which challenges the classical opposition between irrationalism and modernism in German culture through an innovative study of social practices of cultural consumption, is Corinna Treitel, A Science for the Soul: Occultism and the Genesis of the German Modern, Baltimore and London, 2004. ⁸ An excellent survey of the debates and activism surrounding the cause of ‘ethics reform’, which foregrounds the role of sexuality, is Tracie Matysik, Reforming the Moral Subject: Ethics and Sexuality in Central Europe, 1890–1930, Ithaca, 2008. ⁹ Examples of this strand are Jennifer Jenkins, Provincial Modernity: Local Culture and Liberal Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Hamburg, Ithaca, 2003; and Jan Palmowski, Urban Liberalism in Imperial Germany: Frankfurt am Main, 1866–1914, Oxford, 1999.

Introduction

5

Germany, but imperial Germany should be thought of as Europe’s ‘laboratory of modernity’.¹⁰ This approach not only seeks to reintegrate modern German history with the history of the West. It also seeks to convey a more richly textured and historically precise understanding of modernism itself. Bruno Latour, commenting on the discrepancies between unifying theories of modernity and its complex and contradictory reality, concluded that ‘we have never been modern’.¹¹ Not all scholars have gone this far, yet most now place the plurality of modernist experiences at the heart of their analyses. Modernity has come to be seen as ‘a matter of movement, of ﬂux, of change, of unpredictability’.¹² Some, such as Marshall Berman, have made the case for subdividing modernity into multiple stages,¹³ while others portray ambivalence as modernity’s operative principle.¹⁴ Reinforcing this theoretical trend towards pluralism is the trend towards microhistories of the reformist milieu, which zoom in on the role of particular reformers, particular sites, or particular organizations, many of which we shall encounter in this study. This differentiation not only enriches our understanding of modernism in general: it also opens up new perspectives on varieties of modernism that were distinct from the more widely known orthodox modernism that dominated research for many decades: the so-called ‘International Style’ and what, after Charles Jencks, has been dubbed ‘Heroic Modernism’.¹⁵ Long decried as ‘reactionary’ by the guardians of modernist ideological purity, a range ¹⁰ Repp, Reformers, ﬁrmly locates this period of German history within an analytical framework of modernity; the same author’s forthcoming study Berlin Moderns: Art, Politics, and Commercial Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Berlin, appropriates the classical Weimar label ‘laboratory of modernity’ for Germany’s Wilhelmine years. ¹¹ Bruno Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes, translated as We Have Never Been Modern, Cambridge, Mass., 1993. ¹² Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman, ‘Subjectivity and Modernity’s Other’, in idem, eds., Modernity and Identity, Oxford, 1992, p. 1. Postmodernism, or more speciﬁcally, texts such as Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis, 1984, have inspired reconceptualizations of the modern. One of the most important forums for this debate is the journal Modernism/Modernity, published by Johns Hopkins University Press since 1994. See especially Lawrence Rainey and Robert von Hallberg, ‘Editorial—Introduction’, Modernism/Modernity 1/1 (1994), pp. 1–3; and Susan Stanford Friedman, ‘Deﬁnition Excursions: The Meanings of Modern, Modernity, Modernism’, Modernism/Modernity 8/3 (2001), pp. 493–513. Another excellent overview of the debate that pays particular attention to the French and German contributions to the debate is Wolfgang Welsch, ed., Wege aus der Moderne: Schlüsseltexte der Postmoderne-Diskussion, Weinheim, 1988. ¹³ Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, New York, 1982. ¹⁴ This approach is represented by Eric Rothstein, ‘Broaching a Cultural Logic of Modernity’, Modern Languages Quarterly 61/2 (2000), pp. 359–94. Bernard Yack, The Fetishism of Modernities: Epochal Self-Consciousness in Contemporary Social and Political Thought, Notre Dame, 1997, argues that postmodernists have fetishized modernity in such a way as to obscure the very feature to which they ﬁrst drew our attention, namely its heterogeneity. ¹⁵ The category of ‘Heroic Modernism’ is developed by Charles Jencks, Modern Movements in Architecture, Harmondsworth, 1985. The label refers to classical modernism in its most radical, uncompromising and triumphalist mode. Yet it is confusing, in that the term ‘heroic’ suggests that

6

Introduction

of ‘alternative’, ‘domestic’, ‘medieval’ or ‘vernacular’ modernisms have recently been unearthed by historians in search of a different modern legacy, better suited to today’s postmodern sensibilities.¹⁶ While there is an emerging consensus that pre-war German bourgeois modernism was profoundly important and inﬂuential, it is still proving hard to capture its distinguishing features in precise historical categories. Several recent studies have tried to tease out the national speciﬁcity of this project, and located it in the strong sense of a political ‘mission’ with which day-to-day objects were invested. They suggest that, for ordinary Germans, as well as for a variety of German political regimes, from Wilhelmine Prussia to the two post-war German states, modernity ‘began at home’, and modernism’s ﬁrst political challenge was therefore the reform of living culture, or Wohnkultur. As Katherine Pence put it, German modernism ‘seems to embody a project of aggressively forging links between private households and the national community in new ways through the powerful symbols of material culture. The common understanding of the home as nucleus of the nation is recast for the age of consumerism so that proper use of material goods forms the basis of familial and national well-being.’¹⁷ In 2007, the journal German History published a special issue, exploring how the peculiarity of this German approach operated across conventional period divides. Comparing German reformers of the 1910s and the 1950s, Jennifer Jenkins suggested that, although ‘two wars, dictatorship and genocide separate these examples’, they ‘display interesting and surprising points of connection. Both focused on the importance of transforming and modernizing the culture of the home through the reform of domestic objects, and both insisted on the national parameters of this project.’¹⁸ This nexus found its ﬁrst institutional manifestation in an organization called the Deutscher Werkbund, and it is therefore unsurprising that it has been at the centre of much academic debate. Founded in 1907, the Werkbund’s purpose was to bring together designers and manufacturers, who would collaborate in producing modern ‘quality work’, both for domestic consumption and to boost modernism’s chief characteristic, the triumph of abstraction, can be likened to an achievement which is by deﬁnition idiosyncratic: the ‘heroism’ of an individual. ¹⁶ On medieval modernism, Michael T. Saler, The Avant-Garde in Inter-War England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground, Oxford, 1999. On vernacular or regional modernism, Kenneth Frampton, ‘Critical Regionalism: Modern Architecture and Cultural Identity’, in idem, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, rev. edn., London, 1992, pp. 314–27; and Maiken Umbach and Bernd Hüppauf, eds., Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization and the Built Environment, Stanford, 2005. On traditionalist modernism, Vittorio M. Lampugnani, ed., Moderne Architektur in Deutschland, 1900 bis 1950: Expressionismus und Neue Sachlichkeit, Stuttgart, 1994. On alternative modernism, Leif Jerram, Germany’s Other Modernity: Munich and the Making of Metropolis, 1895–1930, Manchester, 2007. ¹⁷ Katherine Pence, ‘Commentary: Modernity Begins at Home’, German Studies Annual Conference, San Diego, 2002, cited in Jennifer Jenkins, ‘Introduction: Domesticity, Design and the Shaping of the Social’, special issue of German History 25/4 (2007), pp. 465–89, quotation p. 471. ¹⁸ Ibid., p. 467.

Introduction

7

German exports. This programme was not targeted at heavy industry: consumer goods, manufactured with traditional German solidity yet the latest technologies, were to usher in a new golden age. In promoting this aim, the Werkbund was not alone: many organizations sprang up that sought to improve consumer taste in order to create a market for such quality work. These fundamentally bourgeois associations generated a wave of enthusiasm for the ‘pedagogic’ project of teaching consumers to furnish their homes in a style beﬁtting their modern identities. Some, such as the Dürerbund, far outstripped the Werkbund in terms of the size of its membership.¹⁹ However, the Werkbund’s particular importance stemmed from the fact that many of its members were industrial corporations: by 1914, they included AEG, Siemens, Bosch, BASF, and Mercedes Benz. The Werkbund’s policies therefore had an immediate impact on production, without having to rely on individuals to make aesthetically ‘correct’ consumer choices. Moreover, the Werkbund also had powerful political backers. The German state looked to this organization to promote Germany’s exports and status in the world. In doing so, industrialists and politicians tapped into a more idealist reformist impulse, which had been devised by the Werkbund’s founding members, and which aimed at the wholesale transformation of modern subjectivities. The Werkbund’s inﬂuence and success is one of the most distinguishing features of German modernism in the early twentieth century: it gave the sum of experiments in architecture and design an organizational framework and sense of intellectual coherence rarely seen in other countries. As Stanford Anderson put it: ‘within the Deutscher Werkbund, unusual intelligence was brought to bear on modern production’.²⁰ Art historians have therefore widely described it as a milestone in the evolution of a modern, functionalist aesthetic.²¹ Supporting this assessment are numerous political histories of the Werkbund, which foreground its role as an engine of modernization, promoted by German elites eager for their country to ‘catch up’ on the international stage.²² ¹⁹ John Maiciuka, ‘The Domestic Interior in Wilhelmine Germany’, German History 25/4 (2007), pp. 490–516. On these ideologically related cultural reform associations, see Gerhard Kratzsch, Kunstwart und Dürerbund: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Gebildeten im Zeitalter des Imperialismus, Göttingen, 1969. ²⁰ Stanford Anderson, Peter Behrens and a New Architecture for the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2000, p. x. ²¹ Julius Posener, Anfänge des Funktionalismus: Von Arts and Crafts zum Deutschen Werkbund, Berlin, Frankfurt a.M. and Vienna, 1964; idem, ‘From Schinckel to Bauhaus: Five Lectures on the Growth of Modern German Architecture’, Architectural Association Papers 5 (London, 1972); Joan Campbell, The German Werkbund: The Politics of Reform in the Applied Arts, Princeton, 1978, esp. pp. 3–81 on the pre-1914 era; idem, Joy of Work, German Work, Princeton and Oxford, 1989. See also W. Fischer, ed., Zwischen Kunst und Industrie: Der Deutsche Werkbund, exhibition catalogue, Munich, 1975; Stefan Muthesius, Das englische Vorbild: Eine Studie zu den deutschen Reformbewegungen in Architektur, Wohnbau und Kunstgewerbe im späten 19. Jahrhundert, Munich, 1974; and K. Junghanns, Der Deutsche Werkbund: Sein erstes Jahrzehnt, Berlin, 1982. ²² Wolfgang Hardtwig, ‘Weltpolitik, liberaler Nationalismus und Kunst: Der Deutsche Werkbund’, in Helmut Berding, ed., Nationales Bewußtsein und kollektive Identität: Studien zur Entwicklung des kollektiven Bewußtseins in der Neuzeit, Frankfurt a.M., 1994, pp. 507–40.

8

Introduction

More recently, the focus of research has shifted, placing more emphasis on how the Werkbund and its protagonists ﬁt into a wider cultural history of the German bourgeoisie. As we shall see, this has opened up an important new perspective, although not all studies reﬂect the same change in sensibilities. Indeed, some new work seems barely touched by the demolition of the Sonderweg. Mark Jarzombek, for example, portrays the Werkbund as a propaganda tool with which the German bourgeoisie created a ‘ﬁction of unity’ that substituted for ‘real’ political achievement. In subtitles such as ‘Authoring Praise’, ‘The Jargon of Unity’ and ‘Proclaiming the Happy Modernity’, he captures the self-interested manipulation and the false consciousness that drove this type of bourgeois modernization.²³ For Werner Oechslin, the Werkbund represents an example of a Nietzschean ‘will to power’, evidence of a deep-seated pathology of the German bourgeoisie.²⁴ Barbara Miller Lane sees the Werkbund as part of a broader German malaise, which she calls ‘national romanticism’: an unstable and aggressively irrational mindset that helped prepare the way for the Third Reich—although she denies the inevitability that some studies have ascribed to this development, by pointing out that a similar disposition led to a democratic and peaceful form of national culture in Scandinavia.²⁵ Frederic Schwartz’s inﬂuential study also treats the Werkbund critically, albeit from a different perspective.²⁶ His emphasis is not so much on nationalism, as on the commodiﬁcation of art in the hands of the bourgeoisie. Drawing on the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, Schwartz discusses the Werkbund and the Bauhaus within the context of capitalism’s tendency to subjugate artistic freedom to the dictates of bourgeois proﬁt. In his account, eccentric ﬁgures operating at the margins of the Werkbund, such as Karl Ernst Osthaus, who defended the ‘auratic’ work of art, emerge as the true progressives, who challenged Muthesius’s championing of the logic of capitalist production.²⁷ ²³ Mark Jarzombek, ‘The Kunstgewerbe, the Werkbund and the Aesthetics of Culture in the Wilhelmine Period’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 53/1 (March 1994), pp. 7–19, and idem, ‘The Discourses of a Bourgeois Utopia, 1904–1908, and the Founding of the Werkbund’, in Franc¸oise Forster-Hahn, ed., Imagining Modern German Culture: 1889–1910, Studies in the History of Art, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Symposium Papers 31, Washington, 1996, p. 53. ²⁴ Werner Oechslin, ‘Politisches, allzu Politisches: Nietzschelinge, der Wille zur Kunst und der Deutsche Werkbund vor 1914’, in Hermann Hipp and Ernst Seidl, eds., Architektur als politische Kultur: philosophia practica, Berlin, 1996, pp. 151–90. In this essay, Oechslin argues that Walter Gropius and Siegfried Giedion systematically repressed the Werkbund’s history as the embarassingly ‘dark’ roots of German modernism, which was driven by the ‘chauvinistic’ and ‘irrational’ ideas of Langbehn and Nietzsche. ²⁵ Barbara Miller Lane, National Romanticism and Modern Architecture in Germany and the Scandinavian Countries, Cambridge, 2000, esp. ch. 1. ²⁶ Frederic J. Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture before the First World War, New Haven and London, 1996. ²⁷ A more detailed version of this argument is developed in Frederic J. Schwartz, ‘Der Schleier der Maja: Karl Ernst Osthaus, das Deutsche Museum für Kunst in Handel und Gewerbe und der Werkbundstreit’, in Michael Fehr, Sabine Röder and Gerhard Storck, eds., Das Schöne und

Introduction

9

A generally more sympathetic approach has emerged in historical works that foreground chronological speciﬁcity. For Matthew Jefferies, Wilhelmine Germany produced a reformist culture which deserves to be studied very much in its own right, rather than as a half-baked version of later modernisms.²⁸ Fritz Schumacher, co-founder of the Werkbund and Building Director in the city of Hamburg from 1911 to 1933, has attracted particular attention. Building on earlier German scholarship, especially that of Hartmut Frank, new cultural historians such as Jennifer Jenkins discuss Schumacher, alongside Alfred Lichtwark, Hamburg’s Art Museum’s director, as a pioneer in the development of what she calls ‘provincial modernity’: a version of the modernism characteristic of pre-First World War Germany, which was broadly liberal in provenance, took local sensibilities into account, and which sought practical solutions to social questions.²⁹ In the same spirit, conferences on the topic have been dedicated to recovering the positive aspects of Schumacher’s political vision.³⁰ Even more attention has been devoted to Hermann Muthesius, who was not only the spiritus rector of the Werkbund, but also its most proliﬁc public spokesman: between 1907 and 1926, he published over 600 articles and reviews in 60 different newspapers and journals and gave countless public speeches and lectures. A full survey of the specialist literature dealing with this oeuvre is beyond the scope of this introduction.³¹ Yet two recent works can serve to exemplify major trends in this ﬁeld. Fedor Roth takes Muthesius’s recurrent trope of ‘harmonious culture’ as his starting point.³² Like Oechslin, Roth detects an afﬁnity with Nietzsche, but he does not dismiss Muthesius’s project as a case of pathological hyper-nationalism. Roth examines how Muthesius invoked ‘culture’ to counter the threat of social fragmentation which he perceived as a feature of the emerging political mass market in Wilhelmine Germany. In Roth’s account, Muthesius’s aims are credited with truly utopian ambitions, but also condemned for their ‘naïveté’, which consigned the Werkbund to the der Alltag: Die Anfänge des modernen Designs 1900–1914, Cologne, 1997, pp. 409–27. For a full discussion of Osthaus’s role in these debates, see Chapter 5 of this study. On the problem of alienation and capitalism, compare also the more orthodox Marxist analysis of Junghanns, Der Deutsche Werkbund. ²⁸ Matthew Jefferies, Politics and Culture in Wilhelmine Germany: The Case of Industrial Architecture, Oxford and Washington, 1995. ²⁹ Jenkins, Provincial Modernity; Hermann Hipp, ‘Fritz Schumachers Hamburg: Die reformierte Großstadt’, in Lampugnani and Schneider, Moderne Architektur, pp. 151–83; Hartmut Frank, ed., Fritz Schumacher: Reformkultur und Moderne, Stuttgart, 1994, which includes a full overview of the extensive specialist scholarship on Schumacher by historians of architecture and urban planning. ³⁰ For example, Zur Aktualität der Ideen von Fritz Schumacher: Fritz-Schumacher-Colloquium 1990, Hamburg, 1992. ³¹ On Muthesius’s writings, see Mitchell Schwarzer, German Architectural Theory and the Search for Modern Identity, Cambridge, 1995. On his biography, see Julius Posener’s writings, such as Anfänge des Funktionalismus and ‘From Schinckel to Bauhaus’. ³² Fedor Roth, Hermann Muthesius und die Idee der harmonischen Kultur: Kultur als Einheit des künstlerischen Stils in allen Lebensäußerungen eines Volkes, Berlin, 2001, esp. pp. 265–78.

10

Introduction

dustbin of failed cultural experiments: the tension between individual stylistic experimentation and modernism as a ‘collective fate’ remained unresolved.³³ In this view, Muthesius’s advocacy of ‘typiﬁcation’ remained an isolated ineffective gesture, unable to ﬁll the ‘spiritual gap’ at the heart of the whole Werkbund project.³⁴ Roth’s analysis of the sources is exemplary. Yet like Schwartz, he postulates a fundamental incompatibility between individual artistic creativity and the collectivist logic of modernism. Both treat ‘individualism’ as a utopian ideal, and neither recognizes its embeddedness in the political project of liberalism, or ‘Bürgerlichkeit’, which, this study will argue, is the foil against which the Werkbund is best interpreted. Before developing this critique, however, a few methodological remarks are required. In moving beyond general theories of modernity and its pitfalls, many historians have looked to written texts by bourgeois reformers active in the Werkbund in order to reconstruct their ideological intentions. This has led to nuanced accounts, which have overturned many old clichés about Germany’s role in this formative phase of Western modernism. Yet it has also entailed the danger of equating rhetoric with reality. Most of the protagonists of this movement were practitioners ﬁrst, and writers only second (or third). With no aspirations to literary originality or theoretical sophistication, authors such as Muthesius invariably relied on a conventional political rhetoric of the day, in which it is easy to identify traces of irrational, Nietzschean nationalism. These were not conﬁned to that social milieu, nor for that matter to Germans. An unqualiﬁed reliance on such written sources, therefore, tends to overshadow the practice-oriented and profoundly rational nature of bourgeois reformism. As if to counteract this danger, John Maciuika provocatively and emblematically entitled his study of the Werkbund Before the Bauhaus, thus highlighting the modernizing dimension of the organization’s activities.³⁵ Although the title seems reminiscent of the much older teleological trope of the ‘pioneers of modern design’, Maciuika’s detailed analysis does not rely on a theory of inevitable progress, but on a wealth of ofﬁcial records.³⁶ As he repeatedly stresses, it was the Prussian government that commissioned Muthesius to reform arts and crafts education in Prussia, and who sent him on a reconnaissance mission to England. In doing so, it not only recognized the genius of an individual: it threw its weight behind the institution of the Werkbund. By focusing on this ofﬁcial political patronage, Maciuika ³³ Roth, Muthesius, pp. 265 and 268. Similarly, according to Roth, the seeming ‘objectivism’ [Sachlichkeit] of Muthesius’s modernist aesthetics was in reality a highly artiﬁcial construct reﬂecting a ‘narcissistic, collective self’. Ibid., p. 268. ³⁴ Ibid., p. 272. ³⁵ John V. Maciuika, Before the Bauhaus: Architecture, Politics, and the German State, 1890–1920, Cambridge, 2005. ³⁶ Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius, rev. edn., Harmondsworth, 1975.

Introduction

11

uncovers a causal connection between the success of German modernism and Prussian political ambitions, challenging the traditional view of pre-war Prussia as a bulwark of cultural traditionalism and reactionary politics. What was true for government was also true for German industrialists, who proved important backers of modernism. The appointment of Peter Behrens as artistic director of the AEG electricity works was the most dramatic, but by no means an isolated example of major German corporations trying to cash in on the cultural prestige of the Werkbund.³⁷ Yet these kinds of sources also entail problems. This is apparent when it comes to deﬁning the modernist project itself. In Maciuika’s account, Prussian employees ﬁgure as the pioneers of a modernism that was almost entirely rational and forward-looking. This assessment is based on a literal reading of key terms in the sources, most importantly ‘functionalism’ and ‘objectivism’. Precisely because both concepts transcended Werkbund circles, and became central to the German modernist imagination throughout the twentieth century, they are difﬁcult to pin down historically if detached from the material culture they were employed to describe. Functionalism soon became an extremely value-laden term, summarizing everything that postmodernists later attacked in the kind of faceless, global modernism that is usually traced back to the Bauhaus.³⁸ Thus, to describe Muthesius and, by extension, the Prussian government that employed him, as functionalists, conjures up implications that can be deeply misleading. As this study will argue, in the bourgeois milieu of the early twentieth century, functionalism meant anything but technical reductionism and abstraction. Rather, it denoted the ‘appropriateness’ of objects to a speciﬁc way of life and political disposition. Emotional and moral categories, such as comfort, sobriety, and tradition and rootedness, were central to this—and many of these were conceived in a spirit of classical idealism so central to the German education system at the time. In this way, appropriateness could be the precise antithesis of the common view of Bauhaus-style modernism as universal, technical and emptied of all emotion or sense of place and time. ³⁷ Behrens became chief designer for the AEG electricity works. In this capacity, he not only designed several famous industrial buildings, such as the Turbine Hall, but also several lines of company products, as well as the accompanying advertising campaigns and the ﬁrm’s logo. While most classical studies, such as Stanford Anderson, Peter Behrens and a New Architecture for the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2000, see Behrens primarily as an architect, several monographs, articles and collections consider his design oeuvre, notably: Alan Windsor, Peter Behrens: Architect and Designer 1868–1940, London, 1981; Tilman Buddensieg and H. Rogge, eds., Industriekultur: Peter Behrens und die AEG 1907–14, Berlin, 1980; Frederic J. Schwartz, ‘Commodity Signs: Peter Behrens, the AEG, and the Trademark: His Designs for German Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft’, Journal of Design History 9/3 (1996), pp. 153–84; Giovanni Anceschi, ‘The First Corporate Image: Peter Behrens and the AEG’, Domus 605 (1980), pp. 32–4; and Hans Georg Pfeiffer, ed., Peter Behrens: ‘Wer aber will sagen, was Schönheit sei?’ Graﬁk, Produktgestaltung, Architektur, Düsseldorf, 1990. ³⁸ On the misunderstanding and mythologizing of ‘functionalism’ as an icon of modernism, see Stanford Anderson, ‘The Fiction of Function’, Assemblage 2 (1986), pp. 19–31.

12

Introduction

The analysis of Muthesius’s practical work as an architect, which was a radical antithesis to the Bauhaus style, can clarify the time-speciﬁcity of the bourgeois ethos that underlay this kind of modernism. And it shows why contemporary writing about material culture should not be detached from a close analysis of the material culture itself. As we shall see, other bourgeois modernists, such as Fritz Schumacher, Alfred Lichtwark, Karl-Ernst Osthaus, Peter Behrens, Richard Riemerschmid, to name but a few, had one thing in common: all saw themselves as practitioners ﬁrst, and writers only second. Reading the texts in connection with the objects not only helps to overcome the danger of teleological readings of the sources. It also helps circumvent the opposite pitfall, which arises from the fact that, when writing, Werkbund activists frequently relied extensively on very dated clichés and rhetorical tropes. One of the favourites was the notion of ‘improvement through culture’, which was plucked from German Enlightenment writings predating the Werkbund’s activities by over a century.³⁹ It is often difﬁcult to distinguish what was merely conventional and what was new and distinctive about the resulting texts. By contrast, even a layman would be able to recognize almost any material object or design emanating from the Werkbund as a distinct product of its age. For this reason, this study is based on the premise that cultural history needs to engage directly with the visual qualities and the materiality of the objects and spatial designs that constituted the practice of bourgeois modernism. This brings two methodological paradigms into play. The ﬁrst, which is indebted to art history, and has sometimes been called the ‘pictorial turn’, has made few inroads into historical studies to date.⁴⁰ Although the ‘linguistic turn’ had put forward a sustained critique of the idea that written sources always have objective and unambiguously accessible meanings, historians often continue to defend their prioritizing of texts by pointing to the ambiguity of images. This privileging of the written over the visual is a constitutive part of the hermeneutic tradition, and has become second nature to the discipline to such an extent that some critics have detected an ‘imperialism of language’.⁴¹ It is certainly true ³⁹ For a fuller analysis of the Enlightenment sources of this project, see Chapter 6 of this study. ⁴⁰ The phrase ‘pictorial turn’ was coined by W. J. T. Mitchell in his Picture Theory, Chicago and London, 1994. Modelled on Richard Rorty’s ‘linguistic turn’, it describes a new appreciation of visual sources as evidence in historical and cultural studies, outside the disciplinary boundaries of traditional art history. ⁴¹ Maiken Umbach, ‘Classicism, Enlightenment and the Other: Thoughts on Decoding Eighteenth-Century Visual Texts’, Art History 25/3 (2002), pp. 319–40. The phrase ‘imperialism of language’ is cited from Ernest B. Gilman, ‘Interart Studies and the Imperialism of Language’, Poetics Today 10 (1989), pp. 5–30. The same problem is famously discussed in Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, translated by A. Sheridan, New York, 1973, as well as W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, Chicago, 1986. Peter Wagner, Reading Iconotexts: From Swift to the French Revolution, London, 1995, observed that the relationship between text and image has been ‘a history of iconoclastic oppression, in which pictura is denounced as ﬁctura’ (p. 169). He is himself less pessimistic about the ‘translatability’ of the visual into the verbal, if the two are deﬁned as idioms in Derrida’s sense (traversing both the pictorial and the lexical ﬁeld), rather than

Introduction

13

that any direct engagement with the visual introduces the need for an additional layer of translation: not only from historical diction into modern analytical language, but from a non-verbal to a verbal medium. Some of the interpretations of visual material put forward in this study therefore evade hard categories of ‘proof’. Yet even the briefest sketch of the rhetoric associated with the Werkbund shows that the written sources relevant to this enquiry are deeply problematic when detached from the objects they described. None of the interpretations of, say, Muthesius’s own writings that we have already cited capture entirely what was most characteristic about this form of bourgeois modernism. The fact that even the most discriminating and carefully researched of these recent studies of Muthesius conclude with such wildly contradictory assessments is testament to this problem. In fact, writings by bourgeois modernists from this era represent a rather dilettantish hotchpotch of various fashionable ideas of the time, and there is no coherent doctrine, no hidden philosophy, behind them that we can uncover to explain away these contradictions.⁴² Like advertisements, such texts drew on a diverse set of popular sentiments and tropes to promote the products and designs of the Werkbund to as wide an audience as possible. To be sure, they tell us something about the intentions of their authors. But their historical and political speciﬁcity can be thrown into much sharper relief if they are analysed alongside the actual objects and spaces which they were meant to promote and legitimate. This study therefore borrows from the methods of art history and cultural studies when it comes to interpreting some of the messages and psychological subtexts encoded in the symbolic language of forms. A second, and equally important methodological inspiration comes from within the historical discipline. Political historians have recently become more attentive to the role of material culture as a historical ‘actant’.⁴³ Many practitioners of this approach have taken the notion of so-called ‘liberal governmentality’ as their point of departure. Focusing mainly on nineteenth-century English and American cities, they suggest that such urban spaces were not only the objects of reform, to be improved in the name of a pre-deﬁned canon of liberal aims and objectives, but themselves a method, or ‘technology’, of government.⁴⁴ Vast in terms of traditional genres (ibid., pp. 170–1). Compare Jacques Derrida, Psyché: Inventions de l’autre, Paris, 1987, p. 106. ⁴² For a modern, edited selection of Muthesius’s writings, see Hans-Joachim Hubrich, Hermann Muthesius: Die Schriften zu Architektur, Kunstgewerbe, Industrie in der ‘‘Neuen Bewegung’’, Berlin, 1980. Muthesius’s own collection of his newspaper cuttings is preserved in the Werkbund Archiv Berlin, which subsequent chapters will frequently draw upon. On Muthesius’s life, compare Julius Posener’s many writings, such as ‘Hermann Muthesius’, entry in Architect’s Yearbook 10 (1962), pp. 45–61; and idem, Anfänge des Funktionalismus. ⁴³ The phrase is borrowed from Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, Milton Keynes, 1987, who introduced the neologism ‘actant’ as a neutral way to refer to actors irrespective of intentions, in both the human and material worlds. ⁴⁴ Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City, London and New York, 2003; Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom, Cambridge, 1999.

14

Introduction

expense and organizational efforts created the infrastructure that allowed for the seemingly uninhibited ﬂow of people and things. In this way, the appearance of ‘a free society can be created, running according to its own laws and patterns, and the leviathan socio-technical intervention maintaining it remains hidden’.⁴⁵ Otter suggests that the ‘liberal city’, thus understood, consisted of different spatial conﬁgurations that corresponded to a hierarchy of different sensory perceptions.⁴⁶ The senses of proximity, such as smell, were replaced by a new discipline with which ‘the respectable mastered their passions in public spaces conducive to the exercise of clear, controlled perception: wide streets, squares and parks. In their homes, separate bathrooms and bedrooms precluded promiscuity and indecency.’⁴⁷ As yet, there are few comparable studies on German cities, yet some exciting new work is now appearing that adopts a similar perspective, for example, on the history of the urban slaughterhouse.⁴⁸ This transformation of people in subcutaneous ways is akin to what Elias described as the process of civilization: the creation of an ‘order sui generis, which is more compelling and stronger than the will and reason of individual people composing it’.⁴⁹ Yet where Elias saw subjugation, the Foucauldian notion of governmentality draws our attention to a more subtle process, by which subjects are imperceptibly conditioned to make seemingly ‘voluntary’ decisions, which always conform to notions of rationality and restraint that are essential to the smooth functioning of liberal political systems. This perspective allows us to appreciate the speciﬁc modernity of such indirect means of governance. It is thus well suited to capturing the liberal and forward-looking side of German bourgeois modernism, without denying the strong element of social control and the centrality of the state underlying the whole project. Yet this study sees itself not only as an application of the model of liberal governmentality to the German case, but also as a critique of it. Most existing work in this vein has focused on schemes designed to free the city of that which was not bourgeois: disorder, the slum, sensory degradation, and so forth. Undoubtedly, controlling the Other was one important aspect of bourgeois modernism. And it is clear that its champions associated the need for sensory discipline with political discipline. ‘The bourgeois capitalist’, Hermann Muthesius wrote in 1899, ‘will see his capital well invested, when it serves to give his workers a ⁴⁵ Chris Otter, ‘Making Liberalism Durable: Vision and Civility in the Late Victorian City’, Social History 27/1 (January 2002), pp. 1–15, quotation p. 5. ⁴⁶ Ibid. ⁴⁷ Otter, ‘Making Liberalism Durable’, p. 3. ⁴⁸ Dorothee Brantz, ‘Animal Bodies, Human Health, and the Reform of Slaughterhouses in Nineteenth-Century Berlin’, Food and History 3 (November 2006), pp. 193–215. ⁴⁹ Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, 2 vols., translated by Edmund Jephcott, edited by Eric Dunning et al., Maldon, Oxford and Carlton, 2000, ii: State Formation and Civilization, esp. p. 230. An interesting recent application of Elias’s model to the historical analysis of German society is Mary Fulbrook, ed., Un-Civilizing Processes? Excess and Transgression in German Society and Culture: Perspectives Debating with Norbert Elias, Amsterdam, 2007.

Introduction

15

well-ordered and happy life, thus containing two threats which would otherwise spread: drunkenness and Social Democracy.’⁵⁰ Yet, however important this controlling, anti-revolutionary instinct may have been, there is also a danger that, in focusing on liberalism’s Other alone, we conceive of the bourgeois mindset as an automatic product of modernization, or capitalism. This study will argue that German bourgeois modernism was not the inevitable precursor of neo-liberal global capitalism, but a highly speciﬁc and hotly contested historical construct, which changed signiﬁcantly even in the few decades under consideration here. The creation of bourgeois modernism in the cities of Germany not only required a sophisticated socio-technical infrastructure. The bourgeois life, which was ‘performed’ in these spaces, was itself a complex, and contested, ritual. Its meaning was not set in stone, but deﬁned only in and through its constant performance—and it was continually changed, modiﬁed, and renegotiated.⁵¹ This process, rather than a single idea or ideology, shaped the physical fabric of the modernist city: not only as the infrastructure for modernity, but also as a theatrical stage of bourgeois identity performances. To conceive of modernism in this way is to redeﬁne its relationship with modernization. Many scholars have simply treated them as analogous. Spatial abstraction and a rupture with the past have long been presented as inevitable and inescapable consequences of modernization, and hence also modernism. In Therborn’s words, modernity was an epoch fundamentally different from ‘and possibly better than the present and the past. The contrast between the past and the future directs modernity’s semantics of time, or constitutes its binary code.’⁵² This resulted in a functional understanding of time and a corresponding modern subjectivity. In his classical account, E. P. Thompson argued that, with the rise of modern capitalism, life came to be organized around the clock and calendar.⁵³ Reinhart Koselleck proposed a similar, yet less economically-determinist thesis by suggesting that during the decades following the seminal ‘modernizing’ event of the French Revolution, the experience of time ‘accelerated’.⁵⁴ Thus, time and speed became the constitutive features of modernity, and modernism has been ⁵⁰ Hermann Muthesius, ‘Das Fabrikdorf Port Sunlight bei Liverpool’, Centralblatt der Bauverwaltung 25/19 (1 April 1899, Berlin), pp. 146–8. ⁵¹ Simon Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class, Manchester, 2000. ⁵² Göran Therborn, European Modernity and Beyond: The Trajectory of European Societies, 1945–2000, London, Thousand Oaks and New Dehli, 1995, p. 4. ⁵³ E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present 38 (1967), pp. 56–97. This classical account has been intensively scrutinized and criticized since, for example by David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World, rev. edn., Harvard, 2000. Compare also Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, ‘The Spaces of Clock Time’, in Patrick Joyce, ed., The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, London, 2002, pp. 151–74. ⁵⁴ Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, Frankfurt a.M., 1979. This hypothesis has been criticized by Wolfgang Ernst Becker, Zeit der Revolution!—Revolution der Zeit? Zeiterfahrungen in Deutschland in der Ära der Revolutionen 1789–1848/49, Göttingen, 1999.

16

Introduction

read as the mirror image of this reality. Stephen Kern suggested that the ‘spirit’ of modernism could best be captured in terms of ‘the miles of telephone wires that criss-crossed the Western world [ . . . that stand for] the vast extended present of simultaneity’.⁵⁵ Futurism’s obsession with speed, movement and technology is often cited as the most blatant example of this direct correspondence between reality and perception.⁵⁶ The same correlation has been claimed for the problem of place. In classical accounts, the nature of modernity is characterized as cosmopolitan, the style of modernity as international, and the archetypal site of modernity as the city —‘where we can interact with strangers without becoming friends’, as Richard Sennett wrote, paraphrasing Simmel.⁵⁷ The city here ﬁgures not as a concrete ‘place’, but as a disembodied, ideal-typical sphere of rational discourse, whose participants remain anonymous and develop no emotional attachments to the physical and social environment. In this view, modernity provides no home—domesticity is the antithesis of this concept of the modern.⁵⁸ Habermas famously described this conﬁguration as the ‘structural transformation of the public sphere’.⁵⁹ In the public sphere of modernity, reasoning individuals engaged in a universal process of emancipation from the authorities of absolutism, feudalism and obscurantism and, last but not least, the restrictions of place. In political terms, too, modernization was associated with shifting geographical scales that imply progressive abstraction. Modernization theorists pointed to nineteenth-century European nation-building as the ﬁrst stage of a universalizing process that led from pre-modern to the modern political afﬁliations.⁶⁰ Identiﬁcation with the nation-state, which overrode older loyalties to the sphere of one’s immediate social experience in the locality or region, turned, to use Eugen Weber’s famous phrase, ‘peasants into Frenchmen’.⁶¹ At the same time, it meant that the collective which deﬁned one’s identity was no longer one that could be experienced in any concrete sense—it was not the lived environment of the locality, but the imagined community of the nation, which existed only ⁵⁵ Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918, Harvard, 1983. ⁵⁶ A rich documentation of evidence for the role of speed and movement in modernist aesthetics and thought is provided in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, Berkeley, 1994. ⁵⁷ Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, New York, 1977. ⁵⁸ Christopher Reed, ed., Not At Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, London, 1996. ⁵⁹ Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, translated by Thomas Burger, Cambridge, 1992. ⁶⁰ On modernization theory, see W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A NonCommunist Manifesto, Cambridge, 1960; Philip Abrams, Historical Sociology, Ithaca, 1983; Mustafa O. Attir, Burkart Holzner and Zdenek Suda, eds., Directions of Change: Modernization Theory, Boulder, Colo., 1981. An excellent survey of the connection between modernization and nationbuilding is Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Becoming National: A Reader, New York, 1996. ⁶¹ Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914, London, 1979.

Introduction

17

in abstraction. A century later, this transformation evolved to a stage when even the nation-state was dismissed as too delimited, and replaced by pan-national institutions and global networks as the organizing paradigms of the modern. By contrast, this study deﬁnes the sense of place and time as central to modernism, which is here regarded not as a mirror image of the modern world, but rather as a project of performative recovery of place and time as dimensions of the social psyche under the changing conditions of modernization. Chapter 2 begins this analysis by focusing on changing conﬁgurations of the past in the bourgeois modernist milieu. Entitled ‘The Sense of Time: Conﬁguring History and Memory in the City’, it examines the embeddedness of modernist responses to the changing sense of time in mainstream bourgeois culture of the earlier nineteenth century. Historicism, a method of historical investigation pioneered by Leopold von Ranke, was a brainchild of nineteenth-century positivism, and treated the past as objectively and entirely knowable.⁶² Because it echoed this approach, historicism in architecture, often known as Beaux Arts, has been seen as ‘imperialist’ in its dealings with the past, exploiting history as a reservoir of styles to be employed and combined as suited the needs of the present. This is usually contrasted with a modernist perception of time, which emerged in the early twentieth century and was centred on the notion of memory. Understood as a long duration, to borrow a term from Henri Bergson, it resisted the tendency to subdivide the past into distinct epochs. Avant-garde literature offered narrative modes, such as the ‘stream of consciousness’, which mobilized intuition rather than science as a key to representing the past.⁶³ As that which, according to thinkers such as Aby Warburg, is sub- or semi-conscious, memory also resisted the notion that the past could be known completely, and its fragmentary and plural nature undermined the universalizing lexicography of historicism. Several scholars have suggested that the transition from historicism to the memory tropes of vernacular revival architecture was integral to the development of architectural modernism, because it emphasized the distance of the past, and this prepared the way towards a jettisoning of history and the forward thrust of modernist thinking.⁶⁴ This chapter argues that, instead, bourgeois modernism was marked by a series of incorporations of the past both as history and as memory. Hence, the transition from historicism was less abrupt than modernist propaganda implied. In this context, the emergence of a new idiom, here called meta-historicism, is particularly important. Where historicist buildings from ⁶² Georg Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present, rev. edn., Middletown, Conn., 1983. ⁶³ Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, Paris, 1889. ⁶⁴ Compare S. Anderson, ‘Memory without Monuments: Vernacular Architecture’, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review 11/1 (1999), pp. 12–22 and idem, ‘Memory in Architecture/Erinnerung in der Architektur’, Daidalos 58 (1995), pp. 22–37; and, for the high modernist period, Francesco Passanti, ‘The Vernacular, Modernism, and Le Corbusier’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (JSAH) 4/56 (1997), pp. 438–51.

18

Introduction

the 1860s simply appropriated historical precedents from different periods, this chapter argues that a new, meta-historicism of the years around 1900 juxtaposed such historical allusion with a new layer of memory tropes. This prepared the way for the early bourgeois modernists, who did not so much reject historical forms as transform them into cultural ‘archetypes’, supra-historical motifs of an archaic nature which resisted academic periodization. True, allusions to diffuse, longue durée memories replaced the more ostentatious forms of stately historicism. Yet history continued to provide a sense of structure, against which the more amorphous narratives of memory could be posited as a kind of counterfoil. I argue that history, rational and accountable, was the domain for expressing speciﬁc political content, Bildung, and bourgeois individualism. It entered into a symbolic dialogue with the representation of memory, which was at once more subjective, less reﬂected, and more collective than the former. This juxtaposition of memory and history allowed the reformers to create a visual vocabulary that could be experienced rather than just deciphered, and at the same time, tightly to control the meaning that emerged from the experience of the built environment. Chapter 3, entitled ‘The Sense of Place: Representing the Local in the Modern City’, approaches bourgeois modernism through another of its deﬁning tensions, that between a sense of place and the abstraction of space, between the vernacular and the universal. Since 1990, scholars such as Applegate and Conﬁno have shown that German notions of Heimat and localism contributed to the consolidation of the modern nation-state.⁶⁵ Building on such work enables us to jettison older notions of the continued importance of place in debates about German identity as backward-looking, nostalgic or symptomatic of a ‘reactionary modernism’, which led to the völkisch ‘blood and soil’ ideology of the Nazis.⁶⁶ ⁶⁵ Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat, Berkeley, 1990; Alon Conﬁno, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany and National Memory 1871–1918, Chapel Hill and London, 1997; Jenkins, Provincial Modernity; Georg Kunz, Verortete Geschichte: Regionales Geschichtsbewusstsein in den deutschen Historischen Vereinen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, Göttingen, 2000; Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis and London, 1996, especially section on ‘The Production of Locality’, pp. 178–99. ⁶⁶ Typical examples amongst primarily historical studies of the Heimat idea are Edeltraut Klueting, ed., Antimodernismus und Reform: Zur Geschichte der deutschen Heimatbewegung, Darmstadt, 1991; and W. Hartung, Konservative Zivilisationskritik und regionale Identität am Beispiel der niedersächsischen Heimatbewegung 1895 bis 1919, Hanover, 1991. Heimat is portrayed as protoand/or pro-fascist in D. Kramer, ‘Die politische und ökonomische Funktionalisierung von Heimat im deutschen Imperialismus und Faschismus’, Diskurs 6–7 (1973), pp. 3–22; David von Reeken, Heimatbewegung, Kulturpolitik und Nationalsozialismus: Die Geschichte der ‘Ostfriesischen Landschaft’ 1918–1949, Aurich, 1995; and J. A. Williams, ‘The Chords of the German Soul are Tuned to Nature: The Movement to Preserve the Natural Heimat from Kaiserreich to the Third Reich’, Central European History 29/3 (1996), pp. 339–84. An excellent new study challenging these categorizations is William R. Rollins, A Greener Vision of Home: Cultural Politics and Environmental Reform in the German Heimatschutz Movement, 1904–1918, Ann Arbor, 1997. See also David Midgley, ‘Los von Berlin! Anti-Urbanism as Counter-Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Germany’, in Steve Giles and Maike Oergel, eds., Counter-Cultures in Germany and Central Europe: From Sturm und Drang to Baader-Meinhof, Oxford, 2003, pp. 121–36.

Introduction

19

But Heimat was not only integral to modern nationalism: it was also a constituent part of bourgeois modernism. Moreover, Heimat should be seen as one variant of an international vernacular revival around 1900, through which modernist movements throughout the West reconﬁgured the sense of place. In this chapter, this process is dissected into three phases, each associated with a paradigmatic location. The ﬁrst is the city of Hamburg, boasting a long history as an autonomous city-state. After 1871, much building activity in the city was devoted to celebrating past ‘Hanseatic’ glory, thus countering pressures for closer integration into the nation-state. In the early decades of the twentieth century, and especially under the direction of Werkbund co-founder Fritz Schumacher, this historical revivalism was transformed into something profoundly modern. The civic ideals of the patrician city republic were redeﬁned so as to appeal to a wider public, notably the vast (and mostly working-class) immigrant population in the industrializing city. The idiom of Heimat presented an opportunity to redeﬁne civic particularism as a localism that spoke to modern subjectivity without presupposing privileged political status. Thus, in Hamburg, traditional civic loyalties were absorbed into a modernist agenda. The sense of place became a vital ingredient for modernism more generally; where it did not connect with strong local traditions, a localist imagination was substituted for them. This was the case in the second case study analysed in this chapter: Berlin. Here, Hermann Muthesius played a leading role in constructing a model architecture for Berlin’s new suburbs, in which rural and urban motifs were creatively intermingled to create a regionalist iconography. In the absence of a distinctive urban history to which to appeal, the vernacular idioms invented in this setting were more generic, and openly acknowledged their English inspiration. But Muthesius was also an outspoken critic of the Bund Heimatschutz, which he regarded as reactionary. His own architectural work attempted to translate the rural vernacular into a speciﬁcally urban, bourgeois context, which used Heimat only as an allusion or quotation, fusing it with a discourse of technical functionalism and urban sociability. In this way, a distinct Berlin vernacular emerged: less instantly recognizable than the Hanseatic vernacular, but an integral part of a political project that was no less place-speciﬁc than that of Schumacher. The third case considered in this chapter is Hagen. If bourgeois modernism was about the need to create a regionalist base for the politics of modernism, then the Ruhrgebiet presented a paradigmatic challenge. In this region, industrialization had principally evolved outside traditional urban structures. Cities such as Hagen were new, industrial creations. Moreover, the heavy industry which dominated the region’s economy was harder to connect with vernacular traditions than highquality, low-volume manufacturing. Karl Ernst Osthaus, who set out to invent a modern Ruhr-vernacular and unite the dispersed industrial settlements into a coherent whole, thus faced an enormous challenge. As patron and collector of the arts, sponsor of commercial art and model housing developments, educational

20

Introduction

reformer, and, last but not least, initiator of the Ruhr settlement plan, he hoped to transform the Ruhr-area into a distinctive region, with Hagen as its cultural focus. The shifting terminology that Osthaus himself employed to describe the role of place in this project—ranging from ‘bergisch region’, via ‘Westphalian Heimat’, to the ‘märkisch style’—indicates the extreme degree to which any sense of place in this setting was invented. This may have been one of the reasons why Osthaus’s projects achieved much less public resonance than analogous attempts in older German cities. Nevertheless, the long-term impact was signiﬁcant, with key elements of Osthaus’s plan being realized after the First World War. Chapter 4 is entitled ‘Nature and Culture: Greening the City’. In the bourgeois modernists’ programme, nature was widely invoked as an antidote to the supposed artiﬁciality of a pseudo-aristocratic, conventional and historicist mentality that one sought to overcome in the name of modernism. At the same time, Idealist notions of culture were crucial tools for creating order and structure in the new, liberal world. Just as history served the bourgeois modernists as a necessary counterpart for memory, culture became a counterpart for nature. It was characteristic of this outlook that culture and nature were not merged into a single, holistic world view—as adherents of the Heimatschutz movement often demanded—but that the tension between the two poles was deliberately sustained. The cityscape that emerged from this imperative was marked by architecture and spaces of a strange hybridity. Three exemplars are analysed in this chapter. The ﬁrst section is dedicated to the garden-city movement in Germany. Imported from England, the garden city seemed to offer the ideal synthesis of the rural and the urban form for the project of vernacular modernism. Yet, as the fate of the ﬁrst German garden city at Hellerau reveals, the experiment was short-lived, at least from the point of view of bourgeois modernists. The vision of small-scale self-sufﬁciency proved incompatible with the realities of urban life in one of the world’s most rapidly industrializing nations. Riemerschmid’s model factory at Hellerau failed to bridge the gap between traditional handicrafts and the memory of the ‘home town’ on the one hand, and mass urbanization and industrialization on the other. Hence, reformers such as Muthesius quickly distanced themselves from this experiment, which increasingly turned into an esoteric artists’ colony.⁶⁷ The chapter then turns to the next step in the evolution of the nature–culture dichotomy: strategies developed to bring nature into the fabric of existing, industrial cities. This ‘greening’ of the city took place on multiple levels. First, there were small, private gardens, which, in the work of Muthesius, the Gerson brothers and others, came to deﬁne suburbia as a zone where nature was embraced, yet strictly regimented and ‘civilized’. Second, there were schemes to introduce ⁶⁷ Marco De Michelis and Vicki Bilenker, ‘Modernity and Reform, Heinrich Tessenow and the Institut Dalcroze at Hellerau’, Perspecta 26 (1990): Theater, Theatricality, and Architecture, pp. 143–70.

Introduction

21

nature into large public spaces in the core of the city. Here, Schumacher’s work in Hamburg led the way. In vast urban parks, canals, basins and waterworks, the alleged healing potential of nature—physical and psychic—was mobilized. In the new parks and on the banks of the Alster, citizens of all classes were encouraged to mingle and experience a new sense of freedom within the city. At the same time, these spaces, too, were subject to tight visual regimentation. Rectangular shapes, symmetry, central perspective, bombastic granite walls that framed a little neighbourhood stream, and other such devices inscribed idealized patterns of physical and social ‘order’ onto the green zones. A similar dialogue between nature and culture, relegated to the purely symbolic level, drove the installation of animal sculptures in many of the city’s public squares and places. Thus, nature itself was reconﬁgured. If the nature imagined by garden-city constructors still bore some resemblance to the actual landscape, in the modernist city, the representation of nature became a topos that was located, above all, in the imagination. Like memory, it alluded to a quality of human subjectivity beyond the rational. The highly contrived quality of Muthesius’s gardens, Schumacher’s parks and rivers, and ﬁnally, Ruwoldt’s statues, spoke to the ‘natural’ in the human mind rather than to nature as seen in the landscape. Nature became a spiritual locus, which ‘liberated’ untapped human instincts and energies, but, in representing them, also controlled them. This ‘spirit of nature’ was, as the third section of this chapter argues, also combined with that which was furthest removed from the idea of an authentic landscape: industry and technology. Exemplary industrial architectures, such as the Spinning Factory Michels and the Wireless Transmission Station at Nauen, are analysed to show how nature was invoked as a spiritual principle even in this most rational and abstract of architectural genres. Chapter 5 analyses the designed object, and in doing so, returns to the original agenda of the Werkbund. It asks whether the strategies developed in the ﬁelds of architecture and urban development, as analysed so far, helped develop a language of forms for mass-produced objects that was recognizably modern while integrating place, memory and nature. Product designs championed by the Werkbund were driven by the perceived challenge of globalization, which necessitated a new awareness of cultural speciﬁcity.⁶⁸ Most of the reformers wholeheartedly supported the project of economic imperialism, a concerted ⁶⁸ According to Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeff G. Williamson, ‘When Did Globalization Begin?’, NBER Working Papers No. W7632, April 2000, the nineteenth century witnessed ‘a very big globalization bang’. Globalization is here deﬁned as trade expansion driven by the integration of markets between trading economies. The take-off began around 1830 in the agricultural sector; the market for manufactured goods followed suit some decades later. On globalization in the later nineteenth century, see James Foreman-Peck, ed., Historical Foundations of Globalization, Cheltenham, 1998; Carl Strickwerda, ‘The World at the Crossroads: The World Economy and International Relations in two Eras of Globalization, 1890–1914 and 1989 to the Present’, working paper, University of Kansas; Hans Pohl, Aufbruch der Weltwirtschaft: Geschichte der Weltwirtschaft von der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg, Stuttgart, 1989; and Maiken Umbach,

22

Introduction

campaign for the ‘Germanization’ of the world by exporting distinctly national products. Yet most did not feel that the ‘nation’ could bring about the recovery of the cultural speciﬁcity that was seen as a prerequisite for such products. Even though Muthesius demanded the creation of national ‘types’, national styles and nationalist symbols played a subordinate role in the development of this new language of forms. The space of the nation, after all, was itself an abstraction. By contrast, the vernacular provided a language that was speciﬁc to place: a place of actual experience, such as the locality or region. Indeed, in the strictest sense, the vernacular was the domestic—vernacular, after all, derived from the Latin verna, and originally denoted things coming from or pertaining to the home.⁶⁹ For the reformers, the private house was the epitome of vernacular culture. Hence, their decision to approach the improvement of object design through a large-scale reform of domestic architecture in the city was fully within the logic of their thinking. While the vernacular was widely accepted as the basis from which to reform material culture, within these parameters, two distinct approaches took shape, which were based, in part, on different readings of modernity itself. For Muthesius and his allies, the problem was the alienation of the worker from the product, which was characteristic of highly mechanized industrial production. Using handicrafts tradition as a basis for object design would overcome this problem, because the vernacular object would naturally express the worker’s identity, his sense of place, memory and nature. The chapter then traces the rival position that was developed by Karl Ernst Osthaus. This opposition may seem surprising. It is widely believed that the famous 1914 controversy that split the Werkbund evolved around the conﬂict between the ‘freedom of art’ and the dictates of economic rationality, and that Muthesius’s leading opponent was Henri van de Velde, not Osthaus. This chapter argues that this polemical clash distracts from a more fundamental division, pertaining not to the freedom of the artist, but to the role of commercial culture in modernity. For Muthesius, the problem of alienation was to be approached from the point of view of production; he had much less to say on the issue of consumption. Indeed, Muthesius was highly suspicious of consumer culture, fashion and advertising, which he saw as a continuation of the alienated ornamental culture of past epochs. For Osthaus, by contrast, the commercialization of culture held the potential to democratize modernity, by dissolving the aura of ‘high art’, which (like Muthesius) he saw as the spiritual ally of the ancien régime. Osthaus sought to develop a design aesthetic that took its inspiration from advertising and shop window displays. This dichotomy has an analogy in the discourse of present-day ‘vernacular ‘Made in Germany’, in Hagen Schulze and Etienne Franc¸ois, eds., Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, 3 vols., Munich, 2000–1, vol. ii, pp. 405–38. ⁶⁹ For an etymological discussion of the ‘vernacular’ see Umbach and Hüppauf, ‘Introduction’ in idem, Vernacular Modernism, Stanford, 2005, pp. 1–24, esp. p. 9.

Introduction

23

modernism’. On the one hand, the paradigm of ‘critical regionalism’ deﬁnes the vernacular as a particularism of place and memory that can act as a corrective to the globalizing abstractions of the modern.⁷⁰ On the other hand, scholars such as Brinkerhoff Jackson employ the term vernacular to denote—even celebrate—the culture of the everyday, as opposed to high culture, and see in popular culture that which is truly universal, and precisely not particularist.⁷¹ Chapter 6, ‘Governmentality and the Spaces of Bürgerlichkeit’, draws together the different strands of the analysis to locate the reformers’ project more precisely in the political landscape of Wilhelmine Germany. Hermann Muthesius described his ambition as the creation of a bourgeois society. Yet the German concept he employed was ‘bürgerlich’. This distinction is central to the interpretation proposed in this chapter. For the German term bürgerlich referred not, as many historians have assumed, to bourgeois as a class identity, much less to an inevitable product of the rise of capitalism. Rather, it denoted a collective political aspiration of the type identiﬁed by Pocock and Foucault.⁷² It originated in the eighteenth century, and is perhaps best translated as liberal citizenship, although it far exceeded the limits of liberalism as an organized political movement.⁷³ Bürgerlichkeit designated an attitude, a lifestyle and a habitus that were self-consciously modern, yet ﬁrmly grounded in notions of self-control, discipline and rootedness. It was ‘liberal’ in so far as it was predicated on a notion of ‘character’ that was a prerequisite for the transformation of direct rule to mediated or liberal government. ⁷⁰ The term ‘critical regionalism’ was originally coined by architectural theorists Alexander Tzonis and Liane Lefaivre, yet it is more prominently associated with Kenneth Frampton’s writings, such as ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance’, in H. Foster, ed., Postmodern Culture, London and Sydney, 1985, pp. 16–30, and ‘Critical Regionalism: Modern Architecture and Cultural Identity’, in idem, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, rev. edn., London, 1992, pp. 314–27. Frampton’s paradigm has since inspired several, at times critical, investigations into contemporary architectural regionalisms, such as a dedicated special issue on ‘Critical Regionalism’ in Arcade: The Journal for Architecture and Design in the Northwest 16/4 (1998). ⁷¹ John Brinkerhoff Jackson, A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time, New Haven, 1994, esp. pp. 154–63, and idem, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, New Haven, 1984. ⁷² Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago, 1991, pp. 87–104, and J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, Cambridge, 1985. An interesting comparison of both approaches is Graham Burchell, ‘Peculiar Interests: Civil Society and Governing the System of Natural Liberty’, in Burchell et al., The Foucault Effect, pp. 119–50. ⁷³ Gotthold Ephraim Lessing termed a new literary genre ‘bürgerliches Trauerspiel’, which designated a moralizing, sentimental play in a domestic setting. Although the word contained a social dimension, aristocrats were encouraged to behave in bürgerlich ways; the paradox is explored in Michael Stürmer, ‘Bürgerliche Fürsten’, in Wolfgang Hardtwig and Harm-Hinrich Brandt, eds., Deutschlands Weg in die Moderne: Politik, Gesellschaft und Kultur im 19. Jahrhundert, Munich, 1993, pp. 215–22. On the same problem in a French revolutionary context, see T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolution: Class War or Culture Clash, Basingstoke and New York, 1998. By contrast, Jürgen Habermas, The Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger, Cambridge, Mass., 1989, conﬂates civic, civil, domestic and bourgeois in the concept of bürgerliche Gesellschaft.

24

Introduction

This chapter exempliﬁes the connection between this political project and the cultural manifestations of bourgeois modernism by focusing on interior spaces. The home was the site where new behavioural patterns were ﬁrst developed, which then governed public conduct. A close reading of Muthesius’s prototypical music chamber demonstrates the centrality of sensory discipline to the formation of bürgerlich subjectivity. Yet the chapter also ﬁnds important divergences between the literature on liberal governmentality and the realities of reform in Wilhelmine Germany. Rose suggested that liberal subjects were governed ‘by throwing a web of visibility over personal conduct’.⁷⁴ The opening up of spaces, inside the house and in the city at large, was undoubtedly an important ambition of bürgerlich reformers in this period. Yet Wilhelmine liberals did not believe that freedom alone could be relied upon to consolidate a liberal order. The new visual openness was constantly kept in check by the invention of new ordering mechanisms, both of a physical and of an ideal-typical kind. The actual performance of music in these intimate spaces, and the socio-psychological impact ascribed to them by contemporaries, serves as an example of the Janus-faced nature of Bürgerlichkeit, conjuring up the very ghosts which it then sought to tame. A deeper and potentially destabilizing experience of the self was central to the constitution of bürgerlich subjectivities. Only in a second step did ordering principles and disciplining devices then act upon this newly destabilized and highly individualized self to achieve a new sense of collective order. In the inter-war years, these ordering mechanisms became more pronounced—to the extent that many of the pre-war reformers eventually returned to history and symmetry in ways that were barely distinguishable from nineteenthcentury historicism. It would be misleading, however, to interpret these developments during the Weimar years merely as a conservative turn in the bürgerlich milieu. This becomes clear in the Epilogue to this study, which compares the project of bürgerlich modernism with the Nazi regime’s cultural politics. The Werkbund was assimilated into the National Socialist state with relative ease. Some scholars have therefore suspected strong ideological continuities between both projects.⁷⁵ In particular, the aim to overcome alienation through ‘joy of work’ has been read as a precursor of the infamous motto at Auschwitz’s gates, ‘Arbeit macht frei’.⁷⁶ Such claims of continuity not only ⁷⁴ Rose, Powers of Freedom, p. 73. ⁷⁵ On the Werkbund during the Nazi regime, see Sabine Weissler, ed., Design in Deutschland, 1933–45: Ästhetik und Organisation des Deutschen Werkbundes im ‘Dritten Reich’, Giessen, 1990. On the continuity thesis, see Oechslin, ‘Politisches’. On Heimat and modernism in Nazi architecture, see Tilman Harlander, Zwischen Heimstätte und Wohnmaschine: Wohnungsbau und Wohnungspolitik in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, Basel and Boston, 1995. A fuller survey of the literature is included in the Epilogue of this study. ⁷⁶ For the tendency to portray the Werkbund’s signiﬁcance as part of a uniquely German teleology, see Holger Schatz and Andrea Woeldike, ‘Deutsche Arbeit und eleminatorischer AntiSemitismus: Über die sozio-ökonomische Bedingtheit einer kulturellen Tradition’, in Jürgen Elsässer and Andrei S. Markovits, eds., Die Fratze der eigenen Geschichte: Von der Goldhagen-Debatte zum

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deny the open-endedness of all historical development. They also rest on the assumption that cultural politics are deﬁned by ‘ideas’; the idea of Heimat, for example, is one on which such continuities have frequently been pinned.⁷⁷ Yet on closer inspection, it is impossible to ﬁnd any modernist movement around 1900, in Germany, in any other European country or in the United States, that did not incorporate some of the language and symbols of the vernacular revival. Such cultural resources only achieved political signiﬁcance in distinctive constellations. Bürgerlich modernism was one such constellation, which worked by ﬁnely balancing history and memory, order and nature, nation and region, the progressive and the archaic. A very different set of constellations characterized the Nazi cultural politics. This difference is illustrated by a comparison between Fritz Schumacher and Fritz Höger, focusing on their use of red brick, the archetypal Heimat material. For Schumacher, red brick was the vernacular material ideally suited to the project of liberal, bürgerlich reform. It invoked civic identities that had developed over time; by drawing on these memories, the abstract modern city could be transformed into a topos of collective identiﬁcation. At the same time, Schumacher argued that brick forced a modernist discipline upon the architect, by exposing structural composition. It was an antidote to the follies of historicism, and hence the concomitant of a new form of rational urban planning. For Höger, red brick was something quite different. Where Schumacher saw civic memory, Höger saw the archaic memory of human existence (and later gave these theories a racist twist). Where Schumacher saw liberal, rational progress, Höger conjured up an emphatically anti-rational vision of collective salvation. Höger’s bricks became the building blocks of a political project that replaced history with archetypes, and progress with spectacularization. Bourgeois modernists had emphasized the tensions between the deﬁning parts of their project: place and space, history and memory, nature and culture were not synthesized, but juxtaposed in a perpetual dialogue. Höger, by contrast, fused the elements of his building ideology into a whole. This aspiration to unity, or totality, lent itself to collaboration with a totalitarian regime, an aim vigorously pursued by Höger, even if his vision clashed with the more classicist line supported by Speer and Hitler. By comparison, the project of Bürgerlichkeit, for all its techniques of exclusion and mechanisms of control, remained a complex, pluralist, and contested ritual. This ritual was constantly performed, reﬁned, adjusted, and redeﬁned. And in the process, the city was reshaped to serve as its appropriate stage. Together, these chapters do not seek to explain material culture: instead, they look to material culture to do the explaining. The very ambiguity of such evidence is also its asset: what the visual loses in precision, it gains in sensitivity, Jugoslawien-Krieg, Berlin, 1999, pp. 103–23. More nuanced is Campbell, Joy of Work, German Work. ⁷⁷ See note 65.

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thus changing so much more quickly than the written word. We are faced with a mélange of traditions invented, remembered, half-forgotten; identities tried out, and half-discarded; futures imagined, planned, defended, half-abandoned. The uncertainty associated with this method opens up some new perspectives onto modernism itself. Its material culture permanently reconstituted itself, and in the act of viewing, was reconstituted yet again. Ambiguity was therefore its essential nature. This realization can serve to steer us away from models that treat modernism as either a ‘cause’ or an ‘effect’ of modernity. Modernism did not cause historical developments, be they democracy, fascism or consumerism. Yet it was also no mirror image of a modern historical reality already out there. Modernism is, itself, history: a series of social, cultural and political interventions, which we can best approach through a careful analysis—or ‘thick description’—of its empirical manifestations. This is the approach adopted in this book.

2 The Sense of Time: Configuring History and Memory in the City

‘Let us go! Here is the very first sunrise on earth! Nothing equals the splendour of its red sword which strikes for the first time in our millennial darkness.’ Thus wrote Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in Le Figaro on 20 February 1909. His Futurist Manifesto became the model for a host of modernist texts, which utilized the ad hoc character of the genre of manifestos to underline a sense of novelty and dynamism. Italian Futurists alone produced sixteen manifestos between 1910 and 1916, and their example was followed throughout Europe and the New World, with large numbers of manifestos and similar polemical declarations being published by various modernist groups in Germany.¹ All of them defined modernism in opposition to the past. This body of writing has given rise to an enduring image of modernism as a rejection of history. Modernism, its very name seems to prove, was conceived as a temporal category.² The notion of progress was at its heart; in Therborn’s words, ‘the contrast between the past and the future directs modernity’s semantics of time’.³ Futurists wanted to burn down museums, as institutional embodiments of the claim that the past mattered. The museum’s political corollary was a mode of thinking that relied, rhetorically or actually, on the application of historical precedents; its aesthetic corollary was the style of historicism, which translated such precedents or conventions into material ornaments. Like other modernists, German Werkbund activists were hailed as ‘destined to come, as part of a healing reaction against a ¹ Luca Somigli, Legitimizing the Artist: Manifesto Writing and European Modernism, 1885–1915, Toronto, 2003; and Milton Cohen, Movement, Manifesto, Melee: The Modernist Group, 1910–1914, Lanham, 2004, esp. pp. 105–34. A more general overview of modernist polemical writings is provided in Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane Goldman and Olga Taxidou, eds., Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, Chicago, 1999. ² On the etymology of modernity, see Matei Calinescu, ‘Modernity, Modernism, Modernisation: Variations on Modern Themes’, in C. Berg, F. Durieux and G. Lernout, eds., Turn of the Century: Modernism and Modernity in Literature and the Arts, New York, 1995, pp. 33–52. ³ G¨oran Therborn, European Modernity and Beyond: The Trajectory of European Societies, 1945–2000, London, Thousand Oaks and New Dehli, 1995, p. 4.

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disease of ostentation, an emptying of meaning through stupidity and historical conventions’.⁴ The trope of modernism as a movement without precedent was all-pervasive. Looking back on these decades, Walter Gropius announced that they witnessed the ‘decisive break from an eclectic period of architecture to an entirely new material language. Its ideas derived from new social ideas and technological inventions.’⁵ Muthesius, too, argued that the direction of modernism was ‘determined by the scientific mindset of the new age’, and that its relationship with the past was that of a ‘struggle against inauthentic pomp and superﬂuous pathos’.⁶ The jettisoning of this legacy, outwardly represented by a rejection of the ornamental architectural vocabulary of Beaux Arts, was invested with ethical, even supernatural significance. Modernists as diverse as Alfred Lichtwark, Alois Riegl and Adolf Loos attacked the architecture of the nineteenth century as morally degenerate.⁷ Loos famously defined ornament as a ‘crime’, and exclaimed, ‘Behold, the time is near, deliverance awaits us! Soon the streets of our cities will be gleaming like white walls.’⁸ This revolutionary rhetoric did much to shape subsequent narratives of modernism. Barbara Miller-Lane speaks of a double revolution in Germany: one that occurred around 1900, which was driven by the protagonists of what we have here called bourgeois modernism, and another revolution that occurred around 1918, and which led to ‘high modernism’ and the International Style.⁹ Not all polemics represent an adequate summary of the contents of a movement. The discourse of modernism employed a diction of authenticity and directness, but was eminently rhetorical itself, and thus prone to overstate differences that threw its own project into sharper relief. As we shall see, the material evidence tells a different story, a story of continuity and evolution, rather than ⁴ Anonymous article entitled ‘Hermann Muthesius’, Fachblatt f¨ur Holzarbeiter, published by the Deutscher Holzarbeiter-Verband, issue 11, November 1911, Berlin, unpag., in Werkbund Archiv Berlin, Bestand Muthesius, ‘Artikel u¨ ber Muthesius’. ⁵ Walter Gropius, cited in Helmut Weber, Walter Gropius und das Faguswerk, Munich, 1961, pp. 7–8. ¨ ⁶ Hermann Muthesius, ‘Uber das Moderne in der Architektur’, Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung, 7 May 1904, pp. 236–7, in Werkbund Archiv Berlin, Abt. 10, Artikel von Muthesius 1899–1906. ⁷ Alois Riegl, Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament, 1893; trans. 1992, especially introduction and ch. 1; Alfred Lichtwark, ‘Palace Window and Folding Door’, Pan 2 (1896), pp. 57–60; idem, ‘Practical Application’, Dekorative Kunst 1 (1897), pp. 24–7, in Tim and Charlotte Benton, eds., Form and Function: A Source Book for the History of Architecture and Design 1890–1939, London, 1975, pp. 9–11 and 14–15; Adolph Loos, Spoken Into the Void: Collected Essays 1897–1900, Cambridge, Mass., 1982; Barry Bergdoll, European Architecture, 1750–1890, Oxford, 2000, pp. 269–79; Schwarzer, German Architectural Theory, pp. 215–37. ⁸ Adolf Loos, ‘Ornament und Verbrechen’, 1908, printed in Ulrich Conrads, Programme und Manifeste der Architektur des 20. Jahrhunderts, Braunschweig, 1975, p. 16. On Loos, see also Janet Stewart, Fashioning Vienna: Adolf Loos’s Cultural Criticism, Routledge, 2000; and Christian K¨uhn, Das Sch¨one, das Wahre und das Richtige: Adolf Loos und das Haus M¨uller in Prag, Birkh¨auser, 2001, which confronts Loos’s writings with a model analysis of a programmatic modernist building. ⁹ Barbara Miller-Lane, Architektur und Politik in Deutschland, 1918–1945, Braunschweig and Wiesbaden, 1986, pp. 23–4.

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rupture and revolution, in the genesis of modernism and its relationship with the past. This chapter will offer a ‘thick description’ of some key buildings and urbanistic projects to trace such continuities and gradual changes. The aim is not to deny that a seismic shift took place in the historical imagination of this period. Rather, it is to argue that the relationship with the past, while decisively reconfigured, remained of utmost significance. Nor was it unambiguously encased in a strict teleology of improvement. Rather, bourgeois modernism was characterized by a mode of appropriating and utilizing the past, which, whilst innovative in some ways, was also deeply grounded in the eminently bourgeois and by no means entirely pre-modern practice of historicism, an intellectual and architectural school that rose to prominence in the later nineteenth century, and was subtly redefined and reconfigured to meet the new challenges of the decades immediately before the First World War. From the point of view of self-appointed modernists, one of the problems with historicism was that it was a product of the Academy. The style of Beaux Arts derived its name from the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, formerly part of the Acad´emie Royale.¹⁰ Its reliance on canonical textbooks of architectural forms and d´ecor, its rapid international diffusion, and the fact that its patrons were overwhelmingly members of an increasingly globalized capitalist elite, led critics to detect a moral degradation in Beaux Arts, where historical forms were used mechanically, detached from their proper cultural context, and rendered subservient to status representation. Adolf Behne suggested that ‘one built Gothic buildings one day, early Christian the next, and Romanesque the day after, because one [i.e. the Beaux Arts practitioner] had no architectural language of one’s own’.¹¹ According to Fritz H¨oger, Beaux Arts was a ‘palace and castle style’, which had become ‘dreadfully common’.¹² A more socially sensitive and politically ambitious ‘reform architecture’ would help overcome this reliance on defunct historical models.¹³ Such statements have to be read in the context of broader contests about the role of the past. German critics frequently employed the term Historismus when attacking Beaux Arts. Thereby, they likened the architectural idiom to a major ¹⁰ Useful introductions to Historismus are Alan Colquhoun, ‘Three Kinds of Historicism’, in idem, Modernity and the Classical Tradition: Architectural Essays, Cambridge, Mass., 1989, pp. 3–19; Barry Bergdoll, ‘Archaeology vs. History: Heinrich H¨ubsch’s critique of Neoclassicism and the Beginnings of Historicism in German Architectural Theory’, Oxford Art Journal 5 (1983), pp. 3–12; Dwight E. Lee and Robert N. Beck, ‘The Meaning of Historicism’, American Historical Review 59 (1953/4), pp. 568–77. On one of historicism’s most inﬂuential German contemporary theorists, see Harry Francis Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper, Architect of the Nineteenth Century, New Haven, 1996; and Mari Hvattum, Gottfried Semper and the Problem of Historicism, Cambridge, 2004. ¹¹ Adolf Behne, ‘Die a¨sthetischen Theorien der modernen Baukunst’, Preussische Jahrb¨ucher 2/153 (August 1913), pp. 274–83. ¹² Fritz H¨oger, ‘Die architektonische Entwicklung Hamburgs’, Stadtbaukunst alter und neuer Zeit 8/4 (20 July 1927), p. 65. ¹³ Schwarzer, German Architectural Theory, pp. xi–32 and 69–77; Jenkins, Provincial Modernity, pp. 261–93.

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intellectual trend of the time, which had seen a group of German scholars, the so-called Historisten, take a leading role in the invention of history as an academic discipline.¹⁴ History-writing was now practised as a Wissenschaft, or science, at universities, drawing its evidence and legitimacy from archival research. Leopold von Ranke, professor at the University of Berlin, was one of the founding fathers of this school. Although Ranke never denied the need for an ‘interpretation’ of historical facts, his and his pupils’ historical method was based on a fundamental epistemological optimism: the past was knowable, objectively and entirely. In this way, it was an extension of nineteenth-century positivism, the bourgeois doctrine par excellence. Towards the end of the century, intellectual challenges to historicism were couched in a new preoccupation with memory. Against historicism’s tendency to dominate the past by subdividing it into distinct moments or epochs, writers such as Wilhelm Dilthey and Henri Bergson configured memory as a duration: the gaze into the past was by definition subjective and resisted classification.¹⁵ And these were only the two most prominent champions of a new cult of memory. According to Max Scheler, writing in 1913, Bergson’s inﬂuence had become ‘so popular and dominant in German cultural life’ of the time that intellectuals referencing Bergson were in danger of being regarded as populists.¹⁶ The new and increasingly popular preoccupation with memory was further informed by new narrative structures, such as the Joycian ‘stream of consciousness’, which captured a sense of the past as longue dur´ee in poetic terms.¹⁷ Moreover, the powerful new paradigm of the subconscious, which ushered in a radically new view of the bourgeois self and its Other, also played a decisive role in propelling memory to the forefront of debates. This was, after all, an age in which the science of psychology was invented—yet simultaneously one in which the bourgeois fascination with psychology was deeply enmeshed in a popular vogue of occult movements, as Corinna Treitel has shown.¹⁸ Within this context, Aby Warburg was one of the first scholars systematically to explore the psychological dimension of memory. In the inscription above the entrance of his famous ¹⁴ Georg Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present, rev. edn., Middletown, Conn., 1983, esp. pp. 287–90; idem, ‘The Image of Ranke in American and German Historical Thought’, History and Theory 2/1 (1962), pp. 17–40; and idem, ‘Historicism: The History and Meaning of the Term’, Journal of the History of Ideas 56/1 (1995), pp. 129–52. ¹⁵ Henri Bergson, Essai sur les donn´ees imm´ediates de la conscience, Paris, 1889. On the German reception of Bergson’s ideas on time, see Rudolf Meyer, ‘Bergson in Deutschland, unter besonderer Ber¨ucksichtigung seiner Zeitauffassung’, in Ernst Wolfgang Orth, ed., Studien zum Zeitproblem in der Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts, Freiburg and Munich, 1982, pp. 10–64. ¹⁶ Max Scheler, ‘Versuche einer Philosophie des Lebens’, originally in Die Weissen Bl¨atter, November 1913, reprinted in idem, ‘Vom Umsturz der Werte: Abhadlungen und Aufs¨atze’, Gesammelte Werke, iii, Bern, 1955, pp. 323–5. ¹⁷ On Bergson and James Joyce, see Mary Ann Gillies, Henri Bergson and British Modernism, Montreal, 1996, esp. pp. 132–50. ¹⁸ Treitel, A Science for the Soul, esp. pp. 56–82.

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Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek in Hamburg, he invoked the allegorical figure of Mnemosyne. Replacing the rule of Clio, the muse of History, Mnemosyne was the patron goddess of Memory, introducing a novel and self-consciously subjective dimension into perceptions of the past.¹⁹ While the later ‘Warburg school’ looked for universal allegories, Warburg himself was interested in those characteristic gestures in art whose function was, above all, psychological. His symbolic cosmos, in which astrology and pagan rituals took centre stage, evolved around the irrational and shamanistic elements of human culture, and thus shared important leitmotifs with occultism. Warburg’s turn towards memory has often been identified with the political radicalization of the Weimar years. It is true that, in the inter-war period, several thinkers of the political left looked to memory as a vehicle for challenging hegemonic historicism, opposing its universal conclusions with the fragmentary and plural nature of memory. Scholars such as Walter Benjamin attacked historicism for reconstructing the past, claiming that, because the past was marked by exploitation and repression, in reconstructing it, historicism prolonged it, and thus served as a tool of power.²⁰ To avoid this affirmative feedback effect, the task of the Materialist historian, according to Benjamin, was to break the cycle of power and repression, by deconstructing any sense of historical continuity or evolution. In this approach, memory assumed a politically subversive function.²¹ Yet it pre-dated Weimar radicalism by some decades. Recent scholarship has rightly emphasized the degree to which the psychological turn in the approach to the past, which Warburg’s work represented, was embedded in the milieu of Wilhelmine Hamburg.²² Born in 1866, Warburg was an almost exact contemporary of the most inﬂuential bourgeois modernists we shall be encountering in this and the following chapters: Hermann Muthesius, born in 1861; Fritz Schumacher, born ¹⁹ Roland Kany, Mnemosyne als Programm: Geschichte, Erinnerung und die Andacht zum Unbedeutenden im Werk von Usener, Warburg und Benjamin, T¨ubingen, 1987. Recent decades have seen a revival of interest in Warburg’s original conception of art history. As part of this process, the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek in Hamburg was carefully restored, and a series of Warburg conferences were held, for example Horst Bredekamp, Michael Diers and Charlotte Schoell-Glass, eds., Aby Warburg: Akten des internationalen Symposions, Hamburg, 1990, Weinheim, 1991. ²⁰ Dag T. Andersson, ‘Destruktion/Konstruktion’, in Michael Opitz and Erdmund Wizisla, eds., Benjamins Begriffe, 2 vols., Frankfurt a.M., 2000, vol. i, pp. 147–85. Cf. Alexander García D¨uttmann, ‘Tradition and Destruction: Benjamin’s Politics of Language’, MLN 106/3 (1991), special issue on Walter Benjamin; Heinrich Kaulen, Rettung und Destruktion, Untersuchungen zur Hermeneutik Walter Benjamins, T¨ubingen, 1987; Christian J. Emden, Walter Benjamins Arch¨aologie der Moderne: Kulturwissenschaft um 1930, Munich, 2006. ¨ ²¹ Walter Benjamin, ‘Uber den Begriff der Geschichte’, in idem, Ein Lesebuch, ed. Michel Orpitz, Frankfurt a.M., 1996, pp. 665–76. Cf. Krista R. Greffrath, Metaphorischer Materialismus: Untersuchungen zum Geschichtsbegriff Walter Benjamins, Munich, 1981; G´erard Rulet, ‘Benjamins Historismus-Kritik’, in Uwe Steiner, ed., Walter Benjamin, 1892–1940, zum 100. Geburtstag, Bern, 1992, pp. 103–22. An English translation of Benjamin’s Theses on History by Dennis Redmont is available online at http://www.efn.org/∼dredmond/Theses on History.pdf (accessed 8 August 2008). ²² Mark A. Russell, Between Tradition and Modernity: Aby Warburg and the Public Purposes of Art in Hamburg, 1896–1918, New York and Oxford, 2007.

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in 1869; Richard Riemerschmid, born in 1868; and Peter Behrens, born in 1868; while others, such as Karl-Ernst Osthaus and Fritz H¨oger, both born in the mid-1870s, were slightly younger than Warburg. The peak of Warburg’s own research work and field-trips, as well as his public lecturing activities, fell before the First World War, and he spent much of the 1920s struggling with mental health problems. Yet his frequent classification as a Weimar intellectual is indicative of a persistent historiographical trend to associate modernism with the radicalism of the Weimar years. The built environment offers fascinating clues for tapping into the broader shifts in mentality that underpinned these debates about history versus memory.²³ What philosophers and literati debated in their own circles was often able to take root in collective consciousness through the experience of the built environment. A new understanding of time, and a new pre-eminence of memory, came to shape the physical fabric of day-to-day urban life. In it, we see how a sense of the past remained integral to modernist identity politics, and no radical break with historicism is detectable. This historicism had reached a first peak in Germany around the time of political unification, and as part of the building boom called the Gr¨underzeit. In an epoch characterized by political optimism, especially within the National Liberal milieu, and by the economic optimism that preceded the first cyclical recession of the later 1870s, historicism seemed to suit the collective mentality of the bourgeoisie. Stately bourgeois town houses, the so-called Gr¨underzeit villas, expressed the social ambitions of the country’s nouveau riche industrial and commercial middle classes.²⁴ They employed a range of allegorical architectural forms that alluded to the achievements of earlier eras: Gothic, Renaissance and Baroque palaces and cathedrals served as templates. For its critics, the Gr¨underzeitvilla became emblematic of the ‘feudalization’ of the German middle classes, as Friedrich Naumann had identified it, which prefigured the political ‘failure’ of liberalism.²⁵ Werkbund writers such as Hermann Muthesius argued that they were indicative of the failure of the German bourgeoisie to develop an appropriate cultural vocabulary of their own, mimicking outdated, aristocratic forms and values.²⁶ ²³ Rudi Koshar, Germany’s Transient Pasts: Preservation and National Memory in the Twentieth Century, Chapel Hill, 1998. ²⁴ An architectural history of the Gr¨underzeit is provided by Rainer Haaff, Gr¨underzeit: M¨obel und Wohnkultur, Westheim, 1992. For an interesting social history of both historicist and reformstyle villas around Berlin, see Heinz Reif, ed., Berliner Villenleben Die Inszenierung b¨urgerlicher Wohnwelten am gr¨unen Rand der Stadt um 1900, Berlin, 2008. ²⁵ Friedrich Naumann, ‘Der Industriestaat’, 1912, in idem, Werke, 6 vols., Cologne and Opladen, 1964, vol. iii: Politische Schriften, pp. 42–70. ²⁶ Muthesius’s dismissal of style in architecture dates back to his pamphlet Stilarchitektur und Baukunst: Wandlungen der Architektur im 19. Jahrhundert und ihr heutiger Standpunkt, M¨uhlheim-Ruhr, 1902. The political content of this critique was elaborated in his essay in Der Kunstwart 17 (1904). Between 1907 and 1926, Muthesius almost constantly attacked historicist architecture.

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From the late 1880s, German historicism developed in a new direction. At a time of relative recession, it moved away from its associations with private wealth and into the public realm, where it became grander in scale, more complex in its allegorical narratives and more conspicuous in its locations within the cityscape. This later form of historicism is often referred to as Wilhelminismus, a pejorative label that underlines this architecture’s supposed affinity with Emperor William II’s autocratic style of government, and the pomp and circumstance of his self-glorification.²⁷ Wilhelminismus, too, was soon widely derided by critics. Fritz Schumacher was particularly outspoken. ‘Up to now’, he wrote in his memoirs about the time of his arrival in Hamburg, ‘there has been no ordering principle in Hamburg which might have brought any sense of order into the artistic aspect of the city. This is clearly demonstrated by a monstrosity like the newly created ensemble on the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Straße.’²⁸ The monstrosity in question was Hamburg’s Forum of Justice, an ensemble of three ‘Wilhelminist’ court buildings. In remarks such as these, the focus of the anti-historicist polemic had shifted: where earlier historicism had been deemed symptomatic of the German middle classes’ nostalgic obsession with an aristocratic past, later historicism was deemed a propaganda tool of the reactionary politics of the imperial government. Both of them, the bourgeois modernists alleged, were based on a refusal to engage with the realities of the modern world and, hence, irrelevant to the evolution of cultural modernism. This view dominates architectural criticism to the present day. Echoing Schumacher’s verdict, the Forum of Justice has recently been described as ‘pompous’, ‘theatrical’, ‘laboured’, ‘typical Wilhelminismus’ and ‘nothing but enclosed air’.²⁹ Characteristically, such condemnations employ purely stylistic categories, which are then endowed with moral authority. They thereby downplay the role of Wihelminismus in the overall evolution of cities in this period, and thus obscure important lines of continuity between this late, or hybrid, historicism and the project of bourgeois modernism. To re-evaluate this relationship, we first have to reﬂect on the location of buildings in the city. In the middle of the nineteenth century, most remaining ²⁷ On Wilhelminismus, see Matthew Jefferies, Imperial Culture in Germany, 1871–1918, Basingstoke, 2003, esp. pp. 194–9; Ruth Glatzer, Das Wilhelminische Berlin: Panorama einer Metropole 1890–1918, Berlin, 1997; and Helmut Engel, Baugeschichte Berlin, ii: Umbruch, Suche, Reformen: 1861–1918: St¨adtebau und Architektur in Berlin zur Zeit des deutschen Kaiserreiches, Berlin, 2004. ²⁸ Fritz Schumacher, Stufen des Lebens: Erinnerungen eines Baumeisters, 2nd edn., Stuttgart, 1949, p. 384. The original text reads: ‘Es gab bis dahin in Hamburg keinerlei ordnende Macht, um in das k¨unstlerische Bild der Stadt irgendwelchen Zusammenhang zu bringen. An Mißgeburten, wie [. . .] dem neu entstandenen Durchbruch der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Straße konnte man das mit Schrecken sehen.’ ²⁹ The quotations drawn from the following works: Karin Wiedemann, Von der Gerichtslaube zum Sievekingsplatz: Gerichtsgeb¨aude in Hamburg, Hamburg, 1992; Volkwin Marg and Gudrun Fleher in Architektur in Hamburg seit 1900, new edn., Hamburg, 1968, esp. p. 21; Hermann Hipp, Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg: Geschichte, Kultur und Stadtbaukunst an Elbe und Alster, Cologne, 1989, esp. p. 213; Ralf Lange in his Architekturf¨uhrer Hamburg, Stuttgart, 1995, esp. p. 55; Volker Plagemann, Kunstgeschichte der Stadt Hamburg, Hamburg, 1995, esp. pp. 256 and 259.

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medieval fortifications around medieval town centres were razed, thus creating a tabula rasa for the conspicuous transformation of the core of the city. The Vienna Ringstrasse set the tone, and many German cities followed suit. The cleared spaces in the immediate vicinity of the crowded old town centres presented great opportunities for architects and planners alike. Many of these areas were transformed into model zones of urban planning, with ambitious and often intensely pedagogical building programmes for the improvement of the public. As Joyce put it, ‘given the scruples about direct political intervention that appear to have marked liberalism, the aesthetic took on particular significance as a mode of indirect governance, and functioned in an analogous manner to engineering or sanitary solutions’.³⁰ The shift towards a larger-scale, more public historicism during the 1880s and 1890s was part of this mode of governance. Often, this new architecture echoed political ambitions to showcase national greatness. Indeed, much of the extensive building activity in this period was linked to international exhibitions and world fairs.³¹ The attention attracted by such events points to one of the great paradoxes of the so-called age of historicism. On the one hand, its visual appearance celebrated the glories of the past. On the other hand, its association with industrial exhibitions and spectacular displays linked it conspicuously to modernity. This was underpinned by the use of high-tech material, and by the fact that many of the exhibition buildings were ephemeral structures, barely more than grand pavilions, designed as sites of spectacle rather than durable monuments. Both of these trends were related. The past was no longer lived: it became a commodity in its own right, to be exhibited or spectacularized through architecture. This tendency not only applied to exhibition buildings in the narrow sense, but affected the cityscape at large. Barcelona offers a characteristic example of this dynamic. The engineer and urban planner Iledfons Cerd´a had devised a gigantic urban extension, the Eixample.³² Key to its success was the connection between the newly built areas and the medieval city centre, separated by a wide ring, site of the recently razed city walls and the Spanish Citadel. ³⁰ Joyce, Rule of Freedom, p. 144. ³¹ On the architecture of World Exhibitions, see Bjarne Stoklund, ‘The Role of International Exhibitions in the Construction of National Cultures in the Nineteenth Century’, Etnologia: European Journal of Ethnology 24/1 (1994), pp. 35–44; Bernhard Rieger, ‘Envisioning the Future: British and German Reactions to the Paris World Fair in 1900’, in idem and Martin Daunton, eds., Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to World War II, Oxford and New York, 2001, pp. 145–65; and Winfried Kretschmer, Geschichte der Weltausstellungen, Frankfurt a.M. and New York, 1999. The notion of the city as spectacle is explored for late nineteenth-century Paris by Vanessa R. Schwarz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Si`ecle Paris, Berkeley and London, 1998. ³² Arturo Soria y Puig, ed., Cerd´a: The Five Bases of the General Theory of Urbanization, Madrid, 1999. See also Emili Giralt, Pere Anguera, Manuel Jorba, et al., Romanticisme i Renaixenc¸a, 1800–1860, Barcelona, 1995, especially the chapter by Feran Sagarra, ‘Arquitectura i Urbanisme’, pp. 162–204; and Lluis Permanyer, Barcelona modernista, Barcelona, 1993.

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This became the venue for the 1888 World Exhibition.³³ Alongside gigantic yet mostly temporary exhibition buildings, major public buildings such as the Palau de Justícia were constructed here. Like its German equivalents, as I have shown elsewhere, the Barcelona Palau used historical narratives in highly innovative and spectacular ways.³⁴ Such urbanistic events shaped the international climate in which the most dramatic new architectural creations of German late historicism, such as Hamburg’s Forum of Justice, took shape. So how did the buildings themselves reﬂect this change? First of all, it is clear that historical allegories did not disappear. Indeed, this is hardly surprising. After all, in the intellectual realm, most critics of Rankean Historismus, such as Karl Lamprecht, were professional historians, who never intended to downplay the relevance of the past.³⁵ Rather, they developed a critique first articulated by the historicists themselves, who had attacked Enlightenment thinkers and their neo-classicism for subjugating the past to the changing and transient needs of the present. Instead, historicists argued, the epochs of the past should be studied in their own right, and the encounter with one’s own national past would reveal the long and organic roots of modern identities.³⁶ A greater sensitivity to the difference of the past was called for, and the way history was represented increasingly became a way of articulating this fundamental difference between the past and the present. One’s engagement with history involved a constant dialogue with an imagined Other. And like many dialogues, this was one marked by much rhetorical sophistication. As modern commentators have pointed out, contrary to his declared objectives, Ranke’s histories were anything but detached reconstructions of what ‘had actually happened’. Instead, they were highly polemical tracts.³⁷ ³³ J. M. Garrut, L’Exposici´o Universal de Barcelona de 1888, Barcelona, 1976; M. C. Grandas, L’Exposici´o Internacional de Barcelona de 1929, Barcelona, 1988; Ignasi Sol`a-Morales, ‘L’Exposici´o Internacional de Barcelona, 1914–1929 com a instrument de política urbana’, Recerques 6 (1976); and idem, L’Exposici´o Internacional de Barcelona, 1914–1929: Arquitectura i ciutat, Barcelona, 1985. ³⁴ Josep M. Mas i Solench, El Palau de Justícia de Barcelona, Barcelona, 1990; and Maiken Umbach, ‘A Tale of Second Cities: Autonomy, Culture and the Law in Hamburg and Barcelona in the Long Nineteenth Century’, American Historical Review 110/3 (2005), pp. 659–92, esp. pp. 684–90. ³⁵ Ranke’s key critic was Karl Lamprecht, whose work and the debates surrounding it are discussed by Roger Chickering, Karl Lamprecht: A German Academic Life, Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1993; Luise Schorn-Sch¨utte, Karl Lamprecht: Kulturgeschichtsschreibung zwischen Wissenschaft und Politik, G¨ottingen, 1994; Matthias Middell, Das Leipziger Institut f¨ur Kultur- und Universalgeschichte 1890–1990, 3 vols., Leipzig, 2004; and Karl Heinz Metz, Grundformen historiographischen Denkens: Wissenschaftsgeschichte als Methodologie, dargestellt an Ranke, Treitschke und Lamprecht, Munich, 1979. ³⁶ Bergdoll, ‘Archaeology vs. History’; Wolfgang Herrmann, ‘Introduction’, in idem, In What Style Should We Build? The German Debate on Architectural Style, Santa Monica, 1992, pp. 1–63. ³⁷ Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History, London, 1997; Iggers, The German Conception of History.

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Historicist architecture was no less rhetorical in character. While the Gr¨underzeit villa had stood more or less on its own, as a monument to bourgeois social aspirations, the architectural ensembles of late historicism were much more intertextual. On the Vienna Ringstrasse, each grand public building on the Ring ‘conversed’ with another, invoking a range of historical moments that embodied particular political functions.³⁸ The Vienna Parliament building, for example, was neo-classical, with a giant Athena statue guarding the entrance: the material form of the building represented a claim to political legitimacy, by invoking a historical ancestry of parliamentarism that was traced back to ancient Greek models. The adjacent town hall referred to the Renaissance, with a specifically Dutch inﬂection, suggesting an association between municipal self-rule and the economic prosperity and political ‘liberties’ of the early modern burgher cities of north-west Europe. The nearby museum, opera house and other buildings on the Ring were designed according to the same principles. Style became iconographically significant beyond the mere expression of power. The use of history in these buildings echoed the classification of epochs in contemporary academic history-writing. Yet in addition, three-dimensional ensembles of such precedents, like that on the Ring, brought a mapping impulse to the discourse of historicism, which, as we shall see, had profound long-term consequences. To appreciate the function of historicism in the governance of the city, it is of course important not to overlook the role of individual agency, interest groups and political conﬂict in this process. While the Vienna project could be deemed to come from a single mould, discursive connections between historicist buildings elsewhere were less harmonious. As will be explored in more detail in the next chapter, Hamburg’s Town Hall and Trade Union Hall were conceived as a corresponding pair, yet by hostile political factions. The Town Hall design that won the competition in 1885, selected by the senate, served to celebrate and strengthen the city’s traditions of autonomous government vis-`a-vis Berlin.³⁹ In the later 1880s and 1890s, a large number of German cities began erecting new town halls that followed the pattern established in Hamburg.⁴⁰ To this, the working-class movement responded by embracing a uniform, national expressive language, in Hamburg’s case, with Heinrich Krug’s neo-Baroque design for the Trade Union Hall.⁴¹ The architect drew an established visual rhetoric of power, even if this was reminiscent of Wilhelmine courtly representation—a point ³⁸ Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Si`ecle Vienna: Culture and Politics, New York, 1980, pp. 24–115. ³⁹ A detailed discussion of the planning of the new Hamburg Town Hall can be found in Joist Grolle, ed., Das Rathaus der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg, Hamburg, 1997. ⁴⁰ An extensive documentation of these projects is Martin Damus, Das Rathaus: Architektur- und Sozialgeschichte von der Gr¨underzeit zur Postmoderne, Berlin, 1988; see also G. Ulrich Großmann, ‘Die Renaissance der Renaissance-Baukunst’, in idem and Petra Krutisch, eds., Renaissance der Renaissance: Ein b¨urgerlicher Kunststil im 19. Jahrhundert, i, Munich, 1992, pp. 201–19. ⁴¹ Das Hamburger Gewerkschaftshaus: Ein F¨uhrer durch das Hamburger Gewerkschaftshaus, Hamburg, 1914, p. 6. Compare also Elisabeth Domansky, ‘Das Hamburger Gewerkschaftshaus’, in

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Figure 1 Strafgerichtsgeb¨aude (Criminal Court), 1879, ‘Forum of Justice’ (Sievekingplatz), Hamburg. Photo: MU.

overlooked by modern critics who dismissed the Trade Union Hall as yet another example of the horror vacui of Wilhelminismus.⁴² Soon afterwards, Hamburg’s Ring became a preferred arena for the battle over the public face of the city. Buildings on the Wallring included an Art Gallery (1863–9), an Arts and Crafts Museum (1873–6), and Post Office Headquarters (1883–7), all in a neo-Renaissance style; the Customs’ Headquarters of 1889–91, in a neo-classical idiom; a neo-Baroque Concert Hall of 1904–8; several grand railway stations which combined neo-Baroque and Jugendstil elements; the neoBaroque Heinesches Wohnstift of 1901–2; and two schools in neo-Gothic and neo-Baroque styles. The Forum of Justice was located at the junction between the Ring and Kaiser-Wilhelm-Straße, and consisted of three buildings: a criminal court building, constructed from 1879 in a neo-Renaissance style (Figure 1), a Arno Herzig, Dieter Langewiesche and Arnold Sywottek, eds., Arbeiter in Hamburg, Hamburg, 1983, pp. 373–84. ⁴² Ralf Lange, Architekturf¨uhrer Hamburg, Hamburg, 1995, p. 78, writes: ‘Artistically the ornate building with its Baroque forms and art nouveau decorations was trapped in petty bourgeois notions of respectability and self-representation. [. . .] It was to be another two decades until the unions’ self-confidence was expressed in independent architectural designs such as those of Max Taut, Erich Mendelsohn or Hannes Meyer.’

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Figure 2 Hanseatisches Oberlandesgericht (Hanseatic High Court), 1903, by Lundt and Kallmorgen, ‘Forum of Justice’, Hamburg. Photo: MU.

civil court building, which matched the former’s style, and, finally, the Hanseatic High Court, designed by architects Lundt and Kallmorgen in 1903 in what is best described as Palladian Baroque (Figure 2). Modernist polemics, such as Schumacher’s attacks cited above, tended to single out the Hanseatic High Court for particular attack. To be sure, it was a building of great symbolic significance. The architectural competition had been managed directly by the city government—an unusual procedure at the time, testifying to its special importance.⁴³ Yet if anything, the resulting building was more modern in character than the other two courts. It appears that not the traditionalism, but precisely this hybrid status singled this building out for particular attack from the modernists. For it deviated significantly from the conventions of historicism, and introduced notions of memory into the built environment that would ultimately form the basis for the memories inherent in the architecture of Hamburg’s modernism of the early twentieth century. This ⁴³ The Senate and Lower Chamber of the Hamburg government managed the architectural competition, in direct contravention of the usual procedure, whereby such decisions were made by the Hochbauamt, the city’s building office, which was responsible for the other two justice palaces on the Forum. The history of the planning of the High Court, and the extensive debates over many of its individual features, is documented in the Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Akte Baudeputation B626, 1885–1912. For the commissioning of the building, see fol. 84, 12 April 1889.

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Figure 3 Clio and other allegorical figures, detail of Oberpostdirektion (Post Office Headquarters), 1883, Stephansplatz, Hamburg. Photo: MU.

development must not be confused with increasing architectural abstraction, which, since the days of Pevsner, has been the dominant mode of conceptualizing the rise of the modern style.⁴⁴ Instead, the High Court Building exemplifies a new departure within late or ‘hybrid’ historicism, which its modernist critics have consistently overlooked: it dissolved the order of historicism from within. This merits closer inspection. The first striking feature of the High Court building is the near-absence of allegorical figures. Earlier historicist buildings, especially those with an important political or public function, had made extensive use of sculptures or other allegorical ornaments to convey their message—the Town Hall’s emperor statues and crests were a typical example. Sometimes, these allegories were updated when the function of a building required it. The Post Office Headquarters, for example, were crowned by a group of three female allegorical figures (Figure 3). Stylistically, these are typical neo-classicist sculptures, yet instead of their classical attributes, they carried thoroughly modern implements, including a telephone receiver and a roll of telegraphic wires. The central figure, the muse Clio, is shown entering the name of the inventor of the telephone into the book of history. The Hanseatic High Court featured no such allegorical narratives. Its sculptural ⁴⁴ Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius, rev. edn., Harmondsworth, 1975.

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Figure 4 Justicia, by Arthur Bock, detail of Hanseatic High Court, Hamburg. Photo: MU.

decoration was minimal. Over the entrance towered a single figure: Justicia. The ancient embodiment of Justice is usually depicted in classical dress with a set of appropriate attributes, such as blindfold, scale, and sword. By contrast, the High Court’s Justicia was an auratic figure, sculpted in a simple style, seated on a throne, without any adornments (Figure 4). In so far as there was a historical model for this style, it dated back to a ‘primitive’ past rather than a distinct historical period. The so-called severe style and minimalist decoration were perhaps inspired by the new enthusiasm for pre-classical Greece that was cultivated by German archaeologists such as Theodor Wiegand at this time. Archaic art, previously dismissed as primitive, was now widely celebrated as more ‘authentic’ than the decorative classical forms that had been the subject of innumerable neo-classical revivals over the centuries.⁴⁵ Archaic art was not simply art from a different period: it became popular with late historicist and ⁴⁵ In 1904, the renowned Wilhelmine archaeologist Theodor Wiegand published his inﬂuential Die archaische Porosarchitektur der Akropolis zu Athen, Kassel, 1904, which examined the archaic temples of the Athenian acropolis, which were constructed from poros, unlike the classical marble temples. Cf. Carl Watzinger, Theodor Wiegand, ein Arch¨aologe, 1864–1936, Munich, 1936. In art history, an analogous approach was developed by Hans Schrader, Archaische Marmorskulpturen, Vienna, 1909. A brief survey of these developments is provided in the introduction to Karl Schefold, Orient, Hellas und Rom in der arch¨aologischen Forschung seit 1939, Bern, 1949. See also Suzanne L. Marchand, Down from Olympus: Archaeology and Philhellenism in Germany, 1750–1970, Princeton, 2003. On William II’s interest in Greek archaeology, see Lamar Cecil, Wilhelm II, Chapel Hill and London, 1996, vol. ii, pp. 51–2.

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later modernist artists and designers because, in its alleged primitivism, it seemed to contain a radically new approach to the past altogether—shrouded in mystery, inaccessible to academic history-writing, even to reason and Enlightenment itself. At the Hanseatic High Court, this sense of mythical distance was reinforced by the figures of two Egyptian sphinxes on either side of the entrance. Sphinxes had no connection with the classical allegorical outfit of Justicia, but they were the nineteenth century’s mythical creatures par excellence. Their only modern association with justice in German culture is Goethe’s Faust II, where the sphinxes offer an account of their role as ancient guardians of the ‘High Court of Peoples’.⁴⁶ This was a mythological court, located outside normal chronology. In a preceding scene, the sphinxes inform Mephisto that they cannot point the way to Helen, because they belong to an earlier age, which predates Hercules’ ordering of the mythical world (verses 7197–8), and thus Helen’s birth. Hercules here stands for the heroic enlightened individual who overcame a primitive world based on pagan ritual and replaced it with the well-ordered rationality of classical Greece.⁴⁷ His defeating the mythical creatures is analogous to Apollo’s killing the Python at Delphi. The slaying of mythological forces by the power of reason was a centrepiece of Augustan political propaganda, of Winckelmann’s enlightened aesthetics, and a foundational moment in the history of modern governmentality.⁴⁸ The sphinxes in Goethe’s Faust refer to this moment when they announce that they did not survive into Hercules’ days. At the same time, however, they defy the master narrative of historical progress when they assure Mephisto that they will always be in their place—a constant presence, refusing to be annihilated by the reason of a modern world.⁴⁹ The sphinxes, then, are a symbol for a conception of justice rooted in a sense of time that is outside history: a mythical memory defying periodization. In this way, the sculptures on the High Court acted as counterpoints to the normal historicist evocation of distinct precedents. The auratic Justicia and her sphinxes convey instead a sense of memory structured not by the clear epochs and events of historicist precedents, but by a continuum, a longue dur´ee or Bergsonian ‘duration’. This rejection of periodization distinguished the High Court’s symbolism sharply from that of conventional historicist architecture. In keeping with this shift from history to memory, architects Lundt and Kallmorgen added no further ornaments to the building itself, but instead

⁴⁶ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust II, Act 2, Klassische Walpurgisnacht, Pharsalische Felder, verses 7241–8. ⁴⁷ Commenting on this passage, verse 7197–8, Erich Trunz, ed., Goethes Werke, 14 vols., 10th edn., Munich, 1976, vol. iii: Faust, p. 136, quotes K. Reinhardt, who argues that the apparent contradiction between the sphinxes’ claim that they have been killed by Hercules, and their claim that their presence is everlasting, refers to the difference between a historical time, initiated by Hercules, and a mythical time, which has no clear beginning and end points. ⁴⁸ Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus, Ann Arbor, 1990, p. 60; Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Kleine Schriften und Briefe, ed. Wilhelm Senff, Weimar, 1960, pp. 149–50. ⁴⁹ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust II, verse 7242.

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Figure 5 Allegories representing the three Hanseatic cities, by Arthur Bock, park in front of Hanseatic High Court, Hamburg. Photo: MU.

extended its symbolic reach into the surrounding park. Here, we find three groups of statues executed by Arthur Bock: an allegory of war and peace, representations of the virtues of commerce, navigation and industry, as well as female figures representing the three Hanseatic cities, assembled around a merchant ship (Figure 5). The sculptures’ themes, like their style, were more modern than conventional historicist allegories. While not entirely dispensing with allusions to the city’s medieval history, notably the Hanseatic League, the sculptural ensemble also incorporated distinctly modern images, like the industrial worker. In a more literal sense, too, this symbolic language was less removed from the day-to-day experience of modern Hamburgers. Bock’s statues no longer towered above the spectator—in a fac¸ade, or on a pedestal—but were displayed at eye level in the park. The execution was bold, almost brutal in character. Like the Justicia above the entrance, Bock’s figures were rough and colossal, lacking all classical garments; indeed, they were almost naked. This was in keeping with the ideals advocated by Wilhelmine life reform movements, in which nudism came to prominence as a way of liberating society from the stuffiness of historicist high culture.⁵⁰ The sculptures were also almost devoid ⁵⁰ Matthew Jefferies, Imperial Culture in Germany, 1871–1918, Basingstoke, 2003, esp. pp. 194–9.

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of narrative attributes. There were, it is true, some symbolic clues to their meaning. Commerce is shown with the traditional Hermes hat, Navigation clutches a model ship, and Industry is depicted as an extremely muscular man holding a heavy hammer. Yet the figures’ true significance lies in the gesture of friendship with which they embrace one another, and the way they hold their heads together as if engaged in intense conversation. They were no isolated allegories: their significance derived from their symbolic arrangement, the implied dialogue between them. Bock’s theme was the bond between them; the emotive connection between Commerce, Navigation and Industry became the primary carrier of meaning. The fact that the building’s symbolic programme was extended to the surrounding area through these statues marks a new departure in the way buildings were integrated into the larger urban fabric, which was in itself highly characteristic of late historicism. The Ring in Hamburg, like those in Vienna, Barcelona and so many other cities, did not only fill a spatial gap between the medieval centre and surrounding, formerly independent towns and suburbs. It also mediated between the two urban zones in a symbolic way. In the process, a novel emphasis on public space emerged. The ring was a space for promenading, for the free movement of liberal subjects, the ‘republic of the streets’.⁵¹ The space between the buildings thus assumed the same significance as, perhaps even one greater than, the buildings themselves. The location of sculptures at eye level, in spaces where people promenaded, symbolically connected them with the free ﬂow of people and ideas that surrounded these buildings. It lies in the nature of this new symbolic language of late or ‘hybrid’ historicism that we can no longer decipher it in standardized iconographic ways. While earlier allegories were taken from learned textbooks, and can be decoded with reference to such works by the modern scholar, the symbolic subtexts of Lundt and Kallmorgen’s building and Bock’s sculptures by their very nature evade easy classification. This brings us to the second feature of the new imagery of memory, which was dissolving historicism from within. The memories and longue dur´ee symbols under examination here were not fully articulated, nor fully conscious: like Aby Warburg’s collective memory, they thrived instead on the interplay of the reﬂected and the intuitive, that semi-conscious realm of Mnemosyne which guides our thinking but is rarely spelt out. In Warburg’s thinking, collective memory was typically defined by shapes that had a basis in nature, and ‘primitive’ nature worship; hence his interest in the serpent rituals of Navahos and Pueblos in New Mexico and Arizona; and, by extension, the symbolic signification of the snake as an image-language in European culture.⁵² It might seem odd to search for traces of such nature-tropes in ⁵¹ Joyce, Rule of Freedom, p. 233. ⁵² The original text referred to is Aby Warburg, Schlangenritual: Ein Reisebericht, new edn., Berlin, 1988. Compare also Martin Diers, ‘Von der Ideologie- zur Ikonologiekritik: Die Warburg-Renaissancen’, in A. Bernt et al., eds., Frankfurter Schule und Kunstgeschichte, Berlin,

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Figure 6 Haus Scholvien, 1904, by Lundt and Kallmorgen, Hamburg, detail of fac¸ade. Photo: MU.

that most artificial of architectural styles that was late historicism. However, they formed a leitmotif in buildings of this period. The work of Lundt and Kallmorgen provides ample examples. Figure 6 shows a detail of Scholvien House, one of their Hamburg office buildings completed in 1904. The untreated, rusticated stone around the window gives it an archaic appearance. Organic shapes had been widely used before, for example in Mannerist architecture, yet what marks a striking departure from historical models is that these architects applied the plant ornament directly onto the untreated stone. It seems as though the plant grows organically out of the stone of the house, thus transposing the edifice from the man-made and constructed to the realm of the organic and intuitive. If we re-examine the High Court Building in this light, we discover the same motif. The sphinxes sit on top of pilasters of rough, untreated stone that reach the height of the entire building. These archaic columns break the rhythm of the fac¸ade, and form an impressive base for these mythical nature-beings. Warburg 1992, pp. 19–39; K. W. Forster, ‘Die Hamburg-Amerika-Linie, oder: Warburgs Kulturwissenschaft zwischen den Kontinenten’, in Aby Warburg: Akten des internationalen Symposions Hamburg 1990, Weinheim, 1991; and Rudolf Wittkower, Allegory and the Migration of Symbols, New York, 1977.

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had argued that modern technology and rationalism were eroding a mental space, a Denkraum, where the relationship of human beings to their environment is understood in terms of concrete and organic forms. The architecture under examination here acknowledges this deficit, and in the gaps between its historicist components, it opened up spaces for the concrete and the organic to come forth. Thus, a Warburgian collective memory emerged in the cracks, ‘between the lines’, of historicism.⁵³ This leads us to the third new departure within the historicist idiom. Although broadly speaking, Baroque models informed the design of the Hanseatic High Court, the overall effect was far removed from the neo-Baroque style so typical of German imperial architecture in this period. Where the latter was marked by dramatic curves and dynamic lines that united the stylistic parts of a building in a single total effect, at the High Court no such unity was achieved or attempted. In part, this was due to stylistic allusions to English neo-Palladianism. Iconographically, the neo-Palladian theme pointed to Hamburg’s traditional aspirations to ‘Englishness’, which had dominated the lifestyle of the city’s merchant elites since the eighteenth century, and inspired the erection of a series of neo-Palladian villas along the banks of the river Elbe.⁵⁴ NeoPalladianism had translated the dynamics of Mannerist styles into a rationalist system of architectural mathematics, in which the component parts often appeared somewhat separate.⁵⁵ Yet at the High Court, this principle was pushed to new extremes. The insertion of the rough pilasters which separated each component of the fac¸ade, reinforced by the changing height of the cornice in each part, led to the impression of a loose assemblage of architectural shapes (compare Figure 2). This kind of structure made the semiotic system behind it visible, dissolving the unity of the built form into a series of lines of association. Two other buildings can illustrate this shift. Figure 7 shows a detail of the Hamburg Post Office Headquarters of 1883. A column, richly decorated with ⁵³ As an architectural phrase, the expression ‘between the lines’ was coined by Daniel Libeskind, who used it as a title for his Jewish Museum extension project in Berlin. Libeskind explores this notion with Jacques Derrida in Alois Martin M¨uller, ed., Radix: Matrix: Works and Writings of Daniel Libeskind, Munich, 1997. ⁵⁴ Paul Th. Hoffmann, Die Elbchaussee: Ihre Landsitze, Menschen und Schicksale, 9th edn., Hamburg, 1982; G¨arten, Landh¨auser und Villen des hamburgischen B¨urgertums: Kunst, Kultur und gesellschaftliches Leben in vier Jahrhunderten, exhibition catalogue, ed. Museum f¨ur Hamburgische Geschichte, Hamburg, 1975. ⁵⁵ John Harris, The Palladians, New York, 1982; Stephen Parissien, Palladian Style, London, 1994; Charles Hind, ed., New Light on English Palladianism: Papers Given at the Georgian Group Symposium 1988, London, 1989; James Stephen Curl, The Art and Architecture of Freemasonry: An Introductory Study, London, 1991.

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Figure 7 Oberpostdirektion, Hamburg, detail: column in the fac¸ade. Photo: MU.

Mannerist ornament, is integrated into a dense network of surrounding historical ornaments. Figure 8 shows a page from a source that was widely copied by academic historicists: an architectural textbook by the late sixteenth-century Dutch architect Vredemann de Vries. The similarities between the two are readily apparent. Figure 9 shows a comparable detail of the Kirdorf House, another Hamburg design by Lundt and Kallmorgen, executed in 1901–5 as the office building of the Rhenish-Westphalian Coal Syndicate. The detail shown here—a column in a comparable location to that shown in Figure 7, between two windows—has a strikingly different character. It is not abstract, nor even devoid of ornament; yet what is radically new is the way this column is dissociated from the context of an overarching architectural narrative, and displayed in deliberate spatial isolation, as a singular sculptural element. The column is thus emancipated from any specific precedent, and recalls, instead, a universal cultural form. It is, in a sense, not ‘a’ column, but ‘the’ column. Moreover, materiality is brought to the fore. The aesthetic appeal of this column derives not from its decoration, nor the harmonious fit with surrounding forms, but, first and foremost, from the material itself: highly polished granite is the visual centrepiece. The archaic surface pattern of this ordinary stone is presented with a pathos normally reserved for semi-precious stone, and thus accorded a symbolic importance not matched by its pecuniary value. It was an Ur-type, alluding

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Figure 8 Hans Vredeman de Vries, Das ander Buech, Gemacht auf die zway Colonnen, Corinthia und Composita, Antwerp, 1565, plate 12.

to the ancient notion that nature, natura artifex, was the perfect constructive force.⁵⁶ ⁵⁶ The topos of nature as an architectural force can be traced back to antiquity. Its origins are famously discussed in Ernst Robert Curtius, Europ¨aische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter, Bern, 1954, pp. 527–9, who traced it back to the Platonic conception of God as demiurge, or constructor

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Figure 9 Haus Kirdorf, 1901, by Lundt and Kallmorgen, for the Rhenish-Westphalian Coal Syndicate, Hamburg. Photo: MU.

So far, I have traced how, around 1900, a hybrid form emerged within the idiom of historicism, which, though historicist in terms of style, contributed substantially to the disintegration of the intellectual order of academic history in the cityscape. As part of this process of deconstruction from within, a new conception of memory emerged, forming a visual subtext with a radically different grammar. Its chief characteristics corresponded closely with those identified at the outset. First, this new historicism alluded to a past with a longue dur´ee, which dissolved distinctions between political epochs. Second, a psychologically charged symbolism of great emotional pathos replaced the standardized, learned allegories of traditional historicism. And third, breaking-points, cleavages and disruptions were brought to the fore, undermining the sense of history as a well-ordered, harmonious narrative of progress, which can be unproblematically represented. None of these themes feature prominently in the current historiography of historicism. Such an oversight might point to the fact that such messages were and architect. According to Curtius, the notion of an architect-god, which informed both Eastern and Western civilization, originated in a primitive religion centred around the craftsman-god. In close correlation with this idea, Curtius argued, the notion of nature as constructor and architect developed. According to Oskar Walzel, Das Prometheussymbol von Shaftesbury zu Goethe, 3rd edn., Munich, 1932, pp. 11–15, the image of ‘universal plastic nature’ can be traced through the eighteenth century, and culminated in Schelling’s assertion that the universe itself was the most perfect work of art.

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so subtle that they were lost on most spectators, and hence had little discernible effect. Throughout the twentieth century, it seems, the historicist idiom was treated dismissively, as a counterfoil against which modernism defined itself, and over which it eventually triumphed. What purpose, one might ask, can the sort of reappraisal of historicism attempted here serve, if these subtle subtexts apparently went unnoticed? Silences in the reception of visual sources can have many causes. In part, they testify to the fact that the built environment is often symptomatic of changing mentalities rather than illustrative of political intentions. The imagery analysed here moved away from an allegorical mode of representation, which can easily be translated from the visual into the verbal, towards a symbolic mode of representation, which provides clues to collective mental dispositions that were never fully verbalized. Yet there is also another reason for the strange dismissal of these important developments by Schumacher and his fellow Werkbund activists. They were engaged in a propagandistic effort to distance themselves from the achievements of their parents’ generation, and carve out their own roles as heroic pioneers of the new. This rhetorical trope, which, as we have seen, mirrored the grand manifestos of modernism, tended towards a rejection of the historical in all shapes and forms, aesthetically and politically.⁵⁷ In the inter-war period, this rhetoric was taken over by the Bauhaus, though it was far from confined to the exclusive school. The sheer mass of Bauhaus publications, far too voluminous even to be sketched here, documents the extent to which this approach has come to monopolize perceptions of modernism. A movement that championed abstraction as the end-game of all progress, aesthetic and social, and which regarded only the ‘International Style’ as politically correct, had little time for the subtler differentiation within the abhorrent legacy of historicism. This bias is already apparent in the pronouncements of Schumacher and Muthesius. The original Bauhaus Manifesto of 1919 contained central Werkbund ideas, and membership in both associations overlapped.⁵⁸ Between them, both reform movements developed a language for thinking about questions of design, which had no vocabulary for capturing the innovative potential of historicism. Yet the gaps in the discourse appear less absolute if we read them against the visual evidence, as was attempted here. In the material culture of the decades around 1900, continuities between historicism and bourgeois modernism emerge, which not only reveal the innovative potential within historicism, but perhaps also account for some of the ease with which, polemics aside, bourgeois modernism incorporated and embodied history within its own materiality. ⁵⁷ On ‘Heroic Modernism’, see Jencks, Modern Movements. The label refers to classical modernism in its most radical, uncompromising and triumphalist mode. ⁵⁸ On the 1919 Bauhaus manifesto, see Michael Siebenbrodt, ed., Bauhaus Weimar: Designs for the Future, Ostfildern, 2000; and Gillian Naylor, The Bauhaus Reassessed: Sources and Design Theory, London, 1985.

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The Arts and Crafts movement, which first rose to prominence in England, to be followed swiftly in America and continental Europe, seemingly looked for inspiration not in history, but in vernacular traditions, which, according to its theorists, had evolved organically, without a ‘will to design’, in response to the practical needs of local people, their lifestyles and mentalities.⁵⁹ Hence, Arts and Crafts architects and designers could regard such models as ‘functional’. This has led historians since Pevsner to assume that reform architects from Morris to Muthesius were ‘pioneers of modern design’ who heralded a new age which defied history in the name of rational functionalism.⁶⁰ However, to such reformers, function was not a category detached from the past. On the contrary, function derived its essence from experience. Ruskin, whose works achieved almost biblical status amongst the followers of the Arts and Crafts movement, defined architecture as the location of social memory: ‘We may live without her, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her.’⁶¹ If the Ruskinian vernacular was anti-historicist, it was certainly not ahistorical. It associated particular virtues and lifestyles not only with permanence, but even with particular epochs, albeit epochs that were less clearly delineated than the political periods invoked by historicist architecture. The most obvious example is the preference of Arts and Crafts architects and designers for the Gothic. They associated the Middle Ages with harmonious culture and a unity between the material and the spiritual, which predated the alienating effects of the modern division of labour, but also of the rise of the modern bureaucratic state.⁶² This trope also became central to the writings of Hermann Muthesius. Such invocations of the medieval past were qualitatively different from citing the specific administrative-political precedents. Of course, for the reformers of Ruskin’s and even Morris’s generation, their medieval orientation went handin-hand with a profoundly sceptical attitude towards all things modern. Both in spirit and in terms of practicality, their ideal was irreconcilable with the industrial age. Morris’s workshops operated on an extremely small scale, and the goods ⁵⁹ Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity, Princeton, 1999, especially the chapter ‘The House of Memory: John Ruskin and the Architecture of Englishness’, pp. 41–74; David M. Craig, Ruskin and the Ethics of Consumption, Charlottesville, 2006; Robert Hewison, ed., New Approaches to Ruskin, London, 1982, which contains a valuable survey of the state of Ruskin criticism and scholarship; Aymer Vallance, The Life and Work of William Morris, London, 1986; Marcus Waithe, William Morris’s Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality, Cambridge, 2006, esp. pp. 22–31; Mavis Matey, ‘Ruskin, Morris and the Early Campaigns’, in idem, David Lambert and Kim Wilkie, Indignation: The Campaign for Conservation, London, 2000, pp. 13–28. ⁶⁰ Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius, rev. edn., Harmondsworth, 1975. On the problem of modernism and Ruskin, see also Dinah Birch, ed., Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern, Oxford, 1999; and Giovanni Cianci and Peter Nicholls, eds., Ruskin and Modernism, Basingstoke and New York, 2001, esp. pp. 32–47. ⁶¹ Quoted from Stanford Anderson, ‘Erinnerung in der Architektur/Memory in Architecture’, Daidalos 58 (1995), pp. 22–37, quote p. 23. ⁶² Chris Brooks, ‘Ruskin and the Politics of Gothic’, in Rebecca Daniels and Geoff Brandwood, eds., Ruskin and Architecture, Reading, 2003, pp. 164–87.

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they produced without the aid of mechanical power were far too expensive to sell to a mass market.⁶³ They were not, therefore, direct precursors of modernism, bourgeois or otherwise. The decades around 1900 saw the emergence of a new reform movement, which combined the Arts and Crafts movement’s admiration for the vernacular with an emphatically modern embrace of progress and mass-production. In Britain, this ‘medieval modernism’ culminated in the activities of Pick and the project of the London underground.⁶⁴ In Germany, leading vernacular modernists were active in the Werkbund.⁶⁵ Their endeavours differed from the Arts and Crafts in two major respects. First, they embraced modernization and its economic concomitants: machine-led mass-production and the global market.⁶⁶ Second, their rejection of all styles ‘neo’ now included the neo-Gothic. Memory, however, remained constitutive to this new praxis of modernism and the understanding of functionalism. For in its original meaning, ‘function’ designated not the perfect technical shape, even less the perfect Platonic form, but, rather, that form which had evolved over time, in response to human requirements, emotional as much as practical. Figure 10 shows Muthesius’s Haus Freudenberg, a 1907 commission in the Berlin suburb Zehlendorff, a model house to propagate the new, modern style in the founding year of the Werkbund. Haus Freudenberg is an example of modernist memory architecture. The irregular positioning and sizing of the windows, for example, was functional, because each window corresponded, in size and location, to the function of the room behind it. The guiding principles behind this were, however, derived not from abstract considerations of the Taylorist kind, which orthodox modernists used in the 1920s,⁶⁷ but, rather, from the observation of traditional vernacular architecture, the subject of Muthesius’s ⁶³ John Burdick, William Morris: Redesigning the World, Twickenham and New York, 1998; Bradley J. MacDonald, William Morris and the Aesthetic Constitution of Politics, Lanham, Md., and Oxford, 1999; Joseph Bizup, Manufacturing Culture: Vindications of Early Victorian Industry, Charlottesville, 2003, esp. ch. 6: ‘Only a Machine Before: Manliness and Mechanism in Ruskin and Morris’, pp. 177–204; Charles Harvey and Jon Press, Art, Enterprise and Ethics: The Life and Work of William Morris, London, 1996. ⁶⁴ Saler, Avant-Garde, esp. pp. 10–24. ⁶⁵ As Adolf Vetter pointed out in a keynote speech on the annual Werkbund conference of 1910, the organization’s aim to promote German Wertarbeit represented a direct translation of Ruskin’s categories. ⁶⁶ Maiken Umbach, ‘The Vernacular International: Heimat, Modernism and the Global Market in Early Twentieth-Century Germany’, in Alon Confino and Ajay Skaria, eds., The Local Life of Nationhood, special issue of National Identities 4/1 (2002), pp. 45–68. ⁶⁷ In the first two decades of the twentieth century, motion studies were utilized to design work areas in the home in such a way as to minimize energy input. In Germany, Christine Frederick’s Scientific Management in the Home: Household Engineering, London, 1920, translated into German in 1922, inspired a fierce debate about the most efficient kitchen layout. May and Lihotzky based their ‘Frankfurt kitchen’ directly on scientific motion studies, while in Meitninger’s ‘Munich kitchen’, the work and living areas remained more closely integrated. Cf. Leif Jerram, Germany’s Other Modernity: Munich and the Building of Metropolis, 1895–1930, Manchester, 2007, pp. 126–42; and Lore Kramer, ‘Rationalisierung des Haushalts und Frauenfrage—Die Frankfurter

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Figure 10 Haus Freudenberg, 1907, by Hermann Muthesius, Berlin-Zehlendorff, from: Hermann Muthesius, Landh¨auser, Munich, 1912, fig. 237, p. 155.

multi-volume work Das Englische Haus.⁶⁸ It was no contradiction that Haus Freudenberg was mostly built from traditional materials—allusions to timberframing in the gable, and red brick throughout. This materiality took the place of the narrative mode of historicism in invoking the past. To be sure, this was not an academically accurate reconstruction of a traditional farmhouse. Rather, individual motifs and materials from vernacular buildings were employed as archaic gestures in Warburg’s sense, speaking to deep-seated longings for homeliness and comfort. The shape of the house, too, signifies such memories. While the historicist villa confronts the spectator with an imposing fac¸ade designed to impress, to convey a sense of social distinction, the unusual, inward-curving front of Haus Freudenberg visually draws the spectator into a semi-enclosed space, where the boundaries between exterior and interior dissolve. Muthesius had borrowed this idea from Edward Prior’s The Barn,⁶⁹ where Prior had consciously recreated the memory of a rustic barn, the ultimate primitive-cum-functional building. The allusion was made explicit in the name K¨uche und zeitgen¨ossische Kritik’, in Heinrich Klotz, ed., Ernst May und das neue Frankfurt, 1925–1930, Berlin, 1986, pp. 77–84. ⁶⁸ Hermann Muthesius, Das Englische Haus: Entwicklungen, Bedingungen, Anlage, Aufbau, Einrichtung und Innenraum, 3 vols., Berlin, 1904–5, rev. edn., 1908–11. ⁶⁹ Edward Prior, ‘The Barn’, Exmouth, Devonshire, designed 1896, originally with thatched roof, which was later replaced by a stone shingle roof.

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of his house (not a barn, but ‘The Barn’). Prior took care to preserve the character of vernacular building traditions, when he encouraged the builders to collect and freely assemble local materials, including stones from the fields and loose timber swept onto the nearby beach, thus artificially replicating the way traditional barns had been constructed.⁷⁰ Muthesius in turn quoted Prior’s memory architecture, preserving the characteristic shape, yet employing new materials. Where Prior used natural stone, Muthesius used brick; where Prior used thatched roof (replaced by shingles after a fire), Muthesius used tiles, and so on. At the same time, Muthesius kept alluding to the vernacular tradition indirectly, for example when he had the timber painted with ‘Celtic’ ornament, or when he used a fake timber frame for the gable only. Alongside nature and tradition, sociability also played a prominent role in this new configuration of memory. Friendship was a central category. As will be explored in more detail in Chapter 6, in his journalistic writings, Muthesius ridiculed the officious dinner parties given by Berlin’s haute bourgeoisie. To him, such ostentatious rituals did not allow for any meaningful social interaction.⁷¹ The opera became another emblem of the falsity and alienation of bourgeois high culture Muthesius attacked.⁷² His architecture was designed to foster an alternative culture, and new patterns of sociability. As we will see, the music chamber became the spiritual centrepiece of many of Muthesius’s houses. Here, in quiet contemplation and serious conversation, the new middle classes would enjoy musical soir´ees and poetry readings amongst friends. But as Muthesius knew only too well, this was hardly a new idea. Indeed, he quite consciously invoked the musical culture of Biedermeier, almost a century earlier, as exemplary in its focus on inward authenticity. This was no isolated example. Following the popular writings of Paul Mebes, bourgeois modernists championed culture around 1800 as a model for the modern bourgeois culture they were trying to create.⁷³ The fireplace in the great hall, another characteristic feature of the suburban houses of bourgeois modernists, fulfilled a similar function. In technical terms, an open fire was a totally outdated method of heating a home, especially in the afﬂuent bourgeois villas of Berlin. But the practice of a family coming together around the hearth was one of those memories of long duration. This device survived into ⁷⁰ Peter Davey, Arts and Crafts Architecture, London, 1995, pp. 71–4. ⁷¹ Hermann Muthesius, ‘Kultur und Kunst’, in idem, ed., Kultur und Kunst: Gesammelte Aufs¨atze u¨ ber k¨unstlerische Fragen der Gegenwart, 2nd rev. edn., Jena and Leipzig, 1909, quoted from online edition www.theo.tu-cottbus.de/D A T A/Architektur/20.Jhdt/MuthesiusHermann/Muthesius Kultur%20und%20Kunst.htm, accessed 6 December 2007. ⁷² Hermann Muthesius, ‘Das Musikzimmer’, Velhagen und Klasings Almanach 1, Berlin, Bielefeld, Leipzig and Vienna, 1908, pp. 222–7. ⁷³ Paul Mebes, Um 1800: Architektur und Handwerk im letzten Jahrhundert ihrer traditionellen Entwicklung, 2 vols., Munich, 1908. Thomas Heyden, Biedermeier als Erzieher: Studien zum Neubiedermeier in Raumkunst und Architektur 1896–1910, Weimar, 1994.

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the twentieth century, in the works of American vernacular modernists such as Frank Lloyd Wright.⁷⁴ In this way, memory themes that first emerged within hybrid historicism around 1900 inﬂuenced the modernist reform architecture which was polemically set up as its opposite. This was not a straightforward emancipation of more ‘memory’ from ‘history’. While it is true that Ruskin and Bailly Scott had little time for historicist gestures (with the aforementioned exception of the Gothic), the German bourgeois modernists, having railed against historicism, themselves reintroduced a number of unabashedly historical themes into the material culture of bourgeois life. As will be explored in Chapter 6 of this study, this trend actually intensified in the years after 1918, a time which saw a return to a sense of symmetry in the fac¸ade, grand staircases and neo-classical columns in front of the main entrance of the houses of many of the same architects who had first risen to prominence as polemical opponents of Historismus. In an effort to explain this discrepancy, some art historians detected a conservative turn after the First World War, when the middle classes assumed a more defensive stance vis-`a-vis the political radicalism of the Weimar years. But already in the Haus Freudenberg, built during Muthesius’s third year of practising as an architect, the same hybridity of memory and history is evident. Just as the historicist architecture of Lundt and Kallmorgan opened cracks and crevices to memory spaces, so Muthesius’s memory architecture smuggles history in through the back door—or, more accurately, the garden. For while bourgeois modernism was characterized by archaic ‘gestures’, it was also driven by a remarkable suspicion towards the natural. Nature, it seems, was only acceptable if integrated into the sophisticated architectural, that is, man-made fabric of the house. Muthesius, the great advocate of the English house, was also one of the first to abandon the idea of the English garden, in which nature appeared untamed. Modern photos of Haus Freudenberg obscure the fact that the original house was framed by a highly formal, geometrical garden (Figure 11). The quasi-Baroque arrangement extends patterns of cultural order into the landscape, reinforced by the extensive use of geometrical white fencing and pergolas, which mirror the prominent white window frames of the house. This was a typical feature of many Muthesius gardens; indeed, it occurs almost without exception in every house–garden complex he designed up to 1914. This geometry served as a mediating zone between the cultural and the natural, and relativized the primitive or archaic side of nature by means of a historical, that is, a Baroque, precedent. In this sense, Muthesius’s later use of columns ⁷⁴ Useful introductions to Wright’s vernacular modernism, or what he called ‘organic architecture’, that engage with the sense of place are Grant Hildebrand, Wright Space: Pattern and Meaning in Frank Lloyd Wright’s Houses, Seattle, Wash., 1991; Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, Frank Lloyd Wright: Building for Democracy, Cologne et al., 2004; and idem, ‘Organic Architecture’, in Frank Lloyd Wright, AV Monograph 54, Arquitectura Viva, Madrid, 1995; Neil Levine, The Architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright, Princeton, 1996.

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Figure 11 Haus Freudenberg, rear view with terraced garden. Photo from the StoedtnerArchiv No. 72529, reproduced with kind permission of Bildarchiv Foto Marburg.

is not deviation from his earlier work, but merely continues his technique of using historical themes as a way of structuring and controlling the diffuseness of vernacular memories. If bourgeois homes were grounded in a strong sense of the past, this programme was extended to spaces more emphatically associated with modernity, too: the spaces of commerce, industry and technology. As we have seen, in 1914, during the famous so-called Werkbund controversy, Muthesius vigorously defended the standardization of forms as the prerequisite for industrial mass-production.⁷⁵ In 1931, Fritz Schumacher gave a lecture ironically entitled ‘The Curse of Technology’, in which he ridiculed the cultural pessimism and technophobia of ⁷⁵ Anna-Christa Funk-Jones, Karl Ernst Osthaus gegen Hermann Muthesius: Der Werkbundstreit 1914 im Spiegel der im Karl Ernst Osthaus-Archiv enthaltenen Briefe, Hagen, 1978; Wulf Herzogenrath, ed., Fr¨uhe K¨olner Kunstausstellungen: Sonderbund 1912, Werkbund 1914, Pressa USSR 1928: Kommentarband zu den Nachdrucken der Austellungskataloge, Cologne, 1981; idem, Dirk Teuber and Angelika Thiek¨otter, eds., Die Deutsche Werkbund-Ausstellung C¨oln 1914, part of the series Der westdeutsche Impuls 1900–1914: Kunst und Umweltgestaltung im Industriegebiet, Cologne, 1984.

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Figure 12 Crematorium, 1906, by Peter Behrens, Hagen-Delstern. Photo: MU.

Oswald Spengler.⁷⁶ For the bourgeois modernists, memory was no antidote to modern industrial culture. More typically, a sense of the past was inscribed into the material culture of technological and industrial modernity. The industrial giant AEG produced high-tech wares that came to be regarded as embodiments of quality work ‘made in Germany’.⁷⁷ Some of these objects will be analysed in Chapter 6 of this study. But the spaces in which such goods were produced, exhibited, advertised and sold are instructive in themselves. The chief designer of AEG’s products, Peter Behrens, frequently invoked historical precedents for ﬂagship buildings. The 1906 Dresden exhibition pavilion for the Anker linoleum factory and the AEG pavilion for the Deutsche Schiffbauausstellung of 1908 both used the characteristic geometric style of the so-called Florentine proto-Renaissance, as exemplified by the famous church of San Miniato.⁷⁸ Another building in this mould was Behrens’s Crematorium in Hagen-Delstern (1906/7, Figure 12). ⁷⁶ Fritz Schumacher, Der ‘Fluch’ der Technik, 2nd edn., Hamburg, 1932. ⁷⁷ Compare David Head, ‘Made in Germany’, The Corporate Identity of a Nation, London, 1992; and Maiken Umbach, ‘Made in Germany’, in Schulze and Franc¸ois, Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, ii, pp. 405–18. ⁷⁸ Another model cited by Behrens in this context is the Renaissance fac¸ade which Leon Battista Alberti added to the Florentine church Santa Maria Novella in 1456–7. Behrens greatly respected Alberti for his geometrical rationalism.

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Figure 13 Crematorium, rear view. Photo: MU.

The front was modelled on the eleventh-century Baptistery in Florence. Correspondingly, the interior of the building had a quasi-Romanesque apsis.⁷⁹ The discrepancy between the commercial and ephemeral purpose of these pavilions and the religious serenity of their Romanesque models seems almost reminiscent of the eclecticism of historicism. Yet in his writings, Behrens was amongst historicism’s fiercest critics. ‘We are sick of games,’ he wrote in 1900, ‘of games architects played with the past. We learnt through our work to understand our own times and our own lives; what use are historical masquerades to us, of ages long gone and little understood?’⁸⁰ Like Muthesius’s, Behrens’s sense of the historical was conditioned by the new discourse of memory. The reverse of his Delstern Crematorium demonstrates this (Figure 13). Although the rusticated pillars were a motif which was on occasion used by Mannerist architects like Palladio, the extreme boldness of this fac¸ade, the archaic feel of its overall form and the roughness of the stone surface suggest a deliberate ‘primitivism’ akin to Muthesius’s vernacular. It seems, then, that the ‘Romanesque’ front, too, was not an example of academic historicism. For Behrens, the attraction of the Florentine Romanesque lay in prominent use of geometry. Behrens condemned formal experimentation in architecture, and thought as little of the Eiffel Tower as ⁷⁹ Stanford Anderson, Peter Behrens and a New Architecture for the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2000. ⁸⁰ Peter Behrens, Feste des Lebens und der Kunst: Eine Betrachtung des Theaters als h¨ochstem Kultursymbol: Der K¨unstlerkolonie in Darmstadt gewidmet, Leipzig, 1900.

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he did of traditional historicist styles.⁸¹ The pure squares, triangles, circles and pyramids of the Florentine Romanesque he regarded as ur-forms, cultural archetypes no different from those which Warburg had examined. Behrens’s use of quasi-Egyptian pylons on the famous AEG assembly hall in Berlin falls into the same category. Muthesius’s first important industrial commission was the Silk Weaving Factory Michels & Cie near Berlin and Potsdam. It was rightly seen by contemporaries as one of his most significant achievements, on a par with the new style of the vernacular burgher-villa he celebrated in The English House, and designed for the Berlin suburbs. Writing in the Austrian architectural journal Der Architekt, H. Siller noted: After Muthesius had set an important example for the construction of suburban villas [. . .], in 1911, he received the commission for the Silk Weaving Factory Michels & Cie in Nowawes near Potsdam. With remarkable self-assurance, he found the form for his first industrial building. Our illustrations may convey some impression of the perfect proportions, to which the building owes its grand effect in the best sense of the word.⁸²

What made the Silk Weaving Factory so remarkable was the way in which it functioned as an advertisement not only for the company, but also more generally for Muthesius’s vision of how manufacturing quality work would contribute to the rise of bourgeois culture in Germany. The key to this lay in the integration of the stately and the functional spheres of the factory. Historicist architects had often adorned mundane technical buildings, including mines, pumping stations and railway stations, with the most pompous stately exteriors.⁸³ Muthesius’s Weaving Factory did not disguise the industrial character of the building, but displayed it openly, even ostentatiously. The main work space—the great weaving hall—was turned into a showcase of ‘quality work’. Administrative and reception rooms around it were arranged in such a way as to afford the best view onto the spectacle of the work process. The spatial arrangement thus directly mirrored Naumann’s call for the elevation of quality work.⁸⁴ The journal ⁸¹ Mechthild Heuser, ‘Die Fenster zum Hof: Die Turbinenhalle, Behrens und Mies van der Rohe’, in Hans Georg Pfeiffer, ed., Peter Behrens: Wer aber will sagen, was Sch¨onheit sei? Grafik, Produktgestaltung, Architektur, D¨usseldorf, 1990, pp. 108–21, esp. p. 113. ⁸² H. Siller, ‘Hermann Muthesius’, in Der Architekt: Organ der Zentralvereinigung der Architekten ¨ Osterreichs 23/5–6 (1920), pp. 35–6. ⁸³ Several examples for historicist industrial buildings in the Ruhr region are discussed by Jefferies, Politics and Culture, esp. pp. 31–41. Other typical examples of the detachment of the symbolism of historicism from traditional representative functions, such as royal or government buildings, include the railway stations and post offices discussed in chapter 2 of Jefferies’ study. ⁸⁴ Naumann stands as a shorthand here for a discourse which, under the heading of ‘Made in Germany’, sought to shift the emphasis of German industrial production to ‘quality work’, in works such as Heinrich Pudor, Deutsche Qualit¨atsarbeit: Richtlinien f¨ur eine neue Entwicklung der deutschen Industrie, Gautzsch b. Leipzig, 1910; in 1910, Pudor also founded the

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Dekorative Kunst captured much of this agenda when it published the following description: For the Silk Weaving Factory Michels & Cie, the original plan envisaged [that] the appointed architect was merely supposed to design the front of the building, which was to house a few administrative rooms. [. . .] Yet the plan was abandoned, because the client specified that a central hall in the administrative section should offer a comprehensive view of the entire Weaving Hall. [. . .] This provided the opportunity to rethink the division into a technical unit [Shedbau] and set of stately reception rooms, and develop a unitary conception for the entire building. An artistic building solution is only possible if the entire complex is understood as an organic whole. Only on this basis could the client’s desire be met that the whole building was to serve as an advertisement for his large trading business.⁸⁵

Since the front of the building was conceived as a kind of advertising poster for the company, Muthesius employed a device often regarded as an invention of postmodernism, exemplified by Robert Venturi’s Basco building: he turned the letters spelling out the company name into an architectural feature in their own right. Crowning the fac¸ade, they took the place of the traditional balustrade.⁸⁶ Architecture became a company logo. This was all the more important because the factory would typically be viewed not by pedestrians, but by passers-by on a fast-moving train, and thus had to achieve a clear impact almost instantaneously: The well-known silk company Michels & Cie was mostly active in trade. Only certain specialist products were manufactured by the company itself; this had hitherto been done in a rented factory in Krefeld. The move to Berlin, aside from reuniting this branch with the main company, was also to serve as an announcement on a great scale. A site near the busy Berlin–Potsdam railway line was chosen as the most suitable for the purpose. The factory required a dignified appearance, a sense of aesthetic refinement and elegance to correspond with the sophistication of silk; these were the guiding principles of the design. The truly remarkable feature, then, is the way in which building art here served the purposes of commercial advertising.⁸⁷

In this emphatically industrial and commercial setting, memory tropes abounded. There was of course the trademark vernacular material, red brick. But like Schutzverband f¨ur deutsche Qualit¨atsarbeit, an association for the protection of German quality work, which from 1911 published its own journal, entitled Unlauterer Wettbewerb: Mitteilungen des Schutzverbandes f¨ur deutsche Qualit¨atsarbeit. See Thomas Adam, ‘Heinrich Pudor: Lebensreformer und Verleger’, in Mark Lehmstedt and Andreas Herzog, eds., Das bewegte Buch: Buchwesen und soziale, nationale und kulturelle Bewegungen um 1900, Wiesbaden, 1999, pp. 183–96. ⁸⁵ Karl Neumann, ‘Die mechanische Seidenweberei Michels & Cie in Nowawes bei Potsdam’, Dekorative Kunst 19/6 (March 1916), pp. 190–5. ⁸⁶ In 1978, Robert Venturi, John Case and Steven Izenour redesigned a 1950s shopping mall in Bristol Township, Pennsylvania, as the Basco showroom. They placed the letters BASCO in front of the fac¸ade; they are twice the height of the roof. See Stanislaus von Moos, Venturi, Rauch und Scott Brown, Munich, 1987. ⁸⁷ Neumann, ‘Die mechanische Seidenweberei’.

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Behrens’s pavilions, Muthesius’s factory also achieved a ‘spiritualization’ of the space. The Silk Factory invoked ecclesiastical forms, the central part of the main fac¸ade being shaped like a classical basilica. Yet, rather than invoking ecclesiastical motifs narratively, as historical precedents, Muthesius built them into the proportions of the architecture. They appealed not to the brain—no ‘learned’ recognition effect was intended—but to the emotions. The spectator was to look at the building, see nothing but an industrial complex, yet experience an air of grandeur and awe akin to religious sentiment. This was a psychological symbolism that operated through the subtle manipulation of spatial sensations. The Idealist subtext was there, but it was hidden in those proportions that the contemporary sources praised as so ‘perfect’. Muthesius’s second major commission, the Wireless Transmission Station of Nauen, took this process one step further (Figure 14). Located about 30 kilometres west of Berlin, the transmission station was the first of its kind, and represented a technological advance of enormous economic, political and strategic importance in Wilhelmine Germany. The Navy used wireless transmission to communicate with ships around the globe, and the project therefore became so crucial to Wilhelmine empire-building that the Emperor personally intervened in 1903 to ensure that AEG and Siemens/Halske stopped blocking each other by maintaining their respective patents, and collaborated in setting up the

Figure 14 Wireless Transmission Station, 1906, by Hermann Muthesius, Nauen. Photo: MU.

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Wireless Telegraphy Company Telefunken.⁸⁸ Shortly afterwards, Muthesius won the commission to design the buildings which would house the prestigious new technology. It was, therefore, of special significance that he should have used sacred forms in this architecture so prominently. Nauen’s ﬂoor plan was that of a church. The small entrance hall of the building, curiously lowered, recreated the atmosphere of a crypt, while the main hall—the nave—ended in a crossing followed by a choir. The choir was segregated from the nave by a large glass wall in the place of the traditional rood screen. In front of it, the space normally used by the congregation at Nauen served as a lecture theatre, while the area behind the screen was the engine hall, which thus took the place of the sacred centrepiece of the whole complex. Here, the public could admire the wireless transmitters as marvels of technological progress, which were recast, through the architecture, as objects of timeless devotion. A contemporary newspaper captured this point well when it described Nauen in the following terms: There is no trace here of decorative forms or parts in the architecture. Extreme rationalism and the most severe treatment of the building’s volume combine to achieve a curiously entrancing overall effect, which dominates the wide plain of the Havel. It resembles the grand brick buildings which, even today, lend a sense of monumentality to the wide and barren plains of Syria. The surfaces of Oldenburg Clinker [a particularly dark type of North-German red brick] are of a bluish red; none have any decorative pattern. The building is the result of an enormous intellectual labour [Denkarbeit], and its architect, Hermann Muthesius, has succeeded in giving it a sense of great dignity without invoking any historical forms.⁸⁹

The formulation is, perhaps unwittingly, paradoxical. It highlights, on the one hand, the lack of any historical allusion, but at the same time compares the overall effect to the monumentality of ancient Syrian architecture. What is captured in this metaphor is the quality already observed in Behrens’s use of history: the reference to a cultural archetype, one which exists outside historical time, but, like the sphinxes, belongs to the collective memory of all civilizations. The more archaic, and the more remote the religious form invoked, the more effective the transfer from history to memory. The classic example is Peter Behrens’s 1908 AEG Turbine Hall in Berlin. In many ways the industrial building of Wilhelmine Germany per se, it is the subject of an almost infinite literature by architectural historians.⁹⁰ The building’s fascination stems from a set of tensions not unlike ⁸⁸ Michael Boll´e, Die Großfunkstation Nauen und ihre Bauten von Hermann Muthesius, Berlin, 1996. ⁸⁹ Article in the Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung 81/40 (Berlin, 9 October 1920), p. 513. ⁹⁰ The building has not only played a dominant role in the vast literature on the life and work of Peter Behrens in general, including such important works as Anderson, Peter Behrens; and Alan

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those detected here in the work of Muthesius and other bourgeois modernists. It was, at once, spiritual and rational, archaic and modern. Among its archaizing elements, the monumental pylons in the fac¸ade stood out. From a static point of view, they were superﬂuous in this modern steel-and-glass construction. They communicated a sense of ancient gravitas, reminding the spectator perhaps of the grand pylons on which Egyptian sphinxes were displayed before the pyramids. Yet the building was also strikingly modern. Even more so than Muthesius’s Silk Factory, it achieved a complete integration of the ceremonial and the functional. Indeed, here there was only one hall, with no separate reception areas. Through the ingenious device of the grand pylons, Behrens managed to turn the ultimate industrial shape—a machine hall—into an archetypal space of human civilization. This did not detract from the building’s modernity. Indeed, with its pioneering use of the glass curtain wall, the Turbine Factory also bears the signature of the young Mies van de Rohe, who, working as Behrens’s assistant at the time, has been credited with designing the building’s side wall to the courtyard.⁹¹ Indeed, the building had a Miesian character in other ways, too. If it is true that the most important quality of the work of the mature Mies was its neo-Kantian Idealism, which refuses to treat architecture as anything but an end in itself, then we can see traces of this approach emerging in the Turbine Factory.⁹² In the way it combined the emphatically modern with a certain ancient mysticism, this building typified the dialogical tensions within bourgeois modernism analysed in this chapter. What is less typical is the unity of the overall aesthetic effect which Behrens achieved here, and which often eluded his more ‘dilletantish’ colleagues Muthesius, Schumacher, Riemerschmid, Osthaus or the Gersons. In part, this was simply a difference of talent. In part, Behrens’s virtuoso use of forms represented the culmination of the neo-classical impulse that was inherent in bourgeois aesthetics, and which, as we shall see, increasingly marginalized the self-conscious naïvet´e of the vernacular. Historicism and bourgeois modernism both thrived on a dualism of history and memory. To contemporaries, the allegorical language of historicism, far from being merely decorative or eclectic, offered a mechanism for configuring the sense Windsor, Peter Behrens: Architect and Designer 1868–1940, London, 1981. It is also the subject of several volumes and essays devoted to Behrens’s role as designer-in-chief at the AEG, especially Tilman Buddensieg and H. Rogge, eds., Industriekultur: Peter Behrens und die AEG 1907–14, Berlin, 1980; Frederic J. Schwartz, ‘Commodity Signs: Peter Behrens, the AEG, and the Trademark: His Designs for German Allgemeine Elektricit¨ats-Gesellschaft’, Journal of Design History 9/3 (1996), pp. 153–84; and Giovanni Anceschi, ‘The First Corporate Image: Peter Behrens and the AEG’, Domus 605 (1980), pp. 32–4. ⁹¹ Mechthild Heuser, ‘Die Fenster zum Hof: Die Turbinenhalle, Behrens und Mies van der Rohe’, in Hans Georg Pfeiffer, ed., Peter Behrens: ‘Wer aber will sagen, was Sch¨onheit sei?’ Grafik, Produktgestaltung, Architektur, D¨usseldorf, 1990. ⁹² This interpretation is advanced by Ignasi Sol`a-Morales Rubi´o, for example in his Mies van der Rohe: Barcelona Pavilion, with Cristian Cirici and Fernando Ramos, Barcelona, 1993.

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of the past. Where the historicism of the 1860s quoted and combined historical precedents from different periods, the hybrid historicism of the period around 1900 introduced the new idiom of memory. As part of this process, historical forms were not so much jettisoned as transformed into cultural archetypes. The architecture of late historicism and of bourgeois modernism never served as a simple illustration of a fixed ideology. These buildings were ﬂuid and richly textured image-texts in themselves, often negotiating different conceptions of the past. Their component parts were not just aesthetic attributes, but argumentative strategies. This caused friction and ruptures within the built environment. In this way, the last wave of historicists and the first wave of modernists alike helped deconstruct the unity of academic historicism, and opened up a wealth of new and increasingly modernist ways of investing the cityscape with a sense of the past.

3 The Sense of Place: Representing the Local in the Modern City

To speak of the sense of place in German modernism inevitably conjures up the spectre of Heimat. In the German language, Heimat denotes everything which is local, place-speciﬁc and vernacular—as opposed to universal, cosmopolitan and abstract. The quest to preserve traditional building styles and landscape features as signiﬁers of an authentic Heimat emerged in later nineteenth-century Germany, and was closely related to an international vernacular revival at that time.¹ Yet Heimat was (and remains) not just a description of traditions that require preservation. In German usage especially, Heimat is a powerful political concept, which transcends the limits of contemporaneous Arts and Crafts ideologies. For it designates not just an appreciation of vernacular traditions: it implies a more fundamental assertion of the signiﬁcance of ‘place’ as a marker of identity, individual as well as collective.² The English term homeland is perhaps more comparable to this usage, for it captures the central association of ¹ The Heimat style was ﬁrst deﬁned in Ernst Rudorff, Heimatschutz, Berlin, 1897. On the founding of the German League for Heimat Protection, see Walter Schoenichen, Naturschutz, Heimatschutz: Ihre Begründung durch Ernst Rudorff, Hugo Conwentz und ihre Vorläufer, Stuttgart, 1954; Andreas Knaut, ‘Ernst Rudorff und die Anfänge der deutschen Heimatbewegung’, in Edeltraut Klueting, ed., Antimodernismus und Reform: Zur Geschichte der deutschen Heimatbewegung, Darmstadt, 1991, pp. 20–49; Werner Hartung, ‘Denkmalpﬂege und Heimatschutz im wilhelminischen Deutschland 1900 bis 1913’, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Kunst und Denkmalpﬂege 43 (1989), pp. 173–81; and Arne Andersen, ‘Heimatschutz: Die bürgerliche Naturschutzbewegung’, in Franz-Josef Brüggemeier and Thomas Rommelspacher, eds., Besiegte Natur: Geschichte der Umwelt im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Munich, 1987, pp. 143–57. Helpful English overviews of the German Heimatschutz movement are Thomas Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature: Landscape Preservation and German Identity, 1885–1945, Cambridge, Mass., 2004; and Rollins, A Greener Vision. On parallels with the contemporaneous vernacular revival in other Western countries, see Maiken Umbach and Bernd Hüppauf, eds., Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization and the Built Environment, Stanford, 2005. ² On the changing meanings and connotations of the term Heimat, see Hermann Bausinger, ‘Auf dem Wege zu einem neuen, aktiven Heimatverständnis. Begriffsgeschichte als Problemgeschichte’, Heimat (1984), pp. 11–27; and Andreas Lehne, ‘Heimatstil. Zum Problem der Terminologie’, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Kunst und Denkmalpﬂege 43 (1989), pp. 159–64.

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Heimat with Heim, home. Like heimisch and einheimisch, Heimat refers to being rooted in one’s place of origin and, by implication, the exclusion of strangers. In combination with knowledge or information, heimlich also means secret, notably that which is known only inside a closed circle of the initiated, those who belong. Einheimisch translates as native or indigenous, but again, it has more fundamental connotations than the English term: ‘einheimisch werden’ is not the same as ‘to naturalize’, because, based as it is on the notion of Heim, it transforms a primarily legal into a more all-encompassing category of belonging. The same subtle difference is apparent in the term Heimweh, homesickness. This concept ﬁrst appeared in a 1688 medical dissertation, where it denoted a medical condition affecting both mind and body.³ After 1800, this condition was individualized and psychologized. For the Romantics, Heimweh signiﬁed a subjective psychic disposition, the state of the lonely soul of an ego that feels exposed and experiences a longing for a place called Heimat. At that time, the imagery of Heimat became a staple of German literature and art. At the outset of the twentieth century, Heimat gained a new political potency in Germany. No longer just an idea debated by intellectuals, the so-called Heimat protection leagues (Heimatschutzverbände) now attracted an unprecedented mass following. Their success has often been associated with a popular rejection—or at least critique—of modernity, albeit one conducted by thoroughly modern means.⁴ To distinguish this function of Heimat as a political rallying call from the earlier, more individualist usage of the term, German scholarship often employs the adjective heimatideologisch to characterize such organized anti-modernism. Not infrequently, this usage of Heimat is linked directly to the blood and soil ideology championed by leading National Socialists.⁵ At the same time, anglophone scholarship has opened up a new perspective onto the modern German notion of Heimat as a mediator between locality and nation, which approaches the phenomenon of populist Heimat enthusiasm rather more sympathetically. Celia Applegate’s pioneering Nation of Provincials interpreted the discourse of Heimat and the practice of Heimat and landscape protection as a constitutive and necessary feature of the nation-building process.⁶ Similarly, ³ Johannes Hofer, De nostalgia, Basel, 1688. ⁴ This view prevails in Klueting, Antimodernismus und Reform, especially the chapter by Werner Hartung, ‘Das Vaterland als Hort von Heimat: Grundmuster konservativer Identitätsstiftung und Kulturpolitik in Deutschland’, pp. 112–56; and Hartung, Konservative Zivilisationskritik und regionale Identität am Beispiel der niedersächsischen Heimatbewegung 1895 bis 1919, Hanover, 1991; Klaus Bergmann, Agrarromantik und Großstadtfeindschaft, Meisenheim am Glan, 1970. A similar deﬁnition of Heimat is implicit in Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich, Cambridge, Mass., 1984. ⁵ Authors who trace speciﬁc continuities between this anti-modernism and National Socialism are Williams, ‘The Chords’; Karl Ditt, ‘Die deutsche Heimatbewegung 1871–1945’, Heimat (1990/91), pp. 135–54; Winfried Speitkamp, ‘Denkmalpﬂege und Heimatschutz in Deutschland zwischen Kulturkritik und Nationalsozialismus’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 70 (1988), pp. 149–93; Kramer, ‘Die politische und ökonomische Funktionalisierung’; von Reeken, Heimatbewegung. ⁶ Applegate, A Nation of Provincials.

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Alon Conﬁno argued that the familiar imagery of Heimat helped ordinary men and women imagine the abstract category of the nation.⁷ It is therefore neither surprising nor paradoxical that the proliferation of Heimat ideas and images peaked precisely when popular nationalism was at its height, i.e. both before and during the First World War.⁸ This approach has profoundly deepened our understanding of Heimat’s place in German nationalism. Yet it is also clear that the Second German Empire was a rapidly modernizing state, which was marked by unprecedented urban growth. In cities, which gained in importance not only as living spaces, but also, by extension, as sites of political activism, the symbolic politics of ‘place’ developed in new directions, which were not necessarily compatible with the iconography of Heimat. Jennifer Jenkins is one of several scholars who have questioned whether the generic and predominantly rural notion of Heimat in the homeland protection movement can be equated with the place-speciﬁc iconography of belonging that emerged in Germany’s major cities in this era.⁹ It is tempting to deﬁne the difference between the two as one between a more state-driven project of identity formation in urban locales, in contrast to the grass-root activism of the simultaneous Heimat movement. Capital cities in particular became prominent showcases. Napoleon III’s Paris was a model for the transformation of many European capital cities, which were subjected to extensive building programmes giving physical shape to the respective regime’s domestic and imperial aspirations.¹⁰ And outside Europe, new capital cities like Washington, New Delhi and Canberra were laid out in ways that not only symbolized political ambitions, but also provided a three-dimensional template for the state’s operations.¹¹ For the majority of Germans in this period, however, ⁷ Conﬁno, The Nation as a Local Metaphor. See also Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis and London, 1996, especially the section on ‘The Production of Locality’, pp. 178–99. ⁸ Kunz, Verortete Geschichte; Lekan, Imagining the Nation. On Heimat and war, see also Jeffery Verhey, The Spirit of 1914: Militarism, Myth and Mobilization in Germany, Cambridge, 2000; Bernd Ziemann, Front und Heimat: Ländliche Kriegserfahrungen im südlichen Bayern 1914–1923, Essen, 1997; Aribert Reimann, Der große Krieg der Sprachen: Untersuchungen zur historischen Semantik in Deutschland und England zur Zeit des Ersten Weltkriegs, Essen, 2000. ⁹ Jennifer Jenkins criticized Conﬁno’s work in her review of his book in the Journal of Social History 33/1 (1999), pp. 223–5. ¹⁰ On nineteenth-century Paris, see David Harvey, Paris: Capital of Modernity, New York, 2003; Patrice de Moncan, Le Paris d’Haussmann, Paris, 2002; Willet Weeks, The Man who Made Paris, London, 1999; David P. Jordan, Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann, New York and London, 1995; Dennis Paul Costanzo, Cityscape and the Transformation of Paris during the Second Empire, Ann Arbor, 1994; David Theodore van Zanten, Building Paris: Architectural Institutions and the Transformation of the French Capital, 1830–1870, Cambridge, 1994. On Berlin, see Brian Ladd, Urban Planning and Civic Order in Germany, 1860–1914, Cambridge, Mass., 1990; Douglas Klahr, Instrumente der Selbstdarstellung eines Kaisers: Die Schlossfreiheit und das Berliner Stadtschloss, Berlin, 2003; Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900, Cambridge, Mass., 1996; Alan Balfour, Berlin, The Politics of Order, 1737–1989, Milan and New York, 1990. ¹¹ A useful comparative discussion of the political layout of these capital cities is Wolfgang Sonne, Representing the State: Capital City Planning in the Early Twentieth Century, Munich, 2003.

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the experience of urban modernity was not that of the capital city.¹² They lived in what I have elsewhere referred to as ‘second cities’: subject to rapid population growth and large-scale economic transformations, such cities were no less modern than capitals. Yet their status also meant that politically, they operated at arm’s length from the nation-state, and developed their own spatial iconographies, which frequently drew on particularist legacies.¹³ In such second cities, not only a sense of the past, but also a sense of the speciﬁcity of place was cultivated, which often undercut a universalizing, state-centred agenda. Hamburg was an exemplary second city of this kind, and it is no coincidence that its history informed Jenkins’s critique of Conﬁno.¹⁴ But while recent scholarship about the cultural life of cities such as Hamburg and Munich has ﬂourished, much of this writing pays relatively little attention to the peculiar signiﬁcance of Germany’s federal system. It is true that the project of using aesthetic education for turning working people into citizens was not speciﬁc to second cities. Nor was it a product of this time. Most of the leading reformers active in Hamburg and comparable cities wrote in a language which closely mirrored the eighteenth-century discourse of enlightened ‘improvement’.¹⁵ If historians such as Jenkins nevertheless examine provincial modernities, this use of modern refers principally to questions of artistic style—as in Lichtwark’s efforts at fostering a peculiarly Hanseatic version of French Impressionism.¹⁶ By the same token, provincial here does not so much denote the particularity of the Free and Hanseatic city, but functions as a moral category, invoked to suggest that art with a local connection was deemed more effective at fulﬁlling its educational mission than art which was far removed from people’s daily sphere of experience.¹⁷ All these notions were clearly crucial to the evolution of bourgeois modernism in provincial cities. What this chapter seeks to add to our knowledge is a sharper sense of the speciﬁc political situation that tied modernism and regionalism together. One thing both heimatlich and civic identity politics in this period had in common was that both celebrated the particularity of place ¹² Andrew Lees, Cities Perceived: Urban Society in European and American Thought, 1820–1940, Columbia, 1985. ¹³ Umbach, ‘A Tale of Second Cities’. ¹⁴ Jenkins, Provincial Modernity. ¹⁵ This point is made by Katherine B. Aaslestad in her review of Jennifer Jenkins’s Provincial Modernity, published by [email protected], July 2003. On the Hamburg Enlightenment, see Mary Lindemann, Patriots and Paupers: Hamburg 1712–1830, New York and Oxford, 1990; Joachim Whaley, Religious Toleration and Social Change in Hamburg, 1529–1819, Cambridge, 1985; Franklin Kopitzsche, Grundzüge einer Sozialgeschichte der Aufklärung in Hamburg und Altona, Hamburg, 1990; and Anne Conrad, Arno Herzig and Franklin Kopitzsche, eds., Das Volk im Visier der Aufklärung, Studien zur Popularisierung der Aufklärung im späten 18. Jahrhundert, Hanover, 1999. ¹⁶ For the same, aesthetic reasons, Lichtwark emerges as a lone champion of modernism in a conservative bourgeois milieu in Carolyn Kay, Art and the German Bourgeoisie: Alfred Lichtwark and Modern Painting in Hamburg, 1886–1914, Toronto, 2002. See also Sterling Fishman, ‘Alfred Lichtwark and the Founding of the German Art Education Movement’, History of Education Quarterly 6/3 (1966), pp. 3–17. ¹⁷ Jenkins, Provincial Modernity, pp. 181–216.

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without being ‘particularist’.¹⁸ For the latter term, and yet more so its German equivalent, Kleinstaaterei, suggest an anti-national and nostalgic orientation. It is of course true that many of the activists under examination here looked to history when they deﬁned spatial identity. But so did nationalists, when they deﬁned the nation. This alone makes neither group pre-modern. Not only did both nationalists and regionalists pursue distinctly modern social and economic interests. As we shall see, there was also something profoundly modern about their understanding of place itself. Like Heimat, urban and civic regionalism in this period must therefore be read as an integral part of the history of modernism, not its opposite. This chapter expands on this theme, and it will begin with Hamburg, before moving on to different types of ‘second cities’ in Germany. Since the publication of Richard Evans’s seminal study of Hamburg’s failure to deal effectively with the last cholera outbreak of 1892, the city state’s government has widely been viewed as old-fashioned and inefﬁcient.¹⁹ Hamburg’s constitution did not subdivide the administration into functional ministries, but into ‘senatorial deputations’, commissions answerable to the Senate (Upper House). These deputations were largely staffed by honorary, i.e. unpaid, members recruited from Hamburg’s patrician classes.²⁰ This set-up was a typical product of a republican city-state’s history, and distinct from the professional bureaucracies that gradually developed inside the German princely states during the early modern period. Throughout the medieval and early modern periods, Hamburg had been a free imperial city within the Holy Roman Empire, and it defended the republican constitution well beyond the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. Hamburg’s civic identity politics in the Wihelmine era have to be read against this backdrop. The importance of this historical identity was reinforced by economic continuity; with the exception of its sizeable shipbuilding industry, well into the twentieth century, Hamburg’s economy was based more on trade than on industry. The city’s port became the nodal point through which raw materials were imported, goods ‘made in Germany’ were exported, and many others changed hands without even entering the German customs system.²¹ Hamburg became the launch-pad for William II’s imperial ambitions. The build-up of Tirpitz’s navy was only part of this project.²² Both economically ¹⁸ Celia Applegate, ‘A Europe of Regions: The History and Historiography of Subnational Groups in Modern Times’, American Historical Review 104 (1999), pp. 1157–82. ¹⁹ Richard Evans, Death in Hamburg: Society and Politics in the Cholera-Years, 1830–1910, Oxford, 1987. ²⁰ The text of the 1860 constitution, which ratiﬁed these principles, is reprinted in Jürgen Bolland, Die Hamburgische Bürgerschaft in alter und neuer Zeit, Hamburg, 1959, pp. 16–17. ²¹ Lamar Cecil, Albert Ballin: Business and Politics in Imperial Germany, 1888–1918, Princeton, 1967; Holger H. Herwig, Luxury Fleet: The Imperial German Navy, 1888–1918, rev. edn., London, 1987; Achim Quaas, ‘Der Schiffbau’, in Volker Plagemann, ed., Übersee: Seefahrt und Seemacht im deutschen Kaiserreich, Munich, 1988, pp. 126–34. ²² Jan Rüger, The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire, Cambridge, 2007.

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and symbolically, the merchant ﬂeet was at least as important in challenging Britain’s maritime hegemony. Hamburg and the Hanseatic city of Bremen capitalized on this trend. The ships built by Ballin’s HAPAG in Hamburg, and by Bremer Lloyd, were presented in political propaganda as emblems of German modernity and imperial aspirations.²³ Because the ﬁrst German Empire had been a continental power, this bid for naval supremacy had no historical precedent. The medieval organization of the Hanseatic League was an exception, and it therefore became a favoured topic of the apologists of Wilhelmine nationalism. Historians wildly exaggerated the role the Hansa had played in the early modern economy: it became a national myth in its own right, propagated to a wider audience through the use of monuments, popular prints and political rhetoric.²⁴ This agenda formed the starting point for a physical transformation of Hamburg’s cityscape, and any consideration of the role of place in modernism has to take the role of place in later nineteenth-century historicism as the starting point. In 1888, Hamburg’s special status as a customs-free zone, maintained beyond the national uniﬁcation of 1871, was converted into the privilege of a free port.²⁵ This arrangement was attacked by advocates of political centralization and economic uniformity, who demanded the abolition of all of the city’s historical privileges.²⁶ In this situation, the government of the city-state commissioned a team of seventy architects and engineers, directed by Franz Andreas Meyer, chief engineer of the Tiefbauamt, to design a new warehouse district, the so-called Speicherstadt, as part of the free port area.²⁷ It was to give three-dimensional expression to the ‘Hanseatic compromise’ between particularism and national unity. On 29 October 1888, Wilhelm II laid the foundation stone to the entrance gate of the main bridge connecting the city to the Speicherstadt. Like the adjoining buildings, this gate emulated the medieval North-German ‘red brick Gothic’, which was associated with the period of the Hanseatic League’s greatest inﬂuence and wealth. At the ofﬁcial opening, William II himself gave a speech suggesting that Hanseatic particularism, far from undermining the Empire, provided a precedent for Germany reaching out to the world at large: ‘You are the ones who connect our fatherland with invisible ties to distant parts of the globe, trade with our products, and more ²³ Rudolf Kroboth, ‘Flottenbau, Finanzkrise und Reichssteuerreform, 1898 bis 1914’, in Plagemann, Übersee, pp. 37–40. ²⁴ Volker Plagemann, ‘Kultur, Wissenschaft, Ideologie’, in idem., ed., Übersee, pp. 299–308. ²⁵ Richard S. Thoman, Free Ports and Foreign-Trade Zones, Cambridge, Mass., 1956. ²⁶ Vierteljahrschrift für Volkswirtschaft, Politik und Kulturgeschichte C (Berlin, 1888), p. 38. ²⁷ Karin Maak, Die Speicherstadt im Hamburger Freihafen: Eine Stadt an Stelle der Stadt, Hamburg, 1985; Dieter Schädel, Wie das Kundtwerk Hamburg enstand: Von Wimmel bis Schumacher: Hamburger Stadtbaumeister von 1841–1933, Hamburg, 2006; Hamburg und seine Bauten unter Berücksichtigung der Nachbarstädte Altona und Wandsbek: Zur IX. Wanderausstellung des Verbandes deutscher Architekten- und Ingenieur-Vereine in Hamburg, ed. the AIV, Hamburg, 1890.

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than that: you are the ones who transmit our ideas and values to the wider world, and for this the fatherland owes you a debt of special gratitude.’²⁸ The architectural expression of this fusion was an invented tradition if ever there was one.²⁹ The neo-Hansa style actually broke with the city’s typical architectural style: white, neo-classical buildings.³⁰ This did not perturb the planners of the Hanseatic revival. A creatively reinvented medieval past was politically much more useful than simple traditionalism. North European red-brick Gothic, as championed by the Hanover School, was historically associated with the heyday of the Hanseatic League, and ﬁtted the purpose exactly. Within the overall ensemble, individual landmark buildings and ediﬁces served as iconographical highlights. An example was the bridge which connected the warehouse district with the old city centre. It was adorned by two statues of equal size: the ﬁgure of Germania, and that of Hammonia, according to popular belief, Hamburg’s patron goddess. In the same spirit, the design that won the 1885 competition for the rebuilding of Hamburg’s Town Hall fused national and particularist traditions.³¹ The façade of the building focused attention on the relationship between the city-state and the nation (Figure 15).³² On the ﬁrst-ﬂoor level, it featured twenty life-size statues of emperors of the Holy Roman Empire. This demonstration of imperial power was matched by a series of keystones showing the crests of the members of the Hamburg senate of 1892 and sculpted ﬁgures carrying the attributes of local crafts and trades. Additionally, there were statues of the patron saints of Hamburg’s seven medieval parishes, and allegories of virtue. The spire, an emblem of burgher liberty, was adorned by the coat of arms of the City of Hamburg—but above it towered the imperial eagle. The interior structure of the building was designed to reﬂect the city republic’s traditional constitution. All administrative functions were relocated to district authority ofﬁces, and the remaining space was divided between the Senate in one wing, the Lower House (Bürgerschaft) in the other. Between them lay a large shared hallway as a lobby; the room above it was called the ‘Hall of the Republics’, ²⁸ Karin Maak, ‘Die Freihäfen’, in Plagemann, Übersee, pp. 107–10, cited from p. 110. ²⁹ For the concept of invented tradition, see Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, 1983. ³⁰ Hermann Hipp, ‘Das rote und das weiße Hamburg: Eine ganz lokale Architekturgeschichte des Backsteins’, in Jahresberichte der Hamburgischen Gesellschaft zur Beförderung der Künste und nützlichen Gewerbe für das Geschäftsjahr 1994/95, Hamburg, 1995, pp. 64–82, esp. p. 81. ³¹ Joist Grolle, ed., Das Rathaus der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg, Hamburg, 1997. For comparable iconographies elsewhere in Wilhelmine Germany, see Martin Damus, Das Rathaus: Architektur- und Sozialgeschichte von der Gründerzeit zur Postmoderne, Berlin, 1988; and G. Ulrich Großmann and Petra Krutisch, eds., Renaissance der Renaissance: Ein bürgerlicher Kunststil im 19. Jahrhundert, 3 vols., i, Munich, 1992, esp. pp. 201–19. ³² This was not a new device. Similar galleries of statues depicting key political ﬁgures, luminaries and local saints often featured in the civic architecture of the North European Renaissance which the Hamburg architects regarded as their model, for example in the remodelled façade, dating from 1405–10, of the Bremen Rathaus.

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Figure 15 Town Hall, 1885, collective design by the ‘Hamburger Baumeisterbund’, Hamburg. Photo: MU.

and represented the city republics of Athens, Rome, Venice and Amsterdam through allegoric wall paintings. The architects of the Town Hall were well aware of the political potency of the architectural allegories. As one member of the team put it during the building phase of what was effectively an independent state’s government headquarters: ‘As long as the great views of our Imperial Chancellor of the importance of small, vigorous and independent

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states within the German federal states are respected, so long our project is safe.’³³ These historical allegories provided a reservoir of historical arguments that formed the matrix for appropriations of the past well into the twentieth century. Self-styled modernists may have rejected the formal language of historicism, yet as we have seen in Chapter 2, it deeply informed the reconﬁguration of space in modernist praxis. One of the modernists who looms large in modern accounts of reformist circles in Wilhelmine Germany was Alfred Lichtwark. In 1886, he became director of the Kunsthalle, Hamburg’s Fine Arts Museum.³⁴ Through his promotion of Impressionist art, Lichtwark came into conﬂict with some of the more traditionalist families amongst Hamburg’s patricians.³⁵ Jenkins’s inﬂuential study has persuasively argued that, in spite of occasional and much publicized clashes, Lichtwark’s efforts were an integral part of Hamburg’s bourgeois culture.³⁶ For all his polemics against the ‘academic’ art of historicist painters, history was a vital part of Lichtwark’s vision of a locally inﬂected, socially embedded modernism. In his quest for an art that would be sensitive to place, Lichtwark, like his historicist predecessors, ﬁrst turned to the medieval. At the Kunsthalle, he set up a major permanent exhibition of Hamburg’s medieval art, notably the famous altarpieces by Meister Bertram and Meister Francke, which he recovered from the city’s decaying medieval churches, restored and displayed in the museum. Such efforts were directly connected with his championing of what he deﬁned as modern art. When commissioning Max Liebermann, Theodor Hagen and other ‘modern’ painters, he hoped to sow the seeds for a Hamburg-speciﬁc brand of Impressionism. He envisaged not simply a regional application of an international style, but instead, Hamburg Impressionism as a product of a long history of speciﬁcally Hanseatic art that was grounded in the Gothic. The connection was not one of stylistic ‘citation’, as it had been for historicists, but an appreciation of the way in which a genius loci penetrated all artistic production. Lichtwark himself was supremely conscious of the historical and political parameters of Hamburg’s Gothic heritage. In his book Deutsche Königsstädte, he offered a typology of urban traditions based on the distinction between princely cities, such as Berlin, Dresden or Munich, and city-republics, Bürgerstädte, such as Hamburg, alone capable of producing true bürgerlich art.³⁷ Against this background, it is unsurprising that Lichtwark, the great champion of ‘modern art’, publicly supported the historicist building project of the Town Hall, which alluded to this Hanseatic legacy, even ³³ Wilhelm Hauers, 1885, cited in Hermann Hipp, ‘Das Rathaus der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg’, in Grolle, Das Rathaus, pp. 15–35, quote p. 24. ³⁴ A modern biography is Rudolf Großkopff, Alfred Lichtwark, Hamburg, 2002. See also Hans Präffcke, Der Kunstbegriff Alfred Lichtwarks, Olms, Hildesheim, et al., 1986. ³⁵ Kay, Art and the German Bourgeoisie. ³⁶ Jenkins, Provincial Modernity, pp. 181–216. ³⁷ Alfred Lichtwark, Deutsche Königsstädte: Berlin, Potsdam, Dresden, München, Stuttgart, 2nd edn., Berlin, 1912.

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though aesthetically he was probably the city’s single most outspoken critic of historicism. This was not just a matter of personal taste or individual choice. Social and political changes transformed the symbolic identity politics of this epoch. Imperial Germany’s political sphere became increasingly democratized, in the sense that a political mass market developed—in public debate, in the press, and also in the realm of material culture.³⁸ The old elite discourses were too limited in their social reach. This rendered historicism problematic, for it conﬁgured history through the symbolic cosmos of ruling elites. Epochs were recalled through allusions to the architecture of palaces, or, in some regions, the architecture of burgher elites, where they, rather than the princes or the aristocrats, had been the hegemonic group. The visual discourse of the neo-Hanseatic warehouse district in Hamburg was no exception. This idiom appeared out of touch with social developments, as those representing the groups whose memories were thus excluded rapidly recognized. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, Hamburg had become the centre of the German working-class movement, which was the most powerful, most tightly organized and politically engaged in Europe. This workingclass movement had no connection with place-based particularism: it was, above all, a movement of migrant workers. By 1910, 53.5 per cent of those who lived and worked in Hamburg had migrated into the city, the vast majority of whom were unskilled labourers.³⁹ To these workers, Hanseatic historicism provided no positive points of identiﬁcation. On the contrary: it seemed to embody the city government’s unwillingness to address the needs of the new population. The dramatic dock-workers’ strike of 1896/7 was just one symptom of this growing political alienation. The workers’ politics were national, their thinking was shaped by the ideal of a modern, uniform nation-state. Hamburg’s urban notables, its shipowners and merchants may have thought internationally in economic terms, but their identity continued to be based on the city-republic. The trade-unionists, as representatives of labour migrants, challenged the notion of political legitimacy based on ownership, wealth and connections with one of the city’s patrician families. The symbolism of the Hamburg Town Hall became a particular target of their agitation. In 1891, Hamburg’s trade unions formed the so-called Hamburg Trade Union Cartel. In 1900, the cartel began to plan a central Union Hall that was to give physical expression to the anti-particularist spirit of the movement. The union’s own guidebook to the building suggested that ‘after intense struggle, various trade union umbrella organizations have now been welded together and the leadership of the labour movement, the general commission of the German ³⁸ On the debate about the ‘creeping parliamentarization’ of imperial Germany, see Manfred Rauh, Die Parlamentarisierung des Deutschen Reiches, Düsseldorf, 1977, and Dieter Langewiesche, ‘Das Deutsche Kaiserreich: Bemerkungen zur Diskussion über Parlamentarisierung und Demokratisierung Deutschlands’, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte 19 (1979), pp. 628–42. ³⁹ Ilse Möller, Hamburg, Stuttgart, 1985, p. 71.

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trade union, has been housed in Hamburg’.⁴⁰ Hamburg’s having attracted so many working-class immigrants in recent years was cited to explain why this city was an ideal ‘breeding ground for the centralist ambitions of the trade union movement’.⁴¹ The Trade Union Hall, built in 1900, was conceived as an anti-type to the Town Hall.⁴² The Union’s guidebook, published in 1914, showed pictures of the Town Hall and the Trade Union Hall opposing one another (Figure 16). Curiously, Heinrich Krug’s 1905 design of the Trade Union Hall was anything but modern. The Hall’s symmetrical façade, with an entrance ﬂanked by imposing, monolithic pillars of deep red granite, a neo-Baroque hipped roof and a dome lending gravitas to the centre were all reminiscent of a palace. The advantage of this formal language was that it closely mirrored the iconography of buildings in Berlin. At the 1890 elections, Hamburg’s SPD won all direct mandates in the city for the German Parliament, yet it had precious little power in the city-state, which retained its property-based franchise. An allegorical alignment with Berlin thus seemed preferable to Hanseatic city-state politics. The Cartel’s own guidebook for the Trade Union Hall spoke of ‘the elegant opulence of its somewhat [. . .] modern Baroque’.⁴³ Yet there was also a sense of unease in trade union circles about historicism. Even the guidebook expressed this scepticism, suggesting that perhaps too ‘little reference was made to the simple and beautiful thought of the outstanding strength of the working class which ought to have been captured in this building’.⁴⁴ The SPD-newspaper Hamburger Echo raised a similar point: ‘The exuberant splendour of a modernized Baroque does not seem to be the most appropriate monument to the working-class struggle for the betterment of social order.’⁴⁵ And in 1911, Clara Zetkin pointed out that ‘the style of our trade union, popular and commercial buildings differs little from their bourgeois counterparts. [. . .] In other words, if we take style to be the visual expression of inner life, it seems that the working class has thus far failed to ﬁnd an adequate architecture to correspond to its spiritual life.’⁴⁶ ⁴⁰ Hamburg Trade Union Cartel, ed., Das Hamburger Gewerkschaftshaus: Ein Führer durch das Hamburger Gewerkschaftshaus, Hamburg, 1914, p. 6. ⁴¹ Hamburger Gewerkschaftshaus, p. 6. Compare also Elisabeth Domansky, ‘Das Hamburger Gewerkschaftshaus’, in Arno Herzig, D. Langewiesche and Arnold Sywottek, eds., Arbeiter in Hamburg, Hamburg, 1983, pp. 373–84. ⁴² A property was purchased in the former suburb St Georg, next to Hammerbrook, a district that had been formed as a result of the 1842 ﬁre. Hammerbrook was one of the high-density living quarters in Hamburg—most families displaced by the construction of the Warehouse District moved here. See Hermann Hipp, Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg: Geschichte, Kultur und Stadtbaukunst an Elbe und Alster, Cologne, 1989, p. 267. An architectural alignment with the working quarters of Hammerbrook, however, was never seriously considered. Indeed, the imposing historicist façade of the new hall faced away from Hammerbrook, towards the political centre of Hamburg. ⁴³ Hamburger Gewerkschaftshaus, p. 6. ⁴⁴ Hamburger Gewerkschaftshaus, pp. 13–14. ⁴⁵ ‘Hamburger Echo’, at the inauguration of the Trade Union Hall, 1906, quoted from Deutscher Gewerbschaftsbund, ed., 75 Jahre Gewerkschaftshaus Hamburg, Hamburg, 1982, p. 14. ⁴⁶ Clara Zetkin, quoted from Romana Schneider, ‘Volkshausgedanke und Volkshausarchitektur’, in Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani and Romana Schneider, eds., Moderne Architektur in Deutschland

75 Figure 16 Trade Union Hall, 1905, by Heinrich Krug, Hamburg, illustration from Hamburger Gewerkschaftskartell, ed., Ein Führer durch das Hamburger Gewerkschaftshaus, Hamburg, 1914, p. 6.

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This debate provided the context for the emergence of a vernacular turn in Hamburg’s evolution, in which the city’s director of public building works, the Baudirektor, Friedrich Wilhelm (better known as ‘Fritz’) Schumacher, played a prominent role. Architectural historians have widely classiﬁed his work and legacy as ‘modernist’.⁴⁷ We have already seen that Schumacher eloquently condemned the historicist legacy.⁴⁸ There was also much in Schumacher’s own architectural works, and in the works of architects such as the Gerson brothers, whom he promoted in his role as building director from 1909 until 1933 (an ofﬁce he held with one brief interruption), which might be classiﬁed as ‘modern’, in so far as it was based on moving away from ornamentation towards greater visual discipline, simplicity and materiality. But the label modernism can obscure what became the deﬁning feature in Schumacher’s project: the sense of place. To inscribe this into the built environment, reformers like Lichtwark and Schumacher required a new, more expressive language, which would rescue the speciﬁcity of place from the all too universal language of historicism. History, if its relevance were to continue, needed to be communicated in new ways, and it needed to be tied to a very strong sense of the uniqueness of place. Fritz Schumacher was not a native Hamburger. In 1901, he had become Professor of Architecture and Design at the Technical University of Dresden. His time in Dresden coincided with the high point of the Jugendstil movement. As a ‘modernist’, Schumacher should have supported this innovative movement. Instead, like his Werkbund co-founder, Hermann Muthesius, Schumacher attacked Jugendstil vitriolically. He felt it privileged considerations of style in ways that he viewed as analogous with the primacy of style in historicism, and which rode roughshod over place-based sensitivities. Over the past thirty years, industry has employed a quick succession of stylistic trends to generate demand for novel and ever more novel fashions. The increased rapidity of this turnover ﬁnally had to lead to totally absurd results. [. . .] The outcome was even more embarrassing than the exploitation of style [in historicism]. By caring only about outward appearances, and by employing draughtsmen to create pattern books based on a superﬁcial view of the legacy German artists had created, one ﬁnally arrived in the shallow waters that are the Jugendstil.⁴⁹ 1900 bis 1950: Reform und Tradition, Stuttgart, 1992, pp. 184–99, quote p. 189. Modern architectural historians have agreed with her verdict, for example Ralf Lange, Architekturführer Hamburg, Hamburg, 1995, p. 78. ⁴⁷ For literature on Schumacher as a modernist architect and building director, see notes 29 and 30 in Chapter 1 of this study. ⁴⁸ Schumacher’s polemical anti-historicism forms a guiding thread in his oeuvre, from early writings such as his speech on the occasion of the founding of the Werkbund, to his later autobiography, Stufen des Lebens: Erinnerungen eines Baumeisters, 2nd edn., Stuttgart, 1949, esp. p. 384. For a fuller account of historicism and its detractors, see Chapter 2 of this study. ⁴⁹ Hermann Muthesius, ‘Zur kunstgewerblichen Lage’, Die Werkkunst: Zeitschrift des Vereins für deutsches Kunstgewerbe in Berlin 1/1 (1 October 1905), unpag. Muthesius’s critique was theorized in Stilarchitektur und Baukunst: Wandlungen der Architektur im 19. Jahrhundert und ihr heutiger

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Jugendstil, nearly all bourgeois modernists agreed, was driven by commercial interests, and was insufﬁciently ‘tectonic’.⁵⁰ It derived its inspiration from the two-dimensional, the curving line and delicate ornamentation capturing the ﬂeetingness of a moment of elegance. This they opposed to the supposed tectonic solidity and longevity of traditional architecture: the more archaic, the more authentic. Such polemics motivated the turn ﬁrst to Gothic precedents, and, when they, too, appeared increasingly ‘corrupted’ by fashionable historicist revivals, to the early medieval or Romanesque. The Romanesque seemed truly monumental—an impression that was exaggerated by the later removal of colourful frescoes that had adorned the plain walls of early medieval churches. This served as a model for a modern reconceptualization of the tectonic.⁵¹ A typical result was Schumacher’s Crematorium Dresden-Tolkewitz (1908/11), designed during his Dresden days, which was characterized by a lack of ornamentation, strict symmetry, monumentality and quiet grandeur. On the surface, such tectonic minimalism seemed to clash with Hamburg’s sense of place. An architectural language that was preoccupied with order and authority seemed to have little room in a commercial and polycentric burgher republic. Equally, Schumacher’s attacks on Jugendstil commercialism are difﬁcult to connect with the spirit of Hanseatic mercantilism. And indeed, the neoRomanesque idiom was more ardently supported by William II than by the patrician elites of Hamburg.⁵² Yet this difference in outlook also offered an opportunity. Schumacher’s appointment opened the door to the evolution of a new kind of regionalism, which proved better suited to bridging the social gulf that had opened up in the arguments over the Town Hall and the Trade Union Hall. Where old-style Hanseatic historicism had seemed elitist, Schumacher offered a view of the city as an all-encompassing social cosmos. This was not, as has sometimes been claimed, a Social Democratic programme.⁵³ From 1924 to 1933, Schumacher’s activities in Hamburg coincided with the term of ofﬁce of Progressive Liberal (DDP) Senator Carl Petersen as Standpunkt, Mühlheim-Ruhr, 1902. It is important to note that such polemics were targeted against the use of certain Jugendstil ornaments in industrial-produced products of the time. Muthesius did not reject Jugendstil when it was part of a holistic reform movement, as in the work of Mackintosh at Glasgow. ⁵⁰ For example in Schumacher’s monumental architectural history of Germany, Strömungen in deutscher Baukunst, Leipzig, 1935, pp. 103–9. On the tectonic as a leitmotif in contemporary debate, see Mitchell Schwarzer, German Architectural Theory and the Search for Modern Identity, Cambridge, 1995. ⁵¹ Holger Brülls, Neue Dome: Wiederaufnahme romanischer Bauformen und antimoderne Kulturkritik im Kirchenbau der Weimarer Republik und der NS-Zeit, Berlin, 1994. ⁵² Birgit Grimm, ‘Wilhelm II. und Norwegen’, in Bernd Hennigsen et al., eds., Walhlverwandtschaft: Skandinavien und Deutschland 1800 bis 1914, Berlin, 1997, pp. 100–12. ⁵³ Dirk Schubert, ‘Fritz Schumacher in Hamburg 1909–1933: Städtebau als Wohnungspolitik und Sozialreform’, in Zur Aktualität der Ideen von Fritz Schumacher: Fritz-Schumacher-Colloquium, 1990, Hamburg, 1992, pp. 75–104, points out that what is popularly known as Social Democratic

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mayor, and Schumacher himself brieﬂy joined the DDP. Although party-political constellations changed quickly at this time, and, especially during the late imperial period, were marked by numerous mergers and splits in liberal ranks, a socially inﬂected civic liberalism probably best describes the political project that informed the transformation of the cityscape in both the pre- and post-war years.⁵⁴ At the same time, Schumacher’s thinking was deeply collectivist, and thus at odds with the traditional view of liberalism as individualist. Recent work on the nature of liberalism has opened up new perspectives for recognizing the connection between these two projects. For liberalism, as post-Foucauldian scholars such as Joyce, Rose and Otter have shown,⁵⁵ was not so much about individualism per se, but rather about creating a structure within which individuals could behave free from external constraints, because they acted according to norms and behavioural codes that they had internalized to such an extent that they made them their own. Precisely this internalization of order was what Schumacher had in mind when he created an entirely new genre of public spaces. He was able to infuse particularism with a new grassroots energy. Regional speciﬁcity assumed a new, psychological dimension. Identiﬁcation with the city was no longer based on the history of the city’s political and mercantile institutions, but on a more diffuse sentiment of local character.⁵⁶ This was invoked through a resourceful combination of traditional Hanseatic and new Heimat elements. Schumacher’s Oberschulbehörde of 1911–12 (Figure 17) typiﬁes this synthesis. The composite structure of the large building is particularly signiﬁcant. Schumacher avoided the pompousness of the traditional historicist façade by subdividing his building into three vertical units, each with its own gable. The resulting impression is reminiscent of north German and Dutch Renaissance town houses, traditionally steep vertical structures attached to one another, an architectural form which was at once an epitome of burgher living and a prototype for the terrace. Yet any explicit historical reference points were of secondary importance to the functioning of this building. Instead, a sense of Heimat was conveyed, above all, by the material. Like other northern European cities, Hamburg buildings were rarely made of stone, which was not locally available and, therefore, expensive. Since the Middle Ages, Hamburg’s cityscape was thus characterized above all by red brick. Red brick, most frequently urban development in Hamburg’s inter-war period was in fact supported by the Deutsche Demokratische Partei (DDP) and the Deutsche Volkspartei (DVP). ⁵⁴ See Hartmut Frank, ‘Schumachers soziale Stadtbaukunst’, in Zur Aktualität der Ideen von Fritz Schumacher: Fritz-Schumacher-Colloquium, 1990, Hamburg, 1992, pp. 56–74, esp. p. 58; and Document-Center Berlin, Akte Fritz Schumacher, Antrag an den Reichsbund Deutscher Schriftsteller e.V., 14/01/1934. ⁵⁵ Joyce, Rule of Freedom; Rose, Powers of Freedom; Otter, ‘Making Liberalism Durable’. ⁵⁶ Fritz Schumacher, ‘John Ruskin: Der Apostel der modernen englischen Kunstbewegung’, Kunst und Handwerk 47 (1897/8), pp. 123–8. Ruskin’s inﬂuence is also highlighted in Fritz Schumacher, Strömungen in deutscher Baukunst seit 1800, Leipzig, 1935, esp. pp. 105–6.

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Figure 17 Oberschulbehörde (Education Authority Headquarters), 1911, by Fritz Schumacher, Hamburg, drawing by the architect, from: Moderne Bauformen: Monatsheft für Architektur und Raumkunst 11 (Stuttgart, 1911), p. 549.

in the form of the darker and more robust clinker, became a leitmotif of Schumacher’s work, and also of the architects whose efforts he supported in overseeing urban development schemes.⁵⁷ Sometimes, the plain clinker walls ⁵⁷ Lutz Tittel, Backstein in Hamburg, Hamburg, 1977.

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were structured by the occasional geometric pattern of ceramic tiling, which Schumacher used ﬁrst for public and, after 1918, also for domestic buildings. Thus embellished, external walls resembled the decorated internal walls of a living room. This gave them a uniquely domestic quality: the urban space itself became, in a sense, an interior space, where people were manipulated into feeling at home. To regard this kind of built environment as a transitional style between allegorical-historicist and technical-functionalist design is to belittle the political signiﬁcance of this project. It was symptomatic that Schumacher was utterly uninterested in industrial architecture. Unlike Muthesius and Behrens, who tried to recast industrial buildings as cultural icons with religious overtones,⁵⁸ Schumacher practically never concerned himself with the design of the modern workplace. His conception of the city appears to have been entirely domestic. That is not to say that he privileged domestic architecture. Public space was vital to the way he saw the city evolve. In his own work, he focused on public buildings that acted as focal points for the quarters of the city: schools, swimming pools, ﬁre stations, branches of municipal administration, parks and, last but not least, the redevelopment for leisure purposes of the banks of the river Alster. Every one of these projects combined historicizing shapes and proportions, which suggested structure, discipline and order, with vernacular motifs, which stimulated a Heimat-like attachment to the urban fabric. Where Schumacher’s predecessors had been content to direct building activity in the city, Schumacher effectively declared himself chief architect of the city. He worked collaboratively only when it came to housing developments, for which his own public landmark buildings had already set the tone. To enable this organic connection with their surroundings, Schumacher’s public buildings contained no references to the speciﬁc functions they housed. The older Town Hall had embodied the ideal of city-state government, thus demarcating a distinctly public sphere, in contradistinction to a private sphere. Schumacher, by contrast, did not conceive of a public domain separate from the city people inhabited. To him, a school or a leisure complex was not a self-contained unit, but the stitching in the fabric of the city, which he considered as a single living space—a Heimat. A sense of social discipline loomed large in these projects. Yet it would be reductionist to regard the aim of an emotive identiﬁcation with the urban fabric as a tactical device to appease the working classes. Schumacher saw the vernacular as a resource for the regeneration of society at large or, to put it differently, as a way of ascribing meaning to modernity. For him and the other bourgeois modernists in the Werkbund, reforming the ‘decadent’ elite culture of their own day was just as much the goal as ﬁnding a pragmatic answer to the political dangers of proletarization. To recapture ‘harmonious culture’, Schumacher declared in ⁵⁸ The semiotics of industrial architecture are discussed in Chapter 6 of this book.

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his writings, one had to appreciate, even adore, the vernacular.⁵⁹ Schumacher saw his work as integral to the broader ideological project of the German life reform movement.⁶⁰ He abhorred mock-aristocratic attitudes, but also had little sympathy for the old-style liberalism of Hamburg’s patrician elites. For Schumacher, the vernacular provided an ideological antidote to both. Its inherent anonymity made it the ideal vehicle for the collective culture of the future, through which the individualism and class divisions of the old order could be overcome. This political vision, whilst clearly a response to modernity, was often at odds with what is commonly regarded as modernism. Two brief examples can illustrate this. In 1905, Schumacher’s former design students from Dresden, Erich Heckel and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, together with Karl Schmitt-Rottluff set up the artistic community Die Brücke, which marked the heyday of German Expressionism. They pioneered, amongst other things, the use of primary or ‘absolute’ colour. Schumacher, by contrast, was interested in colour only in terms of the ‘harmony’ of the natural tones of his local materials. Much the same is true for the issue of perspective. Between 1907 and 1912, Pablo Picasso and Georges Braques invented cubism, which dissolved the single, academically correct perspective into a multitude of angles. In the same time-span, Schumacher built his Institute for Tropical Disease and the Johanneum Gymnasium in Hamburg, and started planning the Stadtpark. All three projects proudly celebrated, indeed, triumphantly reasserted, traditional notions of symmetry and the central perspective. And yet, Schumacher was very aware of international modernism. As a youth, he spent several years in New York, and recounted these as a formative experience in his autobiography.⁶¹ It is reasonable to assume that Olmsted’s Central Park, designed speciﬁcally as a ‘people’s park’, inspired Schumacher’s conception of the Hamburg Stadtpark as a ‘Volkspark’.⁶² Schumacher aimed at a democratization of the cityscape, and he embraced the use of modern technology. Schumacher’s grand development plan for Hamburg demonstrated an extremely systematic approach to the question of urban planning. It created a blueprint for the whole city, based on radial expansion in all directions (except to the south, where the Elbe provided a natural border), which was to be guided by the new

⁵⁹ The notion of ‘harmonious culture’ is a recurrent theme in Schumacher’s extensive publications, for example Fritz Schumacher, Im Kampf um die Kunst: Beiträge zu architektonischen Zeitfragen, Strasbourg, 1899. ⁶⁰ A comprehensive documentation of this movement is Kai Buchholz, Rita Latocha, Hilke Peckmann and Klaus Wolbert, eds., Die Lebensreform: Entwürfe zur Neugestaltung von Leben und Kunst um 1900, 2 vols., Darmstadt, 2001. ⁶¹ Fritz Schumacher, Stufen des Lebens: Erinnerungen eines Baumeisters, 2nd edn., Stuttgart, 1935, esp. chapter on ‘New York, 1875–1883’, pp. 32–65. ⁶² On Central Park, see Albert Fein, ed., Landscape into Cityscape: Frederick Law Olmsted’s Plans for a Greater New York City, Ithaca, 1968; and Roy Rozenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park, Ithaca, NY, 1992. For a full analysis of Schumacher’s Hamburg Stadtpark, see Chapter 4 of this study.

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subway lines, and intersected by green triangles reaching right into the urban centre.⁶³ Amongst the lesser known architects who implemented this grand vision, the brothers Hans and Oskar Gerson (from 1920, a third brother, Ernst, joined their ﬁrm), Fritz Höger and, in the post-war period, Karl Schneider were key players. The Gersons’ designs for domestic and commercial complexes especially set new standards. Although they have been rather neglected by later historians of architecture,⁶⁴ in their own time, these architects enjoyed a considerable international reputation. Höger’s and the Gersons’ Hamburg ofﬁce blocks featured in major architectural exhibitions in New York (1925), London (1928) and Budapest (1930). A visiting US architect commented: ‘That new school of Architecture that you have developed around Hamburg is, I believe, the one big forward-looking movement existing in Europe, and we across the Atlantic unfortunately are far too little informed of the ﬁne things you are accomplishing.’⁶⁵ At the same time, these architects distanced themselves from ‘academic’ architecture, and professed a particular sensitivity for the sense of place. Before setting up their Hamburg practice in 1907, the Gerson brothers brieﬂy visited the Technical University in Munich, but both left without a diploma; later, they referred to the Heimatschutz movement as their primary formative inﬂuence.⁶⁶ In their ﬁrst years in Hamburg, the Gersons mainly worked for rich patrons from the city’s patrician classes.⁶⁷ Through these contacts, they became involved with the political elites of the city-republic. A key patron and friend was senator Carl Petersen, a left-liberal who later succeeded Naumann as leader of the DDP, and served as mayor of Hamburg from 1924.⁶⁸ One of the Gersons’ ⁶³ The plan, entitled ‘Schema der natürlichen Entwicklung des Organismus Hamburg’, is reproduced in Susanne Harth, ‘Stadt und Region: Fritz Schumachers Konzepte zu Wohnungsbau und Stadtgestalt’, in Hartmut Frank, ed., Reformkultur und Moderne, Stuttgart, 1994, pp. 157–81, illustration on p. 178. The image itself bears no date, and there is some dispute about the precise chronology. Harth dates the plan ‘around 1919’ (ibid.). However, Jens Beck and Ralf G. Voss, in their Die Alster: Ein Fluß prägt die Stadt, Hamburg, 1999, p. 96, cite 1921 as the date for the plan. ⁶⁴ Wolfgang Voigt, ed., Hans und Oskar Gerson: Hanseatische Moderne: Bauten in Hamburg und im kalifornischen Exil 1907 bis 1957, Hamburg and Munich, 2000. ⁶⁵ Alfred C. Bossom, letter to the Gerson brothers, 28 April 1926, quoted from Hartmut Frank, ‘Baukunst, Monumentalität und Heimatschutz: Die Architektur der Brüder Gerson und die Hamburger Schule’, in Voigt, Hans und Oskar Gerson, pp. 32–49, quote p. 32. ⁶⁶ Ibid., p. 45. ⁶⁷ Before the First World War, the Gersons designed twenty mansions for private clients from the upper echelons of the Hamburg mercantile bourgeoisie, including the families Darboven, Nottebohm and Emden; for Paul Böger (director of the HAPAG shipyard), William Scholz (director of Deutsche Werft), and for the bankers Gustav Nordquist and Max Warburg, and later Hamburg mayor Carl Peterson. Cf. Wolfgang Voigt, ‘In Hamburg gefeiert, aus Deutschland vertrieben: Die Architekten Hans und Oskar Gerson’, in idem, ed., Hans und Oskar Gerson: Hanseatische Moderne. Bauten in Hamburg und im kalifornischen Exil 1907 bis 1957, Hamburg and Munich, 2000, pp. 6–19. ⁶⁸ Peterson succeeded Naumann as chairman of the parliamentary faction of the DDP until 1924, when he became mayor of Hamburg. In the city, he was one of the leading advocates of an alliance between his liberal party and the Social Democrats. Voigt, Hans und Oskar Gerson, p. 12.

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ﬁrst commissions was the 1908 villa for the Hamburg banker Salomon Bondy in Hamburg-Othmarschen (Figure 18). The inﬂuence of English Arts and Crafts architecture is very apparent here. The L-shape had become something of an Arts and Crafts emblem since Philip Webb’s Red House for William Morris, and was further popularized by Voysey’s The Homestead.⁶⁹ Other Arts and Crafts leitmotifs adopted by the Gersons for this commission included the variable height of the roof; the asymmetrical arrangement of key component parts, such as a multitude of regular and dormer windows; oriels; the joining together of windows into rows; and the combination of red brick and white painted wooden door and window frames. The Gersons even copied the idea of a small decorative well in the same place—the fourth corner of the imaginary ‘L’—where Webb had placed his, and connected house and garden with a covered walkway and pergola (now destroyed). The overall effect closely resembled that which Schumacher achieved through his decorative ceramic tiles: the boundaries between inside and outside were blurred, the exterior space became part of the home.⁷⁰ Indeed, at House Bondy, the garden was speciﬁcally designed for leisure pursuits, including tennis and gymnastics, as well as being equipped with a surprisingly sophisticated bicycle shed.⁷¹ Sports were an integral feature of the reform ideology to which the architects of vernacular modernism subscribed. The bicycle in particular came to be seen as an icon of an aesthetic which harmoniously combined the technical and the natural: the form was derived from the technical function, yet the movement it allowed was deemed more natural than transportation by carriage or train.⁷² The Gersons’ contribution to the evolution of Hamburg’s bourgeois modernism peaked in the 1920s, when they turned their attention to the construction of large apartment buildings. In their determination to continue using the vernacular brick, they invented ingenious ways of getting around the coal shortage, which curtailed domestic brick production.⁷³ Voigt describes these buildings as ⁶⁹ Voysey’s The Homestead was built in 1905–6 in Frinton-on-Sea, Essex. See Wendy Hitchmough, C.F.A. Voysey: The Homestead, London, 1994. A useful survey of Voysey’s architectural oeuvre is Stuart Durant, C. F. A. Voysey, London, 1992. ⁷⁰ This was no isolated incidence. In 1913–14, Hans and Oskar Gerson’s House Zadik was built in the Jungmannstraße 1, Hamburg-Othmarschen. The semi-circular structure layout of the house was matched by a semi-circular pergola, so that the garden space was an enclosed oval. ⁷¹ Voigt, Hans und Oskar Gerson, p. 64. ⁷² Muthesius described the bicycle as the prototype of a form which was both functional (‘zweckmässig’) and pleasing (‘es gefällt’). Hermann Muthesius, ‘Kunst und Maschine’, Dekorative Kunst 5 (1902), pp. 141–7, quotes from pp. 143–4. On the cult of cycling in Wilhelmine Germany, see Anne-Katrin Ebert, ‘Zwischen ‘‘Radreiten’’ und ‘‘Kraftmaschine’’: Der bürgerliche Radsport am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts’, Werkstattgeschichte 44 (2006), pp. 27–46; idem, ‘Cycling towards the Nation: The Use of the Bicycle in Germany and the Netherlands, 1880–1940’, European History Review 11/3 (2004), pp. 347–64; and Rüdiger Rabenstein, Radsport und Gesellschaft: Ihre sozialgeschichtlichen Zusammenhänge in der Zeit von 1867 bis 1914, Hildesheim, 1996. ⁷³ The Gersons encouraged prospective owners of individual apartments in their blocks to contribute to a collective fund, from which coal was purchased abroad that was then used to manufacture the brick required for the building in question. The sum in question was then

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Figure 18 Haus Salomon Bondy, 1908, by Hans and Oskar Gerson, HamburgOthmarschen. Photo: MU.

‘prototypes for the modern metropolis. [In 1928] Werner Hegemann praised them as path-breaking [. . .] The most incisive comment came from Hans Bahn in 1925, who recognized that [they] represented the decisive step towards masshousing. The Gersonian mega-house no longer disguised its thoroughly collective character.’⁷⁴ The contemporary critics were certainly right in identifying these buildings as truly innovative. Yet classifying them as ultra-modern, as Voigt suggested, is, in a sense, misleading. Theirs was a hybrid language of forms, which derived its signiﬁcance from the interplay of the traditional and the futuristic, from the universal and the place-speciﬁc. The relative scarcity of decorative detail, the daring display of mass and volume may have persuaded contemporaries that they were looking at a radical alternative to the over-ornate façades of historicist architecture. Reinforcing this visual impression was the fact that in terms of their deducted from the apartment’s price once completed. Up to twenty-ﬁve prospective owners united in the Mietergesellschaft m.b.Hs which the Gersons set up. Hermann Hipp, Wohnstadt Hamburg: Mietshäuser zwischen Inﬂation und Weltwirtschaftskrise, Hamburg, 1982, and Gert Kähler, Wohung und Stadt: Hamburg, Frankfurt, Wien, Modelle sozialen Wohnens in den Zwanziger Jahren, Braunschweig, 1985. ⁷⁴ Voigt, In Hamburg, p. 75.

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actual usage, the Gersons’ apartments were relatively collectivist. They may still have been targeted at middle-class clients—the majority were owner-occupied apartments—yet they differed only in size from the new low-cost, co-operative housing projects that Schumacher and others designed in the inter-war period, in Langenhorn in 1919–21, in Dulsberg in 1919–23, and the so-called Jarrestadt in Winterhude in 1927–30. What they all had in common was that the aesthetic coherence of each project, and the rhythmic order of the housing blocks, created the impression of a ‘city within the city’. These new microcosmic cities allowed for much higher-density, more economical living than was possible with detached or even terraced houses. Several of the projects on which Schumacher collaborated became famous for their space-saving devices, for example moving the main stairwell from the interior to the exterior of the building. One development, in Dulsberg, even contained a ‘single-kitchen-house’ for communal use, to save space in individual apartments.⁷⁵ In this way, these new developments opened up new ways of integrating working-class housing into the texture of the city. It may be tempting to see these experiments as the Western, Social Democratic equivalent of contemporaneous Socialist experiments such as Ginzburg’s famous Narkomﬁn House in the Soviet Union.⁷⁶ However, although Hamburg’s bourgeois modernists tried to address some of the social problems associated with overcrowding, their vernacular collectivism was quite different from the Soviet variety. The apartment blocks built during Schumacher’s regime as building director conspicuously avoided abstraction, in aesthetic as well as ideological terms. They were collectivist yet, at the same time, place-speciﬁc and heimatlich. Aside from the iconography of the vernacular material, the notion of variation was key. Of course, the allegorical language of historicism, too, placed much emphasis on differentiation. When Hamburg architects such as Martin Haller invoked the decorative arsenal of palatial architecture in their turn-of-the-century villas for the Hamburg haute bourgeoisie, these status symbols helped construct a sense of social apartheid.⁷⁷ Those enlisted by Schumacher in his reforming regime were sceptical of such class-based differentiation. Yet they also believed in variation as key to social integration, albeit of a different kind. Identiﬁcation was key: the ⁷⁵ Schubert, ‘Fritz Schumacher’, p. 86. ⁷⁶ Vladimir Paperny, ‘Men, Women and the Living Space’, in William Brumﬁeld and Blair Ruble, eds., Russian Housing in the Modern Age: Design and Social History, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 149–70. See also Victor Buchli, An Archaeology of Socialism, Oxford, 1999, esp. chs. 2–4, and Selim Khan-Magomedov, Pioneers of Soviet Architecture: The Search for New Solutions in the 1920s and 1930s, London, 1983, pt. II, chs. 2–4. On architecture and communal living in the Soviet era more generally, see Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, New York and Oxford, 1989, esp. ch. 10; Milka Bliznakov, ‘Soviet Housing during the Experimental Years, 1918 to 1933’, in Brumﬁeld and Ruble, Russian Housing, pp. 85–148; Khan-Magomedov, Pioneers of Soviet Architecture; and Anatole Kopp, Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and City Planning, 1917–1935, London, 1970, chs. 6 and 7. ⁷⁷ Wilhelm Hornsbostel and David Klemm, eds., Martin Haller, Leben und Werk 1835–1925, Hamburg, 1997.

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individual was to ‘recognize’ the city as a Heimat. Variation deﬁned the peculiar character of the city as home; anonymity rendered identiﬁcation impossible. The Gerson blocks were ﬁne-tuned to this agenda. Local context was decisive. The housing blocks were carefully integrated into the surrounding urban fabric. Predominantly located in the neighbourhoods of Eppendorf and Rothenbaum, which were already densely built-up, the new blocks were meticulously ﬁtted into existing gaps, arranged so as not to disrupt the existing street front. Existing gardens, most of which dated back to the eighteenth century, were integrated into the new designs, and building heights were adapted to existing old trees. Additional markers of local character were skilfully created. Red-brick buildings were adorned with a wide variety of surface patterns, making each distinctive. Concave curves and hipped roofs added an element of plasticity and depth. Entrance areas were of particular signiﬁcance in creating emotional reference points for the occupants. Hence, it was here that the Gersons used particularly conspicuous decor, for example in the Haynstraße 3–4, where the door was framed by bright blue ceramic tiles (Figure 19). No two doors were alike, and each home was thus easily distinguished from its neighbours.⁷⁸ Decorative ceramic tiling also featured in Schumacher’s work, as well as Fritz Höger’s, who designed several of Hamburg’s major commercial buildings including the Chilehaus,⁷⁹ and, in collaboration with the Gersons, the Sprinkenhof. These buildings illustrate the limitations of an approach to the built environment through the history of style. For as a style, this treatment of surfaces as graphic canvases seemed at odds with Schumacher’s constant emphasis on the ‘tectonic’, and the polemical condemnation of Jugendstil by Schumacher, Muthesius and many other Werkbund members. Using bands of clinker brick and coloured tiles to create decorative patterns that covered entire façades was, after all, a technique very prominently associated with Jugendstil artists. The paradox can only be resolved if we consider these visual means as part of a technology working towards the production of new forms of subjectivity. Interior-style decor applied to the outside of apartment blocks enabled the bourgeois modernists working under Schumacher’s direction to combine a relatively traditional architecture, ﬁrmly rooted in Hanseatic traditions, with emotive ‘domestic’ signposts, which rendered abstract space inhabitable, and which thus spoke to the psychological needs of the modern city-dweller. This dichotomy was reinforced by the arrangements of streets. The socalled Kontorhausviertel, one of Europe’s earliest pure ofﬁce districts, where the Chilehaus, the Sprinkenhof, the Ballinhaus, the Mohlenhof, and the Montanhof were located, not only employed domestic patterns on exterior walls. The ⁷⁸ Hipp, Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg, p. 184. ⁷⁹ On the expressionist vernacular of the Chilehaus, see Manfred F. Fischer, Das Chilehaus in Hamburg: Architektur und Vision, Berlin, 1999; and the analysis and images in the Epilogue of this study.

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Figure 19 Doorway of apartment block, Haynstraße 3–4, 1923, by Hans and Oskar Gerson, Hamburg. Photo: MU.

inﬂuence of Camillo Sitte and his 1889 Der Städtebau nach seinen künstlerischen Grundsätzen, translated as ‘City Planning According to Artistic Principles’, was paramount here.⁸⁰ As Schorske argued, Sitte ‘fed a new aesthetic of city building in which social aims were inﬂuenced by psychological considerations’.⁸¹ Schumacher and his team of architects took up Sitte’s recommendation that streets should form a network of irregular, curving, and frequently intersecting paths and squares. Radically, they applied it not only to domestic settlements, like the apartment complexes discussed above, but also to the working areas of the city. The Kontorhausviertel, thoroughly modern in function, was given a street layout that recalled memories of the buzzing medieval harbour area, which had been located nearby, and which was ‘humanized’ through intimate courtyards, small squares, rising and falling street levels, and small pedestrian passageways, ⁸⁰ Scholars have variously portrayed Sitte as a traditionalist—as in Carl E. Schorske, Fin-De-Siècle Vienna Politics and Culture, New York, 1981, pp. 24–115—or as a modernist, as in George R. Collins and Christine Crasemann Collins, Camillo Sitte: The Birth of Modern City Planning, New York, 1986. See also Ladd, Urban Planning; Stefan Fisch, Stadtplanung im 19. Jahrhundert: Das Beispiel München bis zur Ara Theodor Fischer, Munich, 1988; Michael Mönninger, Vom Ornament zum Nationalkunstwerk: Zur Kunst- und Architekturtheorie Camillo Sittes, Wiesbaden, 1998; Karin Wilhelm and Detlef Jessen-Klingenberg, eds., Formationen der Stadt: Camillo Sitte weitergelesen, Basel and Gütersloh, 2006. ⁸¹ Schorske, Vienna, p. 62.

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such as the Firschertwiete, which actually traversed Höger’s Chilehaus (Figure 50, see Chapter 7). The buildings themselves were equipped with telephones and electrical elevators, and constructed in concrete, to which clinker was externally applied. This synthesis of modern technology and emotive signposting appealing to local memories was a leitmotif in the bourgeois modernists’ approach to the city. So was urban regionalism in this period really qualitatively different from the universalizing rural iconography of Heimat? While Schumacher and the architects he promoted drew on speciﬁcally Hanseatic traditions, which would have been out of place in southern German cities, the purposes for which the new vernacular was employed appear to have been universal. It is, therefore, worth investigating whether and how the reform ideas of Werkbund members in other German cities differed in anything but a formal sense from the work of the Hamburg reformers. Berlin’s political locus in the new nation-state differed dramatically from that of Hamburg. Berlin had never been an independent city-state. It was the new national capital. And it also bore all the hallmarks of a long history as a Residenzstadt, the seat of the Prussian court and the Prussian army. There were few unique burgher traditions that could be called upon to fashion a modern bourgeois culture from local roots. Nevertheless, Berlin became pivotal to the evolution of bourgeois modernism and its politics of place. Muthesius deﬁned it as a kind of front-line city in the ideological defence against everything that was anti-bourgeois in German society. An almost anxious addiction has spread, which aims to gloss over natural conditions, to over-reﬁne until something is considered ‘distinguished’, to force oneself into a fakearistocracy.⁸² We seem to be ashamed of the very thing that should make us proud, our Bürgertum. We want to be aristocrats at the very moment when the Bürgertum has become the basis of our economic, social and political condition, when it has reached such a height that it is able to determine the culture of our time.⁸³

In this power struggle, the alliance between Werkbund and left-liberal political activists was decisive. Friedrich Naumann was a key ﬁgure in the evolution of progressive liberalism in Germany.⁸⁴ He ofﬁcially joined the Werkbund in 1908, but was already involved in the debates which led to its foundation. In ⁸² The German term is ‘Talmi-Aristokratie’. Talmi (also the root of Yiddish: tinnef ) refers to what shines like gold but is not gold, and by extension, to everything that seems precious, but is really worthless. ⁸³ Hermann Muthesius, ‘Kultur und Kunst’, in idem, ed., Kultur und Kunst: Gesammelte Aufsätze über künstlerische Fragen der Gegenwart, 2nd rev. edn., Jena and Leipzig, 1909, quoted from online edition www.theo.tu-cottbus.de/D A T A/Architektur/20.Jhdt/MuthesiusHermann/Muthesius Kultur%20und%20Kunst.htm, accessed 6 December 2007. ⁸⁴ Traugott Jähnichen, ‘Neudeutsche Kultur- und Wirtschaftspolitik: Friedrich Naumann und der Versuch einer Neukonzeptionalisierung des Liberalismus im Wilhelminischen Deutschland’, in Rüdiger vom Bruch, ed., Friedrich Naumann in seiner Zeit, Berlin and New York, 2000, pp. 151–66.

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1909, he published an essay entitled ‘The Industrial State’.⁸⁵ Here, Naumann suggested that at a time when the German economy had become fully industrial, politically and culturally, Germany was still ruled by largely aristocratic agrarian elites, and shaped by their reactionary value system. The task for the future, according to Naumann, was to create an ‘industrial state’, that is, a political order which would truly reﬂect the interests and values of those who deﬁned Germany economically and socially. Naumann felt that large sections of the German bourgeoisie had sold out to the aristocracy, mimicking their lifestyles and supporting their politics. Attitudes towards protectionism were seen as symptomatic of this. To Naumann, the captains of heavy industry, centred in the Ruhr area, typiﬁed the problem. In his view, there was nothing bourgeois about Krupp and Thyssen. The coal and steel industries employed unskilled labour—often Polish immigrants—much in the same way as the Prussian Junkers had employed serfs on their estates. Where the Junkers supported protectionism to shelter their inefﬁcient estates from trans-Atlantic competition, the coal and steel barons of the Ruhr supported protectionism to fend off British and, increasingly, Far-Eastern products. In Naumann’s view, the only class to represent a truly bourgeois spirit were the commercial middle classes, liberal-minded supporters of free trade whose manufacturing enterprises produced ‘quality work’, and employed skilled workers. ‘We shall either be a people whose style and taste has broken through around the world, or we will be scrapping it out with the Orientals to see who can produce the cheapest mass products, squeezed out of ﬂesh, blood and iron.’⁸⁶ Many of these companies which held the key to the competitive and socially harmonious future Naumann envisaged were organized in the Werkbund. Berlin was the location in which the conﬂict between these two economic and political agendas reached fever-pitch. As the Prussian capital, it was the bedrock of agrarian protectionism. Yet it was quickly outgrowing agrarian Prussia. In 1871, the population of Berlin was 826,000; by 1890, it had increased to 1.6 million; by 1913, to 2.7 million. If the new suburbs, such as Charlottenburg, Lichtenberg, Neukölln, Niederbarnim, Rixdorf, Schöneberg, Teltow and Wilmersdorf, are included in the calculation, by 1913, the population of Berlin reached 4.2 million. Much of this increase was due to the growth of industry. In 1901, the Gewerbeaufsichtsbehörde, the supervisory board of manufacturers, recorded 10,740 factories; by 1913, the ﬁgure was 21,061. Most of these specialized in textiles, ironworks, machine-building, metal-processing ⁸⁵ Friedrich Naumann, ‘Der Industriestaat’, 1912, in idem, Werke, ed. Theodor Schieder, iii: Schriften zur Wirtschafts- und Gesellschaftspolitik, ed. Wolfgang Mommsen, Opladen, 1964, pp. 42–70. ⁸⁶ Friedrich Naumann, Die Kunst im Zeitalter der Maschine, 2nd edn., Berlin, 1908, pp. 5–26, quoted from Kurt Junghanns, Der Deutsche Werkbund: Sein erstes Jahrzehnt, Berlin, 1982, documentary appendix, pp. 155–7, quote p. 156.

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and electrical industries, car construction and brewing.⁸⁷ Vast new suburbs were created, facilitated by the construction of a local train network. These not only housed workers from the new industries; some, like Dahlem, Zehlendorff, Wannsee and Nikolassee, were prestigious locations where the new industrial and banking elites settled. They were the primary clientele of architects and planners associated with the Werkbund. Hermann Muthesius in particular saw it as his mission to create a visual vocabulary that would serve the cultural and political self-assertion of these new industrial elites vis-à-vis the Prussian Junkers, who had dominated traditional Prussian life. While in 1904, he still bemoaned the ‘mania to force oneself into a pseudo-aristocracy’, by 1911, he was detecting the ﬁrst symptoms of a sea-change: Many people, especially the rich and the aristocracy, reject our movement, because they dislike its purifying character and because the bürgerlich confession [Bekenntnis] of our new understanding of art appears frightening to them.⁸⁸

The use of the term ‘confession’ is indicative: what was at stake was a quasireligious quest for spiritual renewal. Remnants of aristocratic culture were to be eradicated, the very core of modern subjectivities was to be puriﬁed and cleansed from tradition. In terms of the built environment, the ﬁrst target was, naturally, historicism, because of the centrality of social and political status in its visual vocabulary. The deconstruction of outmoded hierarchies was central to this project. Houses designed by leading bourgeois modernists were separated into functional spheres, which, whilst distinct, were accorded equal importance. The same rules about space, air circulation and light applied to the sitting room, the kitchen, and the servants’ rooms. Radically, the servants’ quarters were to be located on the same ﬂoor as and have the same height as the rooms of the house’s owners.⁸⁹ Anti-historicist, the bourgeois home of modernity did not, however, renounce tradition. In his path-breaking two-volume study, Das Englische Haus, Muthesius not only invoked Ruskin, Morris and the English Arts and Crafts as an ‘acceptable’ carrier of memories.⁹⁰ He was also the ﬁrst author to attempt a detailed scientiﬁc analysis of the characteristic patterns and proportions of houses from the Elizabethan period onwards, which also included the neo-vernacular dwellings designed by architects such as Philip Webb, Norman Shaw, Lutyens and Baillie ⁸⁷ Figures from Hubert Kiesewetter, Industrielle Revolution in Deutschland 1815–1914, Frankfurt a.M., 1989, pp. 79 and 135. ⁸⁸ Hermann Muthesius, ‘Wo stehen wir? Vortrag, gehalten auf der Jahresversammlung des Deutschen Werkbundes in Dresden 1911’, Jahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbundes 1912, ed. Bernd Nicolai and Frederic J. Schwartz, Berlin, 1999, pp. 11–36, cited from p. 17. ⁸⁹ For a fuller discussion of interior space in the work of Muthesius and others, see Chapter 6 of this study. ⁹⁰ On the reception of English Arts and Crafts in Germany, see Stefan Muthesius, Das englische Vorbild: eine Studie zu der deutschen Reformbewegungen in Architektur, Wohnbau und Kunstgewerbe im späteren 19. Jahrhundert, Munich, 1974.

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Scott. For Muthesius, these English houses were ideal types. The vernacular required a special sensitivity to place, nationally and locally. Copying English houses directly was not an option. ‘Muthesius took the clamour of offended patriots seriously enough, and repeatedly denied that he simply wished to import the English house, as it had developed and existed, to Germany,’ the Neudeutsche Bauzeitung commented.⁹¹ As Muthesius himself put it: ‘I did not want to recommend imitating the English house or its details, but to explain to the German reader the ideology [Gesinnung] which lies at its heart.’⁹² In doing so, he changed a crucial element not only of these English houses’ appearance, but also of the way they worked upon the mind. A certain deliberate naivety had been constitutive for the Arts and Crafts movement. Traditional craftsmanship was to take the place of the stylistic fancies of a single designer; architecture was to be an organic outcome of indigenous practices, not a product of theoretical reﬂection.⁹³ In trying to capture the vernacular’s visual characteristics in analytical categories, Muthesius transformed the vernacular into an intellectual system. From this point onwards, memories featured in quotation marks. Contemporaries reacted sensitively to this shift. Muthesius’s work was hailed in the English press for his sensitivity to their culture. Yet his thorough and methodical approach also provoked bewilderment. Under the heading ‘A German View of Modern English Architecture’, The Architect and Contract Reporter reviewed Muthesius’s work in the following terms: The text reveals in almost every line the pains which the author must have taken to arrive at the truth, and we have only to compare it with essays in which French architects have endeavoured to describe our modern architecture in order to perceive the difference not only between individuals but between two races. The German, being more of a philosopher, endeavours to get at the root of things and to explain why they assume one form rather than many others.⁹⁴

An analogous pattern can be observed in Muthesius’s three-dimensional work in Berlin. The English houses he had analysed were emphatically ‘private’, hidden from public view by large trees, with their grounds protected by that archetypal English signpost ‘No trespassing’. Muthesius himself described the experience of ‘not seeing the English house’ during his travels in Britain. Many of these houses ⁹¹ Anonymous article entitled ‘Hermann Muthesius’, Neudeutsche Bauzeitung: Organ des Bundes der Architekten, issue 6/30 (1910), unpag. ⁹² Muthesius, Das Englische Haus, vol. i, p. iv. ⁹³ Peter Stansky, Redesigning the World: William Morris, the 1880s, and the Arts and Crafts, Princeton, 1985; Elizabeth Cumming, The Arts and Crafts Movement, London, 1991; Mavis Matey, ‘Ruskin, Morris and the Early Campaigns’, in idem, David Lambert and Kim Wilkie, Indignation: The Campaign for Conservation, London, 2000, pp. 13–28; Robert Hewison, ed., New Approaches to Ruskin, London, 1982, which contains a valuable survey of the state of Ruskin criticism and scholarship; Aymer Vallance, The Life and Work of William Morris, London, 1986. ⁹⁴ The Architect and Contract Reporter LXV/1673, 11 January 1901, pp. 27–8, and 18 January 1901, pp. 42–3, is a two-part review of Hermann Muthesius, Die englische Baukunst der Gegenwart: Beispiele neuer Englischer Profanbauten, Leipzig and Berlin, 1900. Quote from Part One, p. 27.

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were located in the countryside of the home counties, relatively few in London itself. Muthesius himself had devoted several publications to English country houses.⁹⁵ Transposed to Berlin, vernacular architecture moved into the city, and thereby became an altogether more public affair. An idiom that had signalled a retreat from society was transformed into a political resource, mobilized for the regeneration of the ‘alienated’ public culture of the capital city.⁹⁶ Although they rejected the ostentation of historicist architecture, these houses could, and should, be ‘read’. This entailed a reinterpretation of the relationship between the city and the countryside, which is most apparent in those new suburban housing developments, especially in Dahlem and Zehlendorff, which straddled the geographical divide between city and country. A typical example is an ensemble of houses by Muthesius on the grassy valley of the Rehwiese in Nikolassee. Surrounded by small-scale, formal and ‘urban’ gardens, on the back, these houses possessed vistas over the adjacent valley and stream, which could be enjoyed from the main reception and living areas. One of these was Muthesius’s own home, conceived partly as an advertisement of his work for prospective clients. His own published description of the house opens with a view from the Rehwiese, showing the house as the crown on the hill above the valley, as if growing organically out of the landscape (Figure 20).⁹⁷ This impression is reinforced by the slope of the roof, which matches the angle of the hillside, and, almost touching the ground, symbolically continues it. Moreover, the resulting silhouette is an almost exact match for the imposing ﬁr trees next to the house.⁹⁸ While the back of the house thus engaged with nature, the front faced a large street that led directly towards the centre of Berlin. It was, moreover, very open towards that street, easily visible to the passer-by. Hedges were kept very low—no more than a foot or two—and Muthesius’s characteristic white fences, which he used as Mackintosh-style geometrical ornaments, offered little more than a symbolic suggestion of private space. These houses ‘spoke’, they projected private values onto the public sphere. For all his dislike of ostentation, they were proud ﬂagships of the new ‘confession’. ⁹⁵ The country house was not only the main focus of Muthesius’s attention in the ﬁrst two volumes of Das Englische Haus, but also the topic of special publications such as his Landhaus und Garten: Beispiele neuzeitlicher Landhäuser nebst Grundrissen, Innenraeumen und Gärten, Munich, 1907, and its later sequel Landhaus und Garten: Beispiele kleinerer Landhäuser nebst Grundrisse etc.: Neue Folge, Munich, 1919. Compare also Laurent Stalder: ‘Wie man ein Haus baut: Hermann Muthesius: Das Landhaus als kulturgeschichtlicher Entwurf ’, Ph.D. dissertation, ETH Zurich, 2002. ⁹⁶ The withdrawal from the public which English Arts and Crafts houses embody is only surpassed by the paranoia that produced American gated communities, in which many US Arts and Crafts houses are today located. The work of Bruce Price at Tuxedo Park, for example, is totally sealed from public view, and cannot even be viewed by appointment. ⁹⁷ Uwe Schneider, ‘Hermann Muthesius and the Introduction of the English Arts and Crafts Garden to Germany’, Garden History 28/1 (2000), pp. 57–72. ⁹⁸ Hermann Muthesius, ‘Mein Haus in Nikolassee’, Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration 12/1 (October 1908), reprinted in the bound volume of the same journal no. xxiii (1909), pp. 1–21.

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Figure 20 Haus Muthesius, by Hermann Muthesius, view from the Rehwiese, from: Hermann Muthesius, Landhäuser, Munich, 1912, ﬁg. 251, p. 167.

The sense of Heimat was subjected to the same transformation. Motifs such as timber framing, the high pitched roof, and unadorned brick were reminiscent of rustic architecture. Other features, such as the extensive use of bay windows, were borrowed from English vernacular buildings: their signiﬁcance was a recurrent topic in Das Englische Haus.⁹⁹ Yet such motifs were employed in a manner akin to the Gersons’ use of ornament. By invoking rural living, bourgeois culture could be grounded in vernacular traditions. These in turn served to conjure up sentiments of homeliness, but were sharply distinguished from neo-Romantic conceptions of Heimat that were predicated on a rejection of modern city life. Although in 1904, Muthesius was amongst the signatories of the Bund Heimatschutz’s founding document, which established a national umbrella organization that united countless local Heimatschutz clubs, Muthesius quickly grew critical of what he saw as the movement’s anti-modern character: Associations for the preservation of folk costumes will not be able to prevent this development [the emergence of a global market], as indeed Heimatschutz movements in different countries will not be able to prevent the internationalisation of forms and shape.¹⁰⁰ ⁹⁹ Muthesius, Das Englische Haus, 2nd edn., vol. ii, pp. 190–9. ¹⁰⁰ Muthesius, ‘Die Werkbundarbeit der Zukunft: Vortrag gehalten auf der Kölner Werkbundtagung 1914’, reprinted in Deutscher Werkbund., ed., Zwischen Kunst und Industrie: Der Deutsche Werkbund, new edn., Stuttgart, 1987, pp. 85–96, quote from p. 94.

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This difference is the key to understanding the complex relationship between Werkbund activists such as Muthesius and purist Heimat architects such as Paul Schultze-Naumburg, who later wielded inﬂuence and high ofﬁce in the Third Reich.¹⁰¹ Between 1901 and 1917, Schultze-Naumburg published the nine volumes of his Culturarbeiten,¹⁰² which were widely regarded as founding documents of the Heimatschutz movement in Germany. Muthesius reviewed the early volumes in a broadly favourable fashion.¹⁰³ Yet the correspondence between Muthesius and Schultze-Naumburg reveals that more tensions existed even then than are apparent from the published papers.¹⁰⁴ Schultze-Naumburg insisted that German national traditions were the only appropriate inspiration for German ‘reform architecture’. His scepticism about the preoccupation with English models, often peppered with a rather ominous irony, is evident in many of his letters to Muthesius: It is peculiar how the new English architecture looks next to my Thuringian farmstead and country dwellings. But of course I am biased, for only the latter are dear to my heart.¹⁰⁵ You know me that I believe that we should really connect with our own, indigenous traditions. [. . .] If I singled out your house as an example [for the failure to do this], then it was only so I would not seem biased. [. . .] for me, your house, although it is a copy, is still a great house. God permit that all people who have no ideas at least copy decent models!¹⁰⁶ Can I make a confession? Generally, I had really expected more of English architecture. You will understand that this is not a criticism of you: you can hardly change English architecture! [In Das Englische Haus] I found a few things that delighted me, but the bulk is barely superior to our own architecture. I am afraid I even feel that some of the new buildings in Munich are superior to English ones.¹⁰⁷

Muthesius in turn criticized Schultze-Naumburg’s nationalist nostalgia, in a similarly sardonic fashion, accusing him of seeking ‘salvation in the formal language of our grandfathers’.¹⁰⁸ The difference was that between a project of ¹⁰¹ Compare Bormann, Paul Schultze-Naumburg. ¹⁰² Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Culturarbeiten, ed. the Kunstwart, Munich, 1901 and 1917. ¹⁰³ Hermann Muthesius in the Zentralblatt der Bauverwaltung 103 (27 December 1902), and in Der Tag 23 (15 January 1904), both unpag., Werkbund Archive, Nachlass Muthesius, Folder 10: Artikel von Muthesius 1899–1906. ¹⁰⁴ See Werkbund Archiv, letter from Schultze-Naumburg to Muthesius, Saaleck bei Kösen ( Thuringia), 2 August 1902; and idem, Berlin, Potsdamer Strasse, 23 January 1903. Muthesius in turn routinely complained that his colleague did too little to promote his publications in the Kunstwart. ¹⁰⁵ Schulze-Naumburg to Muthesius, Berlin, 3 July 1902, Werkbund Archiv Berlin, Korrespondenz Muthesius, typescript. ¹⁰⁶ Schulze-Naumburg to Muthesius, Berlin, 23 January 1903, Werkbund Archiv Berlin, Korrespondenz Muthesius, typescript. ¹⁰⁷ Schulze-Naumburg to Muthesius, Saaleck bei Kösen ( Thuringia), 2 August 1902, Werkbund Archiv Berlin, Korrespondenz Muthesius, typescript. In this letter, Schulze-Naumburg responds to having received a copy of Das Englische Haus. ¹⁰⁸ Hermann Muthesius, ‘Künstlerische Culturarbeiten’, Der Tag 23 (15 January 1904), unpag.

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cultural preservation and restoration, as embodied by Schultze-Naumburg, and a project of self-conscious modernism, which invoked sentiments of Heimat as part of the strategy to create spatially ‘grounded’ citizens. The use of timber provides an instructive example of this. Timber framing was the ultimate icon of German Heimat architecture. It featured in practically all posters of the Bund Heimatschutz that depicted dwellings in the landscape. Muthesius’s Haus Freudenberg featured the same motif. In reality, however, the house was a regular brick construction with no structural timber. Timber was displayed in the gable, almost like a company logo, conjuring up an image of vernacular domesticity. This logo was the product of multiple transpositions. As we have seen, Haus Freudenberg was modelled on Edward Prior’s The Barn of 1896.¹⁰⁹ Made of untreated natural stone, it seemed more archaic, yet this stone, too, hid a modern, concrete structure.¹¹⁰ Muthesius’s prototype, in other words, was already a modernized vernacular; Muthesius then took this modernization process one step further. Such a transposed, almost ironic use of Heimat emblems offered a new freedom in the arrangement of space that could be adapted to bourgeois lifestyles. The positioning and size of windows is a case in point. The notion that windows were irregularly scattered all over a façade of a vernacular building, constructed with no overall plan by local craftsmen, ﬂew in the face of classical teaching. It could be seen as an act of deliberate, heimatish dilettantism, challenging the conventions of historicism. Muthesius used windows in this way, but his patterns were anything but random. Each window reﬂected interior functions. The sitting room had larger windows than the adjacent kitchen, which again differed, in size and direction, from those ideally suited for a bedroom. Vistas, air circulation and sunlight, even the time of day when sunlight would or would not be required in a particular room, were the deﬁning criteria. In this way, Berlin, the capital of the Junker-dominated Prussian state, was reinvented as a bourgeois city. The prominence of mediated Heimat motifs was part of this process. Bourgeois came to stand for the amalgamation of a distinct set of values and political practices: the notion of a ‘civic’ sphere; the belief in free trade as fostering harmonious social relations; and, last but not least, the idea that burghers derived their identity from speciﬁc urban locales.¹¹¹ In an ¹⁰⁹ Peter Davey, Arts and Crafts Architecture, London, 1995, pp. 71–4. ¹¹⁰ When the thatched roof caught ﬁre in 1905, the house itself did not burn down; the thatch was subsequently replaced by slate. William Richard Lethaby found an even more practical solution to the problems of vernacular materials like wood and thatch. At his All Saints Church in Brockhampton, Hertfordshire, constructed in 1901/2, the thatch on the roof was directly glued to concrete. ¹¹¹ See Jonathan Sperber, ‘Bürger, Bürgertum, Bürgerlichkeit, Bürgerliche Gesellschaft: Studies of the German (Upper) Middle Class and Its Sociocultural World’, Journal of Modern History 69/2 (1997), pp. 271–97; and Jenkins, Provincial Modernity, esp. pp. 1–11, as well as Chapter 6 of this study. The idea of a ‘harmonious culture’ reconciling class conﬂicts was central to the writings of all

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age of mass politics, place-based identities offered a buffer against the dangers of political abstraction, such as the centralized state and the socialist notion of class.¹¹² Where strong regional burgher traditions existed, as in Hamburg, it was a case of recasting them for the requirements of the modern, rapidly expanding city. Where they did not, as in Berlin, a range of vernacular and Heimat tropes were drawn upon to achieve a similar psychological effect. There were, of course, countless other variations of regional cities. The work of the Werkbund member Richard Riemerschmid, for example, could be classiﬁed as a southern German vernacular counterpart to Schumacher’s Hanseatic vernacular.¹¹³ And famously, in the debate about kitchen design, the Frankfurt kitchen came to be regarded as synonymous with a more generic idea of functionalism, while Munich became the by-word for a social notion of functionality that was demonstratively embedded in regional outlooks and lifestyles.¹¹⁴ But if the sense of place in bourgeois modernism arose not so much out of the need to maintain older civic particularisms, but, more importantly, from the conviction that modern bourgeois politics required a regional or vernacular base, then it is particularly interesting to examine examples of cities which not only lacked distinctive burgher traditions, but which were entirely new creations in themselves. bourgeois modernists. Friedrich Naumann’s essays from this time presented a powerful argument in favour of the view that free trade was the key to achieving this ambition. Free trade, he suggested, promoted manufacturing industries, especially those aiming to produce ‘quality work’, because these were less vulnerable to the competition of cheap labour abroad. In high-end manufacturing, the work method was based on traditional handicrafts, thus preventing alienation and class conﬂict. Conversely, according to Naumann, protectionism was required by those industries who saw the recipe of success as exploiting cheap and alienated labour. On Muthesius’s notion of harmonious culture, see Roth, Muthesius, pp. 105–55. ¹¹² The introduction of universal male suffrage for national elections was only the beginning of the rise of mass politics in Germany. In 1871, the election turnout of those eligible to vote was 51%. After several decades of the rise of a national press, political campaigning and party agitation, the election turnout of 1912, the last national elections before the First World War, was 84.9%. Other indicators show parallel trends. Party membership increased dramatically (by 1914, the German SPD had over 1 million members); the same applied, on a smaller scale, to membership ﬁgures in the new right-wing pressure groups like the Pan-German League. The largest political organizations, however, were trade unions, with a membership of around 2.6 million by 1914. On suffrage and the rise of mass politics, see Larry Eugene Jones and James Retallack, eds., Elections, Mass Politics, and Social Change in Modern Germany, Cambridge, 1992; Jonathan Sperber, The Kaiser’s Voters: Electors and Elections in Imperial Germany, Cambridge, 1997, who particularly emphasizes the importance of the 1890 watershed in mobilizing former non-voters; Simone Lässig, Karl Heinrich Pohl and James Retallack, eds., Modernisierung und Region im wilhelminischen Deutschland: Wahlen, Wahlrecht und politische Kultur, Bielefeld, 1995. On the role of the press in this process, see Peter Steinbach, Die Zähmung des politischen Massenmarktes: Wahlen und Wahlkämpfe im Bismarckreich im Spiegel der Hauptstadt- und Gesinnungspresse, Passau, 1990. On non-party political organizations, see Roger Chickering, We Men Who Feel Most German: A Cultural Study of the Pan-German League, 1886–1914, Boston, 1984. ¹¹³ Riemerschmid’s regionalist object designs will be analysed in Chapter 5 of this study. ¹¹⁴ Jerram, Germany’s Other Modernity, pp. 126–42; Kramer, ‘Rationalisierung des Haushalts’, pp. 77–84.

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The amorphous industrial region of the Ruhrgebiet presented a particular challenge for bourgeois modernists. The reasons for the absence of traditional patterns of urbanization were manifold. The legacy of the catholic prince-bishoprics and the effects of the Prussian takeover from 1815 deprived the region of a natural centre. In the course of the nineteenth century, the type of industrialization that occurred in the region, with mining and heavy industry dominant, had evolved outside traditional urban locales. A de-centred network of industrial production sites emerged. Heavy industry had few connections with the traditions of regional handicrafts fostered by the Werkbund under the heading of quality work. In such a region, bourgeois modernists such as Karl Ernst Osthaus, who set out to invent a modern Ruhr-vernacular, faced an uphill struggle. Lichtwark described Osthaus’s ambition to unite the dispersed industrial settlements of the Ruhr into a coherent whole thus: In the Westphalian industrial region, some forty cities are situated closely together. [. . .] Osthaus has now proposed the idea of joining these together in a pragmatic union, to determine an overall building plan. [. . .] This plan extends far beyond ordinary urban planning and expansion. It also includes institutions (museums) and associations (Heimat and art associations). An urban parliament is to be formed to decide fundamental questions relating to the common existence and welfare of these cities. It seems to me, however difﬁcult it will be to invent and maintain the right framework for this, that this is a project of the profoundest signiﬁcance.¹¹⁵

Osthaus is known amongst cultural historians principally for his role as Muthesius’s principal opponent in the so-called Werkbundstreit of 1914.¹¹⁶ His attempt to transform the city of Hagen into the civic heart of the region, for which Osthaus used not only his intellect and connections, but also considerable private wealth, is less widely cited.¹¹⁷ In 1899, aged 25, Osthaus used the industrial fortune he had inherited to commission a major museum for Hagen, the Folkwang Museum, for which Henry van de Velde designed a building, completed, after 1902, by Peter Behrens. It housed a somewhat eccentric collection of art and artefacts from many different cultures, which Osthaus deemed both beautiful and ‘exemplary’. In 1912, Osthaus also founded a ‘Museum for Art in Commerce and Industry’, and he initiated the construction of the garden suburb of ¹¹⁵ Lichtwark, letter of 1910, quoted from Peter Stressig and Justus Buekschmitt, ‘Karl Ernst Osthaus: Der Planer und Bauherr’, in Herta Hesse-Frielinghaus, August Hoff, Walter Erbe et al., Karl Ernst Osthaus: Leben und Werk, Recklinghausen, 1971, pp. 345–84, quote pp. 364–5. ¹¹⁶ Anna-Christa Funk-Jones, Karl Ernst Osthaus gegen Hermann Muthesius: Der Werkbundstreit 1914 im Spiegel der im Karl Ernst Osthaus-Archiv enthaltenen Briefe, Hagen, 1978; Wulf Herzogenrath, ed., Frühe Kölner Kunstausstellungen: Sonderbund 1912, Werkbund 1914, Pressa USSR 1928: Kommentarband zu den Nachdrucken der Austellungskataloge, Cologne, 1981; idem, Dirk Teuber and Angelika Thiekötter, eds., Die Deutsche Werkbund-Ausstellung Cöln 1914, Cologne, 1984, part of catalogue series Der westdeutsche Impuls 1900–1914: Kunst und Umweltgestaltung im Industriegebiet. ¹¹⁷ See also Wolfgang Schepers, ed., Düsseldorf: Eine Grossstadt auf dem Weg in die Moderne, Düsseldorf, 1984, in catalogue series Der westdeutsche Impuls 1900–1914: Kunst und Umweltgestaltung im Industriegebiet.

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Hohenhagen, which was to serve as the nucleus for an urban development plan for the region as a whole. Through these activities, Osthaus hoped to create a civic heart for a region that he felt lacked a genius loci. Vernacular materials and forms played a decisive role in Osthaus’s attempt to carve out a Hagen identity. For his own villa Hohenhof, he asked van de Velde to use only colours and materials characteristic of the bergisch region, notably cut blocks of chalk stone, slate shingles and green shutters. While Lichtwark fostered a Hamburg school of modernist painting through his commissions for the Kunsthalle, Osthaus commissioned Hagen artists to portray the ‘Westphalian Heimat’ in a regional style.¹¹⁸ And to suggestions that he should move the Folkwang Museum to a part of Germany where an educated clientele would be able to appreciate it properly, he replied: It [the idea for the Folkwang Museum] originated in the sense of a great injustice, namely the unequal distribution of the objects and beneﬁts of art in our fatherland. Nowhere are museums more necessary than in our rapidly growing industrial cities, yet nowhere are they less frequently found. The consequence is a fading away of all idealist interests, an intellectual decline in these cities, which, especially if we consider the ﬁnancial power which they contain, will be tragic for the life of our nation as a whole.¹¹⁹

Yet the Ruhr region was not a clearly deﬁned political or cultural space. Hence, the geographical frame of reference was constantly shifting. In the examples cited above, Osthaus spoke variously of the bergisch region and the Westphalian Heimat. Of a 1905 series of engravings of local architecture by Heinrich Reifferscheid, Osthaus wrote: ‘The colours of the märkisch house are black, white, green: black for the timber, white for the walls and window crosses, light green for the shutters and dark green for the doors. In yellow-grey, the window frames mediate the transition. These colours add up to one of the most beautiful harmonies that architecture has ever produced.’¹²⁰ The adjective märkisch was derived from the County Mark in the Sauerland. Such terminological shifts were indicative of the problem of deﬁning the Ruhr region, especially since Osthaus insisted that Heimat had to be embedded in social realities to be meaningful: ‘Not romantic, but practical considerations resulted in a choice of materials and colours that had clear afﬁnities with the traditional bergisch-märkischen style.’¹²¹ Where Osthaus differed from the bourgeois modernists we have encountered so far was his positive attitude towards aestheticism. He did not share Muthesius’s and Schumacher’s rejection of the Jugendstil as shallow. This led to a very different transition from historicism and modernism, and by extension, a different sense of place. Osthaus’s ﬁrst purchases for the Folkwang Museum were works by ultra-historicists such as Anselm Feuerbach and Henry de Groux. ¹¹⁸ Hesse-Frielinghaus et al., Karl Ernst Osthaus, p. 48. ¹²⁰ Quoted from ibid., p. 48. ¹²¹ Ibid.

¹¹⁹ Ibid., p. 136.

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Triggered by his encounter with van de Velde, he discovered modernism. Skipping the Impressionism that had been so central to Lichtwark’s vision of local modernism, Osthaus discovered ‘primitivism’, and purchased works by van Gogh, Gaugin, Seurat, Signac, Cézanne, Matisse and various German Expressionists.¹²² Alongside this, he developed a fascination for things Germanic. The name Folkwang itself was derived from Germanic mythology, designating a place for tribal assemblies; in the Edda, it was the name given to the Hall of the goddess Freya, whom Osthaus viewed as a Northern Athena.¹²³ None of these preferences were simply questions of individual taste. Osthaus, forever conscious of the latest trends, absorbed a host of political and ideological fashions that ﬂourished in the late Wilhelmine years. As a youth, he aspired to be a poet, and as a student he modelled his persona on the Sturm und Drang idol Werther. Both reinforced his penchant for aestheticism.¹²⁴ His taste for Germanic mythology is likely to have been a product of his association with the Pan-German League.¹²⁵ The inﬂuence of various anti-rational, aesthetic and anthroposophical movements can all be traced in his writings.¹²⁶ His fascination with the idea of Heimat was only one passion amongst many, and it is perhaps unsurprising that the social reach of his vision was even more limited than Lichtwark’s or Schumacher’s. Thus, Osthaus’s ambition to create a culture rooted in a sense of place that could provide an ontological grounding for the condition of industrial modernity remained largely utopian. When Lichtwark visited the Folkwang Museum in 1910, he was appalled by its overbearing aestheticism and Osthaus’s grand ambitions to create a Gesamtkunstwerk rather than a practical museum space: ‘It all seems gruelling, rococo from 1860. And so clumsy and heavy!’¹²⁷ This is not to say that Osthaus was uninterested in the social. Between 1909 and 1914, he delivered numerous public lectures, in many different locations throughout Germany, on topics such as ‘Space and Body in Architecture’, ‘Shop Window Decoration’, ‘Art in Commerce and Industry’, and ‘Style in Urban ¹²² Karl Ernst Osthaus, Museum Folkwang: Moderne Kunst, Plastik, Malerei, Graphik, Hagen, 1912. See also Birgit Schulte, ed., Carsten Gliese: Modell Osthaus, Hagen, 2006; idem, ed., Auf dem Weg zu einer handgreiﬂichen Utopie: Die Folkwang-Projekte von Bruno Taut und Karl Ernst Osthaus, Hagen, 1994. ¹²³ Herta Hesse-Frielinghaus, ‘Folkwang 1. Teil’, in idem et al., Karl Ernst Osthaus, pp. 119–241, quote p. 130. ¹²⁴ Walter Erbe, ‘Karl Ernst Osthaus, Lebensweg und Gedankengut’, in Hesse-Frielinghaus et al., Karl Ernst Osthaus, pp. 15–115. ¹²⁵ As a student, Osthaus had been involved with the Verein Deutscher Studenten, which was afﬁliated to the Pan-German League. During an exchange year in Vienna, Osthaus also gave public anti-Semitic speeches. Hesse-Frielinghaus et al., Karl Ernst Osthaus, pp. 32–3. On the Pan-German League, see Chickering, We Men Who Feel. ¹²⁶ Anna-Christa Funk-Jones, Karl Ernst Osthaus gegen Hermann Muthesius: Der Werkbundstreit 1914 im Spiegel der im Karl Ernst Osthaus-Archiv enthaltenen Briefe, Hagen, 1978. ¹²⁷ ‘Das Ganze wirkt furchtbar, Rokoko von 1860. Und so plump, und so schwer.’ Cited in Hesse-Frielinghaus et al., Karl Ernst Osthaus, p. 136.

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Planning’.¹²⁸ From 1902, he sent Folkwang exhibitions dedicated to the applied arts and design to tour around Germany. Conversely, he also sought to involve other institutions in his work in Hagen. All major Arts and Crafts Schools in the German-speaking world—Berlin, Zurich, Weimar, Hamburg, and the Wiener Werkstätten—accepted his invitations to exhibit their products in Hagen. Nevertheless, Lichtwark’s negative reaction was not an isolated instance, and Osthaus’s efforts were largely ignored by the public, and certainly by the regional population to which he most wished to appeal. It was rare for more than three people to visit the museum on any one day.¹²⁹ As we shall see, Osthaus’s ambiguous relationship with the broader public also became evident in his later condemnation of Muthesius’s advocacy of typiﬁcation (Typisierung), which he regarded as vulgar and populist. In 1919, Osthaus mapped out an alternative vision for social reform, when he developed a new pedagogical programme for his Folkwangschule: The old school made us cosmopolitan and business-like. The German merchant knew how to succeed, the German engineer and the German physician were widely sought after, yet what was the price? The German became the least liked ﬁgure in the concert of people [. . .] because he was interested in nothing except his diligence, achievement and progress, annoying everyone else in the process. Diligence and progress are not everybody’s ideals. There are people who regard living life to the full, the experience of its beauty and depth, as a valuable aim, who call the elevation of such aims culture, and the mere pursuit of proﬁt barbarity.¹³⁰

This utopian spirit has led Schwartz to see Osthaus as the true prophet amongst the Werkbund reformers, and the least bourgeois of the bourgeois modernists: he refused to ‘sell out’ to the logic of the capitalist system.¹³¹ It is certainly ¹²⁸ Cited in Hesse-Frielinghaus et al., Karl Ernst Osthaus, p. 217. See also Karl Ernst Osthaus, ‘Das Schaufenster’, in Die Kunst in Industrie und Handel, Jahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbundes 1913, Jena, 1913, pp. 59–69. ¹²⁹ According to Hesse-Frielinghaus, during 1902, 520 day passes and 41 annual tickets were sold, which amounts to 2–3 visitors to the museum per day, including special exhibitions. By 1906, visitor numbers had improved moderately, to 817 and 116 respectively, and in 1915, they were at 1015 and 176. ¹³⁰ Karl Ernst Osthaus, ‘Zur Schulreform’, Westfälisches Tageblatt, 21 November 1919, cited in Hesse-Frielinghaus et al., Karl Ernst Osthaus, p. 226. Hesse-Frielinghaus interprets these sources as demarcating a new phase in Osthaus’s life, as a result of the disillusionment brought about by the First World War. It seems to me that they are more plausibly viewed as a continuation of his pre-war pedagogical aspirations by other means, namely a focus on children rather than adults. The aestheticist and anti-capitalist impulse certainly united both. ¹³¹ Frederic J. Schwartz, ‘Der Schleier der Maja: Karl Ernst Osthaus, das deutsche Museum für Kunst in Handel und Gewerbe und der Werkbundstreit’, in Michael Fehr, Sabine Röder and Gerhard Storck, eds., Das Schöne und der Alltag: Die Anfänge des modernen Designs 1900–1914: Deutsches Museum für Kunst in Handel und Gewerbe, Cologne, 1997; and idem, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture before the First World War, New Haven, 1997. For the opposing view, of Osthaus’s aestheticism as anti-modern and proto-fascist, see Sebastian Müller, ‘Deutsches Museum für Kunst in Handel und Gewerbe’, in Hesse-Frielinghaus et al., Karl Ernst Osthaus, pp. 258–342, esp. p. 333. This debate will be tackled in more detail in Chapter 5 of this study.

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clear that Osthaus’s feel for the aesthetic and the decorative made him a pioneer in other areas of modern visual culture, notably advertising, which became the backbone of his Museum for Art in Commerce and Industry. Yet a pedagogical concept that placed culture on a pedestal and expected from it a kind of salvation from the crudeness of daily life, was hard to reconcile with the social realities of Hagen. In his 1911 essay on ‘The Importance of the Garden City Movement for the Artistic Development of Our Times’, Osthaus developed his ideas for the urbanization of the Ruhr region, which were clearly indebted to Ebenezer Howard.¹³² Yet he also found the idea of autonomous garden cities suspect, and distanced himself from what he called a Romanticizing view of small towns. Osthaus’s garden cities—he prefaced the term by ‘so-called’, and generally preferred to call them ‘Vorstädte’—would form a network of urban and green zones that covered the entire region. Thus, a systematic planning effort would transform industrial sprawl into a carefully structured Heimat, in which the rural and the urban were harmoniously integrated.¹³³ Because Osthaus envisaged his Vorstädte as residential cities growing around commercial and industrial centres, some have hailed him as a precursor of modern ‘zoning’, as later articulated in Le Corbusier’s 1933 Charte d’Athènes.¹³⁴ Such a reading of Osthaus is analogous to the view of Muthesius as a precursor of functionalism in house design—and problematic for the same reasons. Osthaus’s ideas about urban planning were futuristic and historical at the same time. He described the ‘global city of the future as the heart of enormous energies, from whose interaction the culture of the future will emerge’.¹³⁵ But this was not to dispense with history: Vorstädte, he wrote, would ‘grow organically from historical communities’.¹³⁶ Here, too, aestheticism set the project apart from analogous developments in Hamburg and Berlin. The word artistic in the title of Osthaus’s planning essay is indicative of the way he transformed a practical social into an idealist cultural movement. This ambition assumed a concrete shape in the garden city Hohenhagen, for which Osthaus purchased the grounds with his private funds.¹³⁷ The project would ‘realize the ambitions of the modern garden city movement and the artistic ¹³² Osthaus, ‘Die Bedeutung der Gartenstadtbewegung für die künstlerische Entwicklung unserer Zeit’, Die Gartenstadtbewegung, Berlin, 1911, quoted in Hesse-Frielinghaus et al., Karl Ernst Osthaus, pp. 345–84. A survey of the proliferation and modiﬁcation of Howard’s ideas on garden cities in continental Europe and America is Stephen V. Ward, The Garden City: Past, Present and Future, London, 1992. On the evolution of the movement in Germany into Bauhaus-style modernism, see Jean-François Lejeune, ‘From Hellerau to the Bauhaus: Memory and Modernity of the German Garden City’, in idem, ed. Modern Cities, New City Series, 3, New York, 1996. ¹³³ Osthaus, ‘Die Bedeutung der Gartenstadtbewegung’, from Hesse-Frielinghaus et al., Karl Ernst Osthaus, p. 369. ¹³⁴ Ibid., p. 370. ¹³⁵ Ibid., p. 369. ¹³⁶ Ibid. ¹³⁷ Peter Stressig, ‘Hohenhagen: Experimentierfeld modernen Bauens’, in Hesse-Frielinghaus, Karl Ernst Osthaus, pp. 385–510.

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movement simultaneously’.¹³⁸ Only the true ‘geniuses’ amongst architects were to receive commissions here.¹³⁹ The choice of the term genius is particularly remarkable: it ﬂew directly in the face of the conceptual opposition between vernacular ‘building art’ and decadent ‘style architecture’, designed by so-called genius architects, which Muthesius had deﬁned in his writings. As his model, Osthaus cited not Hellerau—a curious absence, given the prominence of the ﬁrst German garden city in the contemporary press—but the Mathildenhöhe, where Grand Duke Ernst Ludwig had founded an artists’ colony in 1901.¹⁴⁰ The Mathildenhöhe was a purely ‘cultural’ site, while Hellerau’s raison d’être, at least at its outset, was the factory at its heart. Individual houses at Hohenhagen were designed by leading moderates amongst modern architects of the time, including Henry van de Velde, Peter Behrens, Johannes Ludovicus Mathieu Lauweriks, Josef Hoffmann, and August Endell, although two more radical modernists, Walter Gropius and Bruno Taut, were also involved. Architectural historians have treated the whole enterprise as a somewhat halfhearted, transitional project between historicism and the ‘real’ modernism of the Bauhaus.¹⁴¹ Yet if Hohenhagen is read as a social template for a new form of bourgeois urbanism, its particular meaning comes to the fore. Drawing on Baroque precedents (well before Fritz Schumacher did so in Hamburg), the houses of this colony, although grand in themselves, were integrated into a coherent ensemble, with formal garden elements forming the connecting arteries (Figure 21). The spatial arrangement of Hohenhagen mapped out an ideal bourgeois city—which in turn would form the civic heart of the Ruhr region. To be sure, the local middle classes remained sceptical, and the Hohenhagen houses proved difﬁcult to sell. Not only the magnates of heavy industry, such as Tyssen and Stinnes, but also owners of smaller mining companies such as Emil Kirdorf, had little time for this notion of Bürgerlichkeit. They preferred a conservative, neo-Gothic idiom.¹⁴² Yet there were also internal tensions. Osthaus’s own house in Hohenhagen, the Hohenhof, which van de Velde designed to his speciﬁcations, exempliﬁes them (Figure 22). The front of the house combined traditional historicist and Jugendstil elements, while the sides and back of the house were a loose ensemble of diverse architectural elements in a vaguely Arts and Crafts mode, with towers, balconies, extensions, bay windows, etc., and various Heimat references, especially in the choice of ¹³⁸ Osthaus in the Westfälisches Tageblatt, Hagen, 8 September 1906, unpag. ¹³⁹ Ibid. ¹⁴⁰ Stressig, ‘Hohenhagen’, p. 189. ¹⁴¹ Ibid., p. 390. ¹⁴² Joachim Petsch, ‘Deutsche Fabrikarchitektur im 19. Jahrhundert’, in B. Korzus, ed., Fabrik im Ornament: Ansichten auf Firmebriefköpfen des 19. Jahrhunderts, Münster, 1980. A slightly different argument is put forward by Jefferies, who suggests that the continued use of (neoGothic) historicism especially in Ruhr industrial architecture followed an economic imperative, as an opulent style was most likely to impress shareholders. Jefferies, Politics and Culture, esp. pp. 31–41.

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Figure 21 Johannes Ludovicus Mathieu Lauweriks, Perspective drawing of houses on the Stirnband, advertising prospectus for the Hohenhagen housing colony, 1912.

materials (a combination of a base of rough stone and shingle walls),¹⁴³ and local colours. What tied them together was not practicality, as it had done for Muthesius, but Osthaus’s deﬁant aestheticism. This was a feature of all his projects in the Ruhr region. When in 1907–10, the Hagener Textilindustrie commissioned a model working-class housing colony in Hagen, ‘Walddorf ’, Osthaus ensured that Richard Riemerschmid was appointed as chief architect. Lichtwark observed that, under Osthaus’s patronage, even architects such as Riemerschmid, normally renowned for their practicality and lack of aesthetic affectation, ended up building houses that looked ‘Romantic and strangely Bavarian’.¹⁴⁴ ¹⁴³ These represented a local variation of a style pioneered by the American architect Henry H. Richardson (1838–86), one of the leading advocates of the American Shingle Style. He frequently visited Europe, studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and was inﬂuenced by the English reform architect Norman Shaw. In New England and Chicago, he designed neo-Romanesque buildings, such as Boston’s Trinity Church, but also countless country houses that combined shingles and rough stone in a manner closely akin to Hohenhof. As a local variation, van de Velde replaced Richardson’s wood shingles with the traditional bergisch material, Schiefer. ¹⁴⁴ Lichtwark, Reisebriefe, quoted from Winfried Nerdinger, ed., Richard Riemerschmid, vom Jugendstil zum Werkbund: Werke und Dokumente, Munich, 1982, p. 399.

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Figure 22 Villa Hohenhof, 1907, by Henri van de Velde, designed for Karl Ernst Osthaus, Hohenhagen. Photo: MU.

Comparing the efforts of bourgeois modernists in the different settings of Hamburg, Berlin and Hagen, clear differences emerged. Their ambitions were similar, but the ways in which these buildings and housing colonies succeeded in ‘acting’ upon the public in the way they were intended depended decisively on pre-existing notions of place which architects and planners could mobilize. Yet the difference was relative. That Muthesius’s programmatic architecture struck a chord with signiﬁcant numbers of Berlin’s Bürger is evident from his own commercial success, and from the fact that these types of houses were widely imitated in the new Berlin suburbs. Comparable initiatives in Hagen did not develop the same momentum. It is, however, important to remember that several key elements of Osthaus’s plan were realized after the First World War, when Konrad Adenauer, mayor of Cologne from 1917, implemented an urban development plan for the Ruhr region with Hagen as its centre. Cologne was to become the capital of a separate Rhine region, informed by a Catholic brand of social paternalism, and hence an ideological alternative to the SPDdominated cities of Germany. In the context of this dual regional development strategy, based on Hagen and Cologne respectively, Adenauer commissioned Fritz Schumacher in 1919 to devise a development plan for the inner ring (or ‘Rayon’) of Cologne. The resulting ‘General Settlement Plan’ for Cologne, presented

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in 1923, was embraced as a third way between the ostentatious historicism of the Vienna ring and a more radically ruralist plan by Paul Bonatz, which envisaged only a giant green belt around the city.¹⁴⁵ Schumacher’s belt resembled Osthaus’s notion of the Vorstadt, merging generously proportioned green areas with large-scale ensembles of apartment complexes. It relied on a Baroque manner of structuring space, not unlike that which Osthaus had pioneered at Hohenhagen. Bonatz, who had lost out in the competition, ridiculed this design as neo-absolutist.¹⁴⁶ Yet this form of Baroque spatiality was not historicist. It was, rather, a means of mobilizing the symbolic potential of generic ordering ‘patterns’ in the built environment as a social and political technology of control. And it was vital for extending the practice of urban planning to entire regions, thus translating into spatial practice what, before 1914, had been little more than an iconographic connection between civic identities and the landscape as Heimat. This relationship, between nature and the city, will form the topic of the next chapter. ¹⁴⁵ Hartmut Frank, ‘Vom sozialen Gesamtkunstwerk zur Stadtlandschaft: Fritz Schumachers Generalplan für Köln’, in idem, ed., Fritz Schumacher: Reformkultur und Moderne, Stuttgart, 1994, pp. 133–55. ¹⁴⁶ Paul Bonatz, in Der Städtebau, 1921, quoted from Frank, Fritz Schumacher, p. 144.

4 Nature and Culture: Greening the City

In the course of the nineteenth century, a conﬂuence of factors—new technologies, new resources at the disposal of the state, new cultures of expertise—led to an unprecedented intensiﬁcation of the planned transformation and management of space, both urban and rural. New scholarship on this period has uncovered manifold ways in which political projects were played out through the management of nature.¹ Nature, it is clear, was not a given, but culturally and politically produced. Yet if it is true that the relationship was reciprocal, and that ‘neither culture nor nature are objects, both are relations that permeate one another giving rise to an increasingly complex social world,’² what role did nature play in shaping culture? To raise this question is to turn one’s gaze to the city. For a long time, the city was treated in isolation from nature, or more particularly, as its antithesis. To champion the cause of ‘civilization’ was to subjugate nature, while the celebration of the ‘wilderness’ was a way of rejecting urban modernity. Intellectual historians have repeatedly emphasized that, especially in modern German history, the celebration of the natural world entailed a radical rejection of the city and civic values. German cultural pessimists and thinkers of the so-called ‘conservative revolution’ looked to nature to uncover the spiritual core of Germanness, which they saw as the cure for a rootless, alienated ¹ Excellent overviews are David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape and the Making of Modern Germany, London, 2006; Thomas Lekan and Thomas Zeller, eds., Germany’s Nature: Cultural Landscapes and Environmental History, New Brunswick, NJ, 2005; Christof Mauch, ed., Nature in German History, New York, 2004; and Thomas Lekan, ed., ‘The Nature of German Environmental History’, with contributions by Verena Winiwarter, Paul Warde, Thomas Zeller, Dorothee Brantz and Bernhard Gissibl, German History, forthcoming, 27/1 (2009), pp. 113–30. ² Dorothee Brantz, ‘The Natural Space of Modernity: A Transatlantic Perspective on (Urban) Environmental History’, in Ursula Lehmkuhl and Hermann Wellenreuther, Historians and Nature: Comparative Approaches to Environmental History, Oxford, 2007, pp. 195–225. On the cultural construction of nature, see William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York, 1996), esp. his own ‘Introduction: In Search of Nature’, pp. 23–68; and Michael Watts, ‘Nature: Culture’, in Spaces of Geographical Thought, ed. Paul Cloke & Ron Johnston, London, 2005, pp. 142–74.

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society of cosmopolitan urbanites.³ Yet this discourse disguises the actual and formative presence of the natural world in the modern German city, which has become the focus of a new brand of environmental history. In 1990, Cronon stated that ‘environmental history continues to have too strong a bias toward the wild and the rural [. . .] Cities in particular deserve much more work than they have received.’⁴ Things have changed since then. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to nature’s hidden presence in the city as one of its deﬁning characteristics. Nevertheless, much of this work perpetuates the notion that nature, albeit a constitutive part of the city, was repressed, that is to say, banished from the visible realm of bourgeois civic culture. Nature in the city was driven underground, into invisible sewers, hidden behind the walls of modern abattoirs, or disguised through technology, for example through the introduction of modern street lighting banishing nightfall from the ﬂˆaneur’s experience.⁵ The visible presence of nature, or what we might call the performance of nature within the city, has received less attention. The bourgeois performance of nature in the city, which took shape in the period under discussion here, was rendered possible by the simultaneous change in perceptions of the ‘natural’ landscape outside the city boundaries. As we have explored in previous chapters, the German Heimatschutz movement, which gathered pace in the ﬁnal decades of the nineteenth century, no longer posited nature against civilization, but sought to engage the two in a dialogical relationship.⁶ The decades around 1900 also saw an unprecedented intensiﬁcation of the debate about natural lifestyles. The view of German neo-Romantics and ³ The politics of anti-urbanism in Wilhelmine Germany are discussed in David Midgley, ‘Los von Berlin! Anti-urbanism as Counter-Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Germany’, in Steve Giles and Maike Oergel, eds., Counter-Cultures in Germany and Central Europe: From Sturm und Drang to Baader-Meinhof, Oxford, 2003, pp. 121–36; K. Bergmann, Agrarromantik und Großstadtfeindschaft, Meisenheim, 1970; and Friedrich Sengle, ‘Wunschbild Land und Schreckbild Stadt’, Studium generale 16 (1963), pp. 619–31. On the intellectual history of cultural pessimism in Germany, see Roger Woods, The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic, Basingstoke, 1996; Rolf Peter Sieferle, Fortschrittsfeinde? Opposition gegen Technik und Industrie von der Romantik bis zur Gegenwart, Munich, 1984; Armin Mohler, Die Konservative Revolution in Deutschland 1918–1932, 2 vols., rev. edn., Darmstadt, 1989; Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik, Munich, 1968; Klaus Fritzsche, Politische Romantik und Gegenrevolution: Fluchtwege aus der Krise der b¨urgerlichen Gesellschaft: Das Beispiel des ‘Tat’-Kreises, Frankfurt, 1976. For a critical reassessment of the importance and coherence of this movement, see Stefan Breuer, ‘Die Konservative Revolution: Kritik eines Mythos’, Politische Vierteljahresschrift 31/4 (1990), pp. 585–607. ⁴ William Cronon, ‘Modes of Prophecy and Production: Placing Nature in History’, Journal of American History 76 (1990), pp. 1122–31. ⁵ Maria Kaika, City of Flows: Modernity, Nature, and the City, New York, 2005; Susanne Schindler-Reinisch, ed., Berlin Central-Viehhof: Eine Stadt in der Stadt, Berlin, 1996; Dorothee Brantz, ‘Animal Bodies, Human Health, and the Reform of Slaughterhouses in Nineteenth-Century Berlin’, Food and History 3 (2006), pp. 193–21; Thomas Hughes, Networks of Power: Electriﬁcation in Western Society 1880–1930, Baltimore, 1983. ⁶ Applegate, Nation of Provincials; Conﬁno, The Nation as a Local Metaphor, especially the section on ‘Cityscape, Regionscape, Nationscape’, pp. 162–9. For a fuller discussion of changing appreciations of Heimat, see Chapter 3 of this study.

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cultural pessimists, who saw nature as the antithesis of a decadent civilization, was only one minority position amongst many.⁷ It is true that decrying particular dispositions or behaviour as ‘unnatural’ became a favoured polemical trope in Wilhelmine political discourse. Yet few of these polemicists used it to reject modernity or civilization per se. More frequently, the trope of nature was invoked to attack a particular political enemy, portraying as ‘unnatural’ the habitual conservatism of the Junker classes, the supposed disingenuousness with which the nouveau riche in their Gr¨underzeit villas were mimicking elite aspirations, or, on the other end of the spectrum, the alienated work and the deprived living conditions of the urban poor. What constituted a ‘natural alternative’ to these ways of being was a matter not only of debate, but also of praxis. Germany witnessed an explosion of reformist experiments, concerned with developing alternative modes of being that were more in touch with nature. From Fidus to Worspwede, from nudism to vegetarianism: countless voluntary associations and communes both preached and practised the reform of everything from high culture to day-to-day conduct.⁸ Yet the invocation of nature as a vehicle of social and cultural reform far exceeded the boundaries of the self-styled ‘alternative’ milieu with which it is most frequently associated. It also profoundly transformed the bourgeois culture it set out to challenge. This transformation took shape in the physical transformation of the city, through which the relationship between nature and culture was decisively redeﬁned. That is not to say that an unequivocally modernist appropriation of nature took place. Nature remained a deeply ambiguous trope—as contemporaries realized only too well. If Wilhelmine Germans were busy invoking nature, they were ⁷ This view was promoted, for example, by George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich, London, 1964; and Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, Berkeley, 1961. Traces of it can still be found in more recent work on German environmentalism, such as R. H. Dominick, The Environmental Movement in Germany: Prophets and Pioneers, 1871–1971, Bloomington, 1992, esp. pp. 22–30; C. Riordan, ed., Green Thought in German Culture: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, Cardiff, 1997, esp. pp. 8–16; H.-P. Bahrdt, Die ¨ moderne Großstadt: Soziologische Uberlegungen zum St¨adtebau, Opladen, 1998, pp. 57–62; Klueting, Antimodernismus und Reform; Hartung, Konservative Zivilisationskritik; Kramer, ‘Die politische und o¨ konomische Funktionalisierung’; von Reeken, Heimatbewegung. ⁸ John Alexander Williams, Turning to Nature in Germany: Hiking, Nudism and Conservation 1900–1940, Stanford, 2007, esp. pp. 1–104; Matthew Jefferies, ‘Lebensreform: A Middle-Class Antidote to Wilhelminism?, in Geoff Eley and James Retallack, eds., Wilhelminism and Its Legacies: German Modernities, Imperialism, and the Meanings of Reform, 1890–1930, Providence and Oxford, 2003, pp. 91–106; and Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History 1890–1930, London, 2003. Most German literature on this topic takes a different line, by emphasizing the supposed anti-modern aspects of the life reform movement, such as Wolfgang R. Krabbe, ‘Die Lebensreform: Individualisierte Heilserwartung im industriellen Zeitalter’, Journal f¨ur Geschichte 2 (1980), pp. 8–13; Diethart Kerbs and J¨urgen Reulecke, eds., Handbuch der deutschen Reformbewegungen 1880–1933, Wuppertal, 1998; Kai Buchholz, Rita Latocha, Hilke Peckmann and Klaus Wolbert, eds., Die Lebensreform: Entw¨urfe zur Neugestaltung von Leben und Kunst um 1900, 2 vols., Darmstadt, 2001. For an evaluation of life reform as an integral part of modernism, see Florentine Fritzen, Ges¨under Leben: Die Lebensreformbewegung im 20. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart, 2006.

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also frantically engaged in an effort to order, regulate and control its meaning. The problem was particularly acute for bourgeois modernists. On the one hand, nature served as a convenient platform from which to critique the urban social order they tried to reform, and as a corrective to those implications of urban modernity they disliked. Like the recourse to the sense of place and the sense of the past already explored in previous chapters, nature served to stabilize the project of liberal governmentality. All three helped ground the social identities of those who were being governed in seemingly immutable parameters of belonging: in place, in time, and in nature. On the other hand, the invocation of this natural basis of social existence also contained disruptive potentials of a novel kind, threatening to upset the carefully constructed balancing act that was bourgeois life in the city, and unleashing sensual energies prone to overwhelm the discipline of the self that was so central to bourgeois notions of citizenship. Manoeuvring between Scylla and Charybdis, a set of distinctive political strategies emerged that were designed to utilize those aspects of the nature trope which were politically useful, whilst containing and controlling a range of more subversive and politically unstable cultural subtexts. This chapter will argue that analysing such strategies can offer us important insights into the psychic dispositions of the milieu of bourgeois modernism. The archetypal space invoking nature within the city is the park. Here, nature featured not merely as something to be mastered and hidden from view (or smell), but as that which is brought out into the open and experienced. All senses were enlisted in this project: gazing at the scenery, hearing the singing of birds, smelling the ﬂowers, breathing the fresh air, and strolling along the paths or taking physical exercise on the lawns: a visit to the park involved the whole body in the encounter with nature. This immersion in nature, delimited and controlled, of course, by the careful design of the park, was believed to have a positive, healing effect on the mind and the body of the citizen. The widespread creation of largescale public urban parks that resulted from this conviction marked a milestone in the history of urban planning. Of course, designed gardens had existed in cities since time immemorial, and were often associated with princely displays of afﬂuence and power. Yet from the eighteenth century, and more typically from the mid-nineteenth century, numerous new purpose-built public parks were created, which were designed speciﬁcally for the purpose of public recreation, and as spaces in which the beneﬁts of nature—grass, trees, water—would be made accessible to city-dwellers without social distinction. No longer just a beautiful luxury, parks now came to be seen as a necessary feature of modern cities, and the answer to a social entitlement to public recreation.⁹ These new parks were not ⁹ Galen Cranz, The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America, Cambridge, Mass., 1989; Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Parks, 1825–1875, New York, 1995; Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park, Ithaca, 1992; Robin Bachin, Building the Southside: Urban Space and Civic Culture

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only innovative in the speciﬁcs of their design. According to Peterson, Schuyler and others, so-called park systems, that is, interconnected landscaped spaces that structure the whole city, such as that realized in Washington DC from 1900, should be viewed as one of the principal drives behind the rise of modern city planning.¹⁰ And yet, it would be misleading to assume that the rise of the public urban park was linear, unproblematic, or indeed that parks formed the starting point for bourgeois modernists’ attempt to naturalize the modern city. More often than not, the creation of urban parks was characterized by caution and scepticism. Depending on local conditions, responses varied from outright rejection to carefully designed iconographic programmes that would frame and ‘disarm’ undesirable subtexts of such spaces in other cases. Fin-de-si`ecle Munich is an example of the former response. Like their counterparts in most other major cities, Munich’s civic elites embarked upon a systematic programme to reshape the urban fabric. The liberals in the municipal government sought to promote socio-economic modernization, yet they also hoped to foster a popular sense of identiﬁcation with the city as Heimat. Like their counterparts in other German cities, around 1900, Munich’s ‘managers of modernity’ increasingly mobilized a sense of place as a powerful antidote to more objectionable platforms for identity politics, such as class. Typically, the search for a vernacular vocabulary that might engender such a sense of place looked to the rural heritage for inspiration, and tried to combine this with civic traditions. In the context of Bavarian politics, this project faced distinctive challenges.¹¹ Munich’s hinterland was the territorial state of Bavaria, and the divide between city and country was riddled by political and confessional oppositions. The governing elites of the city tended to be liberal and Protestant, while Bavarian politics were dominated by Catholic, agrarian and conservative interests.¹² The resurgence of radical rural Catholicism from the 1890s exacerbated the

in Chicago, 1890–1919, Chicago, 2004; Nicholas Green, The Spectacle of Nature: Landscape and Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth-Century France, Manchester, 1990. ¹⁰ John A. Peterson, The Birth of City Planning in the United States, 1840–1917, Baltimore and London, 2003, esp. pp. 42 and 162; David Schuyler, The New Urban Landscape: The Redeﬁnition of City Form in Nineteenth-Century America, Baltimore, 1986; Sonja D¨umpelmann, ‘The Park International: Park System Planning as an International Phenomenon at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century’, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 37 (2005), pp. 75–86; Cynthia Zaitzevsky, Frederick Law Olmsted and the Boston Park System, Cambridge, Mass., 1982. ¹¹ Leif Jerram, Germany’s Other Modernity: Munich and the Building of Metropolis, 1895–1930, Manchester, 2007. ¹² Hans Hesselmann, Das Wirtschaftsb¨urgertum in Bayern 1890–1914: ein Beitrag zur Analyse der Wechselbeziehungen zwischen Wirtschaft und Politik am Beispiel des Wirtschaftsb¨urgertums im Bayern der Prinzregentenzeit, Wiesbaden, 1985; and, on confessional politics, Siegfried Brewka, Zentrum und Sozialdemokratie in der bayerischen Kammer der Abgeordneten 1893–1914, Frankfurt am Main, 1997. More generally on liberal governance of German cities during this period, see Jan Palmowski, Urban Liberalism, and idem, ‘The Politics of the Un-Political German: Liberalism in German Local Government, 1860–1880’, Historical Journal 42 (1999), pp. 675–704.

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divide.¹³ In response, the liberals in the municipal government cultivated an almost paranoid distrust of the countryside. They saw the assertion of the city’s sphere of inﬂuence over the surrounding rural regions as a kind of ideological crusade. Through architecture, they constructed an urban iconography which separated the city from the countryside, even where individual architects they commissioned, such as Hans Gr¨assel, employed the imagery of Heimat. The city’s physical boundaries were visually fortiﬁed through emblematic toll booths.¹⁴ The creation of new urban parks in the city was banned to prevent any incursion of the hostile Bavarian countryside into urban space. This programme even developed an expansive drive: under the auspices of the ofﬁce for urban expansion, the Stadterweiterungsb¨uro, which was established in 1893, the incorporation of surrounding villages into the city’s territory was celebrated like territorial conquests, and planned with military precision. Such incorporations were followed up by a systematic elimination of all village-speciﬁc features in the architecture of the new boroughs.¹⁵ While the confessional confrontation was speciﬁc to Munich, the tension between civic and agrarian versions of the vernacular was not. Neither was it short-lived. Even though bourgeois modernists in other German cities drew more extensively on the cultural heritage of the wider regions, they generally shared the anti-agrarian suspicions of their Munich colleagues. This tension was often conceptualized as a contrast between a machine-like and an organic vision of modernity. In 1931, Fritz Schumacher gave a lecture ironically entitled ‘The Curse of Technology’, in which he criticized the cultural pessimism and technophobia of Oswald Spengler.¹⁶ Modernity was to be embraced. In particular, modern technology, according to Schumacher, was a force for good, rendering possible the kind of urban planning that ‘made people’s lives in large cities bearable’. Yet he criticized that the ‘terribly sophisticated constructions of the city of the future, as Hilberseimer, Le Corbusier, Wolf and others present them, have not yet progressed beyond the notion of replacing a poorly constructed great machine with a better great machine. This strategy does not seem a great consolation to me.’¹⁷ Without roots in nature, the new city would remain a soulless machine. This attempt to write nature into the project of ¹³ Klaus Tenfelde, ‘Stadt und Land in Krisenzeiten: M¨unchen und das M¨uncher Umland zwischen Revolution und Inﬂation, 1918 bis 1927’, in idem and Wolfgang Hartwig, eds., Soziale R¨aume in der Urbanisierung: Studien zur Geschichte M¨unchens im Vergleich, 1850–1933, Munich, 1990, pp. 37–59. ¹⁴ Jerram, Germany’s Other Modernity, pp. 83–4, demonstrates this using the example of Hans Gr¨assel’s fourteen toll-booths, which were built on the borders of the municipality from 1892. ¹⁵ Dagmar B¨auml-Stosiek, ‘Grosstadtwachstum und Eingemeindungen: St¨adtische Siedlungspolitik zwischen Vorsicht und Vorausschau’, in Friedrich Prinz and Marita Krauss, eds., M¨unchen, Musenstadt mit Hinterh¨ofen: Die Prinzregentenzeit, 1886–1912, Munich, 1988, pp. 60–8. Jerram referred to this as a ‘frontier mentality’ in Jerram, Germany’s Other Modernity, p. 84. ¹⁶ Fritz Schumacher, Der ‘Fluch’ der Technik, 2nd edn., Hamburg, 1932. ¹⁷ Ibid., 24.

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urban modernism brought Schumacher into conﬂict with both: Le Corbusier’s International Style as well as Spengler’s anti-modernism.¹⁸ Schumacher picked Frank Lloyd Wright, the archetypal American vernacular modernist, as an example for a synthesis that avoided the pitfalls of anti-modernism as well as those of modernist ‘machine aesthetics’:¹⁹ Recent years had witnessed the emergence of new, more naïve (and that also means:) livelier images of the city of the future. I am thinking, for example, of Frank Lloyd Wright, with whose work Germans have just familiarized themselves due to an unusually successful travelling exhibition. In architecture, he [Frank Lloyd Wright] is not a follower of the abstract style, as the anonymous metropolis produces it, but a preacher of the ‘organic’ style, that is, of an architecture that grows out of climate, nature and site, and which makes room not only for practicality and ﬁtness for purpose, but also for individual sentiment. In the same way, he sees the future life form for the masses as a free organism which is developed from natural conditions.²⁰

For Schumacher, Frank Lloyd Wright’s name functioned as a shorthand for the juste milieu between the poles of Spengler and Le Corbusier, which bourgeois modernists were trying to occupy. Once again, it is important not to read a German Sonderweg into this strategy. While each project differed, from region to region and from country to country, there was nothing uniquely German about the recourse to nature. Rather, the attempt to root the modern in vernacular traditions characterized a reform movement that spanned much of Europe, and North America, in this period. Contemporaries were acutely aware of this international dimension—not least because of the architectural journals and travelling exhibitions, which proliferated both before and after the First World War.²¹ And one of the most frequently cited common reference points of this movement was the English garden-city. The garden-city movement was an attempt to develop a systematic language of forms, and a mode of spatial planning, that sought to enrich urban life with ¹⁸ The conﬂictual relationship between modernity and ‘the German ideology’ is foregrounded in classic accounts, such as Georg Lukacs, Der Zerst¨orung der Vernunft, Berlin, 1955; Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, Berkeley, 1961; and George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich, London, 1964. ¹⁹ The ‘machine aesthetics’ and internationalism that characterized orthodox modernism was prominently associated with the European avant-garde in the mid-1920s, and exported to America principally through the efforts of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. in his capacity as director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Compare Mardges Bacon, ‘Modernism and the Vernacular at the Museum of Modern Art, New York’, in Bernd H¨uppauf and Maiken Umbach, eds., Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization and the Built Environment, Stanford, 2004, pp. 25–52. ²⁰ Schumacher, Der ‘Fluch’, p. 25. ²¹ The ﬁrst, an enormously inﬂuential exhibition which popularized the work of Wright in Germany, was held in Berlin in 1910, and widely publicized through the accompanying sumptuous catalogue, Ausgef¨uhrte Bauten und Entw¨urfe von Frank Lloyd Wright, 2 vols., Berlin, 1910, which was published by Ernst Wasmuth. In 1926, closer to the date Schumacher published his thoughts on Wright, a large exhibition providing an overview of recent American architecture toured German cities.

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the positive psycho-social characteristics attributed to living in close contact with nature. Ebenezer Howard’s seminal 1898 tract To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Reform, better known under the title of the 1902 edition Garden Cities of Tomorrow, has ‘done more than any other book to guide the modern town planning movement and to alter its objectives’.²² The garden cities of Letchworth and Welwyn, founded respectively in 1903 and 1920 according to Howard’s principles, quickly achieved iconic status internationally. Yet they were not the ﬁrst of their kind. Many of the spatial arrangements and the aesthetic characteristics which Howard synthesized in his bestselling theory had ﬁrst been developed in reformist workers’ settlements developed around progressive manufacturing enterprises in later nineteenth-century Britain. Hermann Muthesius himself visited and praised several such English model estates such as the Lever Brothers’ Port Sunlight near Liverpool and Cadbury’s Bournville Village near Birmingham.²³ Yet transferring such models to Germany also proved problematic. It is true that the garden city appeared to give a spatial expression to that intermediate tier between the urban/industrial and the natural/vernacular that Schumacher had sought to locate ideologically in between Le Corbusier and Spengler.²⁴ As such, it proved an important source of inspiration for him and many other German bourgeois modernists, from Riemerschmid to Osthaus, as we have already explored in Chapter 3 of this study. Yet in practice, this space proved harder to control than Schumacher’s carefully delineated intellectual argument. The fate of Hellerau, the ﬁrst German garden city, illustrates this.²⁵ Karl Schmidt, who initiated Hellerau’s construction, had spent a year in England, where he studied the models, and had become active in the German reform movement in 1898 as the founder of the Dresdner Werkst¨atten f¨ur Handwerkskunst, a Ruskinesque Arts and Crafts enterprise, later renamed the Deutsche Werkst¨atten f¨ur Handwerkskunst. Between 1906 and 1913, Schmidt initiated and supervised the creation of Hellerau. Yet it was the inﬂuence of ²² Lewis Mumford, ‘The Garden City Idea and Modern Planning’, introductory essay to F. J. Osborne’s edition of Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-Morrow, Cambridge, Mass., 1965, p. 29. Amongst the vast literature on Howard and the birth of the garden city movement, useful introductions are R. Beevers, The Garden City Utopia: A Critical Biography of Ebenezer Howard, London, 1988; and Robert Fishman, Urban Utopias in the Twentieth Century: Ebenezer Howard, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Cambridge, Mass., 1977, pp. 23–88. For a survey of the international reception of Howard’s ideas, see Ward, The Garden City. ²³ Hermann Muthesius, ‘Das Fabrikdorf Port Sunlight bei Liverpool’, Centralblatt der Bauverwaltung 25/19 (Berlin, 1 April 1899), pp. 146–8. ²⁴ Writing about contemporary views of the city, Susanne Hauser has dubbed ‘mixed’ spaces that are part city, part landscape, Zwischenstadt. This term has interesting resonances with the in-between city Schumacher proposed. It gives its name to a series of publications, the Schriftenreihe Zwischenstadt, edited by Thomas Sieverts, Wuppertal, 2004–. ²⁵ Klaus-Peter Arnold, Vom Sofakissen zum St¨adtebau: Die Geschichte der Deutschen Werkst¨atten und der Gartenstadt Hellerau, Dresden, 1993; Michael Fasshauer, Das Ph¨anomen Hellerau: Die Geschichte der Gartenstadt, Dresden, 1997; Werner Durth, ed., Entwurf zur Moderne: Hellerau, Stand Ort Bestimmung, Stuttgart, 1996; Hans-J¨urgen Sarfert, Hellerau: Die Gartenstadt und K¨unstlerkolonie, 2nd edn., Dresden, 1993.

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Friedrich Naumann, Schmidt’s close friend and ally at the time, which turned the project from a pastoral idyll into an ambitious social experiment, where the social beneﬁts of modern ‘quality work’ were to be tried out in practice. The factory building, the economic and spiritual heart of Hellerau, was designed by Richard Riemerschmid, and produced what became known as ‘Dresden machine furniture’. Around it, a settlement was laid out, with terraced houses for the workers and detached houses for the directors of the factory, according to the designs of Riemerschmid, Muthesius, and Tessenow. During the founding stage, Muthesius advised Schmidt on his plans for training workshops. Based on his observation of such courses in New York, when he was on his way to the St Louis World’s Exposition of 1904, Muthesius recommended that ‘a rationalized method of training craft workers’ in Dresden would be useful for ‘the very people who are best situated to raise the level of the trades working class’, and he advised on the curriculum for workers at Hellerau.²⁶ Yet as Maciuika observed, Muthesius’s involvement with Hellerau presented a challenge both for the architect and for the Prussian Ministry for Commerce and Manufacturing that employed him. Their pro-capitalist orientation clashed with the ideology of characters such as Heinrich Tessenow, Wolf Dohrn, the ‘idealistic’ executive secretary of the Werkbund, and others ‘whose ideas about modern architecture and art were at cross purpose with the pragmatic, business-oriented approach of the senior Wilhelmine ﬁgures’.²⁷ Maciuika interprets this conﬂict between idealism and pragmatism principally as a conﬂict between generations: a younger group of activists were more radical in turning away from the bourgeois world, rejected what was economically ‘useful’, and sought instead to get in touch with unadulterated nature and natural expression. Due to their inﬂuence, in the decades following its inception, the economic experiment of Hellerau ﬂoundered, and the aesthetic dimension came to the fore. Eventually, Hellerau’s fame came to be based not on its manufactured products, nor on the innovative social housing it provided, but on its cultural centre, the Festspielhaus, and its innovations in music and rhythmic dance under Dalcroze.²⁸ Yet chronology offers no sufﬁcient explanation for this change. To be sure, Tessenow, born in 1876, was one decade younger than Muthesius, ²⁶ Muthesius, in Hohe Warte 3 (1906/7), pp. 322–3, and letters from Karl Schmidt to Muthesius, dated 6 May 1908 and letter Muthesius to Karl Schmidt, dated 5 May 1908, all quoted from Maciuika, Before the Bauhaus, p. 232. ²⁷ Maciuika, Before the Bauhaus, p. 217. ²⁸ On the architecture of the Festspielhaus, see Marco DeMichelis, Heinrich Tessenow, 1876—1950: Das architektonische Gesamtwerk, Stuttgart, 1991. Dalcroze’s role in Hellerau was ﬁrst publicized in Otto Blensdorf, Die Hellerauer Schulfeste und die ‘Bildungsanstalt Jaques-Dalcroze’, Elberfeld, 1913. On Dalcroze’s ideas on rhythmic education and life reform, see J. Timothy Caldwell, Expressive Singing: Dalcroze Eurythmics for Voice, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1995; and Michael Kugler, Die Methode Jaques-Dalcroze und das Orff-Schulwerk ‘Elementare Musik¨ubung’, Frankfurt a.M., 2000. Dalcroze publicized his own method in Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, Rhythmus, Musik und Erziehung, reprint of the 1921 Basel edn., Seelze, 1994.

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Behrens, Riemerschmid and Schumacher, who were all born in the 1860s.²⁹ Yet Tessenow’s writings about the importance of Arts and Crafts, ‘Objectivism’, and the failings of historicism are barely distinguishable from the polemical texts produced by these other authors, which we have analysed in previous chapters. It is true that Tessenow preferred small, provincial towns to major industrial cities. Yet it would be too simplistic to suggest that Hellerau, originally the project of nineteenth-century bourgeois modernism, was ‘hijacked’ by younger, twentieth-century irrationalists. Hellerau’s initial conception had already been marked by an unresolved tension between a progressive and a nostalgic impulse. The material evidence provides some important clues. Hellerau’s overall layout captured some of the spontaneity and organic sitespeciﬁcity for which Schumacher had called. Its spatial conﬁguration created a settlement that was at once compact—thus minimizing the time workers spent travelling to the factory—and closely integrated into its natural surroundings. Street patterns were curving, offering ever-changing views of the fac¸ades, and interspersed with small squares and parks to facilitate social interaction (Figure 23). Within this ensemble, Riemerschmid’s factory building occupied a central location, and its internal arrangement set the tone for the settlement as a whole (Figure 24). A contemporary paper, dedicated to the cause of Arts and Crafts, described this conﬁguration thus: Even if the arrangement of the buildings around a courtyard apparently invokes rural precedents, especially that of a large agricultural estate, where several working buildings are grouped around the central farmhouse, at second glance, we sense the pulse of technical forces at work here. [. . .] Without compromising on practical issues, the architect has succeeded in balancing buildings so harmoniously, in sloping the roofs so gently, in ﬁtting the bulky red chimneys so perfectly into the angles of the long building for wood processing, that even a William Morris, an outspoken enemy of all things industrial, would enjoy this scene.³⁰

Many modern historians have shared that view. Nerdinger quotes approvingly from the above passage, and adds that the ‘great signiﬁcance’ of the factory building lay in ‘the combination of a functionally organized layout with an overall form characterized by variability and excitement’.³¹ Jefferies refers to the same building as an embodiment of the ethical vision of the reformer.³² Compared to this innovative design, Riemerschmid’s later work has been classiﬁed ²⁹ The birth years were: Muthesius 1861, Behrens 1868, Riemerschmid 1868, Schumacher 1869. ³⁰ Dekorative Kunst, 1911, pp. 335–6. ³¹ Winfried Nerdinger, Richard Riemerschmid, vom Jugendstil zum Werkbund: Werke und Dokumente, Munich, 1982, p. 404. ³² With regard to Riemerschmid’s factory building at Hellerau, Jefferies writes: ‘It was not by chance that the architectural characteristics most loudly championed by the Heimatsch¨utzer —honesty, simplicity, solidity—were ethical qualities above all else.’ Jefferies, Politics and Culture in Wilhelmine Germany: The Case of Industrial Architecture, Oxford and Washington, 1995, p. 81.

116 Figure 23 Prospectus for the Garden City Hellerau near Dresden, 1911, featuring streets nos. 2, 3, 4 and 19, with houses by Hermann Muthesius.

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Figure 24 Factory building with gatehouse, Deutsche Werkst¨atten, 1909, by Richard Riemerschmid, Hellerau. Photo: MU.

as a deterioration from the high standards set at Hellerau. In Nerdinger’s analysis, this ‘downhill trend’ set in almost immediately, beginning in 1906 and reaching a nadir in 1910, from which Riemerschmid never recovered.³³ Even though he still supported Muthesius’s pro-industrial stance during the Werkbund controversy of 1914, by this point, Riemerschmid’s own oeuvre had already lost touch with modern developments. When director of the Werkbund, a role he assumed in 1921, and then passed on to Mies van de Rohe in 1927, the organization deteriorated into what Campbell characterized as a ‘shapeless mash’ between modernism and reaction.³⁴ This view is widely shared in the Werkbund historiography. In the ofﬁcial history of the Werkbund, Riemerschmid is blamed for leading the organization along a path towards ‘mindless traditionalism’ and ‘faceless eclecticism’. Indeed, the same publication suggests that his conventionality led him to try and collude with the Nazi movement after 1933.³⁵ Yet the theory of Riemerschmid’s ideological U-turn from modernity to tradition is problematic. At its inception, Walter Gropius described the whole project of Hellerau as ‘kitschy rustic ³³ ‘Soon after 1906’, Nerdinger diagnoses a turn towards ‘decorative and historicizing’ forms, which he describes pejoratively as ‘reductionist style art’ and ‘gentriﬁed folk art’. Riemerschmid was now no longer able to ‘provide any new impulse’. Nerdinger, Richard Riemerschmid, p. 25. ³⁴ Joan Campbell, The German Werkbund: The Politics of Reform in the Applied Arts, Princeton, 1978, p. 170. ³⁵ Die Zwanziger Jahre des Deutschen Werkbunds, ed. Deutscher Werkbund and the WerkbundArchiv, Gießen and Lahn, 1982, esp. p. 337.

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romanticism’.³⁶ It is true that Gropius’s own instincts were internationalist rather than vernacular, and he was, therefore, not an impartial judge.³⁷ Yet a closer reading of Riemerschmid’s work at Hellerau reveals distinct traces of that Romantic agrarianism, which supposedly characterized only his later work. The visitor entered the Hellerau Factory through a quasi-medieval arch, complete with a quaint hut resembling the porter’s lodge of a grand estate, with a curving high pitched roof associated with the D¨urerzeit. In terms of layout, the entire factory was closely modelled on the traditional tripartite structure of a Baroque castle or country villa.³⁸ Read in conjunction with the village laid out around the factory, with curving little streets all oriented towards this central building, it invariably reminded the visitor of a small Saxon residential town, complete with the princely residence at its heart. The archaic drystone wall that surrounded the factory and shielded it from the outside world was another anachronism. Much the same can be said of the details. The decorated wooden shutters testify to a taste, developed by the young Riemerschmid, for Bavarian folk art from the Rococo period.³⁹ There was nothing remotely industrial about them. Other features underline the deliberate dilettantism of the building: a shed dormer awkwardly squeezed into a corner, the uneven height of connecting buildings and their windows, the peculiar angle at which one wing meets the gate. Muthesius had used such devices, too, but in his work, they occurred as deliberate ideological correctives of an otherwise highly rational, ‘ordered’ and modern building. Riemerschmid, by contrast, did not put such features in quotation marks: he simply reproduced historical forms, transplanting them from the past to the present without any ‘translation’ that would acknowledge the new, industrial context. The effect resembled a theatre stage for the performance of traditional ideals of handicrafts and village life. While Jefferies is right when he claims that this performance fulﬁlled a ‘moral’ purpose, this purpose hardly corresponded to the qualities of honesty, simplicity and solidity which he cites. Rather than simple and honest, the Hellerau factory was complex and contrived, or to put it more positively: imaginary and emotionally highly suggestive. If a particular kind of morality was inscribed into these forms, it was not one of solidity. Rather, the Hellerau Factory can be understood as the stage set for a German morality play. Its purpose was indeed ‘ethical’—in much the same way as Grimms’ fairy tales had an ethical function, ³⁶ The original German phrase is ‘unsachliche Bauernhausromantik’. Walter Gropius, letter to Osthaus, dated 23 March 1912, cited in Nerdinger, Richard Riemerschmid, p. 404. ³⁷ Sarah Williams Goldhagen, ‘Coda’, in idem and R´ejean Legault, eds., Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture, Montreal and Cambridge, Mass., 2000. ³⁸ This is visible in the wide-angle illustration in Miron Mislin, ed., Laßt mich doch, Kinder, hier komme ich wahrscheinlich nie wieder her! In memoriam Julius Posener, Berlin, 1997, p. 269, ﬁg. 11. ³⁹ Trained not as an architect but a painter at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts in 1888–90, Riemerschmid developed an interest in furniture design. His ideas were inspired by The Studio, to which he subscribed, and by the collection of rustic furniture in the Gothic style which he studied in the Bavarian National Museum in Munich. See Nerdinger, Richard Riemerschmid, p. 13.

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and were written with the dual purpose of individual improvement and social critique. Judged in this light, it cannot surprise when Nerdinger concludes his own, entirely favourable analysis of Hellerau with the observation that it formed ‘the polar opposite’ of Peter Behrens’s Turbine Hall in Berlin.⁴⁰ The latter, analysed in Chapter 2 of this study, was a ﬂagship building of a historically minded modernism. Yet in the comparison with Hellerau, the differences are glaring, and to account for them, Nerdinger cannot but see Behrens’s work as ‘purely functionalist architecture’.⁴¹ In fact, the difference was one between two divergent appropriations of history. One, as exempliﬁed by Behrens’s building, might be described as symbolic: this was a formal language that ‘embodied’ a past whose principal function was the implicit creation of a mental order. The other, as exempliﬁed by Riemerschmid’s work at Hellerau, was allegorical: it narrated a self-consciously imaginary narrative about the past, which made its pedagogic ambitions explicit. To describe Hellerau’s design as a moralizing allegory is not to deny the social thrust of its pedagogic programme. Most of the Werkbund activists involved in the foundation of this ﬁrst German garden city were genuinely interested in using it as a launch pad for a new kind of industrial culture. Many saw it as a potential ‘third way’ between industrial progress and the healing potential of nature. Yet what was created at Hellerau was not so much a new synthesis as a compromise between conﬂicting agendas. The ‘modernists’ were therefore quick to abandon it. The whole concept of the garden city, they concluded, was ill-suited as a blueprint for the integration of the vernacular and the modern. Their scepticism echoed the reservations of Munich liberals about the ‘greening’ of the city. Camillo Sitte himself, the Viennese urban planner so often credited with the revival of traditional street patterns, which were one of the hallmarks of Hellerau, surmised that it was a mistake to believe that urban expansion could be channelled into garden cities that were physically removed from urban centres.⁴² From this point onwards, German bourgeois modernists turned their attentions to suburbia, where nature could plausibly be invoked, but where the connection with the big industrial city was not severed.⁴³ Nature was to be used as a vehicle for civilizing modernity, reconciling it with the practical and psychic needs of individuals and communities. But the symbolic political grammar of suburbia was far removed from the deliberate naivety of Arts-and-Crafts-style rusticism and allegorical narratives about natural living. To be sure, not all allegorical devices were abandoned: but they were employed in new ways. One ⁴⁰ Nerdinger, Richard Riemerschmid, p. 404. ⁴¹ Ibid. ⁴² G. Collins and C. Crasemann-Collins, Camillo Sitte and the Birth of Modern City Planning, London, 1965. ⁴³ Muthesius, ‘Die Werkbundarbeit der Zukunft: Vortrag gehalten auf der K¨olner Werkbundtagung 1914’, reprinted in Deutscher Werkbund, ed., Zwischen Kunst und Industrie: Der Deutsche Werkbund, new edn., Stuttgart, 1987, pp. 85–96, quote from p. 94.

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example is the use of archaizing materials, such as rough stone, shingles, brick and timber-framing. Such ‘naturalist’ gestures, which signalled a spiritual connection of man-made culture with the physical landscape, did not disappear from the bourgeois cityscape. Yet these materials, too, were transformed from explicit allegories to rather more subtle, psychological devices. In this transformation, the artistic movement of Expressionism proved instrumental. In 1911, the famous Munich-based Expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter was set up. Gabriele M¨unter, one of the founding members, based much of her work on the folk art of her home region, Upper Bavaria. She was especially interested in a tradition called Hinterglasmalerei: for centuries, Bavarian craftsmen had produced glass paintings where the upper layer of the image was painted onto glass from behind. This technique produced simple visual effects, prominent lines and bright colours. In her own work, M¨unter transposed this vernacular idiom into a modern visual language of great expressive potential.⁴⁴ Bourgeois modernists in the Werkbund aimed at a similar effect in the different context of architecture and urban planning. As our analysis of the use of timber in Muthesius’s Haus Freudenberg, and of the Gersons’ decorative ceramic tiling in Eppendorf and Rotherbaum revealed, these vernacular allusions were employed to insert a range of vernacular reference points into a modern context to achieve a psychological effect, without resorting to romanticizing narratives about untamed nature. Meaning was now transported in a non-narrative manner: the expressivity of these signs, their immediate sensual impact on the mind of the spectator, which did not need to be rationalized in order to be perceived, constituted their modernity. Yet the desire to control and regulate the psychological effects that were conjured up in this way was just as prominent. In part, this was achieved through a written and verbal discourse that framed the use of all things natural and archaic: the sheer volume of publications produced in and around the Werkbund justifying this natural turn is evidence of this. In this discourse, the category of function was vital. The functionalist justiﬁcations for the irregular positioning of windows, as we encountered them in Muthesius’s own writings, are a characteristic example. Although their visual effect may have been reminiscent of a crooked, unplanned farmhouse built by peasant hands, the accompanying literature made it clear that nothing here was random, but in fact corresponded to a rational and pre-planned set of functional requirements. But perhaps even more revealingly, the material culture of the ‘natural city’ itself contained numerous counter-naturalizing strategies. ⁴⁴ The same could be said of another artist from the group, Vassily Kandinsky, who developed the colourful rhythmic language of his paintings from models of Russian vernacular art. Ample examples from both these artists’ work are provided in two recent exhibition catalogues: Der Blaue Reiter, ed. the St¨adtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus M¨unchen, Sammlungskatalog 1, 2nd edn., Munich, 1966; and Der Blaue Reiter. Avantgarde und Volkskunst, exhibition catalogue, Bielefeld, 2003/4.

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This is most apparent in the treatment of space and spatial relations. Whilst the Werkbund architects proclaimed the merits of asymmetry, they made extensive use of the symmetrical, which was thinly disguised behind a few randomly scattered vernacular ornaments. Even in Haus Freudenberg, the central part of the fac¸ade was perfectly symmetrical (irregular windows were only placed on the sides). The same applies to the space surrounding the house, with a central approach ﬂanked by perfect squares of grass and straight rows of trees on either side. The reverse of the house, which faced the natural glacial valley Rehwiese, was even more pronounced in its anti-naturalism. Much of the building cost for the overall project was caused by the gigantic supporting walls, which turned the gentle slope behind the house into a terraced, neo-Renaissance garden. Such devices simultaneously integrated nature into the urban fabric, and employed an array of (mostly historical) ordering forms to contain, civilize and tame the natural realm. Hence, Renaissance notions of regolarit´a run like a subcutaneous thread through the whole movement of vernacular modernism. A recourse to classical forms should therefore not be interpreted as an ‘aberration’ from Muthesius’s early style.⁴⁵ They remained constitutive to bourgeois modernism throughout the period. The formal garden was symptomatic of this tendency: behind the apparent pragmatism of the vernacular loomed an almost obsessive drive to bourgeois order. In Hamburg, Schumacher moved the nature agenda from suburbia into the heart of the city. His development plan, entitled ‘Schema der nat¨urlichen Entwicklung des Organismus Hamburg’, envisaged the penetration of green triangles from the surrounding regions right into the centre of the city. This scheme went beyond the park system as it was developed in Washington DC, because it not only connected man-made green spaces in the city, but also constituted a bridge between these and landscape areas outside the city. Surrounding green zones, meadows and woodlands such as the Kl¨ovensteen on the fringes of the city formed the outer edge of the green triangles, which continued as increasingly formal parks inside the urban territory, and which converged in a central Stadtpark. In this way, Schumacher’s plan literally brought nature into the city; but it also exempliﬁed how this move required a translation into speciﬁcally urban ordering systems, which made recourse to an openly historicist grammar at its core. Schumacher conceived of ‘the people’ as a single mass. In the Stadtpark, his general obsession with symmetry and Baroque axes achieved its most concretely social usage. The layout and gigantic scale resembled Versailles more than the less regimented ‘English Gardens’ which proliferated in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany.⁴⁶ The space was ⁴⁵ This is a distinction repeatedly made by Roth, Muthesius, for example, pp. 40–50, 65–74 and 258–64. ⁴⁶ By the later nineteenth century, the ‘English Garden’ design had become so commonplace that the engineers of the Hamburg Tiefbauamt could simply not imagine an alternative pattern

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structured around a wide central axis, with narrower tree-lined alleyways running parallel on both sides (Figure 25). The central axis culminated in large regular basins, one oval-shaped, and the other rectangular. Other ‘Baroque’ elements included grand staircases, balustrades, pavilions, pergolas, water cascades, an array of statues on high pedestals, and geometric ﬂower beds. Yet this was no conventional historicism. While relying on a Baroque prototype of order, the historical reference point—the palace or villa—was missing. Its place had been taken by a Stadthalle, not a town hall, but a restaurant and public resting-place for the ordinary people who used the park. At the park’s opposite end, the main axis culminated in a huge, imposing yet irrefutably practical water tower of red brick, designed by the Dresden architect Oscar Menzel (Figure 26).⁴⁷ Schumacher used the historical prototype of the Baroque garden not as an allegorical narrative, as historicists had done, but as a stage for the exemplary conduct of an ideal social life. Ironically, in doing so, Schumacher actually recovered a function of the Baroque garden which historicists had neglected: gardens such as Versailles and Vaux-le-Vicomte were not meant to be experienced by the individual spectator. They were stages, designed as background settings for the huge courtly festivals, often with over 10,000 participants, during which the political order of absolutism was acted out and thus symbolically reinforced.⁴⁸ To be sure, with the royal residence, Schumacher also removed the political focus, indeed the entire concept of the hierarchical and strictly regimented social layering of the early modern court. Yet the Stadtpark, too, was a stage, and the movements conducted here had just as profound a symbolic resonance.⁴⁹ The for an urban park. The English Garden was imported into Germany as an emblematic princely garden of the Enlightenment. Studies which elucidate this ideological background are Adrian von Buttlar, Der Englische Landsitz, 1715–1760: Symbol eines liberalen Weltentwurfs, Mittenwald, 1982; Maiken Umbach, Federalism and Enlightenment in Germany, 1740–1806, London and Ohio, 2000; and Erhard Hirsch, Dessau-W¨orlitz: Aufkl¨arung und Fr¨uhklassik, Leipzig, 1985. On the English Garden as nineteenth-century public park, see Theodor Dombart, Der Englische Garten zu M¨unchen: Geschichte seiner Entstehung und seines Ausbaues zur großst¨adtischen Parkanlage, Munich, 1972; and A. Ponte, ‘Public Parks in Great Britain and the United States: From a Spirit of the Place to a Spirit of Civilisation’, in Monique Mosser and Georges Teyssot, eds., The History of Garden Design: The Western Tradition from the Renaissance to the Present Day, London, 1991, pp. 373–86. On the revival of the formal garden in the later nineteenth century, see G¨unter Mader, Gartenkunst des 20. Jahrhunderts: Garten- und Landschaftsarchitektur in Deutschland, Stuttgart, 1999; and idem, Der architektonische Garten in England, Stuttgart and Munich, 2000; Uwe Schneider, Hermann Muthesius und die Reformdiskussion in der Gartenarchitektur des fr¨uhen 20. Jahrhunderts, Worms, 2000; Franziska Kirchner, Der Central Park in New York und der Einﬂuß der deutschen Gartentheorie und -praxis auf seine Gestaltung, Worms, 2000; and, as a primary source, Reginald Blomﬁeld and F. Inigo Thomas, The Formal Garden in England, London, 1985, reprint of the original, 1892 edn. ⁴⁷ Schumacher held a competition for the water tower in 1906–7; Menzel’s winning design was erected in 1913–14. ⁴⁸ Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Gardens of Versailles, Cambridge, 1997; Robert W. Berger, In the Garden of the Sun King: Studies on the Park of Versailles under Louis XIV, Washington, 1985. ⁴⁹ Schumacher himself described the intended effect thus: ‘The whole [area] has been designed like a gigantic natural theatre, with the terraces in front of the Stadthalle as the stage and the water

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Figure 25 Hamburg Stadtpark, 1911, overall conception by Fritz Schumacher. Aerial view photographed in 1925, by kind permission of bildarchiv-hamburg.de.

Figure 26 Water Tower (now Planetarium), 1915, by Oscar Menzel, Hamburg Stadtpark. Photo: MU.

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park brought people from different classes together in a single space with no segregation. Indeed, the leisure areas of the park were speciﬁcally designed to entice the working classes out of their overcrowded homes into the public arena, inviting them to use the outdoor space of the city for private recreation. In Schumacher’s own words, this park was the result of necessity, the necessity that arises from the permanent piling up of people and masses of stone, and of the pain that arises for city-dwellers because of the disappearance of any living relationship with nature. In other words: what used to be the decorative park of the past has become the social park of our times, the princely park has become a people’s park.⁵⁰

The park’s lawns, paths and lakes suited a variety of popular leisure activities: playing games, sports, relaxing, bathing, riding, dancing, as well as enjoying music, art, and eating outside were all encouraged. Yet the space imposed a new sense of order on the people who moved within it, constructed around not the ﬁgure of a ruler, but a sense of belonging to an organic social body. The ‘English’ landscape garden encouraged individual perambulation, which is why Schumacher held its layout to be suitable only for private gardens. The Hamburg Stadtpark, by contrast, merged the individual into the collective, thus dissolving rather than reinforcing any sense of privacy.⁵¹ Visitors formed a single whole, which architecture acted upon, improving as well as controlling their leisure time. The layout of this space would discipline the users in ingenious and imperceptible ways. Schumacher himself spoke of the ‘space grouping the people’—instead of the grammatically much more common phrase of people forming groups in a particular space.⁵² This ordered space, a kind of hybrid between nature and its negation, was to act as a template for the city. Wherever Schumacher was responsible for the layout of a new urban area, as in the Jarrestadt and Langenhorn, he would aim at a symmetrical arrangement, with a monumental yet vernacular public building (typically a school) as its aesthetic and social centrepiece. Another telling incidence of this ordering impulse in the conﬁguration of urban nature was Schumacher’s treatment of the river Alster. The Alster is a small stream that ﬂows from Schleswig-Holstein in a broadly southerly direction through Hamburg’s medieval core into the river Elbe. In the early modern period, a small dam near Hamburg’s Town Hall created the Alster basin, from which canals ﬂowed through water mills into the Elbe. Later, this basin was extended to create a decorative lake around which expensive villas were built.⁵³ By the beginning of the orchestra. It has been calculated in such a way as to group thousands of people into an audience.’ Fritz Schumacher, Ein Volkspark, dargestellt am Hamburger Stadtpark, Munich, 1928, p. 59. ⁵⁰ Schumacher, Ein Volkspark, pp. 8 and 17. ⁵¹ Ibid., p. 8. ⁵² Ibid., p. 59. ⁵³ Jens Beck and Ralf G. Voss, Die Alster: Ein Fluß pr¨agt die Stadt, Hamburg, 1999; Susanne Harth, ‘Stadt und Region: Fritz Schumachers Konzepte zu Wohnungsbau und Stadtgestalt’, in Hartmut Frank, ed., Reformkultur und Moderne, Stuttgart, 1994, pp. 157–81.

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the twentieth century, to the north of this basin, the Alster was still a natural stream. Numerous of the painters working under Lichtwark’s patronage to create a Hanseatic School of Impressionism painted this stretch of the Alster as a picturesque landmark.⁵⁴ Yet the Impressionist idealization of a quaint natural stream was not compatible with Schumacher’s desire to control nature through a sense of structure. Thus, the very same building director who created large green zones in the city invented a programme for the transformation of the Alster into a highly artiﬁcial, geometrical canal. Its only economic purpose was the creation of attractive plots for domestic housing development. Principally, it was conceived as a leisure zone for the ‘masses’, which it was designed to manage in certain ways. A series of geometrical basins were created, to encourage boating and canoeing, while little steamships took Hamburgers on panoramic cruises (Figure 27). The buzzwords of Schumacher’s vision were fresh air, movement, and a way of bringing large groups together to move in free yet tightly coordinated ways. To achieve this dual effect, historic prototypes were called upon. The meandering path of the river was straightened, rectangular borders and shapes were created, and throughout, the water was framed by giant granite walls, complete with matching pavilions and grand staircases, simultaneously creating a sense of order and wide openness (Figure 28). Through these manipulations, the surface of the water itself was transformed: where a little stream had ﬂowed with ripples and waves, a perfectly still surface was created, which acted like a giant mirror, reﬂecting back not only the image of the framing architecture, but also the image of the onlooker. These were Rose’s ‘webs of visibilities’ pushed to extremes. In a second step, Schumacher placed carefully considered symbolic icons of wilderness into the highly de-naturalized urban environment. Animal sculptures were key to this. Of course, historicist buildings had already featured heraldic animals, lions or mythological creatures like unicorns, which supported crests or columns. They were frequent features especially of court cities, and their presence underlined the signiﬁcance of palatial and ofﬁcial buildings. In the shape of the equestrian statue, images of horses also featured prominently in such cities, carrying members of the princely family, generals and other such ﬁgures—the ensemble on Berlin’s Unter den Linden is a famous example. In Hamburg, a republican city-state, such animal iconographies were unusual. Heraldic symbolism on buildings was less prominent, free-standing statues were rare, equestrian statues entirely absent. Yet it was into the cityscape of Hamburg that Schumacher introduced his programme of animal sculptures. These were commissioned and displayed on a variety of public sites: on street corners, squares and, most importantly, parks. A favoured location was the Stadtpark. Schumacher explained their signiﬁcance in a dedicated educational brochure on the outdoor sculptures, which described the uplifting emotional effect of these ⁵⁴ Jenkins, Provincial Modernity, pp. 177–216.

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Figure 27 Canalized Alster river, overall conception by Fritz Schumacher, 1911, Hamburg, view of granite wall at Alsterkr¨uger Kehre. Photo: MU.

Figure 28 Canalized Alster river, view of basin with pavilion. Photo: MU.

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artworks on the passer-by.⁵⁵ The animals were displayed throughout the park. Unlike their historicist precursors, they mostly appeared on low pedestals, just above the eye level of the passer-by. One of Schumacher’s favourite sculptors was Georg Wbra (1872–1939). Wbra’s work is largely forgotten today, which is unsurprising from an aesthetic point of view. Yet his large-scale, realistic yet faintly neo-classical animals suited Schumacher’s agenda perfectly. A typical work was his 1910 Diana on a deer, which was displayed in a rhododendron garden (Figure 29). The deer itself looked naturalistic, as though the real animal had just stepped out of the thicket onto the park’s lawns. The ﬁgure of Diana on its back, naked and boyishly muscular, was similarly naturalistic; indeed, she appears almost like a devotee of the nudist movement, emerging to sunbathe naked in the park. Through these associations, the sculpture framed the park as a zone for the encounter with nature. Nevertheless, the subject matter remained classical. Through the reference to the Roman goddess of hunting, the seemingly mundane activities depicted here—grazing, riding, or naked sunbathing—were infused with a mythological signiﬁcance, and lifted onto the elevated plains of bourgeois Bildung. Other artists who were commissioned to design animal sculptures for Hamburg’s public spaces included August Gaul, Ernst Kolbe and Hans Martin Ruwoldt.⁵⁶ All sculpted animals in a similar manner, with a realism that was mediated by a formal simplicity, achieving an effect that was orderly and disciplined, but also left the emotive appeal of the nature-like animal intact.⁵⁷ Contemporaries did not always take kindly to this animal invasion. Wild animals and naked humans were considered offensive to the bourgeois gaze, even obscene. The Hamburger Anzeiger described the crouched position of the female ﬁgure in Kolbe’s Große Kriechende in the Stadtpark as a ‘ghastly contortion’, and referred to the expressive rough surface of the piece as the ‘unﬁnished work of ⁵⁵ Fritz Schumacher, Plastik im Freien: Versuche im Betrachten von Kunstwerken, Hamburg, 1918. ⁵⁶ In 1912, August Gaul designed six bronze penguins standing around a small circular pond close to Wrba’s Diana. Kolbe’s ﬁgures ﬂanked the narrow basin in front of the Water Tower in the Stadtpark. Schumacher persuaded an anonymous donor to pay for their execution in 1927. Ruwoldt was commissioned to create a range of wild beasts, including lions, bears and panthers that were displayed in various locations, for example in the courtyard of Schumacher’s Waldd¨orferschule. ⁵⁷ Among these artists, only Ruwoldt later moved towards a relatively higher degree of abstraction. As one of his last acts in ofﬁce, in 1933, Schumacher commissioned Ruwoldt to create a fountain for the new Crematorium at Ohlsdorf. Max Sauerlandt, Director of the Hamburger Museum for Arts and Crafts from 1919 to 1933, and a promoter of modern art, wrote to Schumacher to alleviate any concerns about Ruwoldt’s new style, which he described as a ‘more severe style’, thus couching the move towards modernism in yet other archaizing gestures. Letter from Max Sauerlandt to Fritz Schumacher, 1933, quoted in Maike Bruhns, ed., Hans Martin Ruwoldt, 1891–1969: Skulpturen, Reliefs, Zeichnungen, exhibition catalogue, Berlin and Hamburg, 1991, p. 11. This new ‘severe style’ also made Ruwoldt attractive for the Nazis, who commissioned him to design two tigers for the portal of the Panzerj¨ager barracks in Hamburg-Wandsbek (Bruhns, Hans Martin Ruwoldt, p. 16). Ruwoldt himself was embarrassed when he was also commissioned to design a monumental relief of an eagle which was to replace the destroyed Barlach relief on the Hamburg Rathausmarkt; Ruwoldt had greatly admired Barlach’s work (Bruhns, Hans Martin Ruwoldt, pp. 19–21).

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Figure 29 ‘Diana on a deer’, 1910, by Georg Wbra, Hamburg Stadtpark. Photo: MU.

an amateur’.⁵⁸ The same paper also criticized the proliferation of animal statues in the city at large. ‘We don’t want to bump into these stone things at every corner. Throw out this rubbish!’⁵⁹ This reaction is unsurprising in view of the fact that free-standing statues had not been part of the traditional cityscape. Moreover, the sculptures of crawling, crouching, twisting and kneeling creatures that now populated Hamburg’s public spaces represented no easily recognizable pedagogic programme. Instead of depicting celebrated political leaders, charitable benefactors or worthy allegories, they seemed to turn the city into a kind of safari park, and lacked the dignity of traditional markers of civic identity. Yet it is also clear that the symbolic universe of the city was being transformed in this period, and that on the whole, objects that were regarded as strange and alien one day could be incorporated and submerged in the built environment the next, to the extent that they became barely noticeable as commonplace features of the cityscape. While shock and incomprehension may have been typical ﬁrst responses, it seems ordinary people quickly got used to the new cult of naturalism in the city, and were no longer offended by its visual manifestations, so that protests of the above sort disappear from the written sources. Nature became the city’s ‘second nature’. This change requires further exploration. ⁵⁸ Hamburger Anzeiger, 1929, quoted from Hartmut Frank, ed., Fritz Schumacher: Reformkultur und Moderne, Stuttgart, 1994, p. 113. ⁵⁹ Hamburger Anzeiger, 1930, quoted from ibid.

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Several causes contributed. We have already explored changing perceptions of the landscape, notably through the rapid transformation of Heimat and landscape protection into a mass movement. Hand-in-hand with this went the rise of new bodily practices of experiencing nature, such as rambling, picnicking and cycling. Although often pioneered by a self-styled ‘alternative milieu’, these practices ﬁrst spread amongst the bourgeoisie of Germany, and, at least before 1914, remained very largely conﬁned to it.⁶⁰ New physical practices of experiencing and appropriating nature in turn informed new symbolic representations. Around 1900, a vernacular revival, which had ﬁrst emerged in the context of the Arts and Crafts movement, quickly spread into mainstream, bourgeois architecture, and rendered rustic motifs acceptable, even popular amongst bourgeois patrons and clients.⁶¹ The more the landscape was appreciated as a practical site and a symbolic resource for recreation, the more seamlessly it was integrated into the fabric of the city. Yet while this greening of the urban grammar was a transnational trend, the ideological ramiﬁcations still varied hugely, not least because the trope of nature was so malleable. Rather than a move to ever more ‘natural’ cities, a host of rival strategies emerged, which changed not only over time, but also from place to place. One important factor inﬂuencing this process was the spread of what has been termed a ‘colonial imagination’ in Wilhelmine Germany.⁶² This term ⁶⁰ John Alexander Williams, Turning to Nature in Germany: Hiking, Nudism and Conservation 1900–1940, Stanford, 2007, pp. 1–104; Rollins, A Greener Vision. Ebert, ‘Zwischen ‘‘Radreiten’’ ’; idem, ‘Cycling towards the Nation’; and Rabenstein, Radsport und Gesellschaft; demonstrate that, once cycling was embraced by large numbers of working-class practitioners, it lost its appeal for the German bourgeoisie. ⁶¹ Didem Ekici, ‘From Rikli’s Light-and-Air Hut to Tessenow’s Patenthaus: K¨orperkultur and the Modern Dwelling in Germany, 1890–1914’, Journal of Architecture 13/4 (2008), pp. 379–82. General introductions to vernacular themes in the Arts and Crafts movement are: Peter Davey, Arts and Crafts Architecture, London, 1995 (original edn. London, 1980); Malcolm Haslam, Arts and Crafts, London, 1988; Gillian Naylor, The Arts and Crafts Movement: A Study of its Sources, Ideals and Inﬂuence on Design Theory, London, 1971; Elizabeth Cumming and Wendy Kaplan, The Arts and Crafts Movement, London, 1991; Lionel Lambourne, Utopian Craftsmen: The Arts and Crafts Movement from the Cotswolds to Chicago, London, 1980; James Macauley, ed., Arts and Crafts Houses: Charles Rennie Mackintosh: Hill House; C.F.A. Voysey: The Homestead; Greene & Greene: Gamble House, London, 1999 (originally published 1992–4 in the series ‘Architecture in Detail’, ed. James Macaulay, Wendy Hitchmough and Edward R. Bosley). ⁶² Milestones in the new cultural history of German colonialism were Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870, Durham, 1997; idem, Sara Friedrichsmeyer and Sara Lennox, eds., The Imperialist Imagination: German Colonialism and its Legacy, Ann Arbor, 1998; Todd Kontje, German Orientalism, Ann Arbor, 2004; Matthew Fitzpatrick, ‘A Fall from Grace? National Unity and the Search for Naval Power and Colonial Possessions 1848–1884’, German History 25/2 (2007), pp. 135–61; and idem, ‘Narrating Empire: Die Gartenlaube and Germany’s Nineteenth-Century Liberal Expansionism’, German Studies Review 30/1 (2007); Birthe Kundrus, Moderne Imperialisten: Das Kaiserreich im Spiegel seiner Kolonien, Cologne, 2003; idem, ed., Phantasiereiche: Zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Kolonialismus, Frankfurt, 2003; and Joachim Zeller, Kolonialdenkm¨aer und Geschichtsbewusstsein: Eine Untersuchung der kolonialdeutschen Erinnerungskultur, Frankfurt, 2000. For a critical overview of the current state of the debate, see Maiken Umbach, ed., ‘Forum: The German Colonial Imagination’, with

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needs to be used with extreme caution. Used too loosely, it can easily obscure signiﬁcant degrees of political and economic opposition to overseas expansion, which, according to some, was the real distinguishing feature of German politics in this period.⁶³ Another problem, to which Philipp Ther and others have drawn attention, is that the fashionable preoccupation with German overseas colonialism, which was conceived as a possible analogy with the British and French colonial imaginations, is threatening to obscure the much more inﬂuential and long-standing legacy of German continental imperialism, which dated back to Prussia’s participation in the eighteenth-century divisions of Poland, and culminated in the grand schemes of eastward expansion of National Socialism.⁶⁴ Important as this continental colonialism may have been, recent research has also made a persuasive case for taking seriously the impact of an Africancentred colonial imaginary in Wihelmine Germany. To be sure, this did not necessarily coincide with or facilitate actual imperialist politics, but it did give rise to a diffuse yet powerful popular imagination of a supposedly primitive world of untamed natural energies, heightened instincts, exciting adventures and civilization’s Freudian Other. Encounters with this Other became a staple of German popular literature and visual culture in the decades around 1900.⁶⁵ They often took place outside colonial contexts in the narrow sense: the German obsession with Karl May’s fantasies about ‘Red Indians’ as noble savages is a case in point.⁶⁶ Another instance of the disjuncture between the colonial imagination contributions by Lora Wildenthal, Juergen Zimmerer, Russell A. Berman, Jan R¨uger, Bradley Naranch and Birthe Kundrus, German History 26/2 (2008), pp. 251–71. ⁶³ See Russell Berman, ‘Der ewige Zweite: Deutschlands Sekund¨arkolonialismus’, in Kundrus, Phantasiereiche, pp. 19–34. An analogous debate about the limits of British popular imperialism was sparked by the seminal works of Catherine Hall, notably her Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867, Chicago, 2002; and her edited volume Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A Reader, Manchester, 2000. Her account clashed with a view that British imperialism was a narrow, London-centred elite discourse in British society, with practically no resonance in working-class and popular culture, as suggested in Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain, Oxford, 2004. For a discussion of the merits of both positions, see the dedicated ‘Forum’ in Victorian Studies 45/4 (2003), pp. 716–28, which includes further contributions by Antoinette Burton and Peter Hulme. ⁶⁴ Philipp Ther, ‘Deutsche Geschichte als imperiale Geschichte: Polen, slawophone Minderheiten und das Kaiserreich als kontinentales Empire’, in Sebastian Conrad and J¨urgen Osterhammel, eds., Das Kaiserreich Transnational: Deutschland in der Welt, 1871–1914, G¨ottingen, 2004, pp. 129–48. ⁶⁵ Ample evidence for the proliferation of colonial imagery in German public consciousness is provided by David Ciarlo, ‘Consuming Race, Envisioning Empire: Colonialism and German Mass Culture, 1887–1914’, Ph.D. dissertation, Wisconsin-Madison, 2003; and Bradley D. Naranch, ‘Inventing the Auslandsdeutsche: Emigration, Colonial Fantasy, and German National Identity, 1848–71’, in Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz and Lora Wildenthal, eds., Germany’s Colonial Pasts, Lincoln and London, 2005, pp. 21–40. All contributions in this volume seek to apply Hall’s approach to the German case, yet most are focused on the afterlife of colonialism in the Weimar and Nazi years. ⁶⁶ Heribert Frhr. v. Feilitzsch, ‘Karl May: The Wild West as seen in Germany’, Journal of Popular Culture 27/3 (2004), pp. 173–89. On the afterlife of Karl May in German popular culture, see Katrin Sieg, Ethnic Drag: Performing Race, Nation and Sexuality in West Germany, Ann Arbor, 2002.

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and politics proper is the appropriation of other nations’ empires, not with the intention of actual conquest, but as spheres where the encounter with the ‘wild’ could be imaginatively rehearsed without any reality checks. The ease with which German audiences imagined the world portrayed in the British colonial movie Victoria Falls as a German colonial universe is a case in point. As one periodical commented on the occasion of the screening of this ﬁlm by the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft in 1907, the ﬁlm showed ‘how German industry was very soon to utilize hydropower to bring electricity to the interior of Africa’.⁶⁷ Actual colonial propaganda and the imagination of an exotic Other informed each other, albeit in indirect and mediated ways. For this reason, it is worth bearing in mind that Hamburg’s pioneering role as a site for the physical and spiritual ‘naturalization’ of the metropolis coincided with its transformation into the launchpad of Germany’s new colonial ambitions. Again, this was a process which drew on pre-existing mental dispositions and discursive conventions. After German uniﬁcation, it became a staple of political rhetoric in the city to invoke Hamburg’s age-old role as the Empire’s gateway to a wider world, and its Hanseatic history as the core of a maritime network of trade and discovery.⁶⁸ This served to legitimate older free-trading privileges, which had underpinned the establishment of a free port area when Hamburg joined the German customs union. The economic consequences were tangible. By 1914, Hamburg was not only Germany’s ﬁrst port, but the second largest port in the whole of Europe, after Rotterdam. This did not mean that Hamburg’s business elites supported the acquisition of formal overseas colonies. To be sure, in negotiations with Berlin, Hamburg’s overseas traders often posed as patriotic imperialists, especially when they repeatedly approached the Reich to provide military protection for their overseas interests. Yet far from simply jumping onto the imperialist bandwagon, the city government remained sceptical about the wider political implications associated with the imperial civilizing mission. When in 1889, Bismarck approached the Hamburg Senate with the offer to run the German colonial administration, possibly jointly with Bremen, the Senate refused.⁶⁹ This was no isolated incident. Research has shown that in Hamburg, public support for the establishment of a formal overseas empire appears to have remained limited. There were, to be sure, carefully choreographed public celebrations, especially when it came to the launching of new navy ships in ⁶⁷ Der Kinematograph 28 (10 July 1907), quoted from Wolfgang Fuhrmann, ‘German Colonial Cinematography’, unpublished working paper, Leiden, 2003, p. 1. ¨ ⁶⁸ Plagemann, Ubersee, pp. 299–308; Umbach, ‘A Tale of Second Cities’. ⁶⁹ Johanna Elisabeth Becker, Die Gr¨undung des Deutschen Kolonialinstituts in Hamburg: Zur Vorgeschichte der Hamburgischen Universit¨at, unpublished MA dissertation, Hamburg, 2005, p. 16. This decision had far-reaching consequences. Over the following decade, the colonial administration was built up in Berlin, and closely modelled on the Prussian administration. Rudolf von Albertini, ¨ Europ¨aische Kolonialherrschaft: Die Expansion in Ubersee von 1880–1940, Munich, 1982.

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Hamburg.⁷⁰ At the same time, compared to the national average, membership in pro-imperialist associations remained low. Wilhelmine Germany was home to a plethora of voluntary associations that were formed to celebrate, publicize or promote imperialism; the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft formed a national umbrella for this dense network of local and regional clubs. In 1896, Hamburg was one of the last German cities to open a branch.⁷¹ To some extent, this reluctance to embrace imperialism wholeheartedly stemmed from the simple fact that, in spite of all the rhetoric likening the Hanseatic League to the modern Empire, trade with German colonies was economically insigniﬁcant, constituting less than 0.5 per cent of overseas trade in 1904, and only 0.7 per cent by 1914.⁷² It required a big leap of the imagination to identify a world shaped by German goods with a world run by German colonizers, and Hamburg’s Pfeffers¨acke, conscious as always of budgetary constraints, were not keen to make that leap. Yet Hamburg banks soon formed a powerful lobby in favour of the consolidation of colonial interests. In addition, the shipping lines, principally Woermann and Laeisz, played a vital role, beneﬁting in turn from large Reich subsidies.⁷³ While it would be irresponsible to read a direct causal relationship into this change in policy direction and the proliferation of a vaguely colonialist allegorical vocabulary, changing economic imperatives at least helped overcome some of the obstacles, by making a merger of traditional and modern, commercial and utopian elements in the colonial imagination thinkable. This transformation is evident in the cityscape, and helped reconﬁgure the signiﬁcance of the ‘natural’ and the ‘primitive’. The ﬁrst manifestations of this shift were evident in buildings that were directly linked to colonial ventures. The headquarters of Woermann’s shipping line are a case in point. Built in 1898, on the Reichenstraßenﬂeet, the emblematic site of Hamburg’s medieval harbour, it was programmatically named Afrikahaus. Its iconography was relatively conventional. Nevertheless, the fact that the place of traditional dignitaries and neo-classical or neo-Gothic ornament was now ﬁlled with a large bronze statue of a Negro with spear and shield, who ‘guarded’ the entrance, and elephants and palm trees in the public courtyard (Figure 30), signalled a transformation of the limits of urban imagery. What is more, such symbols were displayed against the backdrop not of a historicist narrative surface, but of a surprisingly modern foil. Designed by Martin Haller and Hermann Geißler, the strong vertical thrust of the fac¸ade with three large window-arches reaching over three ﬂoors, a separate base (granite) and ‘head’ (row of mezzanine windows), and the tiled, de-materialized surface, not only betrays Jugendstil inﬂuences, but is also reminiscent of early American ⁷⁰ Jan R¨uger, The Great Naval Game: Britain and Germany in the Age of Empire, Cambridge, 2007, esp. pp. 82–92 and 154–8. ⁷¹ Becker, Die Gr¨undung, p. 29. ⁷² Becker, Die Gr¨undung, p. 11. ⁷³ Hermann Hipp, Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg: Geschichte, Kultur und Stadtbaukunst an Elbe und Alster, Cologne, 1989, p. 136; and Elﬁ Bendikat, Organisierte Kolonialbewegung in der ¨ Heidelberg, 1984. Bismarck-Ara,

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Figure 30 Negro with spear and shield, bronze statue in front of Afrikahaus, headquarters of Woermann shipping line, 1898, Reichenstraßenﬂeet, Hamburg. Photo: MU.

skyscrapers by architects such as Louis Sullivan, or the Marshall Field Store by Henry Hobson Richardson.⁷⁴ Architecture was not the only or even the dominant medium through which colonial images permeated the city. As part of the intensiﬁcation of public interest in the extra-European world, new cultures of colonial expertise emerged in Hamburg. Capitalizing on its cosmopolitan image, the city managed to persuade the government in Berlin to subsidize a number of new scientiﬁc institutes and institutions, which were designed to train colonial staff, and to lend legitimacy to the idea of the German Empire as a civilizing, improving project. These foundations included the Institut f¨ur Schiffs- und Tropenkrankheiten, the Deutsche Seewarte, the Botanical Gardens and Museum, the Zoological Institute, and, most famously, the Kolonialinstitut.⁷⁵ Such institutions further helped mould the cityscape in the image of colonialism. In her inﬂuential study, Zantop has emphasized that an important and speciﬁcally German feature of the colonial imagination was that Germans ⁷⁴ Carl W. Condit, ‘Sullivan’s Skyscrapers as the Expression of Nineteenth Century Technology’, Technology and Culture 1/1 (1959), pp. 78–93; George A. Larson and Jay Pridmore, Chicago Architecture and Design, New York, 1993, esp. p. 26. ⁷⁵ Walter K. H. Hoffmann, Vom Kolonialexperten zum Experten der Entwicklungszusammenarbeit, Saarbr¨ucken, 1980, esp. pp. 127–8; Woldemar Sch¨utze, Kolonialpolitik und Kolonialinstitut in Hamburg, Hamburg, 1909; Johann Wilhelm Mannhardt, Die hamburgische Hochschule und der hamburgische Kaufmann, Hamburg, 1913; Wiebke Nordmeyer, Die Geographische Gesellschaft in Hamburg, 1873–1918: Geographie zwischen Politik und Kommerz, Stuttgart, 1998.

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typically imagined themselves as better colonizers than their materialist British and French rivals.⁷⁶ This perceived moral superiority was not deﬁned through a higher degree of civilization compared to the other colonial powers, but rather through the idea that Germans appreciated the primitive natural virtue of the colonized (although this empathy necessarily left the underlying racial distinctions intact). Zantop focuses on the empathy between the German Robinson and his native companion Freitag as an example. Such imagined bonding was, however, not unique to the colonial context. Rather, it emerged as an integral part of the conﬁguration of nature in the project of bourgeois modernism. Schumacher’s wild animals and naked humans were not African, yet they served to articulate an imagined communion with nature not unlike that imagined in the colonial context. The idea was not to stage a triumph of civilization over nature. Rather, the aim was a sensitive (though ultimately equally hierarchical) incorporation of the natural realm into German civilization, which would thereby be morally reformed and enhanced. So-called V¨olkerschauen, ethnographic exhibits, and the publicity material surrounding them, familiarized urbanites with the presence of a seemingly untamed wilderness at the heart of their metropolitan environment. The shows not only featured exotic vegetation or painted panoramas of the wild, but also displayed living humans and animals. The largest shows were organized by Carl Hagenbeck, who also founded the world-famous Hamburg Animal Park.⁷⁷ Indeed, people shows ﬁrst emerged as an offshoot of animal displays. In 1875, Carl Hagenbeck resolved to import not only Finnish reindeer, but also some human Laplanders, complete with their tents, weapons and sleds, to entertain his Hamburg audience. The ‘natives’ were paid a small sum to perform routines of daily life, and the resulting display was perhaps reminiscent of traditional tableaux vivants. The attraction to the public lay not just in the exoticism of the event. Rather, the Sami exhibited in this way were widely believed to live and behave in a way that was still in tune with nature, unspoilt by the artiﬁce of civilization. As Hagenbeck later noted in his autobiography, borrowing from the vocabulary of the life reform movement, the immense success of his Lapland show stemmed from the fact that ‘our guests were unadulterated people of nature, who still knew nothing of Europe’s over-reﬁned politeness’.⁷⁸ Similar shows with African ‘natives’ soon followed suit. In 1878, Hagenbeck sent an ‘Eskimo’ exhibit to Berlin, which received great interest from the public, and was even visited by the Emperor William II.⁷⁹ ⁷⁶ Zantop, Colonial Fantasies. ⁷⁷ Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo, Baltimore and London, 2002; Lothar Dittrich and Annelore Rieke-M¨uller, Carl Hagenbeck, 1844–1913: Tierhandel und Schaustellungen im Deutschen Kaiserreich, Frankfurt, 1998; Matthias Gretzschel and Ortwin Pelc, eds., Hagenbeck: Tiere, Menschen, Illusionen, Hamburg, 1998; Hilke Thode-Adora, F¨ur f¨unfzig Pfennig um die Welt: Die Hagenbeckschen V¨olkerschauen, Frankfurt, 1989. ⁷⁸ Carl Hagenbeck, Von Tieren und Menschen: Erlebnisse und Erfahrungen, Leipzig, 1908, p. 96. ⁷⁹ Rothfels, Savages, p. 85.

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Figure 31 Entrance gateway of Hagenbeck’s Tierpark, 1907, with sculpture of a Nubian by Rudolf Franke and animal sculptures by Josef Pallenberg, Hamburg. Photo: MU.

Many of the techniques Hagenbeck developed for these shows were then applied to the display of animals in his new-style zoo in Hamburg. The entrance gateway of 1907 embodied this connection, as it featured sculptures of two ‘savages’, a Red Indian and a Nubian, by Rudolf Franke, alongside animal sculptures by Josef Pallenberg (Figure 31). In organizing his shows, Hagenbeck had always been adamant that these were not artiﬁcial performances, but opportunities for visitors to witness the authentic life and behaviour of natives, in something that resembled their natural habitat as closely as possible: the picture presented ‘was a true copy of life in nature’.⁸⁰ The same principle was applied to the display of wild animals. The zoo’s spatial layout and design initiated what came to be known as the ‘Hagenbeck Revolution’.⁸¹ Its novelty lay in the removal of visible iron barriers between spectator and animals, who were now separated invisibly, by concealed moats. The enclosures that were thus created no longer looked like cages, but created the illusion that the spectator was entering a realm of untamed, exotic nature. The choice of plants, water features, rocks and other landscaped elements depended on the natural habitat of the animal in question, so that a whole variety of different ‘natures’ could be experienced. ⁸⁰ Hagenbeck, Von Tieren und Menschen, p. 95.

⁸¹ Rothfels, Savages, p. 8.

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As Rothfels has shown, this concern to copy natural habitats had little to do with animal welfare. Instead, the removal of traditional cages created an illusionary proximity, and a space for ‘encounter’, between the spectators and the living exhibits. Simulations of African jungles, Russian steppes, American plains and the Arctic ice conjured up a sense of wilderness, which assimilated the Otherness of nature into the civilized experience of bourgeois city life. The increasing verism of the enclosures did not entail a disenchantment of nature. Admittedly, as the display of zoo animals became more sophisticated, zoological and anthropological societies increasingly brought scientiﬁc methods of classiﬁcation and taxonomy to bear on the subject.⁸² Yet Carl Hagenbeck’s commercial success owed relatively little to the rationalizing gaze of science. As he himself noted, his most successful displays associated the wild with a certain sense of magic. About the ‘Ceylon Shows’ of the 1880s, which involved up to two hundred participants, including sixty-seven elephants, Hagenbeck wrote that it not only captured the ‘picturesque’ of Ceylonese culture, but conveyed a ‘glimmer of its mystique’, which worked a ‘captivating magic upon the audience’.⁸³ In 1901, the display of living human beings for commercial purposes was ofﬁcially banned. Yet the encounters with zoo animals in their seemingly wild habitats only continued to grow in popularity, and the ban did not even put a complete end to the display of human ‘natives’ in colonial shows—now conducted for educational or allegedly scientiﬁc purposes. At the same time, the medium of ﬁlm started to become more important for the staging of wild spaces. It is estimated that before 1918, about ﬁfty-six ﬁlms on the subject of colonialism were produced in Germany.⁸⁴ Screenings were sponsored by the Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft and the Navy League; this trend peaked in 1905, when the League put on 512 screenings, which were seen by 873,385 people.⁸⁵ The Woermann shipping line acted as patrons to cinematographer Carl M¨uller, who had distinguished himself as a producer of colonial ﬁlms screened by the DKG.⁸⁶ They then showed M¨uller’s ﬁlms as on-board entertainment on their passenger ships. This practice continued long after the DKG’s sponsorship of colonial ﬁlms ceased around 1909. The contemporary press picked up on this theme, emphasizing how these ﬁlms documented that ‘the pioneers of Germanness are beginning, slowly but surely, to make their mark, imposing German characteristics on the land and the people abroad’.⁸⁷ What emerged in this way was the illusion of a happy synthesis between German authenticity and rootedness, in its alleged superiority to more abstract models of civilization

⁸² Rothfels, Savages, pp. 84 and 96–126. ⁸³ Hagenbeck, Von Tieren und Menschen, p. 121. ⁸⁴ Wolfgang Fuhrmann, ‘German Colonial Cinematography’, unpublished working paper, Leiden, 2003. ⁸⁵ Ibid., p. 4. ⁸⁶ Ibid. ⁸⁷ Darmst¨adter Tageblatt, 16 March 1908, quoted from Fuhrmann, ‘German Colonial Cinematography’, p. 7.

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and modernity, and the encounter with an extra-European nature unspoilt by Westernization. Although Schumacher himself did not draw on colonial imagery, the subcutaneous appeal to the magical potential of the natural world that was inherent in his designs had much in common with these new cultures of nature on public display. Nature was used as what Aby Warburg called a ‘pathos formula’: an almost magical device, operating through the subconscious, and simultaneously invoking and taming the pre-civilized layers of the human psyche. It was no accident that Warburg’s own work in Hamburg was punctuated by trips to Indian tribes and studies of exotic snake rituals. In the same spirit, Franz Marc, a member of the aforementioned Blauer Reiter group, wrote: I strive to increase my sensitivity for the organic rhythm of all things, pantheistically to feel my way into the quivering and ﬂowing of the blood of nature, in the trees, in the animals, in the air [. . .] I cannot see any better method for the ‘animalization’ of art, as I wish to call it, than the image of the animal itself.⁸⁸

The ‘animalization’ of art was a spiritual intensiﬁcation of the ‘naturalization’ of space achieved through parks and gardens. Both had religious undertones—Marc spoke of pantheism. Evidence of this neo-religious tendency can also be traced in the work of the Gersons. Their Haus Bondy in Hamburg had a formal garden. Alongside the usual structuring devices, like fences, hedges, gravel path and a pergola, it contained a fountain, designed by August Henneberger. This seems oddly old-fashioned, and (unlike the adjacent bike shed) fulﬁlled no practical function. The fountain was adorned by a Biedermeier-style sculpture of a little putto, his torso half-submerged in a sculpted ﬂower (Figure 32). This was an ancient motif of classical Roman and Renaissance art. It originally occurred on Apulian funeral urns, as seen in the illustration showing a late Apulian volute crater from 310 bc (Figure 33).⁸⁹ On vases like this, the putto in the ﬂower was a reference to paradise. Henneberger’s fountain referenced this tradition. Considered in conjunction with the fact that the garden of Haus Bondy was enclosed by a stone wall, the symbolism was coherent: this was a hortus conclusus, a paradise garden. The hortus conclusus was a particularly pervasive and persistent cultural idiom, the ultimate prototype of nature tamed, controlled, spiritualized.⁹⁰ Its use by the Gersons is another example of the way in which the allegorical vocabulary of the German Bildungsb¨urgertum was employed to channel the energies unleashed by the vernacular appeal to ‘nature’ into a controllable framework. Invoking religious archetypes simultaneously intensiﬁed ⁸⁸ Letter from Franz Marc to Reinhard Piper, December 1908, quoted in St¨adtische Galerie Lenbachhaus, ed., Der Blaue Reiter, p. 105. ⁸⁹ From A. D. Trendall, Rotﬁgurige Vasen aus Unteritalien und Sizilien, Mainz, 1990, illustration no. 268. ⁹⁰ On the trope of the hortus conclusus, see Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, London, 1953.

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Figure 32 Putto or Genius adorning garden fountain, by August Henneberger, Haus Bondy, Hamburg-Othmarschen. Photo: MU.

Figure 33 Apulian Volute-krater, c.330–300 bc, attributed to the Painter of Berlin F3383, detail of neck (obverse side). Reproduced courtesy of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Photo Archives.

the experience of the natural form, and located it ﬁrmly within the discourse of traditional elite culture. If we examine the animal sculptures in the Stadtpark in this light, the same theme becomes apparent. Wbra’s Diana on a deer was not only naturalist: the ﬁgure had a distinct neo-classical air, reinforced by the mythological title. The

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motif itself was yet another archetype. In the German Idealist tradition, a naked female ﬁgure riding a beast was a very common metaphor for the workings of art. In 1805, a ﬂagship publication of the German Klassik, Wieland’s Teutscher Merkur, had praised a work by the neo-classical sculptor Johann Heinrich Dannecker depicting Ariadne riding on a panther. This, it explained, embodied the ‘taming of the wild through the beautiful’.⁹¹ Wrba’s sculpture fulﬁlled a similar function. On the one hand, his ﬁgure represented a ‘coming out’ of the natural, at the same time, it showed the taming of uncontrolled nature through classical beauty, that is, through an immensely bourgeois notion of Bildung. The purpose was not simply to suppress wild nature, or to depict the triumph of the human spirit over adverse natural conditions. These were not teleological narratives, of the kind we encounter in Hugo Vogel’s frescoes in the Hamburg Town Hall.⁹² Bourgeois modernists made nature not the object of rule, but the subject. The dialectic twist of this approach was that nature, which for the life reform movement was an anarchic anti-type to civil order, was redeﬁned as an Idealist archetype, and as such became a principle of liberal rule in the city. This chapter has traced how, in bringing green spaces into the modern city, nature itself was reconﬁgured. If the nature imagined by garden city constructors still bore some resemblance to the actual landscape, in the modernist city, the representation of nature became a topos that was located, above all, in the imagination. Like memory, it alluded to a quality of human subjectivity beyond the rational. The highly contrived quality of Muthesius’s gardens, Schumacher’s parks and rivers, and Henneberger’s and Ruwoldt’s animal sculptures, spoke to the ‘natural’ in the human mind rather than to nature as seen in the landscape. Nature became a spiritual locus, which ‘liberated’ untapped human instincts and energies, but, in representing them, also controlled them. This created an uneasy tension with more traditional notions of spirituality. Indeed, their conservative opponents often attacked bourgeois modernists as a-religious. Few Werkbund architects designed any religious buildings; when they did, they mostly lacked the customary religious signiﬁers and layout. Crematoria designed by Schumacher, both at the beginning of his career in Dresden, and again in 1928–33, for the Ohlsdorf Cemetery in Hamburg, illustrate this problem. A critic writing for the journal Deutsche Bauh¨utte during the Third Reich attacked the Ohlsdorf Crematorium as overly progressive, suggesting that, ‘on the whole, it is reminiscent of the new communist building style a` la Moscow, with the brutal suppression of all religious sentiment’.⁹³ At ﬁrst glance, this attack seems ⁹¹ ‘Ariadne auf dem Panther (vom Holfbildhauer Dannecker)’, Teutscher Merkur, ed. Christoph Martin Wieland, January 1805, pp. 152–9. ⁹² Hugo Vogel’s four frescoes in the Hamburg Town Hall’s ceremonial chamber depict four stages of the process whereby the glacial valley of the Elbe river was gradually improved through human intervention, and eventually transformed into the modern seaport with steamships. ⁹³ Deutsche Bauh¨utte, 1933, quoted from Maike Bruhns, ‘Fritz Schumachers Leben und Werk nach 1933’, in Frank, Fritz Schumacher, p. 183.

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curious, as National Socialists were not on the whole known as champions of unadulterated Christian traditions and iconographies.⁹⁴ It therefore seems likely that this anonymous critic objected not so much to the absence of an explicitly Christian symbolism, but to what must have seemed like a dangerous semantic confusion. All recognizable allegories had vanished in this building, and in the work of bourgeois modernists more generally, and with it the tell-tale signs that made a building’s function instantaneously legible. The Nazis did not object to vernacular and modern idioms per se. What was speciﬁc about their approach to the built environment was, rather, a strict and straightforward correlation between function and style. Vernacular tropes were used for youth training camps and military retreats in the countryside.⁹⁵ The abstract language of Bauhaus-style modernism was employed for technical schemes, such as the motorways.⁹⁶ The historical and neo-classical idioms were reserved for ofﬁcial buildings, Speerstyle.⁹⁷ Judged by these standards, bourgeois modernists like Schumacher had created chaos. Their private gardens looked like Baroque parks, while their ofﬁcial parks were cluttered with anti-heroic statues of animals and crawling people. Their industrial buildings looked like cathedrals, but their churches and crematoria looked profane. Yet whatever Nazi critics may have thought, these choices were anything but random or anarchic. What, on the surface, looked like a parallel with the nature idiom as conﬁgured by the movements of Heimatschutz and life reform, on closer inspection revealed itself as a search for Warburg-style archetypes, an attempt to reconnect cultural expression with the Ur-tropes of collective cultural memory. This led to a naturalization of the cultural form that was more akin to Marc’s call for a pantheistic spiritualization than a simple revival of rustic traditions and pre-industrial country-idylls. In this discourse, the everyday and the sacred were not posited as opposite, but as closely intertwined. ⁹⁴ The most drastic examples to remould Christian iconography in the image of a new-age, Aryan spirituality relate to Himmler’s attempts to create new national shrines in his SS Ordensburgen, and within existing medieval sites, such as Heinrich I’s palace and burial ground at Quedlinburg. Some of these are described in Heinrich Himmler, Rede des Reichsf¨uhrers SS im Dom zu Quedlinburg, Magdeburg, 1936. General interpretations of Nazi architecture will be reviewed in Chapter 7 of this study. ⁹⁵ Tilman Harlander, Zwischen Heimst¨atte und Wohnmaschine: Wohnungsbau und Wohnungspolitik in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, Basel and Boston, 1995. This iconography is explored in greater detail in Chapter 7 of this study. ⁹⁶ On Nazi motorway design, see Rainer Stommer and Claudia Gabriele Philipp, eds., Reichs¨ autobahn, Pyramiden des Dritten Reichs: Analysen zur Asthetik eines unbew¨altigten Mythos, Marburg, 1982; and Thomas Zeller, Strasse, Bahn, Panorama: Verkehrswege und Landschaftsver¨anderung in Deutschland von 1930 bis 1990, Frankfurt, 2002. ⁹⁷ An excellent new study, which focuses particularly on the connection between the economics of materials and Nazi architectural projects, is Paul B. Jaskot, The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy, London and New York, 2000. On Speer, see Angela Sch¨onberger, Die neue Reichskanzlei von Albert Speer: Zum Zusammenhang von nationalsozialistischer Ideologie und Architektur, Berlin, 1981. More general on historicist monumentalism in this period: Frank-Bertolt Raith, Der heroische Stil: Studien zur Architektur am Ende der Weimarer Republik, Berlin, 1997.

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A transfer of spiritual forms to industrial and social spaces could not, therefore, be seen as frivolous or sacrilegious in any way. Hierarchical distinctions of the type that deﬁned both historicist and later Nazi approaches were dissolved. Hence, the bourgeois modernists shifted easily between these registers. Schumacher did not hesitate to dissolve the speciﬁcally religious into the generic spiritual, as in his Ohlsdorf Cemetery. He also freely applied the spiritual to the everyday. Menzel’s design for the Water Tower in the Hamburg Stadtpark, which won Schumacher’s approval, was monumental in scale, Gothic in proportion, had an emphatic spiritual quality. Schumacher’s planned extension was designed to enhance this effect. In 1916, two years after the Water Tower was completed, Schumacher proposed the addition of a symmetrical arcade to serve as a space in which the fallen soldiers of the First World War could be honoured. On each end of the arcade, Schumacher envisaged gigantic equestrian statues of a type familiar from funerary architecture. The scheme was never realized. The fact that it was even thinkable to transform a water tower into the site of such metaphysical hero worship shows the remarkable extent to which German bourgeois modernists had pushed the spiritualization of everyday urban space. In the Stadtpark as elsewhere, a hybridity of symbols and actual usages developed, in which urban and rustic, industrial and archaic motifs became closely intertwined, and in this intertwining lay the speciﬁcity of the project of bourgeois modernism.

5 The Designed Object: Commercial Culture and the Global Market

The German form will be more than just a term used in patriotic speeches: it will become the world form. Today the ascendancy of German peoples on this earth is a certainty [. . .] It is not just a question of ruling the world, ﬁnancing the world, educating it, or providing it with goods and products. It is a question of shaping its appearance. Only when a nation accomplishes this act can it truly be said to stand at the top of the world: Germany must be that nation.¹

Muthesius wrote these lines around the same time as authors such as Thomas Mann posited German Kultur’s superiority to Western civilization and its handmaidens, materialism and consumerism.² Seen against this background, it is no coincidence that a writer who wanted to persuade his audience that commercial culture and material objects were integral to German identity had to transpose the German ‘form’ onto a higher philosophical plain, and turn it into a veritable fetish of national pride.³ Leaving the hyperbole of the language aside, however, in substance, Muthesius’s ambition had little to do with any German Sonderweg. As Koshar and Conﬁno have noted, the consumer object became a ¹ Hermann Muthesius, ‘Die Zukunft der deutschen Form’, Der Deutsche Krieg: Politische Flugschriften 50 (1915), ed. E. J¨ackh, p. 36. ² Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, written between 1915 and 1918, published in numerous collections. For a modern edition, see Hanno Helbling, ed., Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, Frankfurt a.M., 2001, especially his ‘Einleitung’, pp. 33–4 and 42. Compare also Helmut Koopmann, Thomas Mann—Heinrich Mann: Die ungleichen Br¨uder, Munich, 2005. ³ Mark Jarzombek, ‘The Kunstgewerbe, the Werkbund and the Aesthetics of Culture in the Wilhelmine Period’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 53/1 (March 1994), pp. 7–19; Roth, Muthesius; Campbell, The German Werkbund; and Wolfgang Hardtwig, ‘Weltpolitik, liberaler Nationalismus und Kunst: Der Deutsche Werkbund’, in Helmut Berding, ed., Nationales Bewußtsein und kollektive Identit¨at: Studien zur Entwicklung des kollektiven Bewußtseins in der Neuzeit, 2 vols., Frankfurt a.M., 1994, vol. ii, pp. 507–40.

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centrepiece of identity politics throughout Europe and America well before the twentieth century.⁴ In the age of nation-state formation, international industrial expositions, including the spectacular World Fairs, promoted the notion that a nation’s international standing could and should be measured not only in terms of its military prowess but, also and decisively, by the quality and ‘character’ of its industrial output.⁵ It was thus not only in German eyes that competition in the global marketplace turned the manufactured object into a carrier of national culture, and a vehicle of a kind of informal imperialism. If in 1915, Muthesius conﬁdently announced that Germany was ready to rule the world market, in 1907, the founding year of the Werkbund, he had been clear about the fact that it was England that dominated the world of goods and, through it, global culture. This was not only because England produced more. It was also because the nature of the produced object, the messages encoded in its material qualities, were deemed decisive for the commercial and, by extension, global cultural hegemony of England. What is decisive for a leading role is only that ideal value which is inherent in a national performance, in other words, its cultural value. The fact that England in the late eighteenth century, at a time when she experienced stunning successes in shaping middle-class taste [. . .], could participate in the world market was her independent national achievement. More recently, the inﬂuence of English Arts and Crafts on the world market is instructive enough. It was only because England gave something that was speciﬁcally her own that her products could [. . .] represent a distinctive presence on the world market. Commercial success marched behind superior values.⁶ ⁴ Rudy Koshar and Alon Conﬁno, ‘Regimes of Consumer Culture: New Narratives in TwentiethCentury German History’, German History 19/2 (2001), pp. 135–61, esp. pp. 137 and 139, with an overview of the literature on German consumption. For an intriguing discussion of Reformhaus products as material embodiment of the reformist discourse in pre-First World War Germany, see Florentine Fritzen, Ges¨under Leben: Die Lebensreformbewegung im 20. Jahrhundert, Stuttgart, 2006, esp. p. 21. ⁵ Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: The Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World’s Fairs, 1851–1939, Manchester, 1988; G¨oran Ahlstr¨om, Technological Development and Industrial Expositions, 1850–1914, Lund, 1996; Robert W. Rydell and Nancy E. Gwinn, eds., Fair Representations: World’s Fairs and the Modern World, Amsterdam, 1994; Linda Aimone and Carlo Olmo, Les Expositions universelles 1851–1900, Paris, 1993; Florence Pinot de Villechenon, Les Expositions universelles, Paris, 1992; John R. Davis, The Great Exhibition, London, 1999; Utz Haltern, Die Londoner Weltausstellung von 1851: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der b¨urgerlich-industriellen Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert, M¨unster, 1971; Philippe Hamon, Expositions: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-Century France, translated by Katia Sainson-Frank and Lisa Maguire, Berkeley, 1992; Peter Hoffenberg, ‘To Create a Commonwealth: Empire and Nation at English, Australian, and Indian Exhibitions, 1851–1914’, Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1993; Philippe Bouin and Christian-Philippe Chanut, Histoire franc¸ais des foires et des expositions universelles, Paris, 1980; Wolfram Kaiser, ‘Vive la France! Vive la R´epublique? The Cultural Construction of French Identity at the World Exhibitions in Paris 1855–1900’, National Identities 1/3 (1999), pp. 227–44; Miriam R. Levin, ‘The City as a Museum of Technology’, in Brigitte Schroeder-Gudehus, ed., Industrial Society and its Museums 1890–1990: Social Aspirations and Cultural Politics, Philadelphia, 1992, pp. 27–36. ⁶ H. Muthesius, ‘Die Bedeutung des Kunstgewerbes’, lecture in the Handelshochschule Berlin, 1907, reprinted in W. Fischer, ed., Zwischen Kunst und Industrie: Der Deutsche Werkbund, exhibition

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The connection between market dominance and cultural hegemony, which contemporaries writing around 1900 perceived so clearly, has often been underestimated by those modern economic historians who often claim that the difference between this ﬁrst phase of globalization, and globalization as we know it today, is that the former was ‘merely economic’, while the latter is also ‘cultural’.⁷ If we deﬁne the cultural dimension of globalization as the perceived power of the consumer object to mould the culture or identity of the consumer, then cultural globalization was just as profound in the decades around 1900 as it is today. Germany’s starting position in this competitive process was comparatively weak vis-`a-vis its English and, increasingly, American counterparts. Partly as a result of this ‘lagging behind’, of which contemporaries were acutely aware, there emerged in the German lands a more explicit debate and more concerted effort to conquer the world market and achieve global cultural hegemony than in the major anglophone nations. It was not merely the intention to ‘catch up’ that was so distinctive of the German situation. Rather, it was that this ambition was so openly and so publicly debated in Germany, and that from this discourse emerged the energetic creation of institutional frameworks set up to promote Germany’s global performance. As we shall see, government assumed an active role in this project. Efforts were concentrated on improving the education and training of those who would design industrial objects or shape the conditions in which they were produced. German governments at all levels, including the supposedly conservative Prussian government, employed progressives like Muthesius to create the organizational infrastructure for the systematic marketing of the notion of German ‘quality work’.⁸ As K¨onig recently emphasized, even Emperor William II played a signiﬁcant part in this process, through his much publicized interest in the most spectacular technological innovations, through his systematic promotion of technical education, and through his broader role in rendering the discourse of technical progress both socially respectable and politically catalogue, Die Neue Sammlung, Staatliches Museum f¨ur angewandte Kunst M¨unchen, Munich, 1975, p. 49. ⁷ Economists now widely believe that the nineteenth century witnessed ‘a very big globalization bang’. Globalization is here deﬁned as trade expansion driven by the integration of markets between trading economies. The take-off began around 1830 in the agricultural sector; the market for manufactured goods followed suit a few decades later. K. H. O’Rourke and J. G. Williamson, ‘When Did Globalization Begin?’, NBER Working Papers no. W7632, April 2000. See also Carl Strickwerda, ‘The World at the Crossroads: The World Economy and International Relations in Two Eras of Globalization, 1890–1914 and 1989 to the Present’, unpublished working paper, University of Kansas; Hans Pohl, Aufbruch der Weltwirtschaft: Geschichte der Weltwirtschaft von der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg, Stuttgart, 1989; and, on the role of culture as a distinctive feature of the second wave of globalization, Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis and London, 1996. ⁸ This is the central argument in John V. Maciuika, Before the Bauhaus: Architecture, Politics, and the German State, 1890–1920, Cambridge, 2005.

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desirable.⁹ Of course, the state’s (and the states’) role in promoting Germany’s industrial progress and technological standing in the world was never entirely coherent, nor did it always map neatly onto the aspirations of bourgeois reformers in the Werkbund. Considerable differences of opinion existed regarding how global hegemony was to be achieved, and why it should be sought. Even within the Werkbund itself, tensions rapidly surfaced. The most notable of these was a rift that emerged between those, such as Riemerschmid and Muthesius, who wanted to create material objects ﬁt to fulﬁl their hegemonic mission by reforming the process of production, and those, such as Karl-Ernst Osthaus, who wanted the reform of patterns of consumption. It is in the negotiation of this tension, rather than any clearly articulated idea or ideology per se, that we can uncover some of the most characteristic traits of the German project of bourgeois modernism. The 1876 Philadelphia World Fair was a deﬁning moment for the evolution of the modern German industrial product. At this show, the inferiority of Germanmade goods became the subject of a high-proﬁle public debate. A journalist commented at the time that the German exhibits were ‘cheap and nasty’, and the phrase quickly assumed iconic status.¹⁰ That was not to say that other nations did not fear German competition even in the mid-1870s. Germany was widely accused of ﬂooding the world market with inferior products, undercutting higher-quality and more expensive wares from elsewhere. In 1887, the British Merchandise Act forced German manufacturers to label all products destined for export to Britain or any of her colonies ‘Made in Germany’. The assumption was that British consumers, once warned that particular goods were German-made, would shy away from buying them. The story of the label ‘Made in Germany’ became a historical parable about intentions that backﬁre.¹¹ Between 1870 and 1913, Germany’s share of world industrial production rose from 13 to 16 per cent. In the same period, Britain’s share dropped from 32 to 14 per cent.¹² Much of this change was due to the fact that German production now concentrated on sophisticated manufacturing processes informed by the latest scientiﬁc and technological inventions. Textile dyes, for example—the manufacture of which had once been completely dominated by the British—became a de facto German ⁹ Wolfgang K¨onig, Wilhelm II und die Moderne: Der Kaiser und die technisch-industrielle Welt, Paderborn: Ferdinand Sch¨oningh, 2007, not only documents William’s keen interest in technical innovation, most evident in his obsession with a modern navy (pp. 19–51) and the conquest of water (pp. 84–109), but also in his particular promotion of polytechnic universities (pp. 110–36). He also argues that William’s personal involvement and enthusiasm had a signiﬁcant social effect, transforming the quest for technical progress into a matter of national prestige for large sections of the German population (esp. pp. 272–3). ¹⁰ A. Bonnell, ‘Cheap and Nasty: German Goods, Socialism, and the 1876 Philadelphia World Fair’, International Review of Social History 46 (2001), pp. 207–26. ¹¹ Compare D. Head, ‘Made in Germany’: The Corporate Identity of a Nation, London, 1992; and Umbach, ‘Made in Germany’. ¹² H.-J. Bartmuss et al., eds., Deutsche Geschichte, ii, Berlin, 1975, p. 785.

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monopoly within the space of less than two decades. Different modes of ﬁnancing industry, not least the role of the state in providing capital, had some impact on the story. But economic historians generally agree that the single most crucial factor for this German success was the close interaction between production and scientiﬁc discovery. The story of industrial patents offers some revealing explanations. Between 1886 and 1900, the six leading German companies patented 948 inventions; the equivalent ﬁgure for England is 86.¹³ This in turn was based on a reformed and expanded education of engineers, physicists and chemists at polytechnics and technical colleges in Germany. In 1900, the aforementioned six largest companies employed 350 technicians and engineers with university diplomas, as well as 500 academically qualiﬁed chemists. The total number of chemists working in English textile dye manufacturing at this time is estimated at around 30 or 40.¹⁴ When in 1911, at the Emperor’s instigation, the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft for the promotion of scientiﬁc research was founded in Germany, the English journal Nature commented that it was ‘wonderful how deeply the spirit of trust in science has penetrated the whole German nation . . . This spirit, which permeates the German people, from the Emperor on his throne to the representatives of the peasants, causes admiration; would that it could inspire imitation!’¹⁵ These developments provided the background for the rapid reversal of fortune for German goods. By the 1890s, ‘Made in Germany’ had been transformed from a pejorative term into one of the most effective marketing tools of modern history. English manufacturers even began to forge it, printing ‘Made in Germany’ on their English-made products.¹⁶ In 1896, Ernest E. Williams published his inﬂuential account of this remarkable reversal in fortunes: Made in Germany.¹⁷ A counterpart to popular invasion scare literature, Williams’s book analysed the decline of British manufacturing and technology, and described the triumph of German objects, which penetrated even into the privacy of ordinary English homes. The protagonist of Williams’s account is horriﬁed to discover the creeping ‘Germanization’ of his world. In a key scene, he despairs over the extent to which German consumer goods have come to dominate his domestic sphere, and, falling asleep, is haunted by a nightmare, during which he discovers that even the gates of heaven are now guarded by a German St Peter, and can be unlocked only with keys ‘Made in Germany’. ¹³ Carlo M. Cipolla, ed., Die Industrielle Revolution, iii, Stuttgart, 1985. ¹⁴ Ibid., p. 157. ¹⁵ Nature 83 (1910), p. 350. ¹⁶ R. G. Hirschmann, ‘Made in Germany: Rolle und Bedeutung aus deutscher Sicht’, in Dokumentation ‘Made in Germany’: Deutsche Qualit¨at auf dem Pr¨ufstand, Achter deutscher Quality Circle Kongress, Mannheim, 1989, pp. 7–16. ¹⁷ Ernest Edwin Williams, Made in Germany, London, 1896. The book was translated into German by C. Willmann, and appeared as E. E. Williams, Made in Germany: Der Konkurrenzkampf der deutschen Industrie gegen die englische, Dresden and Leipzig, 1896.

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Even outside these ﬁctional passages, Williams’s tract was not conﬁned to those products that fell under the restrictions of the Merchandise Act. For Williams, ‘Made in Germany’ became a symbol of German production in general—and of German culture. For Williams did not offer an economic analysis for the German success story. He saw a cultural failure on the part of the British at the heart of the story. Mirroring the structure of Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Germany’s success was portrayed as a symptom of the inner decadence of the British nation. Williams blamed the English lack of energy, thrift and entrepreneurial spirit. English captains of industry were old-fashioned, lazy, arrogant, greedy and more keenly interested in personal luxury and consumption than in the health or vigour of their ﬁrms. English workers were inﬂexible, poorly trained and inclined towards destructive industrial action. By contrast, the success of German industry was indicative of that nation’s cultural ascendancy. Williams warned his compatriots: Made in Germany. The phrase is ﬂuent in the mouth: how universally appropriate it is, probably no one who has not made a special study of the matter is aware. Take observations, Gentle Reader, in your own surroundings: the mental exercise is recommended as an antidote to that form of self-sufﬁciency which our candid friends regard as indigenous to the British climate. Your investigations will work out somewhat in this fashion. You will ﬁnd that the material of some of your clothes was probably woven in Germany. Still more probable it is that some of your wife’s garments are German importations, while it is practically without a doubt that the magniﬁcent mantles and jackets wherein her maids array themselves on their Sundays out are German-made and German-sold, for only so could they be done at the ﬁgure. Your governess’s ﬁanc´e is a clerk in the City, but he was also made in Germany. The toys, and the dolls, and the fairy books which your children maltreat in the nursery are made in Germany: nay, the material of your favourite (patriotic) newspaper had the same birthplace as like as not. Roam the house over, and the fateful mark will greet you at every turn, from the piano in your drawing room to the mug on your kitchen dresser, blazoned though it be with the legend, A Present from Margate. Descend to your domestic depth, and you shall ﬁnd your very drainpipes German made. You pick out of the grate the paper wrappings from a book consignment, and they are also ‘Made in Germany’. You stuff them into the ﬁre, and reﬂect that the poker in your hand was forged in Germany. As you rise from your hearthrug you knock over an ornament on your mantelpiece; picking up the pieces, you read, on the bit that formed the base, ‘Manufactured in Germany’. And you jot your dismal reﬂections down with a pencil that was made in Germany. At midnight your wife comes home from an opera which was made in Germany, has been enacted by singers and conductor and players made in Germany, with the aid of instruments and sheets of music made in Germany. You go to bed, you glare wrathfully at a text on the wall; it is illuminated with an English village church, and it was ‘Printed in Germany’. If you are imaginative and dyspeptic, you drop off to sleep to dream that St Peter (with a duly stamped halo round his head and a bunch of keys from the Rhineland) has refused you admission into Paradise, because you do not bear the Mark of the Beast upon your forehead, and are not of German make. But you console yourself with the thought that

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it was only a Bierhaus Paradise anyway; and you are awakened in the morning by the sonorous brass of a German band.¹⁸

Unsurprisingly, the message was greeted triumphantly in Germany. Robert Wuttke wrote a preface to the German edition, in which he pointed out that the dynamism of the German economy was in part a function of its youth—British competitors had been spoilt by earlier successes—and in part a result of German politics in the aftermath of uniﬁcation, which had opened the door to Weltpolitik.¹⁹ ‘Made in Germany’ had thus ofﬁcially become the vehicle for imperialist politics. The fact that the British had invented the ‘Made in Germany’ stamp, which now caused them such anxiety, was undoubtedly part of its attraction for German producers. As Muthesius was quick to point out, in its arrogance, the British Merchandise Act had become ‘the best advertising for German products there is’.²⁰ That the label was in English also neatly matched Germany’s global aspirations. There was also the additional attraction that behind the seemingly universal formula lingered a German semantic tradition, which worked its way through the subconsciousness of the public and contributed in no small part to the success of ‘Made in Germany’. ‘Made’ alluded to ‘machen’: the making, or manufacturing, of the object. The celebration of machen as an activity of almost spiritual signiﬁcance was at the heart of the project of bourgeois modernism and the Werkbund. Through countless references, both written and visual, machen was linked to old German handicrafts, a tradition that was revived and connected with modern industrial production. Through this grounding in historical solidity, machen was to serve as the antidote to alienation, which was frequently invoked by actors on all sides of the political spectrum to problematize bourgeois capitalism. Goods made in Germany were not just anonymous, massproduced commodities. Through the semantics of machen, they were infused with longue-dur´ee memories of making, and thus re-imagined as an integral part of the identity politics that were so threatened by capitalism. The semantic link needed to be backed up materially. To inscribe machen into the objects, the ﬁrst point of reference was the English Arts and Crafts movement. Its adherents had suggested that a return to vernacular handicrafts could heal the problems of modern production. In enlisting this model, Werkbund advocates constructed a racial afﬁnity, where machen was transformed from a historical German virtue into a generic (and genetic) Germanic activity. According to Muthesius, Ruskin had succeeded in opening the hearts of the English people to art. That is, to art in that special, Germanic sense: for the craftsmanship, the character, the rootedness in the soil ¹⁸ Williams, Made in Germany, pp. 10–11. ¹⁹ Williams, Made in Germany, German edn., preface by Robert Wuttke, pp. iv–v. ¨ ²⁰ Hermann Muthesius, ‘Die Uberraschungen Englands’, T¨agliche Rundschau 6 (9 January 1900), Unterhaltungsbeilage (supplement), p. 21.

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Figure 34 Advertisement for Sussex Rush-Seated Chairs, from the Morris and Co. catalogue, 1900. [bodenw¨uchsig], the authenticity in art, the art of daily life and the human environment in its entirety. His principles were the quest for honesty and depth in art, the turn against false splendour and mere elegance, his conviction that art had to be a necessary part of the life of the human soul.²¹

Ruskin’s followers in the Arts and Crafts movement believed that vernacular craftsmanship had evolved in response to the practical requirements of the English people, resulting in functional yet ‘homely’ forms for consumer objects, which they tried to recreate. William Morris’s chairs are a typical example: the catalogue explained that their inspiration came from the designs of a simple carpenter, whose work Morris had encountered while travelling in Surrey (Figure 34). This was a particularly effective way of casting the practice of making as a moral activity. In a second step, the individual morality of the traditional maker had to be transformed into the collective ethics of the consumers. The vehicle for this was to be found in the formal or aesthetic characteristics of the objects. In 1860, ²¹ Hermann Muthesius, ‘Die moderne Bewegung’, in Speemanns goldenes Buch der Kunst, Berlin and Stuttgart, 1901, unpag., para. nos. 1029–60, quote from no. 1032. Compare also idem, ‘John Ruskin’, Centralblatt der Bauverwaltung 7 (27 January 1900), p. 43. For a discussion of Ruskin’s and Morris’s constitutive role in English modernism during the inter-war period, see M. T. Saler, The Avant-Garde in Inter-War England: Medieval Modernism and the London Underground, Oxford, 1999, esp. pp. 10–24.

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Ruskin deﬁned the essence of social morality as good taste. In 1880, Morris, who ran his own workshops and in 1888 founded the Art Workers Guild, suggested that ugliness was a symptom of the moral decay of modern Britain. If social morality manifested itself in good taste, ugliness indicated alienation, from objects and, by extension, from other human beings. This rhetoric was evidently shaped by socialist theorists of alienation. Morris himself was the author of political pamphlets such as Art and Socialism (1884), active in the English Social Democratic Federation, and, with Marx’s daughter Eleanor, became the founder of the Socialist League. The Romantic elevation of making as the antithesis of alienation, where ‘labour is external to the worker—i.e., does not belong to his essential being’ is present in the writings of the younger Karl Marx.²² Yet in the hands of Morris and his fellow reformers, this dichotomy was conﬁgured in such a way as to circumvent the question of the ownership of the means of production. Substituting machen, the ethical production of ‘quality work’, for alienated ‘labour’, would engender a neo-Romantic identiﬁcation between the object and its maker, while leaving the property structure of bourgeois capitalism intact. Rhetorically, this recourse to pre-industrial ideals of manufacturing was eminently useful. When translated into practice, it created problems. The techniques employed in Morris’s workshops were ill-suited to mass-production. They operated on an extremely small scale, and the goods they produced were far too expensive to sell to the ordinary consumers: Morris’s largest orders came from the church, the aristocracy and the court. The question arose how to transcend the spheres of such elite consumers, and apply this handicrafts mind-set to the conditions of modern industrial mass-production. As early as the 1860s, attempts were made to reconcile the ideological aims of English Arts and Crafts with the modern techniques of production, which Ruskin had rejected. Ways had to be found to embrace industrial mass-production, yet maintain the moral ﬁction of handicrafts. Adolf Vetter pointed out in a keynote speech on the annual Werkbund conference of 1910 that the organization’s aim to promote German Wertarbeit represented a translation of Ruskin’s ‘quality work’; translation here referred not just to the linguistic process, but also more ²² Quotation from Karl Marx, ‘Estranged Labor’, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. On Marx’s view of alienation, David Schweitzer, ‘Marxist Theories of Alienation and Reiﬁcation: The Response to Capitalism, State Socialism, and the Advent of Postmodernity’, in Felix Geyer and Walter R. Heinz, eds., Alienation, Society, and the Individual: Continuity and Change in Theory and Research, Hull, 1991, pp. 27–52; C. E. Grimes and Charles E. P. Simmons, ‘A Reassessment of Alienation in Karl Marx’, Western Political Quarterly 23/2 (1970), pp. 266–75; and, emphasizing the connection with German Romanticism, especially Friedrich Schlegel, Leonard P. Wessell, Jr, Karl Marx, Romantic Irony, and the Proletariat: The Mythopoetic Origins of Marxism, Baton Rouge and London, 1979. For a comparative reading on institutionally and technologically induced alienation in Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx: G. C. Archibald, ‘Three Classical Economists on Trouble, Strife, and the Alienation of Labor’, Canadian Journal of Economics 25/1 (1992), pp. 60–75.

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broadly to the adaptation of Ruskin’s paradigm to an industrial age.²³ Hermann Schwabe argued on the same occasion that ‘quality work’ was no alternative to machines. Instead of turning workers into ‘a living appendage of the machines’, as Marx had predicted, machines could be enlisted into the production of quality work, so that ‘machines [would be turned] into the fourth estate [to] get as many workers as possible back to the third estate’.²⁴ And Muthesius proclaimed: It is often said that it was above all the machine which, together with the handicrafts, eliminated the sense of craftsman-like Gediegenheit [solidity]. Yet we must be wary of considering this effect as the inevitable outcome of mechanization, and deriving from it, as the English social Arts and Crafts reformers did, a general condemnation of the machine. [. . .] Man must create the form, which the machine can then realize, thus widening his horizons and expanding the scope of his work. Thus, with the modern iron bridge, we are no longer interested in the nuts and bolts, as we were in an age of smithery, but in the daring construction, which gives us a glimpse of the spirit and power of the human spirit. [. . .] The machine, in other words is a tool, but not a producer.²⁵

The fusion of the handicrafts tradition within the Arts and Crafts movement with modern techniques of industrial production proved more successful in Germany than in England. Several possible reasons suggest themselves. There was no British organization like the Werkbund to unite the designers and those industrial producers who would then use these designs. The major London-based design schools were geographically separated from the Midlands and the northern provinces, where British industrial production was concentrated. In Germany, design reform operated polycentrically, which mirrored the distribution of German industrial production. State involvement also followed different patterns. In Germany, state governments played a direct role in promoting modern industrial design through state-run design schools and polytechnic universities. In Britain, by contrast, the Board of Education provided little more than symbolic encouragement in this sector.²⁶ In Germany, the quest to achieve a global industrial economy was seen as an ideological project, in the pursuit of which the state and a number of voluntary agencies systematically collaborated. In Britain, few perceived the need for such a concerted effort—after all, Britannia already ruled the waves. Where reform initiatives emerged, these usually remained ²³ The point was later elaborated by F. Naumann, ‘Kunst und Volkswirtschaft: Vortrag im Auftrag des Deutschen Werkbundes’, 1912, in idem, Werke, 6 vols., Cologne and Opladen, 1964, ¨ vi: Asthetische Schriften, ed. H. Ladendorf, pp. 331–50. ²⁴ Hermann Schwabe, ‘Die F¨orderung der Kunst-Industrie in England und der Stand dieser Frage in Deutschland: F¨ur Staat und Industrie, Gemeinden, Schul- und Vereinsleben’, 1866, cited in Monika Franke, ‘Entstehungsgeschichte des K¨oniglichen Kunstgewerbemuseums in Berlin’, in Werkbund-Archiv, ed., Packeis und Preßglas: Von der Kunstgewerbebewegung zum Deutschen Werkbund, Berlin, 1987, p. 174. ²⁵ Hermann Muthesius, ‘Zur kunstgewerblichen Lage’, Die Werkkunst: Zeitschrift des Vereins f¨ur deutsches Kunstgewerbe in Berlin 1/1 (1 October 1905), unpag. ²⁶ Saler, Avant-Garde, pp. 61–91.

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isolated, tackling individual symptoms. Some aimed at overcoming workers’ alienation, others strove to improve public taste, foster national pride, or, as the inventors of the British Merchandise Act, to tackle German commercial competition. These individual initiatives were not, however, conceived as, or synthesized into, a single strategy. As Noel Rooke observed: ‘We changed not only the face but the direction of German industry. [Yet] in all those pre-war years, those of us who were interested could make very much less impression on British industry.’²⁷ Where the Werkbund succeeded in introducing reform ideas into massproduction, the Arts and Crafts notion of ‘quality work’ was conﬁgured in new ways. The recognizable imitation of traditional methods used by craftsmen faded, while ‘functionality’ became the primary bearer of memory. This did not mean abstraction. The association with craftsmanship was never entirely dissolved. Technical reliability was seen as an indicator of moral integrity, and thus born out of the same spirit as honest, ‘authentic’ design. The technical and the aesthetic qualities of industrial objects found their common denominator in the rejection of historicism. At the Philadelphia exhibition, the over-decorated kitsch objects of historicist consumer culture had been derided both as tasteless and as badly made. Not only art critics, but many ordinary visitors made this observation, which was echoed in the socialist press: throughout Europe, but especially in Germany, traditional, artisanal attitudes to work dominated the Social Democratic agenda to a remarkable degree during the 1870s.²⁸ There was, therefore, a broad ideological consensus between workers’ representatives and bourgeois reformers that aesthetic degeneration was closely linked with poor technical quality. It was only logical to conclude that a more ‘honest’ design was the natural corollary of true quality work. Then, form would no longer cover up function, but give it an appropriate expression. The same rules that applied to the domestic house also applied to the goods that would furnish the domestic interior. Thus, the guidelines Muthesius laid out in Das Englische Haus, in which he argued that domestic, vernacular architecture embodied the essence of national identity, applied to questions of design too.²⁹ ‘The simple house that is developed from rural motifs and constructed according to logical objective [fachlich] principles’ was to replace the ‘polished villa which is overloaded with all manner of historical ornamentation’.³⁰ By analogy, Muthesius’s preferred adjectives to characterize this new design were ‘simple’, ‘rational’, ‘comfortable’, ‘practical’ and ‘homely’ (heimatlich). The ²⁷ N. Rooke, The Craftsman and Education for Industry: Four Lectures, Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, London, 1935, quote p. 57. ²⁸ Bonnell, ‘Cheap and Nasty’. This was partly a result of the dominance of traditional artisans amongst the SPD’s ordinary members, as analysed in T. Welskopp, Das Banner der Br¨uderlichkeit: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vom Vorm¨arz bis zum Sozialistengesetz, Bonn, 2000. ²⁹ Muthesius, Das Englische Haus. ³⁰ Muthesius, ‘Die Bedeutung des Kunstgewerbes’, p. 45.

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Werkbund united companies which saw it as advantageous to embrace these design principles for the objects they produced. In 1907, these were mostly medium-sized manufacturing organizations, such as the Deutsche Werkst¨atten f¨ur Handwerkskunst (with around 600 employees), and the Thonet Stuhlfabriken (with 6,000 employees on seven sites). By 1914, several industrial giants had also become Werkbund members, including AEG, Siemens, Bosch, BASF, and Mercedes Benz. The paradox was that, as these companies were beginning to implement the Werkbund agenda, the parameters of the debate that had ﬁrst generated this agenda had already begun to shift. As we have seen, in terms of style, bourgeois modernism was ﬁrst deﬁned in opposition to academic historicism or Beaux Arts. By 1900, historicism was beginning to lose popularity, especially when it came to object design. Its hegemony was gradually replaced by a new movement: the Jugendstil, or Art Nouveau. The term was coined in 1896 in the trend-setting cultural weekly Jugend, which was founded by Georg Hirth. Henry van de Velde became one of its most important theorists. Jugendstil affected all areas of cultural production, from music to book illustrations, yet its inﬂuence was felt particularly keenly in areas where there was a direct overlap of art and commerce: in advertising posters, shop-window decorations and, last but not least, product design, evident particularly in the designs of the Wiener Werkst¨atten from 1903. Bourgeois modernists now faced a new challenge. On the face of it, Jugendstil design, with its practical and emphatically commercial orientation, seemed a political ally. Its formal language, with bold curving lines and organic, ﬂoral motifs, was not obviously conservative in the way historicism had been. Jugendstil designers also accomplished what the Werkbund had long aimed at: the invention of a successful market brand, in which cutting-edge design ideas were taken out of the elitist world of ﬁne art, and introduced to a mass audience. Yet there were also important tensions at work, which were political in origin. They surfaced in the famous Werkbund controversy of 1914, which arose over divided attitudes towards the Jugendstil. Echoing the literal wording of the exchanges between the faction led by Muthesius on the one hand, and that by Henry van de Velde on the other, many historians have portrayed the Werkbund controversy as a clash between the requirements of commerce and the freedom of art. Muthesius features the advocate of capitalist utility, evident in his championing of typiﬁcation (Typisierung), a term that provided the title for his Cologne conference speech.³¹ This stance outraged those Werkbund artists, led by Henry van de Velde, who insisted on a greater degree of artistic individualism vis-`a-vis normative designs. Van de Velde’s followers accused Muthesius of ‘H¨andlergeist’, a petty English-style capitalist mentality, which would lead the German Werkbund to its spiritual ruin. Many artists felt that Muthesius’s stance represented the ³¹ Quoted in Fischer, Zwischen Kunst und Industrie, p. 112.

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culmination of an economic pragmatism, the quest for global economics that had already become too dominant within the Werkbund’s agenda. And Muthesius was not the only ﬁgure capable of arousing such reactions. Similar outrage followed the publication of a study by Johannes Buschmann of the Institut f¨ur exakte Wirtschaftsforschung at Rostock University: many Werkbund members found that the aesthetic side of quality work had been unduly pushed aside by more material considerations of quality such as the strength and durability of a product. This understanding of the Werkbund controversy as a dispute between modernizers and anti-modernists is misleading. Muthesius’s polemical assertion that his opponents were merely interested in ‘style’, thus repeating the follies of oldstyle historicism, was designed to discredit, but is no more adequate a summary of the opposing position than Friedrich Naumann’s characterization of Jugendstil practitioners as aesthetes who ‘inadvertently become helpers for yesterday’s men and a hindrance for the men of tomorrow’.³² As so often, the written discourse was slow to adapt to changing ideological constellations—slower than the world of objects itself. The reformers were no great literati. Finding a vocabulary, any vocabulary, for talking about the politics of design had been hard. Amongst those active in the Werkbund, only Muthesius wrote on the topic with something approaching eloquence. And once one vocabulary had been forged in the debate about historicism, it proved very slow to adapt to the emergence of the new, commercial challenge that was the driving force behind Jugendstil. Instead, Muthesius relied on his established polemics against the notion of style—spiced with the charge of ‘mere fashion’—when he railed against the Jugendstil: During the past 30 years, industry has exploited the quick succession of historicist styles to churn out one novelty after another. The quickened pace with which one style followed another, had to lead the whole business ad absurdum. At this moment, the Arts and Crafts movement seemed to offer a way out of the dilemma. Yet the result was even more embarrassing than the abuse of style. By sticking to matters of outward appearance alone, by hiring designers who copied the superﬁcial qualities of that which German artists had invented, industry reached the shallow waters of Jugendstil. It was clear to every serious observer that this fashion could not last, and was certainly divorced from the aims of German artists. [. . .] It is blatantly obvious that the policy of maximizing industrial turnover by stimulating the customers’ greed for novelty will lead to artistic bankruptcy. This is the same slippery slope as discount pricing.³³ ³² Friedrich Naumann, ‘Der a¨sthetische Mensch und die Politik’, 1908, in idem, Werke, vol. iv, pp. 543–50. Curiously, in subsequent decades, the roles of the 1914 controversy were almost reversed. Van der Velde’s anti-industrial sentiment gave way to another faction who opposed Muthesius for quite different reasons. It included many of the famous ‘modernist’ architects of the Weimar Republic, most notably Walter Gropius, who pioneered the international style—a development which, as we shall see, was fundamentally alien to Muthesius’s political vision and the imperialist Wilhelmine agenda which he came to represent in the minds of most contemporaries. ³³ Muthesius, ‘Zur kunstgewerblichen Lage’.

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The terms of the Werkbund debate seem almost reversed here: Muthesius invoked ‘true art’ to fend off the challenge of ‘mere fashion’. This is another instance where a purely literal translation of the written sources creates confusion. Muthesius was not concerned with shielding the autonomy of the individual artist from market forces: after all, he himself was the ﬁercest advocate of Typisierung. ‘Art’ here stands as shorthand for ‘quality work’, that is: for that non-alienated condition of the producer which represents the modern equivalent of vernacular craftsmanship. The argument, as the last sentence indicates, was just as much about economics as it was about aesthetics. To raise the standards of production was to overcome the exploitation of cheap, unskilled labour that had characterized German heavy industry before the victory-march of ‘Made in Germany’. The buzzword that fused this economic imperative with the aesthetic one was Gediegenheit, or solidity: The perpetual improvement of value, the healthy direction of industrial development is quite a different thing. This is what we must aim at by continually improving quality according to the principles of unshakeable Gediegenheit.³⁴

This was the point at which the improvement of work and the improvement of public taste would converge. According to Muthesius, the consumers—and here, he thought of the wealthy classes, not the mass market—needed to be educated to appreciate quality work: Much educational work remains to be done. Especially the nouveau riche tend to reach for gewgaws [Tand ], and are unable to tell the authentic from the inauthentic. However, they collect their own experiences, and come to realize that the sophistication to which they aspire consists in something other than outward ostentation. At least this new wealth creates the foundation from which industry can ﬂourish in the promotion of Gediegenheit.³⁵

Muthesius warned of the danger of luddism: it was not machine-aided production that was to blame for the evils of commercial culture, but attitudes. Used properly, a machine could elevate rather than eliminate the spirit of craftsmanship. Under the inﬂuence of Jugendstil, it would serve the opposite purpose: catering to the clamour for quick-changing fashion and low prices, and failing to educate the audience.³⁶ This conjunction of style and mode of production is what Muthesius labelled ‘industrial Jugendstil’: The industrial Jugendstil is the most embarrassing perversion of the good intentions of the new movement [the Arts and Crafts reformers]. [. . .] How could this have happened? How was it possible that such a hopeful movement could be diverted into such shallowness, stranded on the sandbanks of dunghill art [Afterkunst]? First of all, I have to say that the original art, of the great masters, is partly to blame. It was born ³⁴ Ibid. ³⁵ Ibid. ³⁶ Hermann Muthesius, ‘Kunst im Gewerbe’, St. Petersburger Zeitung 47 (29 February 1904), Berliner Literarisches Bureau, Paris, London and New York, unpag.

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already infected by that virus, which, only a few years later, gave rise to that horrendous plague of the Jugendstil. This virus was the over-emphasis of form. Continental new art took new forms as its starting point. [. . .] Now the Jugendstil is the cancer of the German condition.³⁷

It is clear that both parties in the argument were motivated by anxieties about modernity: the anxiety about commercialism, in the case of Muthesius and his faction, the anxiety about standardization in production, Typisierung, on the part of his opponents. It is equally clear that each party wanted to emerge as the more pro-modern force in the argument. Hence Muthesius and Naumann accused their opponents of neo-historicism, while van de Velde and his associates accused Muthesius’s faction of an ignorant attitude towards modern art. Yet as analytical categories, the terms ‘modern’ and ‘conservative’ do little to explain the issues that were at stake. Ultimately, both parties shared one aim: they looked to questions of design in order to maximize the beneﬁts, and cure the ills, of modernization. They differed merely in their analysis of what these beneﬁts and ills were. The material evidence can elucidate the different approaches. The work of Richard Riemerschmid is a particularly intriguing case. As the designer of the ﬁrst successful reform furniture in Germany, the mastermind behind Germany’s ﬁrst garden city at Hellerau, and of the workers’ housing project in Hagen, Riemerschmid contributed decisively to the emergence of bourgeois modernism. For a relatively brief moment, his work came to exemplify its spirit. His furniture continued to sell even when, after the outbreak of the First World War, Riemerschmid himself had returned to work as a painter, and ceased to play any signiﬁcant role in setting the tone of the debate. Compared to, say, Peter Behrens, who was active for many decades, and whose pupils later came to run the Bauhaus, Riemerschmid’s career was therefore short-lived, and this is one of the reasons why it deﬁes any easy integration into a teleological narrative of the gradual triumph of functionalism.³⁸ Even while he created his most inﬂuential designs, however, Riemerschmid’s work was marked by strange ambiguities. Unusually, he worked for both the luxury and the lower end of the market. In 1892, he won a competition of the K¨onig-Ludwig-Preisstiftung in Nuremberg for the design of a living room that was to cost no more than 350 Marks. His prototype sold extremely well for many years. During the same period, however, Riemerschmid also designed luxury pieces of furniture, many of which deﬁed the principles of Arts and Crafts simplicity and honesty; for example, instead of showcasing ‘authentic’ ³⁷ Hermann Muthesisus, ‘Kultur und Kunst’, in idem., Kultur und Kunst: Sammlung von selbst¨andig erschienenen Aufs¨atzen seit 1900, Jena, 1909, 2nd edn., pp. 13–14. ³⁸ On these difﬁculties, see Winfried Nerdinger, Richard Riemerschmid vom Jugendstil zum Werkbund: Werke und Dokumente, Munich, 1982; Michaela Rammert-G¨otz, Richard Riemerschmid, M¨obel und Innenr¨aume von 1895–1900, Munich, 1987.

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materials, he painted many of his luxury chairs and settees. Riemerschmid also crossed that dreaded divide between Arts and Crafts and Jugendstil. Having started his professional life as a rather unremarkable impressionist painter in Munich, he switched to Jugendstil paintings when this style became popular in the city in the ﬁnal decade of the nineteenth century. Yet before the century was over, he abandoned the ﬁne arts altogether, and the Jugendstil with them, and turned his attention exclusively to questions of design and architecture. As for so many others in the same movement, the impulse for Riemerschmid’s most inﬂuential designs came from Britain. Inspired by the designs of Morris, Ashbee and Walton, featured in the design magazine Studio to which he subscribed, Riemerschmid developed his earliest furniture designs in the 1890s. The English Arts and Crafts reformers had revived the Gothic, not as historical style, but as an idiom expressive of the traditions of craftsmanship, national authenticity and what Ruskin called ‘savageness’. In his efforts to translate Ruskin’s and Morris’s admiration for the Gothic into a German idiom, Riemerschmid turned to the Bavarian National Museum’s collection of medieval furniture, of which he made many drawings.³⁹ Artefacts from the D¨urerzeit, as well as the early nineteenth-century Biedermeier, became pivotal to his view of tradition. These objects had adorned ‘ordinary German homes’, not palaces or villas. Whilst traditional, they were also vernacular, and differed sharply from pretensions to feudal grandeur. This ideal of age-old domesticity led Naumann to coin the term ‘Hausgest¨uhl’ for Riemerschmid’s designs. Another inspiration came from the sensitivity to materiality that had been central to the Arts and Crafts movement.⁴⁰ In Riemerschmid’s designs, decorative panelling disappeared, solid wood was made visible. Friedrich Naumann appropriately commented that with Riemerschmid, ‘the German forest moved into the German living room’.⁴¹ An interesting example is Riemerschmid’s interior design of his brother’s house of 1901, with its extensive use of the wood of arolla pine (pinus cembra). The arolla pine grows only in mountainous regions in certain parts of Bavaria: for Riemerschmid, it was therefore a regional material par excellence. At the same time, its surface was much more expressively textured than ordinary wood.⁴² Without resorting to outward ornamentation, ³⁹ Nerdinger, Richard Riemerschmid, pp. 13 and 29. ⁴⁰ G¨unter Bandmann, ‘Bemerkungen zu einer Ikonologie des Materials’, St¨adel-Jahrbuch n.s. 2 (1969), pp. 75–100. ⁴¹ Eugen Kalkschmidt, ‘Die M¨obel- und Raumkunst auf der Werkbund-Austellung zu K¨oln am Rhein’, Moderne Bauformen: Monatshefte f¨ur Architektur und Raumkunst, ed. C. H. Baer, 13/2 ( July–December 1914), pp. 401–6, quote p. 404. Kalkschmidt describes Naumann’s dictum as a ‘poetic comment especially on the work of Riemerschmid’, and more generally about the 1906 exhibition. ⁴² This is due to the fact that pinus cembra grows in hostile conditions with high wind exposure; its wood therefore has bonsai-like qualities, with a large number of branches on a short trunk.

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Riemerschmid thus managed to temper Ruskinian ‘savageness’ with a ﬁne sense of aesthetics. Riemerschmid also rejected Ruskin’s stance on machines when he integrated nature-motifs with a pro-industrial outlook. Finally, there was the recourse to handicrafts tradition. In this area, Riemerschmid departed furthest from his English models. In 1905, the Dresdener Werkst¨atten f¨ur Handwerkskunst, which Riemerschmid had helped to set up, developed what came to be called Maschinenm¨obel: industrial furniture. The name was inspired by Friedrich Naumann’s essay ‘Die Kunst im Zeitalter der Maschine’, published in the previous year. Naumann had suggested that Germany’s position on the world market would be strengthened by the invention of a German ‘Volksstil’, a folk style enhanced through ‘Maschinenarbeit’.⁴³ From this, Riemerschmid derived the title for his design programme. The results were exhibited at the Third German Kunstgewerbeausstellung in Dresden. The catalogue described them as ‘the ﬁrst democratic art’, ‘a style born from the spirit of the machine’.⁴⁴ This was no empty phrase. While celebrating nature and vernacular traditions, the aesthetic minimalism of Riemerschmid echoed industrial production. Most of the wooden components of his furniture were, it is true, hand-made. However, their constructivist logic made them compatible with the idea of machine-aided production. These designs severed all ties with architectural forms, which had inspired furniture design for centuries. The Frankfurt wardrobe shown here (Figure 35), dating from around 1700, illustrates this principle. Its tripartite structure echoes the structure of a stately home: a monumental base, a middle section, subdivided by vertical pilasters (here of the Corinthian order), and, at the top, a ledge. This prototype was a commonplace in historicist furniture design. Riemerschmid’s wardrobe, by contrast, did away with all allusions to architecture (Figure 36). What emerged was a design that was self-contained, synthesizing the individual elements which contributed to its functionality: the plain doors, the exposed hinges, the drawers. There was no separate base, and no ledge. While the individual forms were derived entirely from pre-industrial, vernacular furniture, the overall appearance was one of functionality that could be called ‘industrial’ or ‘machine-like’. What Riemerschmid changed, then, was not only the appearance, but the structure of the object. His vernacular modernism was not just about the abolition of the ‘excessive’ ornament that adorned the mass-produced objects of historicism; it was, more fundamentally, about ﬁnding a visual language for the object which was ‘appropriate’ to its nature. The process of production was to become visible; the extent to which this process was man- or machine-driven varied, yet this was a secondary question. ⁴³ Friedrich Naumann, ‘Die Kunst im Zeitalter der Maschine’, Kunstwart 17 (1904). ⁴⁴ ‘Dresdener Hausger¨at’, Preisbuch 1906, Dresdener Werkst¨atten, cited in Sonja G¨unther, ‘Richard Riemerschmid und die Dresdener Werkst¨atten f¨ur Handwerkskunst’, in Nerdinger, Richard Riemerschmid, pp. 34–8, quote from p. 35.

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Figure 35 Wardrobe, 1682. Reproduced from: Konrad H¨useler, Hamburgisches Museum f¨ur Kunst und Gewerbe: Bildf¨uhrer, Hamburg, 1938, p. 85.

The making visible of the production process later came to be called ‘functionalism’. To contemporary ears, functionalism suggests that the design of the object conformed above all to its use-value. This understanding gave rise to countless attacks on modernist functionalism, when its creations seemingly failed to fulﬁl their core function: houses with ﬂat roofs leaked, those with glass screen walls proved difﬁcult to heat, minimalist furniture was uncomfortable to sit on. To the bourgeois modernists, however, functionalism had less to do with practical applications than with the desire for form to be truthful to the making of the object. This legacy can still be felt in the 1920s brand of functionalism that came to be associated with the Bauhaus and the International Style. By then, the visible connection of making with handicrafts had faded into the background. Nevertheless, for Mies van de Rohe and others, functionalism had less to do with practical uses than with the essence of objects, understood in almost Platonic terms. Riemerschmid had expressed the same notion in less elevated terms, when he deﬁned functionalism as the ‘character’ of the object. Yet again, we see a hidden neo-classicism at play. Function was based on the notion of appropriateness, in the sense of the Greek prepon. Prepon denoted more than usefulness with regard to a speciﬁc end: it was a virtue in itself. Since the Enlightenment, aesthetic and moral theorists invoked the term ‘appropriateness’, as developed by the Earl of Shaftesbury, or ‘Angemessenheit’, as elaborated

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Figure 36 Interior with so-called ‘machine furniture’, by Richard Riemerschmid, exhibit at the Third German Arts and Crafts Exhibition, Dresden, 1906, from: Dresdner Hausger¨at: Preisbuch, section ‘Einrichtung I’, Dresden, 1906, p. 18.

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by Christof Martin Wieland, to denote a harmonious relationship between the outer form and the inner intention.⁴⁵ In architecture, for example, NeoPalladianism was perceived as more virtuous than Baroque or Rococo, because the simple mathematical proportions and balance of Palladianism reﬂected the principle of appropriateness.⁴⁶ The same notion of appropriateness underpinned Riemerschmid’s designs. Read in the context of such developments in object design, the issues at stake in the Werkbund controversy take on a new signiﬁcance. Muthesius’s faction did not seek to make objects subservient to the dictates of capitalism. Rather, they looked to typiﬁcation as a way of integrating notions of appropriateness and function, in the above sense, into the design of objects. Muthesius’s critics, such as Henry van de Velde and Karl Ernst Osthaus, were also preoccupied with alienation, yet developed a different strategy for tackling the problem. As we have seen in Chapter 2, Osthaus’s aim as a patron of urban developments and the arts was to foster a modern yet regionally speciﬁc idiom that would forge a distinctive identity for the industrial region of the Ruhr. This area was viewed with suspicion by many Werkbund activists, who saw themselves as the natural allies of high-end manufacturing, and regarded heavy industrialists with their reliance on low-cost labour and their political links with agrarian protectionists as enemies of their reform project. Since the regional producers were not the natural allies of a quest for quality work, Osthaus had to ﬁnd them elsewhere. Therefore, consumers became the central characters in his proposed solution to alienation. This was a radical step. As Conﬁno and Koshar have warned, looking back ‘it is easy to view [. . .] the bourgeois mode of consumption as inevitable, the only viable system of life and thought in modern history, rather than as something unprecedented and historically unique’.⁴⁷ In July 1902, when Osthaus opened the Museum Folkwang in Hagen, the idea of a consumer society was still a dim prospect—especially in the Ruhr area, which lacked any sense of urban glamour.⁴⁸ This museum was to serve as a temple to aesthetics, in which Osthaus deliberately mixed ‘high’ and ‘low art’. In van de Velde’s Jugendstil rooms, he displayed paintings ⁴⁵ A. A. Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. J. M. Robertson, 2 vols., London, 1900, vol. i, pp. 76–7. Christof Martin Wieland, Betrachtung u¨ ber die gegenw¨artige Lage des Vaterlandes, in: S¨ammtliche Werke, 49 vols. in 38, ed. J. G. Gruber, Leipzig, 1818–23, vol. xxxi, p. 237. ⁴⁶ A. A. Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, ‘A Letter concerning Design’ (1712), in B. Rand, ed., Second Characters of the Language of Forms, New York, 1969, p. 22. Cf. Robert Tavernor, Palladio and Palladianism, London, 1991; and John Harris, The Palladians, New York, 1982. The moral connotations of Neo-Palladianism are discussed by G. Bandmann, ‘Ikonologie des Ornaments und ¨ der Dekoration’, Jahrbuch f¨ur Asthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 4 (1958/9), pp. 232–58. ⁴⁷ Koshar and Conﬁno, ‘Regimes of Consumer Culture’, p. 153. ⁴⁸ Herta Hesse-Frielinghaus, ‘Folkwang’, in idem, August Hoff, Walter Erbe et al., eds., Karl Ernst Osthaus: Leben und Werk, Recklinghausen, 1971, pp. 119–241. The name was derived from Germanic mythology, an interest which Osthaus had cultivated during his student days, when he was associated with the Pan-German League.

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by artists such as Ferdinand Hodler, Johan Thorn-Prikker, Edvard Munch, as well as sculptural works by George Minne and Aristide Maillol. These were shown alongside ‘ethnic’ artefacts, such as Spanish Moorish tiles, Persian carpets, ornaments from India, Korea, Siam, Laos and Egypt, and traditional Japanese watercolours. The overall focus of the museum was contemporary objects, but the collection of older and foreign artefacts was not organized in such a way as to trace lines of development or a trajectory of ‘progress’. Rather, Osthaus wanted to create a single spectacle, a show of light, colour and ornament. The effect he aimed at was one of enchantment, and his vision of colour was indebted to the work of his contemporary and close friend Bruno Taut, especially his fantastic Glass House.⁴⁹ Objects were selected for their decorative potential and their ability to appeal to the imagination. Osthaus himself deﬁned the task of his collection as the ‘penetration of all aspects of life with rhythm and beauty’.⁵⁰ This use of spectacle had historical roots, too. Ernst Fuhrmann’s description of Osthaus as ‘aspiring to being a Baroque prince’ may have been somewhat ironic,⁵¹ yet Osthaus’s cultural sensibilities were genuinely based on his reading of Baroque spectacle as exemplary for how the material culture of modernism should communicate its appeal. As Osthaus himself put it, the Baroque was the ﬁrst universal style [. . .] It affected people with the ecstasy of enchantment, and where its sparks fell, ﬂames of passion formed monuments that reached up to the sky. [. . .] The Baroque surpasses nature [. . . In it] fantasy reaches to the horizons and beyond [. . .] Building of the Baroque is always poetry, which far exceeds any necessity, and subjugates utility to effect. And these effects reach all the senses. [. . .] At no other moment has appearance ever been the essence of the arts.⁵²

This reappraisal of the Baroque transcended the categories of historicism, and betrays a deeply modern sensitivity for the sensual, fantastical and spectacular qualities of material culture. Scholars such as Gurlitt made related arguments, ⁴⁹ Murat Dundar, ‘The Concept of Glass Architecture in Bruno Taut’s Thought’, Journal of Architecture and Planning 596 (2005), pp. 199–205; Rosemarie Haag Bletter, ‘The Interpretation of the Glass Dream-Expressionist Architecture and the History of the Crystal Metaphor’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 4071 (1981), pp. 20–43; John A. Stuart, ‘Unweaving Narrative Fabric: Bruno Taut, Walter Benjamin, and Paul Scheerbart’s The Gray Cloth’, Journal of Architectural Education 53/2 (1999), pp. 61–73; Frederic J. Schwarz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture before the First World War, New Haven and London, 1996, pp. 184–5. ⁵⁰ Karl Ernst Osthaus, Moderne Kunst [Folkwang catalogue], Hagen, 1912, quoted from Hesse-Frielinghaus et al., Karl Ernst Osthaus, p. 215. ⁵¹ Fuhrmann was one of Osthaus’s collaborators, and the executor of his will. While slightly tongue-in-cheek, this quote hardly amounts to a ‘complete misrepresentation’, as claimed by Peter Stressig and Justus Buekschmitt, ‘Karl Ernst Osthaus, der Planer und Bauherr’, in HesseFrielinghaus, Hoff, Erbe, Karl Ernst Osthaus, pp. 345–84, quote p. 353. Furhmann’s analogy with the Baroque prince, which he made in the journal Folkwang, volume 1, Hagen, 1921, unpag., was not meant to discredit, but to capture the nature of Osthaus’s creativity. ⁵² Karl Ernst Osthaus, Grundz¨uge der Stilentwicklung, 2nd amended edn., Hagen, 1919, originally 1918, pp. 63–4.

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yet only Osthaus translated them into practice through the innovative use of spectacle at the Folkwang.⁵³ The permanent collection at the Folkwang was supplemented by a series of temporary shows, starting in 1902 and then held in quick succession, usually with two shows being put on every year. Osthaus spent much time and money on popularizing his activities, and published and advertised widely in the regional and national press. Many of the temporary exhibitions were dedicated to objects of everyday life, including porcelain from Copenhagen, Munich and Meißen, ceramics, silver- and copperware, furniture and reform clothing. Osthaus himself travelled up and down the country to lecture on the spiritual signiﬁcance of art and design in the modern world. In a single year, he spoke in D¨usseldorf, Krefeld, K¨oln, Elberfeld, Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin, Leipzig, Stettin, K¨onigsberg and Vienna.⁵⁴ Educational reform became another preoccupation. New schools, which would follow the model of his Folkwangschule, were to instruct people in a new aesthetic appreciation of the world. ‘The teacher’, Osthaus wrote in 1919, ‘is to be an educator in the highest sense of the word. In periods of true culture, the teacher has always been close to the priest, and both stood above worldly rulers. We have to regain something of that dignity for him [the teacher].’⁵⁵ As we have seen, Osthaus soon got frustrated by the unenthusiastic response of the general public to the Folkwang Museum and School. To reach a wider audience, in 1909, Osthaus created a new museum, dedicated to aesthetics in consumer culture. This Deutsches Museum f¨ur Kunst in Handel und Gewerbe was co-sponsored by the Werkbund, from which it received an annual subsidy of 1,000 reichsmark. In his account of its history, Christian M¨uller argues that the Museum was marred by a ‘contradiction’ between Osthaus’s aesthetic Idealism and the practical requirements of modern industrial production, as represented by the Werkbund.⁵⁶ Yet in this new museum, the supposed Idealist Osthaus charted territory hitherto almost completely neglected by the Werkbund, which was vital for the evolution of modern consumerism. Anti-rational as Osthaus’s insistence on the spiritual signiﬁcance of aesthetics may have been, it enabled him to question the boundaries between high art and mass culture. The newstyle museum explored the role of aesthetics in advertising, featuring shows on commercial packaging, shop window decoration and advertising posters and ⁵³ Art historian Cornelius Gurlitt, 1850–1938, pioneered a new academic appreciation of the Baroque, characterized by the late nineteenth-century sense of spectacle, in works such as his Geschichte des Barockstiles, des Rococo und des Klassicismus, which is vol. v of Jacob Burckhardt and Wilhelm L¨ubke, eds., Geschichte der neueren Baukunst, Stuttgart, 1887. ⁵⁴ Hesse-Frielinghaus et al., Karl Ernst Osthaus, p. 217. ⁵⁵ Karl Ernst Osthaus, ‘Zur Schulreform’, Westf¨alisches Tageblatt, 21 November 1919, quoted from ibid., pp. 226–7. ⁵⁶ Sebastian M¨uller, ‘Deutsches Museum f¨ur Kunst in Handel und Gewerbe’, in HesseFrielinghaus et al., Karl Ernst Osthaus, pp. 258–342.

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ﬂiers, shows, moreover, which Osthaus sent on tours throughout Germany to reach as wide an audience as at all possible. These efforts were supported by Peter Behrens, to whom Osthaus had entrusted the design of several rooms in the Folkwang and his own home in Hagen. In 1907, Behrens became chief designer for the AEG electricity works; in this capacity, he not only designed famous industrial buildings, such as the aforementioned Turbine Hall in Berlin, but also several lines of company products, the accompanying advertising campaigns, and the ﬁrm’s logo.⁵⁷ His inﬂuence led Osthaus to include a special department for advertising and industrial logos in his new museum in 1908. Osthaus capitalized on the potentialities opened up by the ‘industrial Jugendstil’ that Muthesius had railed against. Since Toulouse-Lautrec, art nouveau artists throughout Europe had dedicated themselves to graphic and poster art, and many of their works found their way into Osthaus’s exhibitions: Behrens himself, poster artists Julius Klinger, Lucian Bernhard, Julius Gipkens, Hans Rudi Erdt, the designer Emil Rudolf Weiß, who invented the famous logo of the Insel publishers, and Fritz Helmuth Ehmke, one of the foremost designers of graphic fonts (to whom Osthaus offered the post as director of the new department for advertising in the Museum f¨ur Kunst in Handel und Gewerbe), and many others.⁵⁸ Their work was innovative and easily accessible: characteristic, memorable shapes and colours, curving lines and the erotic appeal of many of the featured female ﬁgures contributed to a new aestheticization of consumer goods, transforming them into objects of lust and desire. M¨uller’s condemnation of Osthaus’s advocacy of Jugendstil as a turn away from the more pragmatic targets of solving the problem of alienation in modern mass culture, therefore, only tells half the story. For Osthaus, the esoteric did not preﬁgure the undemocratic ‘cult of genius’ later embraced by the fascists, as M¨uller implies.⁵⁹ Rather, in modern consumerism, the spiritual and the popular were perfectly compatible; in fact, for Osthaus, consumerism could help democratize the elitism of traditional art. Just as the Werkbund controversy cannot be explained in terms of modernists versus conservatives, the nature of the division also transcended a simple ⁵⁷ Behrens’s role as designer is discussed in Alan Windsor, Peter Behrens: Architect and Designer 1868–1940, London, 1981; Tilman Buddensieg and H. Rogge, eds., Industriekultur: Peter Behrens und die AEG 1907–14, Berlin, 1980; Frederic J. Schwartz, ‘Commodity Signs: Peter Behrens, the AEG, and the Trademark: His Designs for German Allgemeine Elektricit¨ats-Gesellschaft’, Journal of Design History 9/3 (1996), pp. 153–84; Giovanni Anceschi, ‘The First Corporate Image: Peter Behrens and the AEG’, Domus 605 (1980), pp. 32–4; and Hans Georg Pfeiffer, ed., Peter Behrens: ‘Wer aber will sagen, was Sch¨onheit sei?’ Graﬁk, Produktgestaltung, Architektur, D¨usseldorf, 1990. ⁵⁸ Michael Fehr, Sabine R¨oder and Gerhard Storck, Das Sch¨one und der Alltag: Die Anf¨ange modernen Designs 1900–1914: Deutsches Museum f¨ur Kunst in Handel und Gewerbe, Cologne, 1997. ⁵⁹ On the idea of the artist as genius, compare Martin Warnke, ‘Ein Motiv aus der politischen ¨ Asthetik’, in J¨urgen Kocka, ed., B¨urger und B¨urgerlichkeit im 19. Jahrhundert, G¨ottingen, 1987, pp. 227–38.

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dichotomy between utilitarianism and artistic free spirits. Some historians have contrasted Muthesius’s pro-capitalist inclinations with Osthaus’s advocacy of artistic autonomy, and claimed that the latter was more resistant to political or economic exploitation.⁶⁰ But for all his idiosyncrasies, Osthaus was no critic of capitalism. Like Muthesius, Osthaus believed the problems of modern capitalist production could, and should, be met by modern, capitalist methods. Neither man advocated a return to a pre-industrial idyll. Just as Muthesius had become suspicious of the Bund Heimatschutz and the garden-city movement, so Osthaus sought to work with, rather than against, modern industrialists, and promoted artists who embraced self-consciously modernist aesthetics. Only on this basis could Osthaus form his close political alliance with Werkbund member Walter Gropius, who became the co-founder of the Weimar Bauhaus and one of the great promoters for what is popularly known as the ‘International Style’. Osthaus saw Gropius as an ally against Muthesius, and Muthesius’s resignation as director of the Werkbund in 1916 gave Osthaus new hope for the future of German consumer culture.⁶¹ Yet Gropius was a radical modernist. He had been instrumental in pushing the Werkbund towards an ever closer association with modern technology: the yearbooks of 1912, 1913 and 1914 featured more motor boats, zeppelins, locomotives and cars—in short, most of the products associated with the label ‘Made in Germany’—than furniture and other, more traditional wares. Gropius’s contribution to this trend had been substantial, and one of the featured ﬂagship products was Gropius’s design for a locomotive for the Prussian state railways of 1913 (Figure 37). Gropius was thus hardly the man to support the anti-industrial stance, which later historians have sometimes sought to associate with Osthaus. The Werkbund was not divided over the question of whether art and industry should co-operate. Nor was there ever any serious doubt that typiﬁcation was desirable. Although Muthesius had made the term the centrepiece of his polemics, in practice, typiﬁcation was accepted by all sides as a necessary precondition for industrial mass-production, and Gropius, who succeeded Osthaus as Muthesius’s most outspoken critic, was by no means averse to calling for more typiﬁcation himself. For Gropius, the idea of a type was central to his artistic as well as his economic vision: a type represented the essence of a thought process. And as the thought process was rational, it found its logical extension in the rationality of industrial techniques of production.⁶² At any rate, Gropius’s condemnation of ⁶⁰ Frederic J. Schwartz, ‘Der Schleier der Maja: Karl Ernst Osthaus, das deutsche Museum f¨ur Kunst in Handel und Gewerbe und der Werkbundstreit’, in Fehr, R¨oder and Storck, Das Sch¨one und der Alltag, pp. 409–27; see also idem, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture before the First World War, New Haven and London, 1996. ⁶¹ As expressed in a letter from Osthaus to August Endell, dated 19 June 1916, quoted from Stressig, ‘Hohenhagen’, pp. 449–50. ⁶² Types were the guiding principle of a collection of photographs of industrial ediﬁces that Gropius created for Osthaus’s museum. In a letter to Osthaus, dated April 1914, quoted from

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Figure 37 Diesel locomotive, by Walter Gropius, for the Prussian state railways, 1913, from: Die Kunst in Industrie und Handel, Jahrbuch des Deutschen Werkbundes, Jena, 1913.

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Muthesius predated the latter’s famous 1914 lecture on typiﬁcation by several years.⁶³ The real question was how exactly the co-operation between art and industry should take shape. The accusation Gropius levelled against Muthesius was not that he approved of mass-production, but that he had emptied the category of ‘quality work’ of its aesthetic content. Like Osthaus, Gropius thought that the primary task for the future was to develop a language of forms for German-made goods that would widen their social appeal.⁶⁴ In this way, Osthaus and Gropius sought to democratize capitalism by transforming it into a system of mass consumption. Aesthetics were vital for the seduction of the masses into consumption.⁶⁵ After 1918, Gropius became ever more determined to implement this utopian vision—if not inside the Werkbund, then against it. He joined forces with the equally utopian-minded Expressionist architect Bruno Taut and the critic Adolf Behne to set up a revolutionary working committee for art. The German title, ‘Arbeitsrat f¨ur Kunst’, deliberately resembled the term ‘Arbeiterrat’, the workers’ soviets set up in conjunction with the revolutionary disturbances of 1918–19. Soon afterwards, Gropius denounced the Werkbund as spiritually dead.⁶⁶ In 1919, he declared that the Werkbund ‘should have assumed the lead when revolution broke out, yet now it has missed the decisive moment, and opinion has turned sharply against it. [. . .] The young [artists] feel isolated from the people [Volk] [. . .] The religious impulse is lacking.’⁶⁷ This quotation does not signify Gropius’s sudden conversion to Christianity. Rather, by religious impulse, he referred to the same spiritual investment that Osthaus had made in the social healing potential of art when he ﬁrst set up the Folkwang Museum. It was out of this spirit of social utopianism, in which the industrial object would save the souls of consumers, that, in 1918, Gropius led a group of politically radical artists and architects away from the Werkbund, and founded the Bauhaus. Stressig, ‘Hohenhagen’, p. 466, Gropius insisted that the collection, in which he took particular pride, always remain associated with his name. It was published, with an introduction by Gropius which emphasizes the role of industrial ‘types’, as Industriebauten, bearbeitet von Walter Gropius, Wanderausstellung 18 des Deutschen Museums f¨ur Kunst in Handel und Gewerbe Hagen i.W. Compare also Sabine R¨oder, ed., Moderne Baukunst 1900–1914: Die Photosammlung des Deutschen Museums f¨ur Kunst in Handel und Gewerbe, Krefeld, 1993, esp. pp. 176–205. ⁶³ Gropius, letter to Osthaus, dated 11 April 1914, quoted from Stressig, ‘Hohenhagen’, p. 467. ⁶⁴ Ibid. ⁶⁵ On the rise of seductive consumerism, compare Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain, eds., Cathedrals of Consumption: The European Department Store, 1850–1939, Aldershot, 1999. ⁶⁶ Gropius, letter to Osthaus, dated 3 August 1919, quoted from Stressig, ‘Hohenhagen’, p. 473. ⁶⁷ Gropius as quoted in the protocol of the board meeting of the Werkbund of 30 June 1919, quoted from Stressig, ‘Hohenhagen’, p. 471.

6 Liberal Governmentality and the Spatial Politics of ‘B¨urgerlichkeit’

In Wilhelmine Germany, modern and bourgeois were used almost synonymously. The association of modernism with an avant-garde impulse, which challenges bourgeois manners and conventions, was largely conﬁned to a few radical artists and intellectuals. Arguably, this changed after the First World War, when more utopian forms of modernism began to take root in social practice. Before 1918, however, modernism was a creed promoted overwhelmingly by those who also saw themselves as bourgeois, and who regarded modernism as a natural extension of this identity. Indeed, on occasions, modernism may simply have served as a ﬁg-leaf for bourgeois economic self-interest. But more importantly, the connection between being modern and being bourgeois rested on an understanding of both conditions as political projects. This is easy to overlook in retrospect. In Goldhagen’s classiﬁcation of modernism’s generative principles, the Werkbund represents a ‘consensual’ rather than a reformist or a utopian strand of modernism.¹ Many Werkbund historians have interpreted the organization’s efforts to modernize design and public taste as a tool for the promotion of capitalist growth, and the social appeasement necessary for it. Certainly, many Werkbund activists supported capitalism, in that they envisaged the private ownership of the means of production. Many of them also believed in the duty of the state to oversee and promote economic development. There were few genuine democrats amongst the bourgeois modernists, and even fewer Socialists. Yet only an anachronistic reading of this period would regard such a mindset as ‘consensualist’. In the decades around 1900, liberal capitalism was neither all-pervasive nor the unquestioned basis of social and political life in Germany. Although they received some backing from national and state governments, bourgeois modernists usually saw themselves as a beleaguered minority, engaged in a power struggle against conservative politicians, agrarian ¹ Sarah Williams Goldhagen, ‘Coda: Reconceptualizing the Modern’, in idem and Legault, Anxious Modernisms, pp. 301–25, quote p. 303.

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elites and dirigiste attitudes. They did not believe that modernization was inevitable. Rather, they understood their modernism as an ambition to forge an aesthetic, social, economic and, ultimately, political alternative to the status quo. And they referred to this alternative way of being as bourgeois, or more precisely: b¨urgerlich. B¨urgerlich is a distinctively German concept, which is hard to deﬁne, and difﬁcult to translate into English. Its meanings range from ‘civil’, via ‘civic’, ‘burgher’, and even ‘domestic’, to ‘middle-class’. In his seminal study of the ‘bourgeois public sphere’, J¨urgen Habermas famously interpreted all these shades of meaning as natural extensions of a bourgeois class identity.² Yet the Marxist concept of class represents an inadequate tool for understanding the complexities of the social status and the political role of the B¨urgertum in Wihelmine Germany.³ It is even less well suited to capturing what was distinctive about the collective persona contemporary authors referred to when they described a milieu as b¨urgerlich. This cannot be reduced to factors such as income and wealth, for not everyone who had one or the other was considered b¨urgerlich. B¨urgerlichkeit was wedded to a notion of political competence as dependent on qualities such as ‘character’ and Bildung, which were obtained through an elitist classical education available only to a select few.⁴ Moreover, B¨urgerlichkeit also, and crucially, entailed a speciﬁc mentality. Its roots lay in the Enlightenment. Half a century before Marx appropriated the term, the aspiration to be b¨urgerlich was closely tied to the aspiration to be, or become, German. A typical representation of this linkage was a series of cartoons by Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki, a proliﬁc artist and well-known illustrator of popular eighteenthcentury sentimental novels.⁵ 1779 saw the publication of Chodowiecki’s series of engravings entitled ‘Natural and Affected Acts of Life’, with a commentary by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg. The ﬁrst two sets of these juxtapositions use German- and French-language titles to identify German B¨urgerlichkeit with the ² Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. ³ Useful overviews of the massive historiography on the middle class in later nineteenth-century German history are David Blackbourn and Richard J. Evans, eds., The German Bourgeoisie: Essays on the Social History of the German Middle Class from the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Century, London, 1990; J¨urgen Kocka and Allan Mitchell, eds., Bourgeois Society in NineteenthCentury Europe, Oxford, 1993, especially Kocka, ‘The European Pattern and the German Case’, pp. 3–39, and Dieter Langewiesche, ‘Liberalism and the Middle Classes in Europe’, pp. 40–69; Pamela M. Pilbeam, The Middle Classes in Europe, 1789–1914: France, Germany, Italy and Russia, Basingstoke, 1990. ⁴ On the German idea of Bildung, see Georg Bollenbeck, Bildung und Kultur: Glanz und Elend eines deutschen Deutungsmusters, Frankfurt, 1994; and, on the narrative construction of self-becoming that deﬁnes Bildung, Martin Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse, Princeton, 1978. ⁵ Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki (1726–1801) und seine Zeit, exhibition catalogue, D¨usseldorf, London and New York, 2001; Werner Busch, ‘The Reception of Hogarth in Chodowiecki and Kaulbach’, Zeitschrift des deutschen Vereins f¨ur Kunstwissenschaft 46 (1992), pp. 9–19; Renate Kr¨uger, Das Zeitalter der Empﬁndsamkeit: Kunst und Kultur des sp¨aten 18. Jahrhunderts in Deutschland, Vienna and Munich, 1972.

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Figure 38 ‘Der Grus/La reverence’, by Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki, in the series ‘Natural and Affected Acts of Life’, from: Georg Christoph Lichtenberg and Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki, Der Fortgang der Tugend und des Lasters: G¨ottinger Taschenkalender, G¨ottingen, 1779, plates 9 and 10.

‘natural’, and French aristocratic styles with the ‘affected’, in areas of social life such as Der Unterricht/L’instruction, Die Unterredung/La conversation, Das Gebeth/La priere, Der Spatzier-Gang/La promenade, Der Grus/La reverence (Figure 38).⁶ In each case, the b¨urgerlich attitude is one of quiet introspection, a modest habitus, and a deeply moralistic (originally Pietist) sensibility. This is shown to correspond, in those scenes that take place in the open air, with a natural setting resembling a landscape garden. The corresponding poses of aristocratic affectation are identiﬁed with pompous Rococo costumes, exaggerated gestures and, in the outdoor scenes, with the artiﬁcially trimmed hedges of a Baroque garden. ⁶ Ingrid Sommer, ed., Der Fortgang der Tugend und des Lasters: Daniel Chodowieckis Monatskuppfer zum G¨ottinger Taschenkalender, mit Erkl¨arungen Georg Christoph Lichtenbergs, 2nd edn., Frankfurt a.M., 1977.

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Similar typologies of B¨urgerlichkeit were constructed in literary texts of the period, most famously Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s dramas, such as Miss Sara Sampson and Emilia Galotti, in which virtuous b¨urgerlich heroines have to ﬁght off the immoral advances of decadent princely tempters.⁷ The corruption that was being chastised here was by no means conﬁned to a particular socio-economic milieu. Rather, it was a moral persuasion that could be adopted by any feeling (and more or less educated) individual. Crucially, this form of B¨urgerlichkeit was ﬁrst developed, and represented, in a domestic setting. Hence the genre of Lessing’s plays, which he himself called ‘b¨urgerliches Trauerspiel’, is best translated as ‘domestic dramas’ (rather than bourgeois drama). Through this polemical emphasis on domesticity as the breeding-ground for the virtues of a new milieu, the realm of private identities, hitherto conceptualized as separate from the res publica, or even its Other, was transformed into a sphere in which a new political culture was forged.⁸ In Burchell’s words, ‘eighteenth-century political thought [was] preoccupied with ﬁnding a way of rescuing man from [. . .] a split between civic and civil models of subjectivity’.⁹ From these practices, nineteenth-century Germans derived a notion of B¨urgerlichkeit that combined sentimental subjectivity with intense self-discipline and control.¹⁰ Its emergence formed part of the transformation of political power from direct rule into indirect, mediated or liberal government, which Pocock and Foucault made the centrepiece of their theories of modernity.¹¹ The exercise of power, so this theoretical framework suggests, was increasingly hidden inside a notion of seemingly disinterested management, in which educated ‘experts’ ⁷ Lessing as an exponent of eighteenth-century B¨urgerlichkeit is discussed in Claudia Albert, Der melancholische B¨urger: Ausbildung b¨urgerlicher Deutungsmuster im Trauerspiel Diderots und Lessings, Frankfurt a.M., 1983; Manfred Durzak, Zu Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Poesie im B¨urgerlichen Zeitalter, Stuttgart, 1984; Dieter Hildebrandt, Lessing: Biographie einer Emanzipation, Munich and Vienna, 1979; Walter Jens, In Sachen Lessing: Vortr¨age und Essays, Stuttgart, 1983; and Edward M. Batley, Catalyst of Enlightenment: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Productive Criticism of Eighteenth-Century Germany, Bern, Frankfurt a.M., New York and Paris, 1990. ⁸ Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, 2 vols., translated by Edmund Jephcott, ed. Eric Dunning et al., Maldon, Oxford and Carlton, 2000, ii: State Formation and Civilization, p. 230. ⁹ Burchell, ‘Peculiar Interests’, in idem et al., The Foucault Effect, pp. 119–50, esp. p. 121. Burchell is here commenting on Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History. ¹⁰ Lothar Pikulik, B¨urgerliches Trauerspiel und Empﬁndsamkeit, Cologne, 1966; Jochen SchultSasse, Briefwechsel u¨ ber das Trauerspiel: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, Friedrich Nicolai, Munich, 1972. Although the word b¨urgerlich contained a social dimension, aristocrats—the target of much enlightened ‘conversion rhetoric’—were always encouraged to behave in b¨urgerlich ways. This paradox is explored in Michael St¨urmer, ‘B¨urgerliche F¨ursten’, in Wolfgang Hardtwig and Harm-Hinrich Brandt, eds., Deutschlands Weg in die Moderne: Politik, Gesellschaft und Kultur im 19. Jahrhundert, Munich, 1993, pp. 215–22. ¹¹ The project, alternately called civil society or liberal governmentality, is deﬁned by both thinkers as originating in the eighteenth century. These arguments appear in Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in Burchell, Gordon and Miller, The Foucault Effect.

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reached ‘common sense’ solutions to social and political problems.¹² This chapter will test some of these notions through a close reading of some of the core rituals of B¨urgerlichkeit. Yet it is important to avoid teleology. Wrapped up in the modernizing discourse of German post-Enlightenment B¨urgerlichkeit were some very persistent older traditions of urban burgher government. Herein lies, perhaps not a peculiarity, but certainly a striking trait of Germany’s political evolution. The speciﬁc constitutional development of the individual territories of the Holy Roman Empire, and later the German Confederation, promoted a fusion of new notions of civility with older traditions of burgher (in this case: patrician) self-government in the free imperial cities.¹³ What developed from this mixture was a tentative yet highly dynamic new milieu, ﬁrmly located within the cities of Germany, and consisting of relatively well-educated citizens with middling yet divergent incomes, who were often though not always employed by the state and its agencies, as administrators, teachers, lawyers, technical experts and so forth, and who were acutely aware of burgher traditions.¹⁴ As we have seen in previous chapters, the transformation of the built environment and of material culture was the strategy of choice (or, in Foucauldian parlance, the political technology) employed by the advocates of b¨urgerlich modernism. Because the domestic realm remained central to the deﬁnition of b¨urgerlich identities in Germany, however, the domestic environment needs to be written into the story of urban transformation. The home was the primary site for moulding new b¨urgerlich subjectivities, and the blueprint for techniques that were then projected onto the city at large. If we want to test the uses and limitations of the Foucauldian paradigm of governmentality for understanding the processes of internalization of norms of behaviour and thought that characterize the bourgeois or liberal style of rule at the outset of modernity in Germany, it is imperative to consider the role of bourgeois domestic space. Let us take the example of Muthesius. His arrangement of the rooms was unconventional by the standards of the period. These were spaces that were geared towards a new lifestyle. What is more, Muthesius also practised this lifestyle himself, and through appropriate publications, documented his own ¹² On the role of the educated or expert middle classes in the German Enlightenment, see Lothar ¨ das Verh¨atnis von B¨urgerlichkeit und Empﬁndsamkeit Pikulik, Leistungsethik contra Gef¨uhlsethik, Uber in Deutschland, G¨ottingen, 1984; Horst M¨oller, Vernunft und Kritik: Deutsche Aufkl¨arung im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, 3rd edn., Frankfurt, 1993; Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1992, especially the editor’s introduction, pp. 1–48; James van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe, Cambridge, 2001; and ¨ Hans-Wolf J¨ager, ed., ‘Offentlichkeit im 18. Jahrhundert’, Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert: Supplementa 4 (1997). ¹³ Maiken Umbach, ‘Culture and B¨urgerlichkeit in Eighteenth-Century Germany’, in Hamish Scott and Brendan Simms, eds., Cultures of Power in Europe during the Long Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, 2007, pp. 180–99. ¹⁴ Cf. the contributions of J¨urgen Kocka, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Hans Mommsen and Rainer Lepsius, in J¨urgen Kocka, ed., B¨urger und B¨urgerlichkeit im 19. Jahrhundert, G¨ottingen, 1987.

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conduct, and encouraged his clients to imitate him.¹⁵ These texts were published alongside writings that tackled the habitus Muthesius disapproved of: polemics and biting satires of all kinds of ‘affectations’, their rhetoric eerily reminiscent of Chodowiecki’s cartoons: The industrious bourgeois and the educated men of today no longer have any taste. In fact, the absence of taste has become one of the most distinguishing features of nineteenth-century society [. . . The man of today] is no longer able to distinguish the authentic from the inauthentic, and thus, like the barbarian, he is drawn to what shines, is vulgar and conspicuous. Thus, the tendency towards ostentation and parvenu behaviour, which is so very typical of our age, was born.¹⁶ All of this ostentation was of course driven by rivalry. The rich set the example for the not-so-rich to try and emulate them, and the means they chose to do so were not exactly the most subtle. Substitutes, after all, could look as pompous as the originals, and pomposity was the only aim. [. . .] Everyone only wanted to represent their status: the merchants believed it was good for their credit to cut a ﬁne ﬁgure; the banker supported the prestige of his bank through his ostentatious household, on display to his business partners during grandiose dinner parties [. . .], the feasts got more sumptuous, the dinners more Lucullian, the domestic setting more showy. This led to a transformation of sociability as such, which became preoccupied with luxury in every sense [. . .] affecting even civil servants and ofﬁcers.¹⁷

To produce a habitus of B¨urgerlichkeit, a re-education was required, affecting all aspects of life, especially the sociability that was to take place in the domestic setting. To reform architecture was thus not only a matter of aesthetics: it was the vehicle that would act upon subjectivities, and accomplish the aim of transforming daily conduct more surely and enduringly than any advice literature. As Muthesius himself put it, the improvement of lifestyle was ‘dependent on one’s personal relationship with art, and this personal relationship is precisely what architecture offers [more so than painting, sculpture etc. . .]. Domestic space is the link between an individual and architecture.’¹⁸ To deﬁne spatial functions is to deﬁne social roles, power relations, and forms of sociability. In conversations with present-day inhabitants of some of Muthesius’s houses in Berlin-Dahlem, it emerged how successfully, and enduringly, this architecture embodies and enforces a certain habitus. The historicist villas which Muthesius polemicized against often came to be subdivided ¹⁵ Hermann Muthesius, ‘Mein Haus in Nikolassee’, Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration 12/1 (October 1908), reprinted in the bound volume of the same journal no. xxiii (1909), pp. 1–21. ¹⁶ Hermann Muthesius, Stilarchitektur und Baukunst: Wandlungen der Architektur im XIX Jahrhundert und ihr heutiger Standpunkt, M¨uhlheim-Ruhr, 1902, p. 22. ¹⁷ Hermann Muthesius, ‘Kultur und Kunst’, in idem, ed., Kultur und Kunst: Gesammelte Aufs¨atze u¨ ber k¨unstlerische Fragen der Gegenwart, 2nd rev. edn., Jena and Leipzig, 1909, quoted from online edition www.theo.tu-cottbus.de/D A T A/Architektur/20.Jhdt/MuthesiusHermann/Muthesius Kultur%20und%20Kunst.htm, accessed 6 December 2007. ¹⁸ Hermann Muthesius, ‘Architektur und Publikum’, Die neue Rundschau no. 2 (February 1907), Berlin, unpag.

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into several apartments when they could not be sold as single dwellings. This trend accelerated during the housing shortages after the Second World War. By contrast, Muthesius’s houses proved much more resistant to sub-division into ﬂats. Because each room was constructed to fulﬁl a speciﬁc function, which was reﬂected in its layout, size, orientation, down to the precise positioning and size of the windows, they proved difﬁcult to adapt to entirely different purposes. On the ground ﬂoor of his house, Muthesius placed the dining room, kitchen, and—in gross violation of established hierarchies of social etiquette—the bedrooms of the servants. The reason given for this arrangement was practical: servants needed to be close to their main place of work, the kitchens. If the presence of the butler and the chambermaid had demonstrated wealth and social distinction, servants were now seen as functional workers, and their location in the house demonstratively geared to the exercise of their practical duties. If the ground ﬂoor was dedicated to the functions of preparing and consuming food, the ﬁrst ﬂoor was dedicated to study and contemplation, located in the Herrenzimmer or gentleman’s room and the winter garden respectively. The top ﬂoor was reserved for the equally important rituals of personal hygiene—with particularly modern bathrooms—and night-time rest. Perhaps the most striking difference with the historicist villa was how little space was dedicated to impressing and entertaining guests. To be sure, sociability continued to be important to the b¨urgerlich habitus, but new spatial structures for it were to redeﬁne its operation. As Muthesius explained, being a host in truth serves one purpose: to welcome the visitor into one’s domestic milieu, to have him ‘with you’. This milieu, which is an extension of the host’s personality, is what motivates the act of visiting, what gives it its authentic meaning. To visit each other’s houses is merely one further step in a personal encounter. And a very important step it is too. For the image we form of a person will always be incomplete as long as we do not experience them in their own world: their home. As Goethe once said, you can only get to know a person if you go to them. But how does this ‘going to someone’ take place in society today? We are placed in the middle of a crowd of people about whom we are entirely indifferent, and barely catch a glimpse of host and hostess, let alone speak to them. Squeezed between two creatures of the opposite sex, who we have never seen before and will probably never see again, we have to consume a meal over the next two to three hours, pre-prepared and delivered by some hotel, and served by some bought-in help, whilst exchanging polite pleasantries with our neighbour. To offer such so-called amusement, the hosts go through enormous trouble, turn their household upside-down [. . .] and spend money badly needed elsewhere. [. . .] Two worlds coexist: a dire, real world, which one is almost ashamed of, and an affected artiﬁcial world, through which, once or twice a year, one tries to persuade one’s guests that one lives like a prince.¹⁹

Key to the reform of b¨urgerlich sociability was the music chamber, which by its very nature offered not only a spatial but also an acoustic framework for human ¹⁹ Muthesius, ‘Kultur und Kunst’.

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Figure 39 Hermann Muthesius, ‘Musikzimmer’, woodcut, from: Almanach: Velhagen und Klasings Monatshefte, Year One, Berlin, Bielefeld, Leipzig, Vienna, 1908, p. 225.

intercourse. The performance and enjoyment of live music was what Muthesius regarded as a deﬁning ritual of the new German B¨urgertum that he wished to create: In a country where music is as important as in Germany, indeed, where music is, in a sense, the national art, the music chamber assumes a very special signiﬁcance in the house. . . It is true that the piano or grand piano is part of the standard furniture of the house in many countries, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world. Yet abroad, music is nowhere near as highly developed as in the German house.²⁰

Performing music was not simply a rhetorical gesture: it was a process of selfeducation and self-disciplining. Muthesius had repeatedly attacked the opera as the epitome of alienation and those anti-b¨urgerlich, mock-feudal habits that he sought to eradicate. It was the ritual of the musical soir´ee, performed in the privacy of the bourgeois home, in an atmosphere of contemplation and with a circle of personal friends, that was to become the training ground for the new b¨urgerlich lifestyle. The music chamber was to induct users into this ²⁰ Hermann Muthesius, ‘Das Musikzimmer’, in Almanach, ed. Velhagen und Klasings Monatshefte, Berlin/Bielefeld/Leipzig/Vienna, 1. Jg., o.J. [1908], pp. 222–37, quotation p. 222.

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Figure 40 Hermann Muthesius, ‘Musikzimmer’, contemporary photograph from: Hermann Muthesius, Landh¨auser, Munich, 1912, ﬁg. 259, p. 171.

new mentality. The near-absence of d´ecor or narrative details, including any Heimat-motifs, fosters a sense of concentration which reafﬁrms the importance ascribed in recent historiography to the control of the senses for bourgeois governmentality (Figures 39 and 40). Nothing here detracts, or entertains—the ‘enjoyment’ of culture was a matter of extreme earnestness. Alongside Spartan aesthetics, the key to controlling how the space was used lay in the ﬁxing of furniture. Muthesius freely admitted that attaching furniture to walls was a device to prevent the free movement of furniture in the room.²¹ In the music chamber, benches were screwed to the wall, which in turn meant that the two separate tables could not be moved away from these benches, and freestanding chairs would be grouped around them, rather than rearranged so as to create a single conversational space in the middle of the room. The arrangement fulﬁlled a dual purpose. On the one hand, it optimized musical acoustics. On the other hand, it shaped the way the music was perceived, and discussed. In the absence of a single dining table, people had to sit in more intimate groups, where conversation about the musical performance could be focused and intense—the antithesis to the social chit-chat in the foyer and on the grand staircase of the opera house. The same dichotomy governed the emergence ²¹ Muthesius, ‘Das Musikzimmer’, p. 233.

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of the b¨urgerlich city at large: on the one hand, a preference for open space, creating Rose’s ‘webs of visibility’; on the other hand, a compulsion to structure the open space through ordering devices that create order, regolarit`a, focus, as in Schumacher’s parks. The preference for a discipline of the senses is apparent in the many seemingly practical rules that Muthesius conceived for domestic life. Rugs, especially ornamental, oriental rugs, did not ﬁt the picture, yet clients had an unfortunate tendency to add them to carefully designed rooms. To combat this temptation, Muthesius suggested that the parquet ﬂoor had to be so perfect in appearance that even the layman will not dare to cover it up.²² His music chambers demonstrated the appearance of this perfect ﬂoor: pure geometrical patterns, executed in different woods, which were reminiscent of the abstract neoRomanesque surfaces of the pavilions Peter Behrens designed for the 1908 Deutsche Schiffbauausstellung. The same principle applied to walls. Wallpaper or textile wall hangings were deemed distracting, as well as acoustically detrimental. White walls fostered concentration. To stiﬂe any temptation to decorate such walls retrospectively, Muthesius pioneered the use of dark wainscoting, thus creating a visual rhythm of white squares in black frames—a technique normally associated with the style of the Wiener Werkst¨atten.²³ Furniture, too, was subjected to the new visual discipline. Cushions and upholstery were to be kept to a minimum, plain wood, beautifully executed, was preferable. Again, the functional argument—perfect acoustics—provided a welcome justiﬁcation for a material minimalism that transformed a sensuous experience—the enjoyment of music—into an exercise in disciplining the senses. The music chamber was practically the only room suited to entertaining guests, thus precluding other, less desirable forms of sociability: the dining room was modest, there was no hall or gallery in which guests could have assembled for preprandials, and no drawing room for post-dinner conversation. The music chamber also replaced the room that Muthesius had identiﬁed as the spiritual centrepiece of the English House: the Grand Hall. Muthesius regarded the hall as the vernacular counterpart of his music chamber. It, too, provided a house with a spiritual core, but it lacked the music chamber’s disciplining potential. That is not to say that Muthesius entirely dispensed with the vernacular association. He had praised the ﬁreplace, which he identiﬁed as one of the hall’s deﬁning features, as vital to an ‘authentic’, ‘honest’ form of the domesticity that naturally evolved around the hearth. Hence, the ﬁreplace was transferred, albeit reduced in scale, to the music chamber. ²² Ibid., p. 231. ²³ Similar patterns can be found in student work at the D¨usseldorf School of Applied Arts, from the class of Max Benirschke, as discussed in John Maciuika, ‘The Production and Display of Domestic Interiors in Wilhelmine Germany 1900–1914’, German History 25/4 (2007), pp. 490–516, esp. pp. 510–12.

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Next to the music chamber, and almost as large, was the aforementioned Herrenzimmer. This was no traditional smoking room, designed for entertaining male visitors, evident in the fact that the necessary counterpart, the female drawing room, was absent from most of Muthesius’s houses. The Herrenzimmer was a study, where the sense of focus, concentration and abstraction that was taught in the music chamber could be pursued further by the individual male, in the intellectual realm that was not accessible to the feminine mind. Since the Enlightenment, liberal governmentality was conﬁned to those who had matured to a state of adulthood, which was deﬁned chieﬂy in terms of the repression of the sensual and instinctive. ‘Internally, the paradigmatic liberal subject continues to govern his passions through non-liberal means, even as both he and his authorities seek to maximize self-rule and other liberal rationalities.’²⁴ As children, the liberal subjects of the new era had ‘the capacity and the very desire for self-government grafted onto their primitive little souls by the strenuous efforts of [. . .] educated adults. [. . .] Liberal governance [. . .] is constituted by a binary opposition between nature and freedom, passion and reason, that continually reproduces despotism within rational autonomous self-rule’.²⁵ This opposition maps onto the ‘geographicalized distinction [. . .] between the private household and the public realm’.²⁶ It has been suggested that this rendering of rationality, which found its spatial expression in the Herrenzimmer as study, was particularly German. For Valverde, the German notion of liberal self-rule was based on a conception of ‘intellectual maturity’, which we can trace in philosophical discourse from Kant to Habermas. Rationality became the principal weapon by which the passions and instincts likely to inhibit liberal self-rule were repressed. Domestic space served as a training ground for such rational repressions. This analysis reiterates observations ﬁrst made by Norbert Elias, who saw the repression of the instinctual by reason as the key to the ‘civilizing process’.²⁷ The analogous English project emerges in no less negative a light, yet here ‘reasonableness’, rather than ‘rationality’, was the focal point: ‘in Anglo-Saxon culture, the moral/cultural content of reasonableness has been held in higher regard than purely intellectual skills’.²⁸ English liberal thinkers from Mill onwards distinguished between mere knowledge and the desire for improvement, where only the latter could lead to real civilizational advances.²⁹ This British emphasis on reasonableness and the will to self-improvement implied a relatively greater reliance on the prescriptive transmission of ‘moral content’ and the formation of ‘character’ through instilling useful ‘habits’, as opposed to the simple privileging of rational faculties over other modes of (sensual) perception. What Valverde takes to be the ²⁴ Mariana Valverde, ‘Despotism and Ethical Liberal Governance’, Economy and Society 25/3 (August 1996), pp. 357–72, quote p. 357. ²⁵ Valverde, ‘Despotism’, p. 326. ²⁶ Valverde, ‘Despotism’, pp. 369–70. ²⁷ Elias, The Civilizing Process, vol. ii, p. 240 ²⁸ Valverde, ‘Despotism’, p. 363. ²⁹ John Stuart Mill, ‘On Liberty’, in idem, Three Essays, Oxford, 1859, new edn. 1975, pp. 88–9.

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typical German self-discipline is reﬂected in Muthesius’s Herrenzimmer, while we can observe a perhaps more Anglo-Saxon teaching of ‘reasonableness’ in his music chamber. Muthesius drew on historical precedents for the Herrenzimmer. Around 1800, the gentleman in his study had become a favourite subject for German painters. Among the more famous examples of this genre were two paintings by Georg Friedrich Kersting, Elegant Reader, and Reader by Lamplight, dating from 1812 and 1814 respectively (Figure 41). While the dress of the male ﬁgure in both paintings identiﬁes the subjects as members of the educated classes, the rooms are of the utmost sparseness and austerity. The prominence of the lamp in both pictures can be read as a symbol of the process of study, as the illumination of unresolved problems, in keeping with Enlightenment ideals of education. At the same time, the pensive expression of the male ﬁgure at the centre of each picture suggests a new focus on the personal response of the reader, a reﬂective rather than merely a cumulative conception of knowledge. This places the picture ﬁrmly in the context of neo-humanist Bildung, as promoted by Wilhelm von Humboldt’s educational reforms that were introduced in these very years.³⁰ The atmosphere of the picture does more to emphasize the internalization of the thought process than its applicability: the aim was the discovery of a new subjectivity. The light in these paintings does not illuminate the entire room, only the hidden pages of the book. Moreover, the reader himself turns his back to the spectator; his invisible face diminished his particularity: glancing over his shoulder, the spectator’s and the reader’s gaze merge into one, the painting acts upon the viewer and draws him into the very process which it purports to depict. This combination of subjective inwardness and extreme sensory and intellectual discipline appealed to reformers like Muthesius. In 1908, two years after Muthesius completed his music chamber, Paul Mebes published a very successful book entitled Um 1800. In it, he championed culture around 1800 as a model for the b¨urgerlich culture around 1900.³¹ We might assume that the parallel rested on the fact that the predominant artistic styles of the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries respectively were aristocratic and princely, when the ‘reform cultures’ around 1800, and again around 1900, were bourgeois.³² Yet the relatively greater sombreness and aesthetic restraint of late neo-classicism, ³⁰ Dietrich Benner, Wilhelm von Humboldts Bildungstheorie: eine problemgeschichtliche Studie zum Begr¨undungszusammenhang neuzeitlicher Bildungsreform, 3rd rev. edn., Weinheim and Munich, 2003; Rudolf Vallentin, Wilhelm von Humboldts Bildungs- und Erziehungskonzept: eine politisch motivierte Gegenposition zum Utilitarismus der Aufkl¨arungsp¨adagogik, Munich, 1999; Tilman Borsche, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Munich, 1990. ³¹ Paul Mebes, Um 1800: Architektur und Handwerk im letzten Jahrhundert ihrer traditionellen Entwicklung, 2 vols., Munich, 1908. Similarly, Alfred Lichtwark argued that Biedermeier furniture was the b¨urgerlich furniture. Compare Thomas Heyden, Biedermeier als Erzieher: Studien zum Neubiedermeier in Raumkunst und Architektur 1896–1910, Weimar, 1994. ³² Gerhart Egger, ed., Vienna in the Age of Schubert: The Biedermeier Interior 1815–1848, London, 1979.

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Figure 41 Georg Friedrich Kersting, ‘The Elegant Reader’, 1812. Weimar, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen. Photo: MU.

and its continuation, Biedermeier, as compared to the more ornate character of French Rococo, had less to do with class than with a new taste for intellectual and sensory discipline. The drive was for a visual economy of means that promoted introspection, or, in Foucauldian terms, that encouraged the self-policing of modes of thinking, feeling and being.

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The similarity of the two historical projects becomes apparent if we focus on the afﬁnity between the ways in which their adherents deﬁned their opponents. Bourgeois modernists and the champions of Biedermeier advocated a new kind of mental hygiene, and called for a cleaning-up of the clutter and ‘decadence’ that characterized what came before. Paradoxically, in doing so, both relied heavily on conﬁgurations of ‘order’ and ‘discipline’ which they borrowed from the preceding classicist or historicist idioms, and which they now pushed to their logical extremes. When writers in Diderot’s famous Salons defended the greater ‘simplicity’ of neo-classical versus Rococo forms in the name of a virtuous enlightened sentimentality, they used the same arguments which later representatives of Biedermeier levelled against neo-classicism. Similarly, Muthesius’s b¨urgerlich spaces differed in degree, rather than kind, from the villas of historicism, which, for all their ostentation, were also designed to showcase bourgeois pride in hard work, achievement and Bildung. This parallel deserves closer scrutiny. In so-called historicist villas, the decoration of domestic space was far from randomly eclectic. Typically, rooms were fashioned in the style of a particular epoch.³³ The Villa Oskar Huldschinsky in Berlin, for example, named after its wealthy patron, contained several so-called period rooms, including a Rococo salon and a Renaissance study. Such period rooms were constructed with much academic earnestness. All component parts had to be ‘authentic’, and were collected so as to create a matching ensemble. Members of Berlin’s haute bourgeoisie frequently consulted Wilhelm von Bode, Director of the Berlin Museums, on how to furnish such rooms. Bode offered his advice, not least with a view to the fact that such rooms were often donated to museums later.³⁴ In 1904, for example, the rich Berlin textile trader James Simon donated a room for the opening of the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, on the condition that the room would be displayed in its entirety as the ‘Kabinett Simon’.³⁵ Bode himself soon abandoned the idea of the period room, and encouraged his prot´eg´es to create ‘Stimmungsr¨aume’, atmospheric rooms.³⁶ Here, a few select historical pieces would provide the appropriate framing for a single work of art. Instead of drowning the spectator in a wealth of historical detail, the purpose of the surroundings was to frame and focus attention on one ‘artistic masterpiece’. This ³³ Ernst-Adolf Siebel, ‘Der Grossb¨urgerliche Salon, 1850–1918: Geselligkeit und Wohnkultur’, Ph.D. dissertation, Hamburg, 1999, esp. pp. 207–62. Various aspects of the social meanings of bourgeois villas are also explored in Heinz Reif, ed., Berliner Villenleben: Die Inszenierung b¨urgerlicher Wohnwelten am gr¨unen Rand der Stadt um 1900, Berlin, 2008. ³⁴ Many such period rooms survive in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. See Amelia Peck, Period Rooms in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1996. ³⁵ Olaf Matthes, ‘Bode—Tschudi—Lichtwark: Zur privaten Sammelt¨atigkeit in Berlin und ¨ Hamburg um 1900’, in Ulrich Luckhardt and Uwe M. Schneede, eds., Private Sch¨atze: Uber das Sammeln von Kunst in Hamburg bis 1933, Hamburg, 2001, pp. 15–21. ³⁶ Thomas W. Gaehtgens, Die Berliner Museumsinsel im Deutschen Kaiserreich: Zur Kulturpolitik der Museen in der wilhelminischen Epoche, Munich, 1992.

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was typically displayed in the centre of the room, or, if the masterpiece was a painting, in the middle of the main wall. Such atmospheric rooms created an appropriate setting for what Walter Benjamin would have called the ‘auratic work of art’ of modern bourgeois culture.³⁷ Thomas Gaehtgens commented: ‘Thus the painting of Preacher Anslo and his wife [the centrepiece of Bode’s Rembrandtsaal] is presented as a profane altarpiece, and the room is transformed into a ritual space for the worship of art.’³⁸ Thus, atmospheric rooms were geared towards the subjective response of the inhabitants. Nevertheless, the choices of the objects to be experienced in this way had to be guided by ‘expert’ advice according to ‘scientiﬁc’ criteria. Bode insisted that the creators of atmospheric rooms needed his professional guidance. This consumption of culture was shaped by the individual tastes of the client, but it also had to serve the creation of a collective, b¨urgerlich agenda. The privacy of these bourgeois rooms was a ﬁction; private space was redeﬁned as a place in which new public modes of perception and understanding were practised. In this, they closely mirrored the function of Muthesius’s so-called reform architecture. Even the genre of the music chamber was preﬁgured in historicism. In 1904, Eduard Simon (cousin of the aforementioned James) commissioned architect Alfred Messel to build him a grand villa in Berlin/Victoriastraße, which included a music chamber with historical Rococo artefacts and decorations. This was a historicist project, yet aspects of the bourgeois modernist agenda were already in evidence in Messel’s work.³⁹ Only two years later, in 1906, van de Velde created Osthaus’s Hohenhof (analysed in Chapter 2 of this study), which contained the Hodler-Raum, a reformist version of what Gaehtgens called a ritual space for the worship of art. Also in 1906, Muthesius created the music chamber as the centrepiece of his own model house. What differentiated the two types, historicist and reformist, was the more Spartan character of van de Velde’s and Muthesius’s spaces. The emptying out of spaces was not just an aesthetic move. With it, the idea of the historical artefact as a ‘trophy’ disappeared; the idea of the space for the worship of culture—or more accurately: the idea of culture—triumphed. Other foreign models were invoked wherever they suited this agenda. It is a well-known fact that the work of the pre-eminent American vernacular modernist, Frank Lloyd Wright, was inﬂuenced by Japanese rooms. From the point of view of disciplining the senses, it is unsurprising that Muthesius invoked the same ³⁷ Interestingly, for Bode, the creation of such spaces was also a way of ordering his perceptions of the wider world, since his collecting endeavours were also the result of his extensive travels throughout Europe and Russia, which he undertook every year. ³⁸ Gaehtgens, Berliner Museumsinsel, p. 45, illustration 47. ³⁹ The house is discussed in Wilhelm von Bode, Mein Leben, ed. Thomas W. Gaehtgens and Barbara Paul, vol. ii, Berlin, 1997, p. 294. There is no modern monograph on Messel, only a reprint of an analytically imprecise and somewhat dated work of 1911: Walter Curt Behrendt, Alfred Messel, with an introduction by Karl Schefﬂer and an epilogue for the reprint edition by Fritz Neumeyer, Berlin, 1998.

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model, even if he refrained from including any visibly Japanizing features in his own designs. Not the style, but the asceticism of the Japanese house, Muthesius argued, could serve as a model for the project of B¨urgerlichkeit. The two deﬁning features of the Japanese house, he argued, were its garden—highly formalized, and representing the ideal essence of nature rather than its appearance—and its ‘proud emptiness’, which he contrasted favourably with the distracting knick-knacks accumulated and displayed in a typical German villa.⁴⁰ Much of what seemed like technical ‘functionalism’ in Muthesius’s writings, on closer inspection reveals itself as part of the project of sensory control. Even the seemingly banal sphere of bodily cleanliness was subjected to these principles. Hence Muthesius’s obsession with the technologies of hygiene: six pages of Das Englische Haus describe modern bathroom plumbing in detail, and characterize it as one of the most signiﬁcant accomplishments of English modernity. In the way in which it acted on subjectivities, the bathroom was not only of equal importance to art, it could be compared to it directly: Thus, a high, and, in the best sense of the word, artistic style of bathroom is achieved. Refraining from adding any ornaments, which would only confuse the overall picture, a space of true modernity is created. It is so authentic, and will stand the test of time, because it has been developed in a strictly logical manner, and is free from sentimental or affected manipulations of the senses. Such a modern bathroom is like a scientiﬁc instrument, through which intelligent technology celebrates its triumph, and where externally applied ‘art’ would only distract. The form that has been developed from functional requirements is in itself so intellectually sophisticated and meaningful, that it gives rise to an aesthetic pleasure that differs on no count from the enjoyment of art. Here we have a truly novel art.⁴¹

For form to have this effect, it did not require design, or artistry, which Muthesius saw as symptomatic failings of the Jugendstil movement. But he did not believe that form should simply ‘follow’ function. Rather, it was an expression of certain principle. Hubrich, who takes over Posener’s classiﬁcation of Muthesius as a functionalist, argues that in advocating a ‘primacy of form, Muthesius ran into the danger of abandoning his functionalist thinking’.⁴² But Muthesius had never advocated a functionalism that negated aesthetics. For him, a form was beautiful whenever it was an expression of regularity and order. The subject matter of the bathroom was not too ordinary a vehicle for such Idealism. It served the ordering of sensory perception and, hence, encouraged the emergence of an ordered liberal self. A classical notion of character was key to this, and applied to the objects as well as to humans. In his Stilarchitektur und Baukunst of 1901, Muthesius wrote about the ‘best order’, ‘elegance’ and the ‘clean economy of forms’: thinly disguised versions of the classical triad of decorum, harmonia (or symmetria) and ⁴⁰ Hermann Muthesius, ‘Das japanische Haus’ (book review of a volume by F. Baltzer), Zentralblatt der BV 49 (20 June 1903), pp. 306–7. ⁴¹ Muthesius, Das englische Haus, vol. iii, p. 238. ⁴² Hubrich, Hermann Muthesius, p. 38.

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simplicitas.⁴³ These categories were applied to bathrooms as much as to clothing. For Muthesius, the modern suit was an example of the way in which a b¨urgerlich culture asserted itself against the uniforms and costumes of ‘feudal’ epochs, where a wealth of details designated the individual status of the owner. The modern suit avoided such status insignia, yet, Muthesius emphasized, it was by no means ‘merely functional’.⁴⁴ Instead, accessories such as the top hat, shining leather shoes and silk cummerbunds signalled that ‘all was elegant and in the best order’.⁴⁵ More generally, then, to categorize bourgeois modernism as ‘functionalist’ or ‘proto-functionalist’ captures only the ﬁrst layer of meaning, the object’s denotation. This was supplemented by a second, connotative layer, in which the symbolic expression of ‘order’ was paramount. What sounds colloquial and practical—the critique of overly-ornate forms and a ‘surplus’ of decorative detail—was a standard trope in the aesthetic discourse of classical antiquity, which was suffused by warnings of an excess of ornatus, and advocated the clean economy of forms that constitutes elegantia. Moreover, elegantia typically featured in conjunction with utilitas —functionalism was by no means a modern addition.⁴⁶ The extent to which bourgeois modernists relied on classical categories may simply have been the result of their inability to ﬁnd a linguistic equivalent for the fundamental innovations they promoted in the built environment. However, read in conjunction with the extensive use of classical principles in their visual vocabulary—from Schumacher’s parks to Behrens’s industrial pavilions—it seems more plausible to assume that these models were invoked deliberately; not so much as historical precedents or quotations, but as a vehicle for transcending technical utility to create forms which represented an ideal-typical order. A teleological reading of the reform movement as a modernizing force would suggest that this neo-classicism was a remnant of older traditions, which would gradually fade away. Instead, the material evidence suggests that neo-classicism became progressively more pronounced in the run-up to 1914, and even more so in the inter-war years. This is clear if we compare houses that have widely been seen as ‘typical’ Muthesius buildings. The house in Knesebeckstraße was the ﬁrst house Muthesius designed for Berlin. It was erected immediately after his return from England in 1904–5, for his superior in the Prussian Ministry ⁴³ Hermann Muthesius, Stilarchitektur und Baukunst: Wandlungen der Architektur im 19. Jahrhundert und ihr heutiger Standpunkt, M¨ulheim-Ruhr, 1901. The German terms are ‘beste Ordnung’, ‘schmucke Eleganz’, and ‘saubere Knappheit der Form’. ⁴⁴ The phrase Muthesius most frequently employed was that the modern suit was not merely composed of ‘N¨utzlichkeitsdinge’. ⁴⁵ Muthesius, Stilarchitektur, pp. 52–3. ⁴⁶ These classical categories can be traced through the writings of the early modern period. Heinrich Lausberg, Handbuch der literarischen Rhetorik, 2nd edn., Munich, 1960, §1079.1, 1a, 1c and 2c.

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Figure 42 Haus Hermann von Seefeld, 1904–5, by Hermann Muthesius, Berlin. Photo: MU.

of Commerce, Hermann von Seefeld (Figure 42).⁴⁷ It already featured most of the elements that would come to deﬁne Muthesius’s signature style: the ⁴⁷ Berlin und seine Bauten, ed. Architekten- und Ingenieur-Verein zu Berlin, pt. iv: Wohnungsbau, section on Die Wohngeb¨aude—Einfamilienh¨auser—Individuell geplante Einfamilienh¨auser—Die Hausg¨arten, Berlin, 1975. The commentaries in this volume, some of which are cited below, were

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L-shaped ground plan, an exaggeratedly high-pitched roof, a dramatic gable with a loggia, a variety of dormers, and a bafﬂing variety of windows of different shapes, sizes and locations on the walls. In the following years, Muthesius was responsible for the erection of a large number of houses that employed this template, with strong Arts and Crafts overtones. They included 15 Bogotastraße (formerly Herderstraße),⁴⁸ 56/58 Bernadottestraße (formerly Parkstraße)—this 1906 house was another commission for a civil servant in the Ministry of Commerce⁴⁹—Muthesius’s own model house, built in 1906–7 at 49 Potsdamer Chausse, the adjacent Haus Freudenberg, 1907 (as depicted in Figures 10, 11 and 20), 71 Schopenhauerstraße, also built in 1907,⁵⁰ 29 Limastraße,⁵¹ 51 Beerenstraße, built in 1909,⁵² 12 Schlickweg, built in 1911,⁵³ and, one year later, 27 Oberhaardter Weg (formerly Josef-JoachimStraße), with conspicuous timber-framing.⁵⁴ These are houses that survived or of which we still have photographic evidence; however, they represent only a small cross-section of similar buildings designed in the years between 1904 and 1911: many others are now destroyed, and we have no full photographic evidence of them, but it seems likely that they would have followed the same formula. By 1912, things were changing. The house Muthesius designed for the painter Alfred Mohrbutter, although it may have been comparatively modest in scale and built of vernacular red brick, had a strikingly symmetrical fac¸ade, accentuated by a large, protruding bay window in the centre, which was crowned by a projection with a quasi-Baroque pediment (Figure 43).⁵⁵ Windows and dormers were arranged symmetrically on either side. Although some of Muthesius’s other commissions from the immediate pre-war year, such as the 1913 house for Ernst J. Hischowitz,⁵⁶ continued the Arts and Crafts emphasis on irregularity and pragmatic functionalism, the majority of buildings from this period display a new penchant for symmetry, and increasingly stately, openly historicist forms. This is evident, for example, in the house Muthesius designed for Dr Robert written by Burkhard Bergius, Julius Posener, Dirk F¨orster and Dieter Rentschler. House Seefeld features as no. 1639, pp. 104–5. ⁴⁸ This house, built for Freiherr August von Schuckmann, is described as Muthesius’s ‘most English’ work in Berlin und seine Bauten, no. 1683, p. 126. ⁴⁹ The client was Dr Heinrich Jakob Neuhaus. See Berlin und seine Bauten, no. 1610, pp. 88–9. ⁵⁰ The client was Albert Bloch. See Berlin und seine Bauten, no. 1688, p. 130. ⁵¹ The client was Gustav von Velsen. See Berlin und seine Bauten, no. 1643, p. 108. ⁵² The client was Dr Hermann Koch. See Berlin und seine Bauten, no. 1669, p. 122. ⁵³ The client was Charles de Burlet, Nikolassee. See Berlin und seine Bauten, no. 1694, p. 137. ⁵⁴ The client was Justus Breul. The house was demolished in 1971, my description is based on photographs in Berlin und seine Bauten, no. 1570, p. 81. ⁵⁵ This property is located at 6 Schlickweg (formerly Brunnenstraße), and featured in Berlin und seine Bauten as no. 1698, p. 140. Mohrbutter taught at the Kunstgewerbeschule in BerlinCharlottenburg until his early retirement in 1910. ⁵⁶ This house is located at 46 Schopenhauerstraße (formerly 7 Sudetenstraße), and featured in Berlin und seine Bauten as no. 1697, p. 139.

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Figure 43 Haus Alfred Mohrbutter, 1912, by Hermann Muthesius, Berlin. Reproduced by kind permission of the Architekten- und Ingenieur-Verein zu Berlin (AIV).

Ren´e Kuczynski in 1913–14 (Figure 44).⁵⁷ It echoes all the elements of the Mohrbutter house, yet opts for an altogether grander scale and dispenses with the vernacular brick.⁵⁸ Hence Posener regarded it as symptomatic of the ‘petriﬁcation of German society’ in the run-up to war.⁵⁹ Other examples in this vein include the 1914 house for Dr Erich Wild.⁶⁰ This neo-historicism became the norm in Muthesius’s architectural work during these years. Some architectural historians have attributed this shift to the inﬂuence of Muthesius’s friend and critic Ostendorf.⁶¹ This is certainly a possibility, yet the traditional model of ‘stylistic inﬂuence’ cannot account for Muthesius’s receptiveness to such suggestions. Moreover, the political rhetoric Muthesius embraced in his writings from this period apparently contradicted ⁵⁷ This property is located on the corner of R¨othweg and Terrassenstraße. ⁵⁸ Berlin und seine Bauten, no. 1699, p. 141. ⁵⁹ Roland Ostertag, ‘Spazierg¨ange mit Julius Posener’, in Miron Mislin, ed, Julius Posener: Laßt mich doch, Kinder, hier komme ich wahrscheinlich nie wieder her!, Berlin, 1997, p. 152. ⁶⁰ This property is located at 25 Kirchweg, and featured in Berlin und seine Bauten, no. 1701, p. 141. ⁶¹ Werner Oechslin, ‘Entwerfen heißt, die einfachste Erscheinungsform zu ﬁnden’: Mißverst¨andnisse zum Zeitlosen, Historischen, Modernen und Klassischen bei Friedrich Ostendorf, in Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani and Romana Schneider, eds., Moderne Architektur in Deutschland 1900 bis 1950: Reform und Tradition, Stuttgart, 1992, pp. 29–54; Miron Mislin, ed., Julius Posener, esp. pp. 180–1.

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Figure 44 Haus Dr Robert Ren´e Kuczynski, 1913–14, by Hermann Muthesius, Berlin. Photo: MU.

this stylistic shift. In a volume designed as a follow-up to his major pre-war work Landhaus und Garten, adapted to post-war conditions, Muthesius described economic austerity as an opportunity, which would help foster greater aesthetic discipline among the Berlin bourgeoisie.⁶² Yet his 1920 villa for Albert Vowinckel is one of the most ostentatiously historicist of all of Muthesius’s houses, with neo-Baroque aspirations to grandeur.⁶³ The same tendency is apparent in the villa he designed for Jacob Tuteur of 1923, and which even Muthesius himself described as neo-classicist (Figure 45), as well as in his last commission of this kind, the 1926 house for Wilhelm Mandler.⁶⁴ The external material of the Villa Tuteur is travertine, a material of choice for neo-classical architects, and its character forms a direct antithesis to the rustic red brick and timber Muthesius ⁶² Hermann Muthesius, Landhaus und Garten: Beispiele kleinerer Landh¨auser nebst Grundrissen, Innenr¨aumen und G¨arten mit einleitendem Text des Herausgebers, new edn., Munich, 1919, esp. p. 14. ⁶³ Schopenhauerstraße 53 (formerly Sudetenstraße 12, 14), Nikolassee. Berlin und seine Bauten, no. 1938, p. 243. ⁶⁴ The Villa Tuteur is located at Bellstraße 2 and 4 (formerly Sophienstraße 1 and 2), in Charlottenburg, and featured in Berlin und seine Bauten as no. 1809, p. 181. Muthesius’s own description of the house as classicist was published in an article in Die Bauwelt 16/9, pp. 181–6, quoted from Hubrich, Hermann Muthesius, p. 11. On this house, compare also Vittorio Magnano Lampugnani and Romana Schneider, eds., Moderne Architektur in Deutschland 1900 bis 1950, Stuttgart, 1992, p. 43. The Villa Vowinckel is located at Limastraßer 30a, Zehlendorf, ﬁg. in Ostertag, ‘Spazierg¨ange’, p. 150.

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Figure 45 Haus Jacob Tuteur, 1923, by Hermann Muthesius, Berlin. Reproduced by kind permission of the Architekten- und Ingenieur-Verein zu Berlin (AIV).

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had propagated for so long. Moreover, the appearance of this house is dominated by colossal pilasters in the fac¸ade, rounded off with a temple-like pediment with sculptural d´ecor. At ﬁrst-ﬂoor level, a series of balconies with bulging balustrades recall the precedent of famous Renaissance buildings such as Raphael’s Palazzo Vidoni-Caffarelli (1515–20), Vasari’s Ufﬁzi Gallery (from 1560) and Inigo Jones’s Queen’s House of 1616. What appears like a direct contradiction in terms of a history of architectural style—the repeated calls for post-war simplicity on the one hand, and the ostentatious conservatism of the buildings Muthesius actually executed on the other—can be explained if we conceive of both as expressions of an intensiﬁed quest for discipline. The search for discipline was a central concern of all bourgeois modernists, and it was pursued with increasing degrees of urgency in the tumultuous political climate of the immediate pre-war years, and the difﬁcult founding years of the Weimar Republic. History was invoked, increasingly emphatically, to control and channel the social upheaval and the psychic threats posed by modernity. Ironically, the disorder that was managed in this way was in no small measure a by-product of the opening-up of spaces that the reformers themselves had promoted. It was not the narrow medieval street, but the modern urban park and the wide boulevard that set the scene for the new experience of urbanism as spectacle. Visibility may have been a b¨urgerlich virtue, because it subjected one’s conduct to the controlling gaze of other members of civil society, but an excess of display was deemed as problematic as its total absence. Such excess had been detected in certain forms of traditional culture—as in the ‘alienated’ spectacle of the opera. Yet it was also the deﬁning feature of the ‘spectacularization’ of urban life, which many scholars have identiﬁed as key to the evolution of the modern city in this period.⁶⁵ Around the turn of the century, fears about the city as spectacle reached new heights.⁶⁶ Literary writers, such as Rainer Maria Rilke or Charles Baudelaire, and social critics such as Georg Simmel or Walter Benjamin, charted how the modern city ‘overwhelmed’ the individual’s capacity to impose a sense of structure upon the perception of urban space.⁶⁷ These writers may have differed in their assessment of the likely consequences of this breakdown, but they all subscribed to the underlying assumption that normal or healthy perception is ⁶⁵ Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Si`ecle Paris, Berkeley and London, 1998. ⁶⁶ Susanne Hauser, Der Blick auf die Stadt: Semiotische Untersuchungen zur literarischen Wahrnehmung bis 1910, Berlin, 1990. ⁶⁷ Georg Simmel, ‘Die Grosstadt und das Geistesleben’, in idem, Das Individuum und die Freiheit: Essais, Berlin 1903, reprint 1984, pp. 192–204; Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: Ein Lyriker im Zeitalter des Hochkapitalismus, Frankfurt a.M., 1974, originally 1939. Later, experimental psychologists like Stanley Milgram developed ‘scientiﬁc’ methods to investigate the response of the human brain to this unstructured ﬂood of perceptions and the emotional responses they trigger. Stanley Milgram, ‘Das Erleben der Großstadt: Eine psychologische Analyse’, Zeitschrift f¨ur Sozialpsychologie 1 (1970), pp. 142–52.

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based on a sense of order and perspective, which in turn requires a certain distance, a kind of ‘stepping back’ to perceive phenomena in their context. To this they added a certain sense of durability, or at least a clear temporal pattern, where rituals are performed with a certain regularity. Neither quality was present in the spectacle of modern city life. Novels by Einstein and Rilke, singled out by the historian Hauser for closer examination of such responses, exemplify two counter-strategies: the turn towards abstraction in the former, the turn towards inwardness (and God) in the latter.⁶⁸ While both strategies ultimately fail, Hauser sees them as symptomatic of a deﬁnitive breakdown of modes of visual perception that relied on perspective as the primary device for reading space.⁶⁹ Bourgeois modernists in the Werkbund reacted to the same problem. They did so by attempting to reassert the validity of perspective. This insistence on perspective, which we have already encountered in Muthesius’s turn towards neoclassicism, became particularly evident where architecture itself became part of the spectacularization of urban life: the exhibition. In the context of such events, every object and building was transformed into what Muthesius dismissively called a ‘piece of art’, by which he meant a commodity, which becomes the object of the public gaze in the search for pleasure. This gaze, Muthesius argued, obscured the object’s true meaning, which ought to be derived from its ‘concrete and individual use’.⁷⁰ An interesting paradox arose where bourgeois modernists themselves became involved in staging large-scale industrial exhibitions. In spite of his vocal attacks on urban exhibitions of all kinds, Muthesius did contribute to the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition in Cologne. The ﬁrst building was a monumental pavilion for the Farbenschau (Figure 46). The setting, a formal garden with water basin, statue and two fountains, was even more openly neo-Baroque than Schumacher’s parks. The building itself was dominated by a grand, imposing dome, a strictly symmetrical fac¸ade, complete with wings on each side, and an entrance hall with monumental pillars. Muthesius’s other contribution to the exhibition was a pavilion for the Hamburg-Amerika shipping line, a similarly Baroque structure, interspersed with allusions to a Behrens-style simpliﬁed neo-classicism. The interior contained model luxury cabins designed for the steamship Bismarck, a Wilhelmine prestige project that, at least while it was being planned, was the largest passenger ship of its time. It seems that, in 1914, a stylistic return to the importance of Baroque perspective neatly coincided with a political rapprochement with Wilhelminism, in its political as well as its aesthetic aspirations. ⁶⁸ Hauser exempliﬁes the thesis in her reading of two novels, Carl Einstein’s Bebuquin of 1912, and Rainer Maria Rilke’s Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge of 1910. While Rilke’s novel leads to the retreat from the city, Einstein’s ﬁnally embraces the fragmentation of perception to arrive at a new aesthetic vision without overarching ordering principles. ⁶⁹ Hauser, Der Blick, p. 154. ⁷⁰ Quoted from: ‘Hermann Muthesius im Werkbund-Archiv’, Ausstellungsmagazin 26 (Berlin, 1990), p. 35.

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Figure 46 Farbenschau pavilion, 1914, by Hermann Muthesius, for the Werkbund Exhibition at Cologne, from the ofﬁcial catalogue Die Deutsche Werkbund-Ausstellung, Cologne, 1914.

The Cologne exhibition also ushered in the famous Werkbund controversy. As we have seen, Muthesius, seemingly the arch-modernizer in this debate, was not above using provocatively anti-modernist symbols and forms. Indeed, the same mass-produced objects he promoted on the occasion of this exhibition, and which earned him his reputation as the principal defender of typiﬁcation, were housed in the two pavilions that were probably the most conservative and most openly historicist designs he ever produced. But the revival of a historicizing emphasis on perspective and order was integral to Muthesius’s aim to resist the notion of the consumer good as ‘art’ or spectacle, which was precisely why he attacked Osthaus and van de Velde in the Werkbund controversy. The more blatant the ordering impulse of bourgeois modernism became in these years, the more effectively it could be employed to counter the chaos of an alleged loss of perspective in the modern city. Industrial mass-production and technology were not enemies but allies of this new historicism, because both were designed to enforce b¨urgerlich self-discipline.

7 Conclusion and Epilogue: Bourgeois Modernism and National Socialism

The history of bourgeois modernism in early twentieth-century Germany can be written in terms of the intentions of its main protagonists: the conquest of new export markets, the promotion of ideological tenets such as nationalism, and the creation of a new, bürgerlich lifestyle. An alternative approach is to focus on the use of the objects, houses and cities that bourgeois modernists created, and measure to what extent their consumers realized or subverted the intentions of the creators. Subversions ranged from the openly political to the mundane. In the former category, we might consider those who spread socialist agitation in Schumacher’s carefully choreographed public parks; in the latter category, practices such as the decoration of modernist spaces with ‘incompatible’ objects. Anyone who visited the Dessau Bauhaus estates a few decades after their creation could see the perfect illustration of such mundane subversions: wagon wheels, neo-Baroque front doors and garden gnomes adorned the purist model houses, reintroducing notions of domestic comfort, tradition, and individual difference, which architects had thought to purge from their rational and universalist designs. Like the act of designing houses and objects, such uses, although seemingly mundane, are also intentional. Because the intentions of the consumer are rarely written down, much less theorized about, their precise meaning is harder to analyse than the intentions of designers, architects and urban planners. Hence, historians have suggested that the social history of things in modern Germany is yet to be written.¹ Yet production and consumption are not just guided by intentions, but also by a set of unspoken assumptions and practices, of which the actors, designers and consumers alike, are not fully conscious. As Sarah Goldhagen put it, no architect, designer or writer ‘could possibly be aware of all the cultural forces that shaped his or her intentions. This is particularly the case when such forces have become suffused ¹ Koshar and Conﬁno, ‘Regimes’, p. 158.

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throughout a culture, and are therefore no longer identiﬁed with their source of origin.’² This study has attempted to move beyond stated aims, and to offer some insights into the underlying political and psychological agendas of bourgeois modernism, mindful of the fact that any such interpretations are by deﬁnition incomplete, provisional and uncertain. Through a close reading of some of the objects and spaces concerned, and by juxtaposing these with the written sources, I hope to have uncovered some characteristic ways in which the bourgeois self both conﬁgured, and was conﬁgured by, material culture at the formative moment of the mentality of modernism. The physical transformation of the material culture of bürgerlich life, for all the speciﬁcs that arose from particular moments of German history, ﬁts into a broader, international trend, which scholars have described as the establishment of a ‘liberal’ mode of governance. Physical and mental ‘sanitation’ was central to this project: through the clearance of slums, the introduction of technologies such as street lighting, the creation of an apparatus for the surveillance of the masses, and the gathering of statistical information about the poor and the undesirable, the non-bourgeois Other was tamed, tidied and controlled.³ This study has sought to supplement such ﬁndings by zooming in on the internal dynamics of this mindset, that is, on the implementation or ‘performance’ of Bürgerlichkeit by its core constituency. Naturally, these two agendas—the disciplining of the self and of the Other—were always intertwined. The resulting dichotomy of liberation and control runs through the chapters of this study like a red thread. The analysis began with one such dichotomy, namely the way in which a sense of time was inscribed into material culture. Modernism is widely understood as a utopian gaze that seeks to manage the present in the image of a desired future. Chapter 2 suggested that, in order to control the social and political dangers associated with the resulting ﬂuidity and dislocation of the modern self, a sense of the past remained a fundamental disciplining mechanism in bourgeois modernism. This amounted to more than a simple continuation of tradition. Nineteenth-century historicism and its three-dimensional counterpart in the Beaux Arts, with their academic structure and elite constituency, were no longer deemed adequate to manage modern urban selves. Hence, the system of ² Sarah Goldhagen, ‘Freedom’s Domiciles: Three Projects by Alison and Peter Smithson’, in idem, ed., Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2000, pp. 75–96, quote p. 79. ³ Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body, British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864, Chicago, 1995, pp. 55–72. On the links between Victorian ﬁction and social investigation, see Anita Levy, Other Women: The Writing of Class, Race, and Gender, 1832–1898, Princeton, 1991; Patrick Brantlinger, ‘Bluebooks, the Social Organism, and the Victorian Novel’, Criticism 14 (1972), pp. 328–44. On slums and sanitation, see H. J. Dyos, ‘The Slums of Victorian London’, Victorian Studies 11 (1967), pp. 5–40; and Otter, ‘Making Liberalism Durable’.

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reference points derived from political history was expanded to embrace and utilize the psychological appeal of memory. As the analysis of the Hamburg High Court demonstrated, even the law, the ultimate form of bourgeois supremacy in Wilhelmine Germany, was now symbolically rooted in a discourse that extended beyond the particularism of institutional history, to a sphere of supposedly universal or ‘archetypal’ notions of human justice, which could be represented as ‘timeless’. By archaizing the origins of this bourgeois paradigm of governance, justice now appeared grounded, not in a concrete and particular historical starting point, but in a long duration. The same function, of providing mechanisms for structuring and ordering identities, is evident in the uses of place-based sentiment in bourgeois modernism, which were explored in Chapter 3 of this study. Wilhelmine bourgeois reformers built on the legacy of early modern particularism, which they mobilized as an antidote to the political dangers of nation-wide mass-politics and the perceived concomitant dangers of an ‘uprooted’ metropolitan existence. Yet civic particularism, too, was not simply continued, but transposed into a distinctly modernist technology of rule. Fusing historical traditions of places with a more generic sentiment of Heimat presented an opportunity to widen the social appeal of burgher culture. Yet there was a problem inherent in this strategy. A close association with Heimat ideologies, which had emerged as part of a powerful popular movement from the ﬁnal years of the nineteenth century, threatened to undermine the habitus of individualism that was so central to the ideology of German Bürgerlichkeit. Hence, the collectivist and anti-urban implications of the Heimat idiom needed to be tightly controlled. My analysis suggests that the role of place in bourgeois modernism is best read as a negotiation between these two positions: a particularist ethos that required an expansion into the psychological realm to be effective, and a Heimat ethos, which required an injection of civic traditions to be rendered compatible with urban bourgeois identities. Next, the discussion moved to an exploration of the tension between nature and culture in German bourgeois modernism. Culture, understood in the bourgeois tradition of German Idealism, needed to be recast in order to extend its social reach. It had to be detached from its more obviously intellectual and elite status to appeal to new and wider constituencies with modern, more subjective sensibilities. For this, nature proved useful. Chapter 4 of this study traced how bourgeois modernists ‘naturalized’ culture, and reconnected it with its imagined vernacular roots. To this end, representations of nature entered the city, ﬁrst in the compromise solution of the garden city, then in the greening of the city itself, as part of the project to ground modernity in the vernacular, the timeless and the natural. This was achieved through new waterways, park systems, zoos and other nature-like spaces. Yet the design and layout of all such spaces also had recourse to an iconography that tied them back to a decidedly bourgeois ethos. Indeed, rarely was the drive to order, discipline and control more evident than

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in the quasi-Baroque and self-consciously staged conﬁgurations of nature in the city, which bourgeois modernists designed. From green spaces, the analysis turned to industrial objects. Here, the universalizing ethos of the modernist project was apparently reinforced by the globalizing imperatives of economic growth. Yet instead of embracing ever more abstract designs, bourgeois modernists were eager to reconstitute historical, place-based and natural speciﬁcities under the conditions of machine-production. Chapter 5 suggested that the resulting divisions within the movement should not be understood, as they often have been, in terms of pro- and anti-industrialists but, rather, in terms of the relative importance accorded to the processes of production and consumption in achieving these goals. Through a detailed investigation of the position of Muthesius and his supporters on the one hand, and Osthaus and his supporters on the other, a nuanced picture of the various strategies for overcoming the problem of ‘alienation’ within bourgeois modernism emerged. All strategies shared the aim to mould and structure the identity of those who produced and consumed modern material objects. Finally, Chapter 6 analysed the microcosm of the bourgeois home, as a space where objects and architectural designs came together as props in the performance of bourgeois identities, which were in themselves highly ritualized. The same ordering mechanism previously traced in material culture operated in the performance of Bürgerlichkeit, too. As the example of the musical soirée in the dedicated music chambers demonstrates, these rituals, too, were by no means simply about perpetuating restrictive conventions. Rather, an intense exploration of the self, which transgressed traditional boundaries of acceptable behaviour and involved emotive, sensual and even sexual experiences, was the starting point. To contain and order the energies thus released, a set of reﬁned disciplining strategies were developed, which worked in ways that were nearly imperceptible to the individual, and thus not experienced as restrictive. Interestingly, the more subtle and implicit these disciplining strategies became—and the more their experience was relocated from the prescriptive to the aesthetic realm—the more vigorously they were pursued, to the extent that bourgeois modernists appear almost paranoid in their distrust of the freedoms they conjured up. It is impossible to write a history of German bourgeois modernism without considering the question of continuities with National Socialism. This question now needs to be posed in ways that are radically different from only a few decades ago. Then, the majority of scholars deﬁned ‘continuity’ as the persistence of traditional hierarchies and reactionary values in German society, which originated in the Wilhelmine refusal to modernize, and which eventually swept an antimodern ‘Third Reich’ to power. By contrast, recent scholarship has foregrounded the modernity of German society and politics, from about 1890 right through to 1945. As the deﬁning text of Sonderweg revisionism, Blackbourn and Eley’s Peculiarities of German History, stated, this ‘means shifting our attention from

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the longue durée of Prussian history [. . .] towards the internal dynamics of the Imperial period itself ’.⁴ ‘Prussian history’ here serves as a synonym for the forces of reaction, which are no longer regarded as the prism through which we should interpret the course of modern German history. Instead, the modernizing agendas of the Wilhelmine bourgeoisie have moved into the limelight, for example in recent books by Repp, Jenkins, Jefferies and Palmowski, and seminal articles by authors such as Yong-sun Hong or Dennis Sweeney.⁵ None of these scholars have postulated an absolute break between nineteenth-century German history and the rise of fascism. Rather, they have seen continuities in the modern, not the anti-modern aspects of German history. If a periodization of modern German history is constructed ‘around the interconnected processes of capitalist industrialization, the associated social formations, and the unstable histories of the national state, we can theorize both nineteenth and twentieth centuries into a single epoch’.⁶ New ways of thinking about continuities also emerge from the fact that in recent years, National Socialism itself has increasingly come to be seen as a modern, even a modernist, phenomenon. Until recently, the majority of Western scholars, even revisionist Marxists such as Thalheimer and Gramsci, portrayed all forms of fascism as the product of a violent rejection of modernity, in which a ‘Bonapartist’ leadership mediated between conﬂicting class interests.⁷ To be sure, traditional Marxist approaches placed more emphasis on the connection between fascism and modern capitalism.⁸ Cultural historians have taken issue with the implied automatism (and teleology) of such a view, and pointed to less self-explanatory disjunctures between pro- and anti-modernist elements in fascist ideology. Jeffery Herf ’s inﬂuential characterization of National Socialism as a form of ‘reactionary modernism’ emphasized the partially modern nature of the regime, while Rainer Zitelmann, Sabine Blum-Geenen and others suggested that, independently of ideology, in practice, National Socialist policies often had radically modernizing consequences.⁹ Roger Grifﬁn has been more radical in ⁴ Blackbourn and Eley, Peculiarities of German History, p. 154. ⁵ Repp, Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity; Jenkins, Provincial Modernity; Jefferies, Imperial Culture; Palmowski, Urban Liberalism; Eley and Retallack, Wilhelminism; Hong, ‘Neither Singular’; Sweeney, ‘Liberalism, the Worker’. ⁶ Geoff Eley, in ‘Forum: The Long Nineteenth Century’, German History 26/1 (2008), pp. 72–91, quote p. 75. ⁷ For a summary of this approach, see Wolfgang Wippermann, Die Bonapartismustheorie von Marx und Engels, Stuttgart, 1983, esp. p. 205. ⁸ Wolfgang Wippermann, Faschismustheorien: Zum Stand der gegenwärtigen Diskussion, 7th edn., Darmstadt, 1989; Reinhard Kühnl, Der Faschismus, Heilbronn, 1983, esp. 99–102; and idem, Faschismustheorien, Heilbronn, 1990; Bernd A. Weil, Faschismustheorien: Eine vergleichende Übersicht mit Bibliographie, Frankfurt a.M., 1984. ⁹ Jeffery Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich, Cambridge, 1984; similarly Thomas Rohkrämer, ‘Antimodernism, Reactionary Modernism and National Socialism: Technocratic Tendencies in Germany, 1890–1945’, Contemporary European History 8/1 (1999), pp. 29–50. On the notion of functional modernization in National

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his categorization of fascism as a distinctive form of modernism; he sees even its apparently backward-looking ideas as modern, because the myth of national rebirth ultimately serves a modern, utopian project.¹⁰ Whatever the merits of these respective approaches, it seems clear that Nazism was no aberration from the path of German modernization, and no new history of modernism can bracket the Third Reich entirely. This has important implications for thinking about the history of bourgeois modernism, too. The institutional trajectories are certainly clear enough. The Werkbund was assimilated into the Nazi state with ease, and some of its leading members from the Wilhelmine and Weimar years became successful functionaries in the Third Reich.¹¹ Yet continuities are part of the essential nature of all historical processes, so once Nazism is interpreted as modern, or partially modern, it can hardly surprise that it bore some similarities with earlier modernist practices. What is more, it is widely acknowledged that Nazi cultural policy, just like Hitler’s own philosophy, represented an amalgam of ideas and conventions that circulated widely in the preceding decades.¹² To determine whether there were any causal links between one set of cultural policies and another, we need to identify these policies’ deﬁning features, not just the almost inevitable overlap of some of their ideas and representational conventions. The Weimar years are clearly crucial for any attempt to answer this question. In previous chapters, I have suggested that German bourgeois modernism did not come to an end in 1914, or 1918. Many of its activists continued debating, and building, the cultural infrastructure of Germany. Yet the changing political context gave new meanings to established practices. In a climate of increasing political polarization, the quest to tame modernism’s emancipatory energies through the invocation, consciously or subconsciously, of history, place and nature became more and more associated with the political right.¹³ More progressive modernists rejected such strategies, and embraced a new-found Socialism, see Rainer Zitelmann, ‘Die totalitare Seite der Moderne’, in idem and Michael Prinz, eds., Nationalsozialismus und Modernisierung, Darmstadt, 1991, pp. 1–20; Sabine Blum-Geenen, et al., eds., Bruch oder Kontinuität: Beiträge zur Modernisierungsdebatte in der NS-Forschung, Essen, 1995. For a critique of these approaches, see Hans Mommsen, ‘Noch einmal: Nationalsozialismus und Modernisierung’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 21 (1995), pp. 391–402. ¹⁰ Roger Grifﬁn, Modernism and Facism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler, Basingstoke and New York, 2007, esp. pp. 250–335. Compare also Peter Fritzsche, ‘Nazi Modern’, Modernism/Modernity 3/1 (1996), pp. 1–22. ¹¹ On the Werkbund during the Nazi regime, see Sabine Weissler, ed., Design in Deutschland, 1933–45: Ästhetik und Organisation des Deutschen Werkbundes im ‘Dritten Reich’, Giessen, 1990. On the most notorious example of personal continuity, see N. Bormann, Paul Schultze Naumburg, 1869–1949: Maler, Publizist, Architekt, vom Kulturreformer der Jahrhundertwende zum Kulturpolitiker im Dritten Reich, Essen, 1989. ¹² One of the many historians who have made this point is Neil Gregor, How to Read Hitler, London, 2005. ¹³ The controversy is documented in Die Zwanziger Jahre des Deutschen Werkbunds, ed. the Deutscher Werkbund and Werkbund-Archiv, Gießen and Lahn, 1982.

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Figure 47 Weissenhof housing colony, Stuttgart, contemporary postcard advertising the opening of the exhibition in 1927.

aesthetic and political puritanism. In 1927, Ludwig Mies van de Rohe replaced Riemerschmid as director of the Bauhaus. Subsequent urban development projects of the late 1920s, such as the famous Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart, purged modernism of any allusions to Heimat (Figure 47). Even where structural ideas of the garden-city movement were incorporated, as in the Bauhaus housing colonies in Dessau, visual references to the idea of a garden—or nature—were eliminated.¹⁴ The aesthetics of Gropius, Le Corbusier and, most of all, the mature Mies van der Rohe, were more concerned with ideal Platonic forms than with preserving connections with local and regional traditions.¹⁵ At the same time, the sense of place was appropriated by the political right. While Hellerau, at least at the time of its initial conception, had united the efforts of both modernists and more Romantically inclined life reform advocates, in the 1930s, ¹⁴ Jean-François Lejeune, ‘From Hellerau to the Bauhaus: Memory and Modernity of the German Garden City’, in idem, ed., Modern Cities, New City Series, 3, New York, 1996. ¹⁵ Karin Kirsch, The Weissenhofsiedlung: Experimental Housing Built for the Deutscher Werkbund, Stuttgart, 1927, New York, 1989; Richard Pommer and Christian F. Otto, Weissenhof 1927 and the Modern Movement in Architecture, Chicago, 1991; and Helge Classen, Die Weißenhofsiedlung: Beginn eines neuen Bauens, Dortmund, 1990. On the mature Bauhaus style in general, see Judith Carmel Arthur, Bauhaus, London, 2000. On Mies’s view of architecture, see Fritz Neumeyer, The Artless Word: Mies van der Rohe on the Building Art, transl. by Mark Jarzombek, Cambridge, Mass., 1991.

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Paul Schultze-Naumburg’s garden city of Staaken was marked by a dogmatic opposition to the progressive urban planning schemes.¹⁶ In this situation, any attempt at steering a ‘middle way’ became politically precarious. Conservatives ﬁercely denounced the Weissenhofsiedlung. Paul Bonatz, Paul Schmitthenner and Schultze-Naumburg attacked it in nationalist, even racist categories: the ﬂat roofs were likened to an ‘Italian mountain hovel’, an ‘Arab village’, and a ‘suburb of Jerusalem’.¹⁷ To be sure, even now, some bourgeois modernists opted for a less unequivocal stance. Muthesius objected to outright condemnations of the project that were based purely on the aesthetic effect, and suggested that the quality of the new building style could only be established once it had been tried out in practice, and that some allowances for stylistic innovation had to be made: The Stuttgart Exhibition has closed its gates, and we have to ask ourselves what it has achieved. This can only be preliminary, because all buildings have to be tried out in practice, and we have to discover how the inhabitants will feel in them. Those who have commented on the experiment so far have frequently used the term ‘living machine’ to describe it. We have to ask how this living machine will work in practice. [. . .] A mistake that is frequently made by those who attacked the project is that they apply heimatkünstlerische criteria to it, against which it naturally has to fail. But as progress demands a new way of building, such criteria have to be abandoned, and must not be invoked to ossify the appearance of buildings today.¹⁸

Muthesius strongly objected to the ideological dogmatism of high modernism, which left little space for the subtle negotiations that had characterized the bürgerlich modernism he championed: In emphasizing the new rationalization of the domestic space, its advocates pretend that nothing of the kind had been achieved before now. What German architects of the past 25 years have accomplished in terms of purifying, elevating and reforming building is entirely forgotten, and the audience is led to believe that they are witnessing a crusade against barbarity. [. . .] We have to ask ourselves if propagating further reform really has to go hand in hand with the arrogance that this exhibition [Weissenhof ] has produced.

In his counter-attacks, Muthesius was not averse to employing some of the same reactionary rhetoric and racist innuendo, which the new Heimat dogmatists invoked: The way new consumers use these buildings will soon reveal whether the new generation, for which these buildings are allegedly constructed, really want to spend a good part of ¹⁶ Dieter Münk, Die Organisation des Raumes im Nationalsozialismus: Eine soziologische Untersuchung ideologisch fundierter Letibilder in Architektur, Städtebau und Raumplanung des Dritten Reiches, Bonn, 1993, esp. pp. 171–9; Lejeune, ‘From Hellerau to the Bauhaus’, in Modern Cities. ¹⁷ Quoted from Karin Kirsch, ‘Die Weissenhofsiedlung: Traditionalismus contra Moderne in Stuttgart’, Architektur Forum (2002), special issue: ‘Von der Moderne zur europäischen Stadt’, pp. 2–8, quote p. 2. ¹⁸ Hermann Muthesius, ‘Die letzten Worte eines Meisters: Die neue Bauweise’, Berliner Tageblatt 512 (29 October 1927), suppl. 1, unpag.

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their lives on rooftops, as in Arab villages, whether they want to freeze in winter behind enormous glass walls, or whether they are happy to use twice as much coal to keep warm, and whether they want to embrace a communal life to an extent that they have no need even for a single self-contained room in the whole house where intellectual concentration might be possible.¹⁹

The last point here is particularly revealing, as it makes explicit the desired connection between architectural space and intellectual concentration, or the disciplining of the mind, so central to the project of bourgeois modernism. Interestingly, Muthesius then invoked the idea of function, which, as we have seen, had strong Idealist connotations, to articulate a critique of the new, pseudo-functionalist architecture: The new formalism has such a tyrannical hold on its practitioners, that the other leitmotifs [of modernism], ﬁrst and foremost the idea of rational building, are almost squeezed out. The new formalism dictates the ﬂat roof [. . .] and that leads to the extreme over-exposure to light [. . .]. These innovations have nothing to do with rationalization, economic or tectonic considerations: they are purely formal problems. Their ideal is to build cubic masses. [. . .] By combining such cubes arbitrarily, one arrives at the same eclectic heaps that characterized the German [historicist] ‘villa’ thirty years ago, sacriﬁcing the intellectual coherence of house that we had achieved in the meantime.²⁰

Increasing ideological polarization split the Werkbund into two factions. Members of the ‘Ring’, which included Mies van der Rohe, Gropius, Bruno Taut and Hugo Häring, moved towards a more universal international aesthetics; in 1928, many of them joined CIAM, the Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne. The more conservative Werkbündler formed a rival association, the ‘Block’.²¹ Two of its leading ﬁgures, Paul Bonatz and Paul Schmitthenner, representatives of the so-called Swabian School, initiated a counter-project to the Weißenhof colony, the adjacent colony Am Kochenhof, which returned to clearly recognizable vernacular styles and dimensions (Figure 48). Cultivating a nostalgic sense of the past, and an essentializing conception of nature, Am Kochenhof moved away from the consciously contrived manner in which earlier bourgeois modernists such as Muthesius or the Gersons had cited such tropes. The Bauzeitung described Am Kochenhof thus: In the housing colony Am Kochenhof, a true children’s paradise has been created, in the spirit of the poetics of the village and the countryside: small gardens, small courtyards, small passageways and small squares, in which children rejoice in harmless games, where ¹⁹ Ibid. ²⁰ Ibid. ²¹ Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, ‘Vom Block zur Kochenhofsiedlung’, in idem and Schneider, Moderne Architektur, pp. 267–81. About the ideological divisions in the Werkbund during this crucial period, see also Knut Niederstadt, ‘Mit der Zukunft im Bunde? Zur Geschichte des Deutschen Werkbundes 1907–1934’, in Die Zwanziger Jahre des Deutschen Werkbundes, ed. the Deutscher Werkbund and the Werkbund-Archiv, Gießen and Lahn, 1981, Reihe Werkbund-Archiv Band 10, pp. 7–11.

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Figure 48 Am Kochenhof housing colony, Stuttgart, from: Moderne Bauformen: Monatsheft für Architektur und Raumkunst 32 (November 1933), p. 657. the leisure of the old is to enjoy the happiness of the young. Romanticism was long deemed outmoded. Yet it is the inevitable outcome, as long as one allows all those small coincidences, which disrupt every regularity here and there, to be seen rather than covered up, as long as we embrace them as a welcome ingredient which enriches and enlivens the whole, and which deserves our very special care and attention.²²

Paradoxically, both Weißenhof and Kochenhof were funded by the same Society for Research into the Economics of Construction.²³ Yet before Kochenhof could be completed, it fell victim to the ﬁnancial pressures of the Great Depression. It was ﬁnished ﬁve years later, now under the direction of Alfred Rosenberg’s Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur. Rosenberg was a leading ideologue of the völkisch right within the Nazi party, and editor-in-chief of the Völkischer Beobachter. His Kampfbund was designed to rally anti-republican, educated German middle-class opinion behind the Nazi movement.²⁴ The fact that this organization ²² ‘Ein richtungsweisendes Beispiel der neuen Baugesinnung: Die Austellung Deutsches Holz für Hausbau und Wohnung’, in Die Bauzeitung, quoted from Lampugnani, ‘Vom Block zur Kochenhofsiedlung’, in idem and Schneider, Moderne Architektur, pp. 267–81. ²³ The German title was Reichsforschungsgesellschaft für Wirtschaftlichkeit im Bau- und Wohnungswesen. ²⁴ Robert Cecil, The Myth of the Master Race: Alfred Rosenberg and Nazi Ideology, Batsford and London, 1972; Reinhard Bollmjus, Das Amt Rosenberg und seine Gegner: Studien zum Machtkampf im NS Herrschaftssystem, Stuttgart, 1970; Frank-Lothar Kroll, ‘Alfred Rosenberg: Der Ideologe als Politiker’, in Michael Garleff, ed., Deutschbalten, Weimarer Republik und Drittes Reich, Cologne, 2001, pp. 147–66.

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decided to adopt the Kochenhof project is revealing, as the connections with Nazi racial thinking were more than coincidence. The humanitarian impulse behind Heimatschutz did not prevent several of its key exponents from collaborating with the new regime: their resentment of international modernism was greater than their resentment of National Socialism.²⁵ Indeed, as the heated discussions about the merits of Weissenhof reveals, some had cultivated a racial discourse well before it became politically de rigueur to do so. The relative merits, and appropriateness, of ﬂat versus pitched roofs became another issue which brought racist language into play.²⁶ The row erupted over the practical question of whether ﬂat roofs should be conﬁned to warmer and drier climates than those of northern Europe. But soon, the climatic argument acquired racial undertones. Schultze-Naumburg prescribed a minimum roof slope of 35◦ for the Kochenhof houses as the only ‘German’ way of building.²⁷ In Berlin, the so-called ‘roof war’ broke out. From 1926, the Argentinische Alle in Berlin-Zehlendorf became the site of the radical modernist housing colony Onkel-Toms-Hütte, designed by Bruno Taut. His blocks were abstract, almost cubist constructions; and the dominant Bauhaus white was supplemented by a colour scheme relying on primary colours rather than natural tones.²⁸ While the colony was still under construction, a rival development was initiated on its southern edge, Am Fischtal. The director was Heinrich Tessenow, and Schmitthenner was amongst the participating architects. Like Kochenhof, Am Fischtal employed a compulsory angle for sloping roofs (45◦ ), as an antithesis to Taut’s ﬂat cubist shapes.²⁹ Around this time, ordinary residents of Berlin spontaneously joined the ‘roof war’. The owners of 13 Schlickweg, a Heimatstyle villa, decorated their gable with an inscription in dialect, which announced that ‘only under a high-pitched roof, decent people dwell’.³⁰ This polarization also affected the progressives. Self-professed left-wingers amongst the high modernists adopted an increasingly doctrinaire and intolerant line. In 1925, Walter Gropius published a volume entitled Internationale Architektur, which featured exemplary Bauhaus buildings. One of them was ²⁵ Lekan, Imagining the Nation in Nature, pp. 153–203. ²⁶ Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Das ﬂache und das geneigte Dach, 1927. ²⁷ The building regulations for the colonies are reprinted in Lampugnani, ‘Vom Block zur Kochenhofsiedlung’, in idem and Schneider, Moderne Architektur, p. 280. ²⁸ Helge Pitz, ‘Die Farbigkeit der vier Siedlungen—Ein Werkstattbericht’, in Norbert Huse, ed., Siedlungen der zwanziger Jahre—heute: Vier Berliner Großsiedlungen 1924–1984, Berlin, 1984, pp. 59–89. ²⁹ Gerhard Weiss, ‘Der Wohnungsbau Heinrich Tessenows: Eine baugeschichtliche und soziologische Untersuchung zum Wohnungsbau des 20. Jahrhunderts’, in Gerda Wangerin and Gerhard Weiss, Heinrich Tessenow: Ein Baumeister 1876–1950, Essen, 1976, pp. 79–147. ³⁰ The original, still in place today, reads ‘Unner en hooget Tak heuert en uprechten Minsken’. According to an oral history interview with the present occupiers conducted by the author on 10 February 2003, the house was built in 1903–4 according to the architectural design of one Richard Schultze. The then-owner, a Lutheran pastor, had the inscription painted onto the gable in the late 1920s, when the ‘Zehlendorfer Dächerkrieg’ was at its peak.

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Haus Michaelsen in Hamburg, by Gropius’s pupil Karl Schneider.³¹ This was an avant-garde building with an innovative, composite structure. But it violated the new internationalist orthodoxy because it had a sloping roof: an altogether sensible feature, given its location on the bank of the windy, rain-swept valley of the river Elbe. Gropius, who had earlier promoted a brand of modernism infused with vernacular social sensitivities, now decreed that a sloping roof constituted political heresy. The photograph he used as an illustration for his book shows not the main house, but a small tower located at its north-western tip: the only part with a ﬂat top that passed the political censors (Figure 49). In 1930, Josef Frank diagnosed a tendency to deﬁne the politics of architecture not by its aesthetic or social merits, but through iconic stylistic features, which became shorthand for particular political afﬁliations. The ﬂat roof was one such feature, which had come to demarcate the dividing line between ‘conservative’ and ‘modern’.³² This tendency towards politically motivated purges of material culture perhaps helps explain why so many former practitioners of bourgeois modernism came to embrace the prospect of working with the National Socialist regimes: it offered the authoritarian muscle that seemed necessary to push through one’s party line. While members of the Block sought the patronage of Alfred Rosenberg, and appealed to blood and soil, members of the Ring solicited the backing of Nazi supporters of functionalism and an abstract neo-classicism.³³ The regime in turn made use of impulses from across the spectrum. Sometimes these tendencies were synthesized, but more often, they continued to coexist, often to the bewilderment of all involved.³⁴ This was often due to conﬂict between different Nazi agencies and institutions that characterized the regime’s polycratic structure.³⁵ In cultural policy, the Ministry for Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment under Goebbels ³¹ Winfried Nerdinger, ‘Karl Schneider und die Moderne: Eine Ortsbestimmung’, Architektur in Hamburg: Jahrbuch (1992), pp. 152–9; Elke Dröscher, ed., Karl Schneider: Landhaus Michaelsen, Hamburg, 1992. ³² Josef Frank, Architektur als Symbol, Vienna, 1930. Similar views still dominate writing on the House Michaelsen today. It is dubbed ‘nicht stilrein’ in Gerd Kähler, Wohnung und Stadt, Braunschweig, 1985, p. 132, and a ‘Zwitterwesen’ (hybrid) in Janis Marie Mink, ‘Karl Schneider, Leben und Werk’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Hamburg, 1990, p. 41. ³³ Winfried Nerdinger, ed., Bauhaus-Moderne im Nationalsozialismus: Zwischen Anbiederung und Verfolgung, Munich, 1993. One of the most authoritative overviews remains Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany 1918–1945, Cambridge, Mass., 1968. ³⁴ Introductions to the architecture and material culture of National Socialism are Reinhard Merker, Die bildenden Künste im Nationalsozialismus: Kulturideologie, Kulturpolitik, Kulturproduktion, Cologne, 1983; Joachim Petsch, Kunst im Dritten Reich: Architektur, Plastik, Malerei, Alltagsästhetik, 3rd edn., Cologne, 1994; Jonathan Petropoulos, Art as Politics in the Third Reich, Chapel Hill and London, 1996; Harald Welzer, ed., Das Gedächtnis der Bilder: Ästhetik und Nationalsozialismus, Tübingen, 1995; and Brandon Taylor and Wilfried van der Wil, eds., The Naziﬁcation of Art: Art, Design, Music, Architecture and Film in the Third Reich, Winchester, 1990. The exhibition catalogue Art and Power: Europe under the Dictators, 1930–1945, London, 1995, offers not only rich primary documentation, but also a comparative perspective. On the role of Hitler, see Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics, Woodstock, NY, 2003. ³⁵ The classic theory of polycracy is summarized in Hans Mommsen, ‘Monokratie oder Polykratie? Hitlers Herrschaft und das Dritte Reich’, in G. Hirschfeld and L. Kettenacker, eds.,

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Figure 49 Haus Michaelsen, 1923, by Karl Schneider, Hamburg, photograph showing both the sloping main roof and the ﬂat-roofed North-Western corner turret, the latter of which was depicted in Walter Gropius, Internationale Architektur, rev. edn., Munich, 1925. Photo: MU.

pursued a different line from the cumbersomely named Amt für die Überwachung der gesamten geistigen und weltanschaulichen Schulung und Erziehung der NSDAP, under the direction of Alfred Rosenberg. There were also more general Der ‘Führerstaat’: Mythos und Realität: Studien zur Struktur und Politik des Dritten Reiches, Stuttgart, 1981, pp. 73–97.

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changes in policy. German Expressionists, for example, could ﬁnd themselves courted by the regime one day, and see their work classiﬁed as ‘degenerate’ only months later.³⁶ In general, it appears that during the ‘Third Reich’, there was a certain shift from an early, völkisch phase, which entailed the worship of the Germanic race, Aryan ancestry and Ariosophical ideas, towards a more neo-classical and almost abstract style, which celebrated the grandeur of the state and pride in technical progress. Jost Hermann has persuasively argued the uses of völkisch ideology and its cultural representations under National Socialism can be read as a story of intensifying repression.³⁷ Increasingly, the regime turned against spurious spiritualism, and merged technological functionalism and with a traditional, neo-classical language of state power, somewhat modiﬁed by some archaizing elements. Famously, Speer’s gigantic projects for Berlin were to be built not in concrete, but in brick.³⁸ This remnant of vernacularism was intimately intertwined with the system of forced labour set up by the SS, which evolved around the cult of natural stone and brick as Germanic building materials.³⁹ Even in the later years of the ‘Third Reich’, differences persisted. In the architecture of its own headquarters, training camps and cultic spaces, the SS remained much more wedded to a ruralist iconography of Heimat, racially ‘puriﬁed’, which differed from the more ‘objective’, neo-classical line promoted by Speer and Hitler himself.⁴⁰ Rivalry between cultural agencies and policies was certainly one continuity in the history of German modernism from 1880 to 1945. This allowed plenty of room for ambiguity, and it is therefore difﬁcult to associate material culture too closely with one particular political camp or ideology. As we have seen, most modernist artefacts combined innovative and traditional elements. Their political impact arose not so much from a coherent ideology which they embodied, but from the political constellations in which these designs and artefacts were produced and consumed. Bourgeois modernism, I have argued in this study, was ³⁶ An interesting case study on an Expressionist who was ﬁrst courted by Goebbels as an exponent of ‘Nordic modernism’, and then declared degenerate, is Peter Paret, An Artist against the Third Reich: Ernst Barlach, 1933–1938, Cambridge and New York, 2003. Jonathan Petropoulos, The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany, New York, 2000, gives an overview of the lives of key artists who proﬁted from the National Socialist regime. ³⁷ Jost Hermand, Der alte Traum vom neuen Reich: Völkische Utopien und Nationalsozialismus, Frankfurt am Main, 1988, esp. pp. 227–66. ³⁸ On Speer, see Angela Schönberger, Die neue Reichskanzlei von Albert Speer: Zum Zusammenhang von nationalsozialistischer Ideologie und Architektur, Berlin, 1981. On historicist monumentalism in this period: Frank-Bertolt Raith, Der heroische Stil: Studien zur Architektur am Ende der Weimarer Republik, Berlin, 1997. On elements of modernist functionalism in NS architecture and planning, see Rainer Stommer and Claudia Gabriele Philipp, Reichsautobahn, Pyramiden des Dritten Reichs: Analysen zur Ästhetik eines unbewältigten Mythos, Marburg, 1982. ³⁹ Paul B. Jaskot, The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy, London and New York, 2000. ⁴⁰ Tilman Harlander, Zwischen Heimstätte und Wohnmaschine: Wohnungsbau und Wohnungspolitik in der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, Basel and Boston, 1995.

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one such constellation. It was deﬁned by the way in which the tension between history and memory, between order and nature, between nation and locality, between the progressive and the archaic were expressed in material culture, to support the formation of a new form of bourgeois subjectivity. Bourgeois modernism did not seek to establish a ﬁction of unity, but sought to make these paradigmatic oppositions visible, resulting in a dialogical and dialectic structure. This structure, more than the sum of all ideas within it, deﬁned the objects’ political impact. Nazi cultural politics functioned differently. Interpretations which try to capture the speciﬁcs of the regime’s use of culture in a single idea, such as Heimat, can offer no adequate insight into this.⁴¹ We might more fruitfully focus attention on the way ideas like Heimat worked within the regime. To offer a complete analysis of this process is beyond the scope of this Epilogue. Instead, I will analyse one characteristic example, which may illustrate how the subtle reconﬁguring of the dialogical oppositions within bourgeois modernism could have dramatic political effects. Fritz Höger was born in 1877, into a family of modest farmers and craftsmen resident in a small village north of Hamburg.⁴² Höger was therefore younger than the founding members of the Werkbund whose work and milieu we have analysed so far, albeit only by about a decade. He was also emphatically not of bourgeois origins, a point to which we shall return later. Nevertheless, Höger’s career initially took shape within the milieu of bourgeois modernism. Höger studied building techniques at the Hamburger Baugewerkschule, and worked as an apprentice in the architectural practice Lundt and Kallmorgen from 1901 to 1905, whose work we have encountered in Chapter 2 of this study. He was therefore directly involved in those ﬂagship projects that initiated the shift from academic to hybrid historicism, and hence to the idiom of memory. Like the other bourgeois modernists, Höger came to reject the legacy of Beaux Arts, and began a search for a modern architectural idiom with a vernacular inﬂection, which eventually led to the establishment of his own architectural practice in Hamburg in 1907. Höger collaborated with one of the leading propagandists of the German Heimatschutz movement, Paul Bröcker, and soon came to believe that the key to the future of architecture in Hamburg lay in a creative appropriation of the red brick tradition.⁴³ To promote this, Höger endeavoured to set up a Meisterschule für Backsteinkunst, which he tried to ⁴¹ Kramer, ‘Die politische und ökonomische Funktionalisierung’; von Reeken, Heimatbewegung, Kulturpolitik und Nationalsozialismus; Williams, ‘The Chords of the German Soul’. For a contrasting view, see Rollins, A Greener Vision; and Midgley, ‘Los von Berlin!’. ⁴² Höger’s place of birth, Bekenreihe, was near Elmshorn, north-west of Hamburg. A useful introduction to his life and work is Piergiacomo Bucciarelli, Fritz Höger: Hanseatischer Baumeister, Berlin 1992. ⁴³ Die Architektur des Hamburgischen Geschäftshauses: Ein zeitgemäßes Wort für die Ausbildung der Mönckebergstraße: Theoretische Betrachtungen von Paul Bröcker: Praktische Vorschläge von Fr. Höger, Architekt, Hamburg, 1909.

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establish in Bremen and Hamburg, while holding a chair at the Nordische Kunsthochschule. The comparison with Fritz Schumacher, the other leading proponent of red brick architecture amongst the bourgeois modernists, is instructive. At ﬁrst glance, this similarity appears to have been translated into similar political trajectories, too. Both men had seen themselves as visionary social reformers. Both also believed emphatically in the need for order and authority. After 1933, when high modernism was ostracized, Schumacher’s and Höger’s architectural oeuvres continued to be cited. Schumacher received the Lessing Prize in 1944, and also had a medal named after him. Höger’s ﬂagship Hamburg ofﬁce blocks continued to be widely depicted in Nazi popular literature about the city, and in 1941, Höger was invited to contribute a richly illustrated article, which provided several opportunities to showcase his own oeuvre, to a special anniversary issue about the glories of Hamburg of the journal Deutschland: Zeitschrift für Industrie, Handel und Seefahrt.⁴⁴ Yet there were practically no new commissions for either architect during the ‘Third Reich’. The regime felt that theirs was an architecture of the past, which had helped cultivate some useful political sensitivities, yet ultimately failed to embody the true spirit of National Socialism. On the surface, then, these look like parallel lives and political trajectories. Yet Höger’s position vis-à-vis Nazi cultural politics was fundamentally different from Schumacher’s, if not morally, then certainly politically. This difference, I want to suggest, marked the end of the project of bourgeois modernism. It crystallized initially around the topic of red brick. For Höger, red brick was the key to a fusion of the vernacular and the modern. Yet his take on materiality differed from that of the bourgeois modernists, and it is this difference that led Schumacher to oppose Höger’s proposed foundation of the Meisterschule für Backsteinkunst. Where Schumacher, Muthesius and the Gersons sought to reconnect with Hanseatic traditions and sentiments of homeliness, Höger saw an altogether deeper, more mystical connection with the past. Since brick was made from clay, Höger regarded it as an authentic material that was, quite literally, rooted in the ancestral soil. As we have seen, such associations were sometimes alluded to by bourgeois modernists, yet always carefully balanced by references to culture, order, and history. Höger, however, wanted to go back to origins, and ‘behind’ culture. Brick was the building material of ancient civilizations, predating the rise of the ‘West’, as Höger explained when he travelled to Teheran to lecture on the importance of brick in Mesopotamian building art. This twist in the tale gave the seemingly harmless material of brick an archaizing ⁴⁴ Schumacher accepted the prize; the pubic speech he gave at the ceremony was published as Fritz Schumacher, Hamburg: Ausführungen bei der Verleihung des Lessingpreises des Hansestadt Hamburg im Kreissaal des Rathauses am 22. Januar 1944, Hamburg, 1944. Höger’s essay, entitled ‘Vom alten Hamburger Kaufmannshaus zum modernen Kontorhaus’, was published in a special issue entitled Hansestadt Hamburg of Deutschland: Zeitschrift für Industrie, Handel und Seefahrt, 9/3 (1941), pp. 30–35.

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dynamic that lent itself to a fundamentalist critique of rationalism, and to racist appropriations. In the same vein, Höger gloriﬁed his own agrarian background, claiming that he came from ‘ancient peasant race’, which he deemed morally superior to bourgeois decadence.⁴⁵ From here, it was only a small step to the Germanic blood and soil ideology later picked up especially by the SS. Höger was certainly ready to embrace anti-Semitism. When he resolved to shut down his architectural practice in Hamburg, Höger produced an inventory of its assets, which he subdivided into two categories: ‘living’ and ‘dead’ assets.⁴⁶ These technical terms acquired a very sinister meaning when Höger included Ossip Klarwein, his most highly paid personal assistant, whom he had elsewhere also described as his most able employee, in the ‘dead’ inventory, otherwise reserved for material rather than human assets.⁴⁷ Höger explained the classiﬁcation in terms of Klarwein’s Jewish origins: ‘Ossip Klarwein does indeed belong to my dead inventory. Because he belongs to a dead people. [. . .] Our German building art must be kept clear of all those elements alien to the country and the race, who have used their artistic talents to smuggle themselves into German building arts’.⁴⁸ This episode could simply be seen as an act of political opportunism of the sort that many bourgeois modernists were only too happy to commit. Yet read against the material evidence, it takes on different connotations. Höger was not simply a conservative architect with a penchant for rural life. Aesthetically, his buildings in inter-war Hamburg were, if anything, more innovative than anything Werkbund architects produced: his Chilehaus is widely regarded as the most highly developed architectural example of German Expressionism (Figure 50). The ofﬁcial submission by the ofﬁce for the protection of monuments within Hamburg’s City government to the UNESCO, requesting world heritage status for Hamburg’s ‘Kontorhaus District’, states that ‘the foremost of these buildings is unquestionably the Chilehaus [. . .]. It is the dominant and outstanding building of the Kontorhaus District—a masterpiece of German clinker Expressionism and at the same time a symbol of the development of the inner city area of Hamburg as a commercial centre.’⁴⁹ Höger’s vision lacked neither creativity nor modernity. Yet one ingredient that he sidelined was the project of Bürgerlichkeit. ⁴⁵ Quoted from Claudia Turtenwald, ‘Fritz Höger im Netzwerk der Beziehungen und Bekanntschaften’, in idem, ed., Fritz Höger, 1877–1949: Moderne Monumente, Hamburg, 2003, pp. 13–42, quote p. 24. ⁴⁶ The manuscript in Höger’s own hand, entitled Inventur-Ausverkauf, is not dated, but was probably written early in 1933. Turtenwald, Höger, pp. 18–20. ⁴⁷ Höger in a letter to the architect Carl Winand, dated 21/4/1933, quoted from Turtenwald, Höger, p. 21. ⁴⁸ Fritz Höger, Inventur-Ausverkauf, from Turtenwald, Höger, pp. 18–20. ⁴⁹ Speicherstadt and Chilehaus with Kontorhaus District, Report reference no. 1367 by Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg/Kulturbehörde/Denkmalschutzamt Hamburg, to the United Nations, Copyright 1992–2007 UNESCO World Heritage Centre, accessed on 20/11/2007 at http://whc.unesco. org/en/tentativelists/1367/. On the history of the Chilehaus as an iconic building of German Expressionism, see Harald Busch and Ricardo Frederico Sloman: Das Chilehaus in Hamburg: Sein

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Figure 50 Chilehaus, 1922–4, by Fritz Höger, ‘Kontorhaus District’, Hamburg. Photo: MU.

As we have seen, within the constellation of bourgeois modernism, bürgerlich designated a tension between the emancipation of the bourgeois self and the invocation of a range of traditions and tropes apt to impose a new social discipline Bauherr und sein Architekt. Hamburg, 1974; and Piergiacomo Bucciarelli: Fritz Höger: Hanseatischer Baumeister 1877–1949, Berlin, 1992.

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on this ‘liberated’ individual. Yet for Höger, modernism was predicated not on the negotiation of these tensions, but on overcoming them in a quest for spiritual unity. Whether or not we classify it as Expressionist, this was a kind of modernism, which, in contrast to its bourgeois counterpart, was deeply non-dialogical. Red brick, the emblematic material of bourgeois modernism, became the vehicle for this transformation. Höger’s brick of choice was clinker, which is harder than regular red brick, because it has a higher iron content and is baked at higher temperatures. The resulting aesthetic qualities are quite different from the softer, mellow tones of regular brick. During baking, the surface of clinker melts, forming a transparent ﬁlm on the outside of each stone. Within this glazed surface, the oxidized iron produces a distinctive visual effect, oscillating between the colours of the rainbow. The intensity of this effect depends on the nature of the clay used, with cheaper, technically ‘inferior’ clinker producing a darker tone and more pronounced oxidization. Höger became particularly skilled at using the most irregular varieties of clinker, exploiting its spectacular and mystical appearance. The Chilehaus is an example of this technique. Like most Hamburg buildings of the inter-war period, the Chilehaus was constructed with reinforced concrete. Dark and particularly colourful clinker bricks were applied to the surface as decoration, to produce a mysterious and archaic effect. They conjured up a mystical air that transcended local and national memory culture. At the same time, the shape of the building was highly dynamic: its wild, swerving façades and the exaggerated, pointed tip, reminiscent of the helm of a ship, blatantly anti-classical. The whole building seemed to be in ﬂux, and its religious overtones appealed to an idiosyncratic sense of the mysterious rather than to traditions of church architecture, as Muthesius and Behrens had done. This spiritualism was reinforced by the building’s arcades, which Richard Kuöhl designed for Höger in an almost Gothic style and executed in ceramics, in a colour echoing the mysterious dark red of the clinker (Figure 51). Statues were to be displayed in niches above the arcade, although this last part of the scheme had to be abandoned for ﬁnancial reasons. The surviving designs provide further clues about the political iconography of the house. Otto Grohe, a sculptor from Hanover, responded to Höger’s commission with designs featuring historical characters from Chile, thus alluding to the commercial purpose of the Chilehaus. Höger dismissed them. Kuöhl’s successful designs, by contrast, represented generic ﬁgures: an architect, a pastor, a scholar, a merchant, a peasant woman, a manual labourer, an agricultural labourer, and a mother. The idea of representing common people in positions and poses normally reserved for saints, whose elongated statues are traditionally positioned in niches on either side of a church portal, was emblematic. The ordinary mortal was likened to the medieval saint, the mundane was recast as the sacred. This strategy was analogous to Höger’s rhetorical gloriﬁcation of his own peasant origins. Where bourgeois modernists ‘cited’ Heimat traditions to invoke vernacular sentiments that countered the spatial abstractions of modernity, for

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Figure 51 Chilehaus, detail: arcades by Richard Kuöhl. Photo: MU.

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Figure 52 Apartment block Breitenfelder Strasse 80, Haynstrasse 29–33, Husumer Strasse 37, Sudeckstrasse 2–6, 1924–6, by Hans and Oskar Gerson, HamburgEppendorf, detail: niches with sculptures by Ludwig Kunstmann. Photo: MU.

Höger, Heimat was an essence, the object of cultic and, eventually, völkisch worship.⁵⁰ The work of the Gersons in Hamburg represented a transitional stage between the two modes. Compared to the founding members of the Werkbund, the Gersons belonged to a slightly younger generation of architects, like Höger, and they, too, were more open to ideas of mystical re-enchantment than the older bourgeois modernists.⁵¹ They commissioned the sculptor Kunstmann to design statues for their residential buildings: ﬁgures with elongated shapes, placed on brick corbels on the façade, conjured up a vaguely Gothic spirituality (Figure 52). Yet these sculptures served as a counterpoint to the realistic, demonstratively functionalist architecture: the tension between the two was decisive and deliberate. Kunstmann’s ﬁgures, made of dark blue ceramic ⁵⁰ At ﬁrst glance, Höger’s enchantment of the everyday appears reminiscent of the work of the famous contemporary sculptor Ernst Barlach, who designed sixteen ﬁgures for the Gothic red-brick church St. Katharinen in Lübeck, of which three were executed in the early 1930s. One of the surviving Lübeck ﬁgures was a beggar; stylized as an archetype of human suffering with Christian overtones; it was not, like Kuöhl’s ﬁgures, a völkisch celebration of the simple German man. Also see Peter Paret, An Artist against the Third Reich: Ernst Barlach, 1933–1938, Cambridge and New York, 2003. ⁵¹ Repp, Berlin Moderns.

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Figure 53 Ballinhaus, 1922–4, by Hans and Oskar Gerson, ‘Kontorhaus District’, Hamburg. Photo: MU.

rather than stone, were positively anti-realist: they recalled representational effects familiar from the Expressionist paintings of Franz Marc and Lionel Feininger.⁵² In this, they were far removed from Höger’s cultic celebration of the ordinary, in which spirituality became a feature of, rather than a counterpoint to, Heimat. What applied to sculptural decoration also applied to architecture more generally. The Gersons’ Ballinhaus (Figure 53), another tall, red-brick ofﬁce block, was marked by a sense of clarity and calm, which contrasted sharply with the adjacent Chilehaus. While the monumental abutments of the Ballinhaus could be read as recollections of the Gothic, the structural inﬂuence of contemporary American skyscrapers is reﬂected in the overall shape.⁵³ Thin slabs of clinker, with an altogether lighter and more uniformly red colour, were applied directly to reinforced concrete, giving the walls a simple, monolithic appearance. In the ⁵² Examples include the Ballinhaus as well as the large domestic housing blocks on the Breitenfelder-, Hayn-, Sudeck- and Husumerstraße. ⁵³ The Gersons had closely followed the development of the US skyscraper, which was documented in contemporary architectural journals. The younger brother, Ernst, travelled to New York, and described his impressions in two publications: Ernst Gerson, ‘Reiseeindrücke in Nordamerika’, Der Städtebau, 24/11 (1929), pp. 293–300; and idem, ‘Amerikanische Geschäftsbauten und Wohnhäuser’, Wasmuths Hefte für Baukunst, 14 (1930), pp. 22–34.

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Chilehaus, by contrast, load-bearing concrete was disguised behind solid brick walls of dark clinker shimmering in a wide range of colours. The resulting difference corresponds to the two different German words for the wall: Mauer and Wand. Frampton described the distinction thus: These two German words [Mauer and Wand ] which may, I believe, be used all but interchangeably in the translation of the English term wall, clearly allude to two tectonically opposite methods for the enclosure of space and in this opposition there surely resides a potentially inﬁnite range of expression as far as spatial enclosure is concerned. Where the one assumes those opaque, heavy-weight, load-bearing characteristics that we necessarily associate with the earthwork, the other has a relatively light-weight, screen-like character, possibly even translucent or transparent, one that may be readily afﬁliated with a load-bearing structural frame and with the roofwork that such a frame invariably supports.⁵⁴

The walls of the Ballinhaus were Wände, clear-cut and screen-like, whereas at the Chilehaus, Mauern embodied the quest for a rooted architecture, earthwork. In opposition to the pro-industrial policy of the Werkbund and its commitment to typiﬁcation, Höger idolized traditional German handicrafts, which he saw as the authentic equivalent of German peasant culture. When Schumacher disapproved of Höger’s plans for an institute for the promotion of red brick, this was not because he was less keen on the promotion of brick, but because to him, Höger’s approach seemed irrational, and ideologically suspect. Schumacher regarded red brick as a vehicle for the rationalization of building practices. His favoured catchphrase was ‘discipline’, which brickwork would force upon any architect, because it exposed structural composition when stucco could cover it up. As we have seen, sensory discipline was fundamental to the project of bourgeois modernism. The vernacular connotations of red brick did not detract from this; rather, red brick helped stage a ‘dialogue’ between order and structure on the one hand, and memory and sentiment on the other. It would be excessively teleological to suggest that Höger’s approach was inherently racist. But its tendency toward ‘wholeness’, in positing the presence of a uniform collectivity whose spirit could be embodied in architecture, was certainly open to racist appropriations. It was more than opportunism that made Höger befriend Hans Much, a professor of medicine who championed a view of red-brick Gothic as racially pure.⁵⁵ As Höger himself put it: ‘Reawakened by the changing tide of the Volk’s disposition, and itself purifying and steeling this disposition afresh, the archaic [uralt] manner of our ancestors, from the ages of the Hanseatic League and the Gothic, marches along its path, responding to ⁵⁴ Kenneth Frampton, ‘Critical Regionalism Revisited: Reﬂections on the Mediatory Potential of Built Form’, in Maiken Umbach and Bernd Hüppauf, eds., Vernacular Modernism; Heimat, Globalization and the Built Environment, Stanford, 2005, pp. 193–97, quote p. 196. ⁵⁵ Hans Much, Norddeutsche Backsteingotik: Ein Heimatbuch, Braunschweig and Hamburg, 1917.

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the tunes of our own times.’⁵⁶ Schumacher’s Zauber des Backsteins makes for interesting comparative reading.⁵⁷ Where Höger started with the ‘archaic manner of our ancestors’, Schumacher started with history. Speciﬁcally, he alluded to a historical controversy that originated in the Renaissance: the debate about the primacy of colorito versus the primacy of disegno. To be fair, Schumacher criticized the intellectual abstraction of the disegno argument developed by Vasari and others, identifying instead with the spirit of Roger de Piles, when he claimed that the primacy of colour found its counterpart in the atmospheric qualities of brick: Brick, like no other material, liberates the building artist from paper [designs] and redirects his work and his thoughts towards craftsmanship. [. . .] There is always a temptation to push our art [architecture] into the sphere of the sketch/design, into a dematerialized existence in lines and proportions. Brick is a perfect antidote to this: it tolerates no abstract being, it forces upon us a material point of view and practice. [. . .] Who looks for a lively, colouristic effect, will ﬁnd it in brick. [Brick] opens the path towards the monumental use of colour in exterior architecture.⁵⁸

Schumacher was quick to point out that his position was not anti-classicist: classicism was his main ideological defence against the dual threats of anarchy and irrationalism. We have to ensure that the trend towards brick retains its naturalness, but does not become dogmatic. This danger is always present, and the most fanatical defenders of brick are the ones who are chieﬂy responsible for it. [I am thinking of ] the personality of Hans Much. [. . .] Back then [before 1914] he wanted to solicit from me a public pledge in favour of North-German red-brick Gothic, which he deiﬁed with grand poetic pathos, in opposition to all Renaissance ideas [. . .]. I, too, admired the Gothic, like Much, yet I was more concerned with reviving red brick on the basis of the material’s characteristics than its history. Only in this way, I believed, could I awaken a fresh expressive potential and develop a language that was suited to the new demands of modern times. [. . .] Most of all, the joy we take in red-brick Gothic must never lead us to declare war upon the spirit of classicism.⁵⁹

The classical, Schumacher went on to explain, was not an empty historical convention, but ‘the spirit of delicate rhythms, the interplay of the horizontal and the vertical, which respond to modern functional requirements’.⁶⁰ This bourgeois dialectic of the historical and the modern sharply contrasted with Höger’s and Much’s celebration of the Gothic as the embodiment of collective and eternal spirituality. Schumacher likened their stance to the writings of Karl ⁵⁶ Fritz Höger in a speech at the opening of the Brick Building Exhibition in 1926 in the Hamburg Museum for Arts and Crafts, quoted from Daniel Schreiber, ‘Höger als Erzieher’, in Turtenwald, Fritz Höger, pp. 43–64, quote p. 59. ⁵⁷ Fritz Schumacher, ‘Zauber des Backsteins’, in idem, Selbstgespräche: Erinnerungen und Betrachtungen, Hamburg, 1949, pp. 10–14. ⁵⁸ Ibid., p. 11. ⁵⁹ Ibid., p. 12. ⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 13.

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Schefﬂer and Wilhelm Worringer on the subject.⁶¹ For them, ‘the Gothic was not a historical style, but a psychological predisposition of the Germanic race, the will to art’.⁶² In 1933, Höger hoped that National Socialism could help bring his political vision to fruition. Yet the regime did not reciprocate Höger’s embrace, although it brieﬂy looked as though Höger’s success was assured. In 1934, he was appointed to a chair at the newly founded Nordische Kunsthochschule in Bremen, with a brief to ‘help in the creation of a racial culture derived from blood and soil, inspired by the foundations of German and Northern Volkstum’.⁶³ Yet in 1935, Höger was dismissed. The University explained its decision by pointing out that Höger’s artistic ideas had been rejected by the Führer.⁶⁴ Shortly afterwards, Goebbels recommended that Höger be stripped of the title of professor, which was effected in 1940.⁶⁵ Höger’s fate was indicative of the quick shift within Nazi policy outlined above. Höger’s fusion of Heimat, spiritualism and racism connected with the Aryanism cultivated by Rosenberg’s ofﬁce and the early days of the movement; yet it clashed with the ofﬁcial line that came to be promoted by Goebbels and Hitler.⁶⁶ A second episode conﬁrms this. In 1942, Rosenberg’s Ofﬁce sent a formal request to Hitler’s Chancellory, requesting that Höger be presented with the Goethe Medal on the occasion of his sixty-ﬁfth birthday. The request was passed on to Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda, where it was rejected because Höger, ‘whose basic talent was not in question’, nevertheless ‘did not achieve the high artistic rank required for this particular honour; Albert Speer conﬁrmed this view on the telephone’.⁶⁷ Interestingly, red brick, once again, became the focal point of these political controversies. The Propaganda Ministry’s objection to Höger’s work was partly grounded in their increasingly sceptical view of clinker as a building material. As Fuhrmeister has shown, in a far-reaching controversy over National Socialist building materials, natural stone came to be seen as the appropriate alternative to ‘bolshevist’ concrete, and brick quite literally ended up in no-man’s land ⁶¹ Karl Schefﬂer, Der Geist der Gotik, Leipzig, 1917; Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie, Munich, 1908 [this was the author’s doctoral thesis, a bestseller that was translated into twenty languages and reprinted repeatedly into the 1980s]; and idem, Formprobleme der Gotik, Munich, 1911. ⁶² Daniel Schreiber, ‘Höger als Erzieher’, in Turtenwald, Fritz Höger, pp. 43–64, quote p. 56. ⁶³ Quoted from Turtenwald, Fritz Höger, p. 23. ⁶⁴ Letter from the Nordische Kunsthochschule Bremen to the Bremen mayor of 30 November 1934, cited in Turtenwald, Fritz Höger, p. 24. ⁶⁵ Goebbels, memorandum of 19 January 1935, cited in Turtenwald, Fritz Höger, p. 24. ⁶⁶ Rosenberg ran the Nordische Gesellschaft, which published the journal Norden; Höger was a member from 1934, and gave numerous lectures to the society over the next ten years. Höger also befriended Rosenberg’s Private Secretary Thilo von Throtha. Ludwig Roselius, patron of Höger, the architect of the Böttcherstraße in Bremen, held views on red brick that were even more spiritualist than Höger’s. ⁶⁷ Quoted from Otto Thomae, Die Propaganda-Maschinerie: Bildende Kunst und Öffentlichkeitsarbeit im Dritten Reich, Berlin, 1978, p. 272.

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between the ideological fronts. Clinker in particular was deemed problematic, according to Fuhrmeister, because its extensive use for social housing projects of the Weimar period made it politically suspect in the eyes of the Nazis.⁶⁸ My analysis suggests that there was also something inherent in Höger’s modernist clinker spiritualism that was at odds with the cultural policies of the Nazis, and which became more obvious as the state consolidated itself. In 1937, Rosenberg informed Höger of various political accusations that had been raised against him, including plagiarism, opportunism and, most critically, ‘socialdemocratism’ (Sozialdemokratismus). Höger defended himself by pointing out that he had ‘always been a national socialist. I have never been anything else, and long before the term ‘‘National Socialism’’ was invented. [. . .] In my work, I have always been the Führer’s closest ally, and will continue to be so.’⁶⁹ In a similar vein, Höger attempted to sell not just his personal loyalty, but also his architectural designs to the regime. In 1937, he heard of the plans to develop the Elbe riverfront just west of the Hamburg harbour. Without having been commissioned, Höger simply submitted his own designs for a bridge and a Gau-headquarters high-rise (Figure 54). The bridge design was ignored, while the high-rise project was sent on to Hitler and Göring, and then rejected. Yet Höger could be forgiven for thinking his project would meet with the Führer’s approval. After a press conference Hitler gave on the architectural development of Hamburg’s harbour area, the Hamburger Fremdenblatt published an article entitled ‘Des Führers gewaltige Bauten in Hamburg’, claiming that ‘Hamburg has to create a special style of building around the harbour, which reﬂects its role as Germany’s ‘‘world port’’. In doing so, it will draw on the magniﬁcent effect of American skyscrapers.’⁷⁰ The riverfront development, in other words, was a showcase to the world of the regime’s ideas about ofﬁcial architecture. Hitler’s favourite was a design by Konstanty Gutschow (Figure 55): pompous in scale, monotonous in its endless repetition of identical columns and gigantic public buildings with no clear function, but carefully executed neo-classical details. Although Hitler did not particularly like the high-rise tower that Gutschow designed, the overall plan met the regime’s requirement for a visual vocabulary that celebrated uniformity, and avoided the pitfalls both of pure functionalism and of excessive irrationalism. A commissioned design by Werner March for the ⁶⁸ Christian Fuhrmeister, Beton, Klinker, Granit: Material, Macht, Politik: Eine Materialikonographie, Berlin, 2001. ⁶⁹ Höger in a letter addressed to the NSDAP-Reichsleitung in Berlin, 4 November 1937, quoted from Turtenwald, Fritz Höger, p. 31. In fact, Höger had applied for party membership at the Braunes Haus in 1931, and received his membership book in 1932. ⁷⁰ Hartmut Frank, ‘Das Tor zur Welt: Die Planungen für eine Hängebrücke über die Elbe und für ein Hamburger ‘‘Gauforum’’, 1935–1945’, in Ulrich Höhns, ed., Das ungebaute Hamburg: Visionen einer anderen Stadt in architektonischen Entwürfen der letzten hundertfünfzig Jahre, Hamburg, 1991, pp. 78–99, esp. p. 83. The commission was eventually awarded to Konstanty Gutschow, who had worked in Höger’s practice during the Weimar years. Hitler himself linked the success of Gutschow’s design to the fact that he had spent time in the United States (ibid., p. 94).

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Figure 54 Proposed high-rise building for Elbe riverfront development, 1937, by Fritz Höger, Hamburg, reproduced by kind permission of the Kunstbibliothek Berlin.

same project—March was the architect of the Olympic Stadium in Berlin—was rejected as overly functionalist. Höger’s design was regarded as an example of the excessively irrational. In particular, Höger’s idea to cover all walls with clinker was not welcomed. The crystal-like appearance of Höger’s design, with very thin slices cutting across each other to form something that looked more like a

220 Figure 55 Konstanty Gutschow, plan for Elbe riverfront development, with separate sections for ofﬁcial buildings (to the left) and ‘private’ (commercial and domestic) buildings to the right. From: Konstanty Gutschow, Elbufergestaltung Hamburg: Erläuterungsbericht, Hamburg, 1939, unpag.

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sculpture than a solid building, also bore witness to his Expressionist roots, and was out of touch with Hitler’s ideas on monumentality and solidity.⁷¹ In his memorandum on the building, Gutschow stated that the premise for his design was the clear visual distinction that the Führer had demanded between private and commercial buildings, on the one hand, and buildings of state on the other. Correspondingly, he advocated that only commercial buildings along the socalled ‘street’ or main avenue feature red brick, while buildings of state, arranged around squares or ‘Platzräume’, would be constructed in natural stone only, and be characterized by ‘calm’ and ‘digniﬁed’ appearances.⁷² Höger, who had made no such hierarchical distinctions, failed to appreciate the emphasis on the ‘stateliness’ of Nazis’ monumental building economy, which became more and more pronounced the more the regime established itself in power. However, he could be forgiven for thinking that the symbolic language of his own architecture, with its quest for spiritual unity, earth-bound authenticity, and mystical ancestry, was a ﬁtting three-dimensional equivalent of the Nazi movement as it had emerged in the so-called Kampfzeit, a dynamic, and all-embracing mobilization of völkisch energies, that aimed at an irrational yet modern total unity. Once the material culture of modernism had established itself, apart from a few reactionary fanatics, no serious political movement in twentieth-century Germany, and certainly no state, ever attempted to undo this process. Yet modernism’s political meanings and consequences were not ﬁxed. A masternarrative of continuity, which sees German bourgeois modernism as a nationalRomantic philosophy, or a precursor of Nazi ideology, is misguided. The architecture and material culture of this epoch of modern German history did not symbolize any one hegemonic idea or ideology. In so far as we can detect speciﬁc political agendas at work here, they have to be located not in the realm of ideas, but in the technical, mental and psychological constellations within which these ideas were utilized. Bourgeois modernism undoubtedly offered cultural ammunition for the Nazis, but, equally, for the cultural politics of the GDR and the FRG that succeeded them. Yet it was also speciﬁc to a historical moment ⁷¹ Hartmut Frank, ‘Gestus und Gestalt: Anmerkungen zu Fritz Högers moderne Monumentalarchitektur’, in Turtenwald, Fritz Höger, pp. 83–102, esp. 86–7, sees this design as an entirely new departure for Höger, an exercise in pure, American-style modernism. This is to overlook the Expressionist and spiritualist legacy that is evident in the building’s crystalline, elegant shape. Frank, by contrast, attributes the design’s failure in the eyes of the Nazi authorities to Höger’s failure to eradicate the memories of his earlier designs—especially the Chilehaus—which even Frank recognizes as excessively Expressionist for Nazi tastes. Höger’s expressionism reached its apex in the design of the Evangelische Kirche at the Hohenzollernplatz. The interior of the church was the ultimate in vernacular expressionism: a dynamic structure resembling the reverse hull of a ship, with mystical light in primary colours—blue above, for the heavens, and yellow below, for the earth. This church was singled out for particular criticism in the report rejecting Höger as a candidate for the Goethe medal during the Third Reich. Cf. Thomae, Die Propaganda-Maschinerie, p. 272. ⁷² Konstanty Gutschow, Elbufergestaltung Hamburg: Erläuterungsbericht, Hamburg, 1939, unpag., section B, ‘Künsterlische Leitgedanken’, point 3.

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that passed almost as quickly as it had arisen. The distinguishing feature of bourgeois modernism in the decades around 1900 was its dialogical structure, which was rooted in a notion of politics as a process of conversation and negotiation. This fell victim to the gradual polarization of the Weimar period. That is not to say that Wilhelmine modernism was ‘liberal’ in our modern sense of the word. Far from simply emancipating individuals and promoting political pluralism, authority and repression were fundamental to the practice of bourgeois modernism. They were evident in bourgeois modernists’ nationalist triumphalism and imperial expansionism, in their advocacy of a strong state, and of course in the constant effort to discipline, control and order the Other. They were also evident in the way in which the bourgeois self became its own schoolmaster, and in the sheer intensity and near-paranoia with which the very energies that were conjured up to create the modern bourgeois self—that is, a self in touch with its own nature, instincts, emotions and memories—were constantly tamed, reined in, and channelled into the safe and established conduits of bourgeois traditions, Idealist notions of culture, historicist notions of a stable past, and the particularism of place. The way in which these tensions were negotiated was a product of an age in which the bourgeoisie felt challenged—by the rising political mass market, by the globalization of the economy, and by the huge population ﬂows within an urbanizing country—yet simultaneously believed in its own potential to emerge as the new masters of a dawning age of modernity. As we have seen, this was not so much an issue of class, but rather a belief in the ability of individuals whose persona and habitus were trained and disciplined through the material culture under investigation here, to master not only their own affairs, but also those of the modern state. Once this dream of bourgeois supremacy, or more speciﬁcally, of the triumph of Bürgerlichkeit, had come to an end, modernism took on very different hopes and fears. In the process, familiar ingredients were used for new ends, and reconﬁgured in the act of their social performance. Modernism did not simply go away again: it was simply adapted to new purposes, and new anxieties. Under different auspices, this process continues in the twenty-ﬁrst century.

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Index NB: Central concepts that inform the analysis throughout, including modernism, bourgeois/ bourgeoisie/B¨urgerlichkeit, city, identity, memory, nature, Heimat, and vernacular are not listed separately in the index. acoustics 176 actant 13 Adenauer, Konrad 104 AEG 7, 11, 56, 58, 60, 153, 164 see also: Behrens Africa 130–1 Afrikahaus 132 agrarianism 89, 110–11, 161, 168 alienation 22, 24, 148, 150, 161, 190 Alster canalization 124ff. altarpiece 72 Amsterdam 71 ¨ Amt f¨ur Uberwachung der gesamten geistigen und weltanschaulichen Schulung und Erziehung der NSDAP 205 animals, animal park, see zoo animal sculptures and images 125–8, 135, 137–8 animalization 137 Anker Linoleum factory 56 anthroposophy 99 anti-Semitism 209 apartments 83–7, 105, 174, 213 Apollo 43 appropriateness (trope deriving from Greek ‘prepon’) 11, 159, 161 Apulian vases 137–8 Arbeitsrat f¨ur Kunst 167 archaic, archaizing 40, 62, 206, 208, 215 Art Workers Guild 150 Arts and Crafts 50–1, 64, 83, 90ff., 100, 102, 113, 115, 119, 129, 143, 148–57, 186 Aryan 217 see also: racism Athena 36 Athens 71 Baillie Scott, Mackay Hugh 90–1 Ballin, Albert 69 Barcelona 34, 43 Baroque 32, 36, 38, 45, 54, 74, 102, 105, 118, 121–2, 140, 161, 162, 170, 186–8, 191 BASF 7, 153 bathroom 14, 174ff., 183

Baudelaire, Charles 190 Bauhaus 8, 10, 49, 159, 165, 167, 193, 199 Bavaria 110–11, 120 see also: Munich Beaux Arts, see historicism Benjamin, Walter 31, 182, 190 Behne, Adolf 29, 167 Behrens, Peter 11, 31, 57, 61, 164 Buildings by: AEG Turbine Hall 58, 61–2, 119 Crematorium Hagen-Delstern 56–7 Folkwang Museum (role in) 97, 164 Hohenhagen (role in) 102, 164 Bergson, Henri 17, 30, 41 Berlin 19, 53, 74, 88ff., 95, 104, 181ff., 203ff. Bernhard, Lucian 164 bicycle 83 Biedermeier 53, 137, 157, 179–81 Bildung 18, 127, 137, 139, 169, 179, 181 Bismarck, Imperial Chancellor 71, 131 Bismarck, passenger ship 191 Blaue Reiter, Der 120, 137 Block (architects’ association) 201, 204 blood and soil ideology 18, 209 Bock, Arthur 40, 42, 217 Bode, Wilhelm von 181 Bonatz, Paul 105, 200–1 Bosch 7, 153 Bournville Village 113 Braques, Georges 81 Bremen 69, 131 Bremer Lloyd 69 brick and clinker 25, 52, 59, 61, 69, 78–9, 83ff., 86, 88, 120, 186, 206, 207–21 British Merchandise Act of 1887 145, 147 Br¨ocker, Paul 207 Br¨ucke, Die (artistic association) 81 Bund Heimatschutz 19, 20, 65–6, 82, 93–4, 107, 129, 140, 203, 207 Buschmann, Johannes 154 Canberra 66 capitalism 3, 8, 15, 100, 148, 153, 165, 167, 168, 197

248

Index

Catholicism 97, 110 Central Park, New York 81 ceramics in architecture 80, 83, 86–7, 211, 213 Cerd´a, Ildefons 34 C´ezanne, Paul 99 Chilehaus, see H¨oger Chodowiecki, Daniel Nikolaus 169–70, 173 cholera 68 CIAM (Congr`es Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne) 201 city-state 19, 68–70, 74 , 80, 88, 125 classicism, Klassik 139, 179–81, 183–4, 188, 206, 216, 218 clinker, see brick clothes 184 Cologne 104–5 colonialism, colonial imagination 129–36 colour, colorito 81, 203, 211, 215, 216 commodiﬁcation 8 conservatism (political) 2, 3, 106, 108, 110, 139, 144, 168, 200 consumer goods 7, 143–4, 149, 164, 192 see also: quality work consumerism 6, 142, 161, 163, 167 court buildings, see Forum of Justice, Palau de Justícia cubism 81 cultural despair 4 cultural pessimism 106, 108, 111 Dalcroze, Jacques 114 Dannecker, Johann Heinrich 139 decadence 80, 102, 108, 147, 150, 171, 181, 209 degenerate art 206 Delphi, oracle of 41 Dessau 193 Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft 131–2, 136 Deutsche Werkst¨atten f¨ur Handwerkskunst 113, 153 Deutscher Werkbund 6, 8, 21, 27, 49, 51, 76, 88ff., 97, 102, 117, 143, 145, 150, 152–3, 163–7, 168, 191, 198, 201 Werkbund controversy of 1914 55, 97, 117, 153ff., 161–5, 192 Deutsches Museum f¨ur Kunst in Handel und Gewerbe, see Museum for Art in Commerce and Industry Diana (Roman goddess) 127–8, 138 Diderot, Denis 181 Dilthey, Wilhelm 30 disegno (in Renaissance debates) 216 domesticity 6, 16, 22, 80, 86, 95, 146–7, 152, 157, 169, 171–3, 177–8, 181, 193, 200

Dorn, Wolfgang 114 Dresden 76, 81 Dresden machine furniture 114 Dresdener Werkst¨atten f¨ur Handwerkskunst 113, 158 D¨urerbund 7 D¨urerzeit 118, 157 Edda 99 education system and reform 11, 144, 146, 151, 163, 179 Ehmke, Fritz Helmuth 164 Eiffel Tower, Paris 57 Einstein, Carl 191 Eixample, Barcelona 34 Elias, Norbert 13, 178 Emperor William II 2, 33, 40, 60, 68, 69, 77, 134, 144, 146 Endell, August 102 England as model and competitor for Germany 10, 19, 45, 69, 90–1, 94, 112–13, 143, 146–7, 151, 178 see also: Muthesius, as author of Das Englische Haus Enlightenment 12, 35, 41, 67, 159, 169, 178–81 Erdt, Hans Rudi 164 ethics reform 4 ethnography, see V¨olkerschauen experts, expertise 1, 133, 171, 182 export 7, 22, 68, 145 expositions 34, 35, 65, 114, 143, 191 see also: world’s fairs, Philadelphia Expressionism 81, 99, 120, 167, 206, 209, 214, 221 fascism, theories of 197 see also: National Socialism Faust 41 federalism 67, 72 Feininger, Lionel 214 feudal elites 2, 3 feudalization, de-bourgeoisiﬁcation 2, 32 Feuerbach, Anselm 97 Fidus 108 ﬁlm (on colonialism) 131, 136 ﬁreplace 177 Fischtal, Am, housing colony, Berlin 203 Folkwang Museum and School, Hagen 97–101, 161, 163 Forum of Justice, Hamburg 33, 37 see also: Hanseatic High Court Franke, Rudolf 135 Frankfurt School 8 free imperial city 68, 172 free port 69

Index free trade 89 Freya 99 function, functionalism 11, 50, 159, 174, 183–4, 201 Futurism 16, 27 garden 121–2, 124, 137 garden-city 20, 97, 101, 112ff., 199, 200 Gaugin, Paul 99 Gaul, August 127 genius 102 German Confederation 172 Gerson brothers (Hans, Oskar, later also Ernst) 20, 76, 82, 137ff., 213 Buildings by: apartment blocks 83–6 Haus Bondy 83–4, 137 Kontorhausviertel (ofﬁce district in Hamburg, role in) 86–8, 213–15 Gibbon, Edward 147 Ginzburg, Moisei 85 Gipkins, Julius 164 globalization, global markets 17, 21, 51, 142ff. Goebbels, Joseph 204, 217 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 41, 174 G¨oring, Hermann 218 Gothic and neo-gothic 29, 32, 50, 69–70, 72, 77, 102, 157, 211–17 Gr¨assel, Hans 111 Grohe, Otto 211 Gropius, Walter 28, 102, 117–18, 165–7, 199, 201, 203–5 Groux, Henry de 98 G¨underzeit 32, 36, 108 Gutschow, Konstanty 218–21 Habermas, J¨urgen 16, 178 H¨aring, Hugo 201 Hagen 19, 20, 97, 104 Hagen, Theodor 72 Hagenbeck, Carl 134–6 hall 177 Haller, Martin 85, 132 Hamburg 19, 20, 43, 67ff., 74, 82ff., 104, 121, 125, 131, 218ff. Hamburg Animal Park, see zoo and Hagenbeck Hamburg Fine Arts Museum (Kunsthalle) 9, 72 Hanseatic High Court, Hamburg, see Lundt and Kallmorgen Hanseatic League 19, 42, 69, 70, 72, 131–2, 215 HAPAG 69 Heckel, Erich 81

249

Heimatschutz movement, see Bund Heimatschutz Hellerau 20, 113–19, 199 Henneberger, August 137 Hercules 43 Hilbersheimer, Ludwig Karl 111 Hirth, Georg 153 historicism in architecture (Beaux Arts) and art 17, 29, 32–3, 36, 37, 43, 45, 48, 62–3, 72, 158, 181–2, 187–9, 192 as an academic discipline 17, 29, 30, 35 polemics against 25, 27, 28, 30, 73, 74, 76, 90, 115, 152, 173 Hitler, Adolf 198, 206, 217, 218, 221 see also National Socialism Hodler, Ferdinand 162 Hoffmann, Josef 102 H¨oger, Fritz 25, 29, 32, 82, 86, 207–21 as architect of the Chilehaus 86, 88, 209–12, 214–15 Hohenhagen 98, 101 Holy Roman Empire 68, 70, 172 hortus conclusus 137 Howard, Ebenezer 101, 113 Humboldt, Wilhelm von 179 Idealism (philosophical tradition) 20, 139 imperial court 3 Impressionism 67, 72, 125 improvement (idea of) 12, 29, 34, 67 industry heavy industry 2, 7, 19, 89, 97, 102, 155, 161 manufacturing industry 6, 7, 19, 58, 89, 113, 114, 143–50, 153ff., 161, 165 see also: quality work Insel publishers 164 Institut f¨ur exakte Wirtschaftsforschung 154 International Style 5, 28, 49, 112, 159, 165, 201 invasion scare literature 146 Japanese house 183 Jones, Inigo 190 Jugendstil, art nouveau 37, 76ff., 98ff., 102, 132, 153–7, 161, 164 Junker 89, 108 Justicia 40–2 Kampfbund f¨ur Deutsche Kultur 202 Kaiser see Emperor Kaiser Friedrich Museum, Berlin 181 Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft 146 Kant, Immanuel 178

250 Kersting, Georg Friedrich 179–80 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 81 Kirdorf, Emil 102 kitchen 51, 85, 90, 95–6, 147, 174 Klinger, Julius 164 Kochenhof, Am, housing colony 201–3 Kolbe, Ernst 127 Kolonialinstitut Hamburg 133 Kontorhausviertel (ofﬁce district in Hamburg) 86–8, 209 Krug, Heinrich 36, 74–5 Krupp 89 Kultur vs. civilization 142 Kunstmann, Ludwig 213 Ku¨ohl, Richard 211–12 labour movement 2, 19, 73 Laeisz shipping line 132 Lamprecht, Karl 35 landscape protection see Bund Heimatschutz Langbehn, Julius 8 Lauweriks, J. L. M. 102–3 Le Courbusier 101, 111, 199 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 171 Letchworth Garden City 113 liberal governmentality, liberal subjectivity 2, 3, 10, 13–15, 23–5, 34, 43, 78, 109, 139, 172, 176, 178ff., 194, 222 liberal party politics 2, 32, 77ff., 82, 88–9, 110–11 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 169–70 Lichtwark, Alfred 9, 28, 67, 72, 97, 99, 125 Liebermann, Max 72 life reform movement 42, 81, 108, 134, 139, 199 Lloyd Wright, Frank 54, 112, 182 locomotive 165–6 Loos, Adolf 28 Lundt and Kallmorgen, architectural practice 207 Buildings by: Hanseatic High Court, Hamburg 38, 39–42, 44–5 Kirdorf House, Hamburg 46, 48 Scholvien House, Hamburg 44 Lutyens, Edwin 90 Made in Germany 145–7, 155, 165 Maillol, Aristide 162 Mann, Thomas 142 Marc, Franz 137, 214 March, Werner 218–19 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 27 Marx, Karl 150–1, 169 Marxism 197 Maschinenm¨obel 158, 160

Index Mathildenh¨ohe 102 Matisse, Henri 99 May, Karl 130 Mebes, Paul 53, 179 medieval fortiﬁcations 34 medievalism 50, 70, 72, 211 see also: Gothic Menzel, Oskar 122–3 Meister Bertram 72 Meister Francke 72 Mephisto 41 Mercedes Benz 7, 153 Merchandise Act see British Merchandise Act merchant ﬂeet 69 Mesopotamia 208 Messel, Alfred 182 Meyer, Franz Andreas 69 Mies van de Rohe, Ludwig 62, 117, 199, 201 Mill, John Stuart 178 Minne, Georg 162 Mnemosyne 31 Morris, William 50, 83, 149–50 Much, Hans 215 M¨uller, Carl (cinematographer) 136 M¨unter, Gabriele 120 Munch, Edvard 162 Munich 51, 67, 72, 82, 94, 96, 110–11, 120, 157 Museum for Art in Commerce and Industry, Hagen 97, 163–4 Museum Island, Berlin 181ff. music chamber 24, 53, 174ff. Muthesius, Hermann as architect 19, 50–5, 58–61, 91ff., 172ff., 185ff. as author of Das Englische Haus 52, 58, 90–3, 152, 177, 183ff. as critic and polemicist 14, 23, 28, 31–2, 50, 88, 113, 142, 148, 151, 171ff., 200ff. as founder and spokesman of Werkbund 9, 55, 88, 142–5, 153ff. Buildings by: Farbenschau Pavilion, Cologne 191–2 Hamburg-America Line Pavilion, Cologne 191 Haus Bloch, Berlin 186 Haus Breul, Berlin 186 Haus Burlet, Berlin 186 Haus Freudenberg, Berlin and others in the Rehwiese ensemble 51–5, 92–3, 95, 121, 174ff. Haus Hischowitz, Berlin 186 Haus Koch, Berlin 186 Haus Kuczynski, Berlin 187–8 Haus Mandler, Berlin 188 Haus Mohrbutter, Berlin 186–7

Index Haus Neuhaus, Berlin 186 Haus Seefeld, Berlin 183–4 Haus Tuteur, Berlin 188–9 Haus Velsen, Berlin 186 Haus Vowinckel, Berlin 188 Haus Wild, Berlin 186 Hellerau (role in) 114 Silk Weaving Factory Michels & Cie 58–60 Wireless Transmission Station Nauen 60–1 Narkomﬁn House, by Ginzburg 85 nationalism, national identity, nation 6, 16, 18, 22, 34, 35, 65, 66, 68, 70 National Socialism 24, 117, 130, 139–40, 196ff., 202–22 natura artifex 47 Naumann, Friedrich 32, 88–9, 114, 154, 156–8 navy 60, 68 Navy League 136 New Delhi 66 Nietzsche, Friedrich 8, 9 Nordische Kunsthochschule, Bremen 217 nudism 42, 108, 127 Oberpostdirektion, Hamburg 39, 45–6 Olmsted, Frederick Law 81 Onkel-Toms-H¨utte, housing colony, Berlin 203 opera 53, 175–6, 190 Ostendorf, Friedrich 187 Osthaus, Karl Ernst 8, 19, 20, 22, 32, 97ff., 145, 161, 163, 182 see also: Folkwang Palau de Justícia, Barcelona 35 Palladianism 38, 45, 161 Pallenberg, Josef 135 Pan-German League 99 pantheism 137, 140 paradise 137 Paris 66 park 109, 121, 124, 190 see also: Stadtpark, Central Park park systems 110, 121 particularism, Kleinstaaterei 67, 68, 69, 73 patents 60, 146 pedagogy 7 period rooms 181 perspective 81, 191 Petersen, Carl 77, 82 Philadelphia World Fair of 1876 145, 152 Picasso, Pablo 81 Pick, Frank 51

251

Pietism 170 Piles, Roger de 216 Port Sunlight 113 Post Ofﬁce see Oberpostdirektion primitivism 41, 43, 57, 99, 130, 132 Prior, Edward 52–3, 95 proletarization 80 promenading 43 protectionism 89, 161 Prussian army 2, 3 Prussian government and ministries 10, 11, 114, 144, 197 putto 137 quality work 6, 7, 58, 89, 97, 114, 144, 150–2, 155, 161, 167 racism, racial thinking 209, 215, 217 rambling 129 Ranke, Leopold von 30, 35 Raphael (Sanzio) 190 rationality 178ff. reasonableness 178 Reichsforschungsgesellschaft f¨ur Wirtschaftlichkeit im Bau- und Wohnungswesen 202 Reichsministerium f¨ur Volksaufkl¨arung und Propaganda 204–5, 217 Renaissance 32, 36, 78, 121, 137, 181, 190, 216 republicanism (in city-states) 68, 70–2 Riegl, Alois 28 Riemerschmid, Richard 29, 31, 96, 103, 114–19, 145, 156–60, 199 Rilke, Rainer Maria 190 Ring (architects’ association) 201, 204 Ringstrasse, Vienna 34, 36, 43 Robinson Crusoe 134 Rococo 118, 161, 170, 180–2 Rome 71 Romanesque and neo-Romanesque 29, 57–8, 77, 177 Romanticism 8, 65, 202 roof, pitch of roof, roof war 186, 203–5 Rooke, Noel 152 Rosenberg, Alfred 202, 204, 217–18 Ruhrgebiet (and overlapping regions) 19, 20, 97ff., 104, 161 Ruskin, John 50, 90, 113, 148–51, 157–8 Ruwold, Hans Martin 127 Schefﬂer, Karl 217 Schmidt, Karl 113 Schmitt, Carl (political theorist) 3 Schmitt-Rottluff, Karl 81 Schmitthenner, Paul 200–1, 203

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Index

Schneider, Karl 82, 204–5 Schumacher, Fritz (Friedrich Wilhelm) as architect 9, 19, 21, 31, 79ff., 81, 104, 121, 208ff. as critic and polemicist 33, 49, 55, 81, 111, 208–21 Buildings by: Alster canals 80ff. Crematorium Dresden-Tolkewitz 77, 139 housing projects 85 Oberschulbeh¨orde Hamburg 78–9 Stadtpark Hamburg 81, 121ff., 141 various public institutes and schools 81 Schultze-Naumburg, Paul 94–5, 200, 203 Schwabe, Hermann 151 second cities 67–8 Senate, senatorial deputations, in Hamburg 68, 131 senses, sensory perception, sensory discipline 14, 24, 80, 109, 124–5, 162, 176–8, 182–3, 190–1, 194 sentimentality 169, 171, 181 serpent, snake 43 Seurat, Georges-Pierre 99 Shaftesbury, Earl of 159 Shaw, Norman 90 shingle 103, 120 Siemens 7, 60, 153 Signac, Paul 99 Simmel, Georg 16, 190 Simon, Eduard 182 Simon, James 181 Sitte, Camillo 87, 119 skyscraper 133, 218 sociability 19, 53, 173–7 Socialism, Social Democracy, SPD 2, 15, 74, 150, 152, 218 Sonderweg thesis 3, 8, 142, 196 Soviet Union 85 spectacle, spectacularization 162, 190–2 Speer, Albert 140, 206, 217 Speicherstadt, Hamburg (warehouse district) 69 Spengler, Oswald 56, 111, 112 sphinx 41, 44, 62 spirituality, spiritualism 60, 139, 206, 211, 213, 216 sport 83, 124 SS (Schutzstaffel) 206, 209 Staaken garden city 200 Stadtpark Hamburg see Schumacher Stimmungsr¨aume 181 Stinnes, Hugo 102 stone (untreated, as emblematic material) 103, 118, 120, 206, 217, 221

strike 73 Studio (design magazine) 157 study (or gentleman’s room) 178–9 suburbs 19, 43, 53, 89–92, 97, 104, 119 subway 82 Taut, Bruno 102, 162, 201, 203 Telefunken 61 Tessenow, Heinrich 114–15, 203 textile dye 145–6 Thonet chair manufacturers 153 Thorn-Prikker, Johan 162 Thyssen 89, 102 timber framing 52, 53, 120, 186 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de 164 town hall generic 36 in Hamburg 36, 39, 70–5, 77, 80 trade unions 73 see also: labour movement Trade Union Hall, Hamburg, by H. Krug 36, 37, 73ff. travertine 188 typiﬁcation, types 10, 22, 100, 153, 155–6, 161, 165, 192 urban planning 25, 34, 81, 87, 97–8, 100–5, 109, 111, 120, 200 utopia, utopian aspirations 9–10, 100, 167, 168 van de Velde, Henri 22, 97–9, 102, 153, 156, 161, 182 van Gogh, Vincent 99 Vasari, Giorgio 190, 216 Vaux-le-Vicomte 122 vegetarianism 108 Venice 71 Versailles 122 Vetter, Adolf 150 Victoria Falls (ﬁlm) 131 Vienna 34, 36 V¨olkerschauen 134–6 v¨olkisch ideology 18, 202, 206, 213, 221 voluntary associations 1, 108, 132 see also: Bund Heimatschutz, Deutsche Kolonialgesellschaft, life reform, Ring, Block Voysey, C. F. A. 83 Vredemann de Vries, Hans 46–7 Walddorf, housing colony, Berlin 103 Wallring, ensemble of buildings in Hamburg 37 Warburg, Aby 17, 30, 31, 43, 44, 137, 140

Index warehouse district see Speicherstadt Washington 66, 110 Wbra, Georg 127–8, 138–9 Webb, Philip 83, 90 Weiß, Emil Rudolf 164 Weissenhofsiedlung Stuttgart 199–202 Weltpolitik 148 see also: colonialism Welwyn Garden City 113 Werkbund see Deutscher Werkbund Werther 99 Wiegand, Theodor 40, 161 Wieland, Christoph Martin 139 Wiener Werkst¨atten 100, 153, 177 Wilhelminismus 33, 37, 191

William II see Emperor Williams, Ernest E. 146 Winckelmann, Joahnn Joachim 41 Woermann shipping line 132–3, 136 wood as emblematic material 157 see also: timber workers’ movement see labour movement World’s Fairs 34–5, 114, 143 World War One 54, 66, 168, 187 Worpswede 108 Worringer, Wilhelm 217 Wuttke, Robert 148 Zetkin, Clara 74 zoo, Hamburg 134–6

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