2023-07-04 19:39:47
The architect Richard Paulick explains the structure of the apartment blocks in the former Stalinallee in Berlin. Central image Quaschinsky
Under the title “Macht Raum Violence. Planning and Building under National Socialism” at the Academy of Arts, which was in the hands of a seven-person historians’ commission appointed by the Federal Minister for Building, Klara Geywitz, and three special curators, is coming to an end. In mid-May I joined a guided tour with interest. I thought I had already measured the presentation of building documents of horror and arrogance until I became aware of a phenomenon in the last room that just about exceeded my comprehension. It is about the bizarre phenomenon that on the walls of this room, in two rows and in alphabetical order, are 150 short biographies of “actors” (according to the accompanying book) illustrated with portrait photos, which also include people who were either in exile during the Nazi era or who architect Richard Paulick who emigrated to Shanghai and the lawyer Lothar Bolz who emigrated to Moscow or who spent the Nazi period in prison or in a concentration camp, like Fritz Selbmann, a trained miner and later a member of the Landtag and Reichstag.
A third group of those who are subsumed here under “planning and building under National Socialism” includes people such as Willi Stoph, who later became Prime Minister of the GDR, and Walter Pisternik, who worked in the GDR Ministry of Construction; both were active in the resistance and at best had something to do with building the Hitler regime in their jobs as bricklayers or technicians. All these and many others – for example the architect Ernst Scholz, who emigrated in 1937, fought in the Spanish Civil War and in the French Résistance and became building minister in the GDR in 1963, the architect Kurt Junghanns, who joined the illegal KPD in 1933 and has been in prison since 1937 and imprisoned in a concentration camp, the Bauhaus director Mies van der Rohe, who, after struggling to get by with exhibition work in Germany after 1933, went into exile in America in 1938, or the architect Kurt Liebknecht, who had already left Germany in 1931 – they are all in alphabetical order and linked not only with architects of this desolate period such as Paul Troost and Wilhelm Kreis, but also with architecture organizers of criminal stature such as Fritz Todt and Robert Ley, Fritz Sauckel, Albert Speer and Ernst Seldte, who were accused in Nuremberg. Photos make the conglomerate of these walls obvious: bizarre neighborhoods without end.
Ad | Scroll to read more
A kind of criminal gallery
Was I the only one who found such an absurd compilation not only strange but scandalous? It is hardly less offensive that there is a plaque on the wall that points to the heterogeneity of those depicted, without however drawing the conclusion that the people named and many others should not be placed in a row under the heading “Planning and Building under National Socialism”. Because the increasingly centrally regulated planning and building in the Soviet occupation zone and then the GDR was not planning and building under National Socialism or Hitler’s fascism. A contribution by Wolfram Pyta in the accompanying book (and also the ten-page DDR chapter of the multi-volume research report) also clearly states this, without however explaining why all of these then appear in that portrait gallery, which the visitor, exhausted from the four previous rooms, readily perceives as perpetrators gallery.
The FAZ dedicated a commentary to the exhibition, which passed the 150-fold series of portraits without comment, as did the reviewers of the Süddeutsche Zeitung or the Berliner Zeitung. The dpa report issued after the opening on April 18 announced: “The exhibition highlights 150 biographies of builders who were managers in the construction industry before 1945 and most of whom were able to continue their careers after the war.” That is one of many public statements that testify that the plaque, which explains that very different biographies are lined up here, does not reach even expert, attentive visitors. One person noticed that something was wrong here, Jürgen Tietz wrote on the web portal Marlowes.de: “Behind the NS system and its terror there were always individual people. But how can it be that the ‘Reich governor’ in Thuringia, Fritz Sauckel, who was executed as a war criminal in Nuremberg, is simply shown in alphabetical order next to the architect Hans Scharoun? Contemporaneity as a sufficient link? Really?”
One can get upset about sheer nonsense, as it is staged here with the gesture of taking it for granted that people who weren’t even in the country are included here; you can write letters and then wait for something corrective to happen. But beyond all outrage, the question remains as to what this pictorial-suggestive stirring together of the divergent means, which human and which historical image stands behind it. This question also arises when one sees oneself pointing out an accusing finger at architects who, without succumbing to their demagogy, accepted construction contracts of all kinds, including insidious ones, simply to keep their heads above water.
Is an inevitable collective guilt being posited here with political-theological volte, in the way that a public official who was commissioned with culture by the state recently teasingly apostrophized a director of the Kulturhaus who is not from Germany but has long been naturalized at his inauguration as a member of the “criminal nation”? If one considers it impossible that those seduced by and to Hitlerism their error after recognized the catastrophe of the Reich and, out of conviction, assigned themselves to new intellectual horizons? Are learning and self-criticism a priori hypocrisy? Couldn’t it be that the architect, who feared and loathed Hitlerism, accepted dubious commissions out of existential distress? Or should he have gone into exile instead? As it turns out, he would still have ended up in this gallery of perpetrators.
The GDR architecture – an appendix of the Nazi era?
The fact that the intellectual horizons to which some of those portrayed in the east of divided post-war Germany assigned themselves were under the sign of socialism seems to have been considered by the exhibition organizers as an aggravation of the punishment; How else can you explain the fact that you included people in your series of pictures who were either not in the country at all, or not at all in a building trade, or who were permanently in prison? All of these are questions I cannot answer. Maybe it’s just the blind spot on the retina of a ten-person collective author, which had too many facets to see clearly. Such exhibitions should not only be left to historians, a member of the Academy’s architecture class, who was apparently not involved in the exhibition, told me as we were leaving. Above all, if you want to visualize the post-war architecture of divided Germany and its bearers, you shouldn’t squeeze this as an appendix into a documentation on building in the Nazi era. It deserves and requires its own exhibition, and there are precedents for it.
In the Journal der Akademie, number 20, page 12, a member of the commission of historians responsible for the exhibition and the four-volume publication that preceded it, Professor Regina Stephan, discussed the series of pictures. She added: “This is impressively documented by 150 short biographies.” 150, that’s all; Even this specialist was unable to notice that exiles, concentration camp prisoners and active resistance fighters had found a place among these 150 short biographies. Removing their panels would have been the least that a responsible exhibition management should have ordered before the opening. It was missed and not made up for. But it is worth noting with gratitude that after many weeks the president of the academy managed to clearly oppose the equalization suggestion of this series of pictures on an additional board in room 5.
#architect #Richard #Paulick #contact #Nazi #greats