Winfried Nerdinger’s history of German architecture in the 20th century

2024-01-14 23:18:29

Walter Benjamin had a great aversion to cultural historiography: “It probably increases the burden of treasures on the backs of humanity. But it doesn’t give her the strength to shake them off in order to get her hands on them in this way.” In this sense, many recent architectural historians have tried to shed ballast in order to historicize knowledge not only for the archives, but to update it for future use .

Winfried Nerdinger resolutely leaves this caravan of progress with his “Architecture in Germany in the 20th Century”. The Munich architectural historian does not spread prospective heroic stories, but rather retrospectively collects huge mountains of material in order to use a decidedly socio-historical perspective to measure architecture no longer just aesthetically, but as a moral discipline. Because modernity is “not a one-way street to freedom”, but rather has a “double face” of technical rationalization and social engineering that has always served “democracies as well as dictatorships”.

The author begins in high spirits with the heyday of Wilhelminism in 1890, when new building materials and constructions revolutionized design, the real estate and capital markets increased and workers’ organizations were no longer forbidden. The emergence of private property ownership as a result of the Prussian land law of 1794 played a major role. The German Empire was built on this: on the urban bourgeoisie, which became pioneers of modernization with its self-governing municipalities.

Administrative and judicial palaces

More than artists, Nerdinger focuses on the self-construction city councilors such as Ludwig Hoffmann in Berlin, Hans Grässel in Munich, Hans Erlwein in Dresden, Hugo Licht in Leipzig or Fritz Schumacher in Hamburg as “the uncrowned kings of architecture in the Empire”. While the Prussian state only contributed Paul Wallot’s Reichstag building to its architectural heyday, the emerging state federalism created enormous administrative and judicial palaces as “monuments of the bourgeois constitutional state”.

Even more ambitiously, in addition to utilities, schools, hospitals and theaters, the cities built a total of 120 town halls by 1914, which were as large as national parliaments and in which the architectural historian Julius Posener once recognized the “Wilhelmine smile of a benevolent authority”.

While the emperor presented Prussia at the World Exhibition in St. Louis in 1904 with a replica of Charlottenburg Palace, the new style of the Secession artists emerged from lifestyle reform and Art Nouveau far from Berlin in Darmstadt, Düsseldorf, Munich and Weimar.

Here the author primarily highlights the Belgian Henry van de Velde as well as the Austrians Otto Wagner and Joseph Maria Olbrich, while he only touches on exceptional artists such as Bruno Paul, August Endell and Hermann Obrist. In Friedrich Naumann’s declaration of war that the “Werkbund” form of decorative arts in 1908 was the counterpart to German naval policy, the Viennese architect Adolf Loos already saw “the German producer Junkers imposing their will to form on the world”.