Architecture Here and There

Illustrations: Above, the Neue Nationalgalerie, in Berlin, opened in 1968, designed by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and inspected by my brother Tony on a trip in 2000; below, Cologne after war; rebuilt house of Goethe's birth; typical residential high-rise; shopping street in Dortmund; Hitler and Speer; Dresden restored. [Shots of Cologne, high-rise, Dortmund, Hitler and Speer, and Dresden from 21-shot slide show with Der Spiegel essay, linked below]

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Germany's popular magazine Der Spiegel has run a long and unusual essay on the postwar reconstruction of the nation's bombed cities. I visited Germany twice early in this decade and felt then that the Germans had botched it, replacing the rubble with vast stretches of modern architecture. The need to rebuild cities fast offered a plausible excuse, and it was difficult to tell bad modernism from good anyway. But Germans seem to have concluded that the new parts of their cities have aged poorly, and the Der Spiegel essay is unusual in that it agrees.

The essay's editors summarize it thus: "Germany's rebirth following the annihilation of World War II is nothing short of a miracle. But the country's reconstruction was not without controversy, and it resulted in cities filled with modernist buildings which have not aged well. Now, a new wave of construction is under way coupled with a new desire to rebuild the old."

But authors Romain Leick, Matthias Schreiber and Hans-Ulrich Stoldt make it plain that the desire to rebuild the old is far from new. "[M]ost people wanted their old houses back," they write. "Across Germany, they formed associations to lobby for the preservation of their old towns -- and urban planners found themselves embroiled in a bitter debate over the right course of action. . . . Those in favor of a new beginning warned that one-to-one reconstruction would be tantamount to ignoring that the war had ever happened. But those who advocated historical faithfulness, on the other hand, argued that it would be downright ahistorical or even a type of repression to wipe out the traces of the past, which consisted of so much more than the 12 disastrous years of Nazi rule."

In some cases, such as the birthplace of the writer Goethe, the rebuilders ended up having their way, with such luminaries as the novelist Herman Hesse, philosopher Karl Jaspers and scientist Max Planck supporting restoration. Goethe's house was rebuilt in 1951, but "the modernizers generally held sway."

That was depressingly clear to me on my two visits. What I learned about only in reading this essay was the "Nazi pedigree" of the modernizers. "Even before the Nazis came to power in 1933, many architects and urban planners had developed a weakness for modernism. Now, suddenly, they found themselves in the same camp as developers who thought the country needed a radical break from the past, both morally and politically. Paradoxically, they were joined by a whole host of architects who had close links to the Nazi dictatorship. These architects now pulled out plans they had been tinkering with since early 1943," when Hitler's chief architect, Albert Speer, convened a working group to plan German cities' future.

I had thought Hitler's vision was a bombastic classicism. It seems the truth is more nuanced. "Thousands of architects were involved," write the authors, "generating a modernist view of the new Germany. After the war, many of these same architects helped reconstruct Germany, using the same modernist ideas."

One architect was Konstanty Gutschow, of Hamburg, who said of its firebombing in 1943: "This act of destruction will be a blessing." He survived the war but was too close to the Hitler circle to play an official role in the rebuilding. "His contacts, however, ensured that he had work. It was the same story elsewhere in Germany." In spite of the very different situations of East and West Germany, modernists wormed into authority in similar ways. An arrogant rejection of public sensibility was their common bond. "After the war, Speer's architects hid behind the Bauhaus, the modernist style initially developed by Walter Gropius and others before 1933. Because the Nazis had persecuted its followers, being associated with Bauhaus was good for one's career after the war. . . ."

[Since this was written I've learned that Hitler's propaganda minister Goebbels was the main proponent of modern architecture as a model for Germany, but his influence over architecture (and the star of modernism in the Third Reich) fell as Speer's influence with Hitler grew. Also, the official German attitude against modernism was tempered even after the Bauhaus was closed when it came to such utilitarian structures as factories.]

Also little known today, and unmentioned by Der Spiegel, are the prewar efforts by modernists such as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and others to get work from the Nazis. When Mies and Gropius fled Germany for America, they were given influential posts at top schools of architecture. Yet modernism has advertised itself to Americans as the cure for the ills that had caused the war. Many modernists might have blushed had they known (as some certainly did) of its conflicted pedigree.

The Der Spiegel essay suggests that Germany leads America in understanding the taint of modern architecture, its disdain for beauty and humanism, and the wisdom of traditional design. Its three authors seem smitten, however, by major modernist projects in Berlin, Dusseldorf and Stuttgart that cut against the grain of their argument. No matter. Its overall thrust will be understood by their readers, some of whom, I hope, live in America.

David Brussat is a member of The Journal's editorial board (dbrussat@projo.com). His blog at projo.com is called Architecture Here and There.

 Tags  Architecture Der Spiegel Germany Modern Architecture Preservation World War II

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Gerardo Brown-Manrique said:

I am curious: Did anyone check the illustrations to see if they matched their captions? I ask because Mies' Neues Nationalgalerie is NOT the Bauhausarchiv by Gropius!

Link | August 20, 2010 12:05 PM
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David Brussat said:

Mr. Brown-Manrique is correct that the illustration is incorrectly identified. The error has been fixed and a correction explaining its the mistake's genesis was added on Saturday. I appreciate the two readers, so far, who have picked up on the slip of memory from my trip in 2000. The other is Michael M. Mendes, of Hannover, Germany, and Little Compton, R.I.

Link | August 22, 2010 12:15 AM
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