Topographies of Class: Modern Architecture and Mass Society in Weimar Berlin

3. Organizing the Modern Masses:New Building in Weimar Berlin

chapter 3 Organizing the Modern Masses: New Building in Weimar Berlin Railing against the scourge of intellectualism that allegedly had taken hold of architectural culture, Heinrich de Vries in 1920 declared that it has only been a few weeks since the most radical group among you decided to distribute ‹fty thousand ›iers on Potsdamer Platz, advertisements for a new journal intended to convey your ideas to the working population and to gain their support for your work. I assume that the thousandth part of those ›iers brought ‹fty workers to you who now urgently wish to see a little piece of the promised paradise. . . . What would you have to offer these people? Where is the design, the model . . . tailored to the speci‹c psychological condition of the proletariat ? . . . “Nowhere” is my answer.1 The intentionally provocative remark by de Vries, who would soon become editor of the professional journal Der Städtebau, suggests two things about the young generation of architects rising to prominence after the war: that they saw the masses as the subject and object of modern architecture , and that they developed formal solutions to the decline of traditional class society and the rise of white-collar society. Building on the spatial reorganization of the Wilhelmine metropolis described in chapter 1 and the social transformation mapped in chapter 2, this chapter focuses on the contribution of New Building to the mass discourses and urban utopias that dominated all aspects of Weimar architectural culture. Based on the discursive patterns outlined in the previous chapter, especially in conservative mass discourse, I discuss the formal solutions offered under the heading of New Berlin as a historically speci‹c left-wing response to the crises of Weimar class society. The modernist 98 ‹xation on structures, forms, and plans will be read as a concerted effort to control emerging new social groups and formations perceived as chaotic, disruptive, de‹ant—in short, as other. Likewise, the elevation of the modernist aesthetic to a secular religion will be interpreted as a defense against the heterogeneity of urban life, its association with multitude, diversity, and transitoriness. Against the frequent equation of modernism with modernity, my reading emphasizes the uneasy relationship of modern architects to a modernity de‹ned simultaneously through uniformity and fragmentation, homogenization and differentiation. Similarly, against the facile characterization of modern architects as urbanites, this chapter emphasizes their deep ambivalence toward urban culture, with their desire for change re›ected in their ‹rm belief in destruction as a valid tool of urban planning and their need for order measurable by the sterility of their architectural utopias and designs. My discussion of these complex issues begins with a brief overview of New Building in Berlin, with a special focus on Bruno Taut as one of its main representatives. The writings of Adolf Behne (in the second part) and Ernst Bloch (in the third part) will allow me to reconstruct the discursive ‹eld in which New Building assumed a key role in the left-wing recon‹guration and rearticulation of class. In the third and fourth parts of this chapter, I introduce the two architectural ideologies primarily concerned with organizing the urban masses, functionalism and rationalism, and trace their formal articulation in the built and unbuilt architecture of Erich Mendelsohn and Ludwig Hilberseimer. Functionalism and rationalism, I argue, represented two reactions to the crisis of modern subjectivity and the threat of social leveling. Consequently, they allow us to further clarify the role of architectural culture in articulating some of the underlying contradictions in the reconceptualization of class. Just as the unique qualities of New Building in relation to architectural modernism can only be understood in the larger context of Weimar social and political debates, the dif‹culty of distinguishing functionalism and rationalism in each instance must be considered an integral part of the intertwined ideological functions of these two strands of thought within contemporary architectural culture and its preoccupation with the organization of the masses. The imagined audience addressed by de Vries could have consisted of the many young architects who, energized by the modern movement, approached the act of building at once as artistic self-expression, secular religion , and revolutionary act. As “a magician, a director of all human experience ,”2 the self-described modern architect set out to support the goals of Organizing the Modern Masses 99 democratization and modernization, to give formal expression to the processes of mechanization and rationalization...