Standard, English language histories of German architecture have tended to follow the path first set out by Nikolaus Pevsner in his Pioneers of Modern Design from William Morris to Walter Gropius, first published in 1936 and still in print in 2005. Pevsner’s narrative follows a powerful teleology, whereby the confusion and indulgence of nineteenth-century historicism, with its focus on decoration and stylistic quotation, was replaced by a simple and by implication more honest manner of design, focused on efficiency, structural integrity, and modern materials. Referring to the model factories designed by Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of World War I Pevsner subsequently confessed that “To me, what had been achieved by 1914 was the style of the century. Here was the one and only style which fitted all those aspects which mattered, aspects of economics and sociology, of materials and function.” Gropius was the hero of Pevsner’s account, and the foundation of the Bauhaus in 1919 under Gropius’s leadership was confirmation for the English-speaking readership of the pre-eminence of the rationalist and functionalist movement in Germany. But the story, of course, was not so simple, and this special issue of Art in Translation focuses primarily on voices that were opposed to the dogmas of modernism. The battle in architecture between the internationalist voices of modernism and the localized resistance, which favored traditional technologies and regional precedents, reflected in microcosm the violent and complex histories of twentieth-century Germany. The texts translated for this issue interrogate the ways architecture constructed and reconstructed these histories.
The authors of these texts are the architects Hermann Muthesius (1861–1927), Theodor “Theo” Lechner (1883–1975), Paul Schmitthenner (1884–1972), Otto Bartning (1883–1959), and Walter Gropius (1883–1969); the architectural critic, journalist, and architect Alfons Leitl (1909–1975); the architect, architectural historian, and academic Julius Posener (1904–1996); the architect and interior designer Gerhardine “Gerdy” Troost (1904–2003); and the engineer Fritz Todt (1891–1942). Further contributions are by the author and poet Rudolf Borchardt (1877–1945), the publisher and writer Wolf Jobst Siedler (1926–2013), and Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm (born 1940), an architectural critic, urban planner, and theologian. Two more texts come from German dictators, Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) and Walter Ulbricht (1893–1973).
These texts reflect the changing eras and contours of the German nation. They were written in the German Empire (1871–1918); the Weimar Republic (1918–1933); the Third Reich (1933–1945); the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), which both existed from 1949 to 1990; and, finally, the reunified Germany that came into being in 1990 when the former GDR and the reunified Berlin joined the Federal Republic of Germany. Chronologically, the writings span the years from 1902 to 1991, a long period that the issue organises into four broader groups.
The first group comprises the German Empire established in 1871 and the Weimar Republic, the first time the German nation was governed democratically. While the First World War resulted in the demise of the Empire and the rise of the German Republic, issues around heritage, traditions, national identity, institutions, and the emerging, often fast-paced changes that Modernity wrought on architecture existed across the abyss of the battlefields.
At the outset of the last century, Hermann Muthesius’s essay “The ‘Restoration’ of our old Buildings” may have declared the reconstruction of historical buildings a collective responsibility of the German people. Yet the framework for this reminder was not introverted, backward-looking, or nationalistic. Instead, for Muthesius, reconstruction was part and parcel of both Modernity and an outward-looking cosmopolitanism that would take inspiration from countries like Great Britain, where Muthesius had served as cultural attaché at the German embassy in the years straddling the turn of the century.
Rudolf Borchardt’s essay “Villa” likewise looked abroad, to Italy, and espouses the genteel life of the landed gentry as an appropriate model for modern-day intellectuals. However, Borchardt’s view of Italian villas and the regional economy is a longing gaze that claims to have found a rooted, local way of life in Italy, which no longer existed in Germany. Whether it is also a nostalgic gaze remains arguable. For Borchardt, the Italian villa symbolized what modern life ought to look like, even if in his own case life in a villa relied not on a regional economy but on social and financial ties between Italy and Germany.
By comparison, Theo Lechner’s article “The Architecture Exhibition in Munich 1926” offers a far more parochial point of view that pitches Bavarian and southern German contemporary architecture against the Modernist architecture that the writer equates with northern Germany. Contemporaries would have understood that this juxtaposition also referenced political and religious differences between the southern German states and Prussia, as well as between German Catholicism, which is mostly concentrated in the south, and Protestantism in the north. Architecturally, Lechner favors architecture that expresses “Liebe zur Heimat”. This phrase speaks about the love for one’s home or region, which Lechner can only define by pointing out how it is not to be achieved. For Lechner, the opposite to love for Heimat was an architecture that resembled machines for living in and aspired to be an international style.
Texts from the Third Reich form the second group. Their authors continue grappling with the issues outlined above, but now in light of the first German dictatorship. Early on in the National Socialist dictatorship, architects aimed to recalibrate the balance between tradition and modern architecture (or Neues Bauen as it was then called in Germany) in favor of the former. Subsequent writings by Third Reich officials, including Adolf Hitler, demonstrate that tradition had morphed from simply signifying the opposite of modernization into a tangible means of asserting the dictatorial goal of political and military dominance. If necessary, traditional materials and forms could co-exist in conjunction with the most functionalist planning and modern design tasks, such as building motorways across Germany and, later, occupied territories. Yet many advocates of historic preservation and natural preservation who were initially won over by the Nazi regime’s lip service to tradition were soon disappointed when their causes were subordinated to a relentless drive for economic and military expansion.
Paul Schmitthenner’s arguments in favor of the vernacular building tradition link design directly to notions of regional and national identity, which in turn are made tangible in architecture. For Schmitthenner, the enemy of this potent localism was the internationalism of 1920s Neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity) and its architectural variant, Neues Bauen. Schmitthenner was a leader of the so-called Stuttgart School of architecture, which promoted traditional architectural design from its base at the Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart and is referenced on several occasions in the texts chosen for this issue.
The title of Alfons Leitl’s article “Northern and Southern Germany: Notes on the Works of the Architect Emil Egermann, Berlin” recalls Lechner’s irreconcilable juxtaposition between northern and southern Germany, and in its first sentence dubs the Stuttgart School as the “Stuttgarty lutenists.” Leitl, however, made a rather sophisticated argument for the principles of modernist architecture, which he rooted in the vernacular traditions of building in southern Germany and saw exemplified in the designs of Emil Egermann, a Bavarian architect then practising in Berlin. Historians have occasionally understood Leitl’s argument as trying to rescue the principles of modernist architecture. Yet the article was published in 1934, when the dictatorship was still consolidating its hold on the country, which suggests that it was one of many attempts by modernist architects to sway the official attitude of the new government towards Modernism in architecture.
In its internal, ideological conflicts, the National Socialist party echoed the architectural debates of the 1920s. On one side the advocates of Blut und Boden (blood and soil) who saw the healthy farming community rooted to the soil as the social goal of the movement: Heinrich Himmler, Walther Darré, and Alfred Rosenberg were supporters of this mystical attachment to the German soil. They were opposed by the modernist technocrats in the Party such as Robert Ley, Fritz Todt, and Albert Speer, who envisaged a National Socialist state committed to high technology and industrial rationalization. Hitler encouraged both groups but identified with neither. Instead, he maintained a position of nurtured ambivalence. In the context of architecture, this enabled a wide spectrum of design options, which ranged from regional vernacular for rural developments and Hitler Youth Hostels, Neo-Romanesque for nationalistically burdened buildings like SS-education buildings, high-tech modernism for technology, industry and transportation infrastructure, a bland carcass-Classicism for low-level public and party administration, and overblown Neoclassicism for major party buildings designed more with propaganda in mind than function. Albert Speer’s project for a Great Hall on the planned North/South axis in Berlin is the prime example. This is the architecture on which Hitler focuses his speech at the 1937 Party Rally, in which he urges that throughout history, monumental buildings—temples, cathedrals, city halls—were the essential stimulus and focus for the consolidation of national community. This was the word in stone.
But the word was also presented in simpler form in books, and Gerdy Troost assumed the role of principal cheerleader for National Socialist architecture with the publication in 1938 of Das Bauen im neuen Reich (building in the new state), which offered a panoramic survey of the remarkable impact of the National Socialist Party on German architecture and building in the five years in which it had been in power. Born in 1904 as Gerhardine Andresen, she had trained as an architect and married fellow architect Paul Troost in 1925. Greatly favored by Hitler, he functioned as the unofficial state architect in the early years of the National Socialist regime but died in 1934, to be replaced in the design hierarchy by Albert Speer. Gerdy Troost, however, remained close to Hitler both as advisor and interior designer for the dictator’s personal residences: the Chancellory in Berlin, his apartment in Munich, and the Berghof in Obersalzberg.
As noted above, high technology was vigorously promoted in certain areas of German design. The most visible and powerful as a propaganda statement about the Germany of the future was the Autobahn network. In his article on highway planning and building across Germany, Fritz Todt, a construction engineer and high-ranking official in the National Socialist government, credits the genius of the Führer with having invented the nationwide system of highways. Beyond such political hagiography, he offers functional arguments for accommodating a new form of individualized travel on a dedicated, new network of roads. And he praises the highways for both their careful integration with the German natural landscapes and their expression of German spiritual values, such as those of National Socialism. His success as Inspector General of the German Road and Highway System in building the Autobahns led Hitler to appoint Todt as Minister for Armament and Ammunition in March 1940. Todt’s death in February 1942, on the day after he had failed to persuade Hitler to sue for peace with the Soviet Union, still raises questions, for his aircraft exploded on take-off from the airfield at Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair headquarters in East Prussia, and his ministerial roles were immediately passed on to Albert Speer.
The third group of texts in this issue cuts across the political divide that developed in the aftermath of the Second World War between the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). They focus on the postwar reconstruction in both German states and offer visions that looked forward—beyond the Third Reich, Second World War, and the Holocaust. Yet many authors found inspiration in debates from the recent past, be they dreams of socialist or communist utopias or of industrialized mass production of architecture under the compassionate guidance and leadership of the architect.
Otto Bartning’s “Heretical Thoughts at the Edge of the Rubble Heaps,” written in 1946 before the division of Germany into East and West was sealed, is a moving reflection on the necessity of rebuilding an unnamed city in parallel to reconstructing German society. Bartning inveighed against historicizing restorations, which he saw as “stage sets…lies” that did not answer to universal human needs. Bartning looked back to the German Werkbund’s prewar vision of craftsmanship as a guide for postwar reconstruction.
Bartning was also part of a group of architects and intellectuals from across the political spectrum who signed in 1947 “An Appeal: Fundamental Demands” that called for a foundational renewal of German cities based on modern architecture rather than a recreation of buildings extant before their destruction. This politically varied group called for a break with the past that would not create a false continuity and thus erase traces of Nazi dictatorship. The translation of “An Appeal” is accompanied by biographical notes on its signatories, an illustrious cross-section of architects, artists, designers, journalists, and critics, most of them with roots in modernist architecture, art, and design. The works of some of the signatories had been displayed in the various Entartete Kunst (degenerate art) exhibitions that the Nazis mounted, but all decided to remain in Germany, some of them in the so-called “inner emigration.” Noticeable as well is the number of signatories who had worked in the totalitarian USSR until Stalin expelled them, and who then had taken up work for the totalitarian Nazi dictatorship. Significantly, no émigré from the Third Reich signed “An Appeal,” which illustrates the lasting split national socialism had introduced between former colleagues.
The sense that the end of World War II in 1945 marked a new beginning, when old beliefs and habits could be abandoned or revised, and new ways of thinking developed, underpins the text by Walter Gropius. Resident for over a decade in the US at the time of writing, Gropius focuses less on the horrors of the National Socialist interlude in Germany, and more generally on the speed of technological change that characterized the early twentieth century, which was unparalleled in early human history. The architect’s response to this challenge, argues Gropius, is to work in a team of design technologists rather than depend on the genius of the “primadonna” architect.
Once the division between East and West Germany had been formalized in the late 1940s, East German architectural and urban politics were based on a rejection both of the Nazi past and of the capitalist West. Walter Ulbricht’s speech to the Volkskammer on “Questions of Architecture” in the East German assembly emphasizes this spirit, decrying the architecture of the Bauhaus as “formalism” and taking cues more from simplified neoclassicism of Russian state architecture. This tone would change dramatically after the death of Stalin, when industrial building techniques and prefabricated panels were employed to construct buildings known as Plattenbauten.
In the fourth and final group, the critique of architectural modernization and Denkmalpflege (care of the built heritage) is the focus of texts from the later twentieth century, when cultural criticism began to question the consequences of the ongoing Wiederaufbauwahn or reconstruction mania. This quasi-psychological condition to rebuild and reconstruct at all costs had prompted a relentless march of modernization through German cities and towns.
In his seminal book Die gemordete Stadt, the conservative critic Wolf Jobst Siedler points at the losses not only of individual buildings but of entire neighborhoods, including houses, urban spaces such as streets and squares, and trees. The destruction was both an aesthetic and a social one; Siedler claims that not only urban quarters were destroyed but also the social networks and communities that created and inhabited them. Subsequently, many of the edifices and neighborhoods whose fate Siedler had lamented became the habitats in which the fledgling student revolt and youth movement nurtured its dreams of a better German society and, accordingly, a better world.
With the increasing political might of the student movement and affiliated political parties grew the general social and economic acceptance of the preservation and restoration of historic buildings and neighborhoods. Indeed, the cultural critic and urban planner Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm argues in “The Case for Abolishing Historic Building Preservation” that preservation and restoration were adopted as means to accumulate financial wealth and power during the later twentieth century, quite comparable to architecture at large much earlier. Consequently, the manifesto calls for the abolition of efforts to preserve historical buildings, not least because any consensus on how society defines a monument worthy of preservation was long gone and irretrievable.
Against this comprehensive but negative radicalism stands the final text of this issue, entitled “Architectural Monuments” and written by Julius Posener, the doyen of German architectural history in the second half of the twentieth century. This short text surveys the entire century and its search for a conclusive definition of a monument. This mammoth effort may have widened the objects of potential concern but failed to establish firm rules regarding the meaning of monuments and how to write history with them. Instead of despairing about how architecture constructs and reconstructs history, Posener concludes with a pragmatism that speaks of his prolonged exposure to the English-speaking world during parts of his long exile as a German Jew, and its attitude to the nexus between architecture, history, and preservation. First, notable buildings always require exemptions from all principles. Second, all rules are best if and when suspended.
As Alan Nothnagle has noted, “the GDR was a place where history really mattered.”Footnote1 This issue argues that architectural history also really mattered, not merely in the GDR but throughout twentieth-century Germany. Whatever their political orientation, architects and commentators have consistently seen the built and political past as relevant to the built and political present and future. Whether Hermann Muthesius’s rejection of “historicizing” restoration that, in his opinion, held back the development of an architecture appropriate to German modernity; Adolf Hitler’s dreams of buildings that would become historical monuments in the distant future; Walter Ulbricht’s call for a new (East) German architecture that would rise from the ruins dually created, in his view, by fascism and capitalism; or Dieter Hoffmann-Axthelm’s critique of a preservationist façade hiding a grab for wealth and power, the writers in this issue saw the past as a central issue in the creation of contemporary Germany. Hitler’s and Ulbricht’s texts, in particular, however repugnant and banal they may be, demonstrate the central importance of physical construction of buildings and cities in the intellectual and theoretical construction of German national narratives.
Few of these texts focus on a specific building. Instead, they present a position, a viewpoint, or a provocation about the state of architecture or historic preservation, or what it should be. They thus place the built environment within a broader political and cultural context. Most of these texts were published in periodicals aimed either at a general or a specialist audience; others were speeches or essays published as part of longer books. Over the course of the century, the concentration of political and economic power changed dramatically, and the authors’ audiences changed accordingly. Different narrative structures, publication outlets, and rhetorical styles were appropriate for a dictator addressing a real or imagined audience of subordinates than for an essayist addressing an informed citizenship or elected officials. Despite these changes, though, in the end this collection only covers 100 years. There is thus considerable interlinking and continuity in terms of arguments and individuals; the phenomenon Werner Durth has termed “biographical entanglements.”Footnote1
Much of this issue deals with historic preservation (Denkmalschutz or Denkmalpflege in German). Hermann Muthesius’ 1904 essay intervenes in technical debates as historic preservation was being codified as a profession around the turn of the twentieth century, for instance, while Hoffman-Axthelm’s 1980 article criticizes bad-faith preservation. But this issue is not exclusively about historic preservation. Instead, we contend that architecture and historic preservation are intimately linked. Theories of modern and contemporary architecture in Germany have always perforce dealt with the past, while theories of historic preservation have always been concerned with the present. We have therefore included articles that focus more on the maintenance and renovation of existing and older buildings alongside those that focus on new construction.
All of these projects, we suggest, constructed and reconstructed twentieth-century German architecture: a process that took place in both physical and intellectual realms, and which constructed not only buildings and cities but also German states, regimes, and identities.
Apart from the illustrations in the texts by Alfons Leitl and Wolf Jobst Siedler, none of the remaining illustrations were included in the original texts translated for this issue. They have been added by the editors to give visual evidence in support of the authors’ arguments.
Notes
1 See Werner Durth, Deutsche Architekten: Biographische Verflechtungen (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1986).
2 We would like to thank Amy Lewis, the 2023 Art in Translation intern, for her help in obtaining images and reproduction rights for this issue of the journal.
1 Alan Nothnagle, “From Buchenwald to Bismarck: Historical Myth-Building in the German Democratic Republic, 1945-1989,” Central European History 26.1 (1993): 92. See also introduction to Ulbricht text.