The Break with the Past

Avant-Garde Architecture in Germany, 1910 – 1925

Deborah Ascher Barnstone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317326236
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architektur
• Subtopic: Architektur Allgemein

Between 1918 and 1933 the German interwar avant-garde was a primary force driving European cultural innovation and modernism. These innovations continue to influence artistic practice, theory, and arts education today, thus making a comprehensive study of the relationship between individual war experience and the immediate response of avant-garde architects after the war all the more important.

The Break with the Past pursues several important, interrelated questions. What were the disparate war experiences of German architects, and did they have different effects on Weimar cultural production? Did political orientation play a part in support for the war? In aesthetic choices? What changes occurred in avant-garde architectural practice after 1918? How do they compare with pre-war positions and practices, and expectations for post-war outcomes? In order to address these questions, the book uses individual case studies of four leading architects: Bruno Taut, Walter Gropius, Erich Mendelsohn, and Hans Scharoun.

This is a valuable resource for academics and students in the areas of Art and Architecture History, German history and Cultural Studies, European Culture and Modernism.

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1 Introduction

Architecture in transition: Germany’s avant-garde in World War I and the Weimar Republic

93 authors, artists, and scientists—including Max Planck, Max Reinhardt, Wilhelm Röntgen, Gerhart Hauptmann—signed a manifesto under the title, “Call to the Cultural World,” publicized on 14 August, 1914: “Believe us! Believe that we will fight this battle to the end as a cultural people.”

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, “Zeitgeschichte: Die Dichter und der Krieg,” January 7, 2016.

Germans of all political persuasions greeted the outbreak of war in August 1914 with nearly universal patriotic enthusiasm, and German artists fell in line with their compatriots. “The war will be waged to clean and shed diseased blood,” declared painter Franz Marc.¹ “War! It was cleansing, freeing, that we felt, and a terrible hope!” avowed acclaimed writer Thomas Mann, in words that echoed far and wide.² “Is a national building art finally coming?” asked the editorial board of the journal Bauwelt. “The small wars in the realm of art have been suddenly forgotten,” wrote Richard Braungart in 1914. “There is only one thought that men have; the thought for the real war. No one can say what development modern art will take [during and after the war].”³ Artists and leading cultural figures believed war would bring new purpose to Germany in every way, and especially as an antidote to a stale and bankrupt culture across the spectrum of the arts. “This is a turning point for the development of German art,” asserted Wilhelm von Bode.⁴ “Are we ready for the victory of culture to follow the victory in arms?” Von Bode asked.⁵ “The German war will not displace German art from the world: on the contrary, it brings holy duties and responsibilities to her,” declared the editors of Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration.⁶ The “victory” they expected would bring with it a second expected outcome: the “development” of German art, resulting in an improved German art and culture that would assume its rightful place at the head of the Western world.

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Historians agree that these predictions accurately foresaw the enormous shift in German art and architecture that occurred after 1918. Cultural, art, and political historians see World War I—at once the “seminal catastrophe of the 20th century” and the “birth of modernity”—as a turning point in German history, German cultural production, and the course of avant-garde art and architecture in Germany.⁷ The German avant-garde was one of the primary forces that drove postwar European cultural innovation and modernism, which still influence artistic practice, theory, and arts education today, a century later. Most crucially, for the purposes of this book, World War I caused a drastic, if brief, transformation in how German architects approached design. Between November 1918 and 1924, as a result not only of the tremendous destruction to the physical environment, the postwar economic crisis, and the resultant lack in building commissions and projects, but also the horrors of the war, coupled with the prewar disillusionment felt by architects and artists, members of the German avant-garde embraced visionary design as the means with which to develop a new architecture.

Although art historians have studied the ways in which the war experience affected drawing, painting and, to a lesser degree, sculpture, to date no comprehensive study exists of the relationship between the individual war experiences of avant-garde architects and their immediate postwar thinking and design. Monographs on important architects like Bruno Taut, Walter Gropius, Erich Mendelsohn, and Hans Scharoun typically treat the war as an event rather than an influence. Iain Boyd Whyte addresses the period briefly in Bruno Taut and the Architecture of Activism, but limits his study to the facts of Taut’s wartime experiences and does not tackle the question of how his response to the war shaped his activism. Reginald Isaacs details Walter Gropius’ military service in his biography, Walter Gropius: Der Mensch und sein Werk, but does not use it to understand his postwar architecture or ideological position. Monographs on Hans Scharoun almost totally ignore his prewar design, military service, and postwar work in East Prussia.⁸ Similarly, scholars have addressed Erich Mendelsohn’s wartime sketches but not in conjunction with his war experience, whereas nobody has studied the effect of his military service on his postwar thinking and design projects. Joan Weinstein’s excellent The End of Expressionism charts the evolution of artists’ attitudes, from initial euphoria to disillusionment, as they comprehended the realities of the economic and political situation in Germany immediately after the war. However, Weinstein does not look at aesthetic continuities and discontinuities across the period. This study aims to complement and expand upon Weinstein’s work by shifting the focus from artists’ involvement with revolutionary councils in 1918 and 1919, to the effects of the war experience itself on the artistic production of the postwar period.

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Contemporary historiographies that probe the relationship of World War I to the avant-garde confirm the war’s importance. In The Great War and the Making of the Modern World, Jeremy Black looks beyond individuals to chart the effect of the war on European culture.⁹ He argues that the Great War was far more consequential to world history, especially the formation of the modern condition, than has generally been credited. He particularly underscores the “accentuation of the already strong Modernist assault on traditional culture.”¹⁰ Modris Ecksteins paints a general picture of how the war affected British, French, and German modern culture in Rites of Spring: The Birth of the Modern World. Ecksteins sees a causal relationship between the war experience and modernism, although he does not address the question of how modernism evolved as a result of the war. Most scholars see a heightened split between modern and traditional culture in the war’s aftermath. Paul Fussell argues that the war caused a radical break with the past in the arts that opened the way for modernism, whereas Rosa Bracco and, more recently, Ana Carden-Coyne, argue that the war experience augmented traditional aesthetics such as classical, romantic, and the vernacular. This study aims to show that these simple causal arguments ignore the messiness of history, what Jay Winter calls “its non-linearity, its vigorous and stubbornly visible incompatibilities.”¹¹

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Two scholarly works more closely related to this study are Kenneth Silver’s Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War (1992) and Michael White’s Generation Dada. (2013). Silver explores the social and political concerns that affected aesthetic choices during and after the war. Most intriguingly for this study, Silver uncovers substantive differences between the work of members of the French avant-garde who served on the front and those who remained at home. White is the first to probe the actual war experiences of members of the German avant-garde, as opposed to the effects of the war as an abstract idea, demonstrating direct connections between those experiences and Dada art. Silver and White both use a combination of sources, including documents written by the artists and their contemporaries, and artworks.

The lacuna in scholarship on architects and the war is surprising since multiple sources from the 1920s show that architects led the German avant-garde during the period immediately following the Armistice, and that the avant-garde expected architecture to unite all the arts, steer the regeneration of German art and culture, and guide Germany to the pinnacle of European cultural achievement.¹² This study thus pursues several important and interrelated questions: What were the disparate war experiences of German architects, and what effects did they have on Weimar cultural production? What changes occurred in avant-garde architectural practice after 1918? How do postwar aesthetic positions compare with prewar positions and practices, and expectations for postwar outcomes? The book answers these questions by compiling and comparing case studies of leading German architects of the time, focusing on their war experiences and their pre- and postwar design work, and drawing together original documents (personal letters, essays, lectures, and memoirs), German War Office records, original drawings, photographs of projects, and secondary literature, in order to illuminate each architect’s trajectory.

These case studies discuss four key figures in the postwar avant-garde: Walter Gropius, Erich Mendelsohn, Hans Scharoun, and Bruno Taut. These architects were all part of the generation that assumed leadership positions in 1918, but they represent a cross-section of German war experiences and a diverse set of aesthetic philosophies within the avant-garde. Gropius served as a lieutenant on the Western Front; Scharoun worked as an architect for the reconstruction effort in East Prussia; Mendelsohn served on the Eastern Front in Russia and on the Western Front; and Taut refused to enlist, remained on the “home front,” and eventually became active in antiwar agitation. Politically, historians consider Mendelsohn the only “born revolutionary”; Gropius and Taut “learned to be revolutionaries,” their positions evolving over time; and Scharoun, an odd man out, was not a revolutionary before the war, but he was considered one after the war.¹³ The four knew each other well and belonged to many of the same postwar radical arts associations, but their wartime experiences affected their belief systems and aesthetics quite differently. Although their experiences in no way comprise the entire story of the postwar German avant-garde, they do indicate some of the ways the war affected the thinking of that community.

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Background

Long before the Great War, German artists and intellectuals had the sense that their cultural production lagged far behind that of other Western countries. Artists turned to Italy during the Renaissance and to Paris and Rome in the eighteenth century for innovative ideas in painting, sculpture, architecture, and art education.¹⁴ In the nineteenth century, German artists still typically went to Paris to complete their training. As early as 1851, t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Break with the Past
• Routledge Research in Architecture
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Architecture in Transition: Germany’s Avant-Garde in World War I and The Weimar Republic
• 2 Bruno Taut: Before the War
• 3 Bruno Taut: War Years’ Resistance
• 4 Bruno Taut: Leading the Avant-Garde
• 5 Walter Gropius: Career Beginnings
• 6 Walter Gropius: War Service on the Western Front
• 7 Walter Gropius: Rise to Prominence
• 8 Erich Mendelsohn: A Born Revolutionary
• 9 Erich Mendelsohn: The War Years
• 10 Erich Mendelsohn: After the War
• 11 Hans Scharoun: Bremen and Berlin
• 12 Hans Scharoun: on the Eastern Front
• 13 Hans Scharoun: The Interwar Years
• 14 Art and The Revolution
• Selected bibliography
• Index