1Introduction

This is a study of a distinctive brand of modernism, which emerged in earlytwentieth-century Germany. Its supporters defined themselves as bourgeois,and acted as the self-appointed champions of a ‘modern’ consciousness, whichthey believed qualified them to tackle the many challenges facing the youngand rapidly industrializing German nation-state. ‘Bourgeois modernism’ maynot have been a mass movement, but it defined the collective persona and theaspirations of a milieu whose members were at the peak of their social andpolitical confidence. Thus, bourgeois modernism became what we might callthe hegemonic doctrine of the Wilhelmine era, and continued to influence theWeimar years in crucial ways. What is more, it also left an important markon German history well beyond the early twentieth century. Yet its successwas not that of an ideology. Indeed, ideologically speaking, German bourgeoismodernism was powerfully challenged, even beleaguered, from the moment itwas invented. Its principal impact was not in the realm of ideas, but in whatwe might call the infrastructure of German social life. Its power was vested in acertain way of being and doing—in other words, it became a dominant social,administrative and political praxis. Out of all proportion to their actual numbers,bourgeois modernists exercised influence: as office holders in the governments ofthe individual German states, as an army of ‘experts’ working in municipal andregional administrations, as social activists in countless voluntary associations, asthe most conspicuous consumers of their age, and, last but not least, as privateindividuals in their own homes, bourgeois modernists transformed the materialworld around them in ways that shaped the experience and meaning of modernityfor decades, perhaps centuries, to come. The physical fabric of social life thuscreated, from the domestic interior to the planning of entire cities, became thetrajectory through which bourgeois modernism acted upon consciousness andbehaviour, with (almost) irreversible consequences.

This book aims to capture some of the defining features of this movement,its psychological, cultural and political parameters. In doing so, it builds on arapidly growing body of literature on the successes of the German Bürgertumin this era, which quite possibly constitutes the single most dramatic process

2 Introduction

of revision in modern German history over the past decades. None of thisliterature disputes that bourgeois modernism had many enemies, many ofthem very vocal: these characters populate the pages of intellectual historiesof the said period. Critics, both on the right and the left of the politicalspectrum, often dismissed bourgeois modernism’s ‘cultural’ focus as window-dressing, disguising the fact that really mattered: the middle classes’ failureto win real political power from reactionary and mostly aristocratic elites. Yet todeduce from this that bourgeois modernism made no political difference is tomisconstrue the nature of the political during this formative phase of moderngovernance in Germany. To be sure, the Emperor had powers exceeding thoseof the head of state in most Western democracies, and the general staff ofthe Prussian army continued to be dominated by conservative aristocrats. Yetthe decisions made by the Emperor and his advisers, albeit fateful in the year1914, mostly had a very limited impact on the day-to-day lives of ordinaryGermans. This was a time when direct government ‘from above’ was graduallysupplanted by a social management of conduct that worked in less visible ways.It is a process which has widely come to be studied under the heading of‘liberal governmentality’, and much of this study will be devoted to exploringthe applicability of this largely Anglophone interpretative paradigm for theGerman context.

The detractors of bourgeois modernism long set the tone for professionalhistory-writing, too. For almost half a century, the overwhelming majority ofhistorians portrayed the German middle classes as losers in a power struggle,in which feudal elites and heavy industry joined forces against the threats ofsocialism and organized labour. The weakness and splintering of the liberalparties in the German national parliament has been seen as indicative of astructural weakness of the German bourgeoisie, compared to their analogues inother Western countries. For the Wilhelmine period, Hans-Ulrich Wehler spokeof a veritable ‘de-bourgeoisification’ of German society, and Hans Mommsendiagnosed a ‘dissolution of the German Bürgertum after 1890’.¹ Others pointedto the feudalization of the lifestyles and values of the German middle classes as

¹ Variations of this argument are developed in the contributions by Jürgen Kocka, Hans-UlrichWehler, Hans Mommsen and Rainer Lepsius in Jürgen Kocka, ed., Bürger und Bürgerlichkeit im19. Jahrhundert, Göttingen, 1987. Its first iconic expression was Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Das deutscheKaiserreich, 1871–1918, Göttingen, 1973; since then, it has been modified, for example in hisDeutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, iii: Von der deutschen Doppelrevolution bis zum Beginn des erstenWeltkrieges, 1849–1914, Munich, 1995. Yet the notion of a weak or underperforming bourgeoisiestill lingers, and Wehler restated it in his ‘A Guide to Future Research on the Kaiserreich?Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870–1930’, Central European History 29/4 (1997),pp. 541–72; and ‘The German Double Revolution and the Sonderweg, 1848–79’ in ReinhardRürup, ed., The Problem of Revolution in Germany, 1789–1989, Oxford, 2000, pp. 55–65. Hisview was challenged by Geoff Eley, ‘Introduction: Is There a History of the Kaiserreich?’ and‘German History and the Contradictions of Modernity: The Bourgeoisie, the State, and the Masteryof Reform’, in idem, ed., Society, Culture, and the State in Germany, 1870–1930, Ann Arbor, 1997,pp. 1–42 and 67–103. A seminal study of bourgeois reform activism of the Wilhelmine period is

Introduction 3

symptomatic of their political capitulation before the old elites.² These elites,themselves remnants of the feudal order of a bygone age, were concentrated inthe antechambers of power at the imperial court, and in the Prussian army.³Its members, historians argued, simply refused to adapt to socio-economictransformations, indeed, even to acknowledge their existence. As a result ofthis ‘blocked modernization’, German development took a qualitatively differentroute from that of ‘normal’ Western countries. When this Sonderweg theory wasfirst formulated, its proponents saw themselves as a critical avant-garde, whotook Fischer’s famous attack on the image of the ‘benevolent conservatism’ of theSecond German Reich onto a new analytical plane.⁴ It was not the experimentalclimate of the Weimar years and the political polarization it produced, theysuggested, that was ultimately responsible for the rise of the ‘Third Reich’,but the anti-modern legacy of the Second Reich, which came to be embodiedby a cast of reactionary lawyers and bureaucrats, who undermined Weimardemocracy.

The proponents of the Sonderweg thesis wanted to teach Adenauer’s conser-vative post-war Germany a political lesson. Yet their work has since becomethe object of a new historical revisionism. The most important critics of theSonderweg model, David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, argued that such anapproach ‘let capitalism off the hook’. They re-focused attention on the socialproblems of the inter-war period, but also emphasized how these were connectedto what they called a ‘silent bourgeois revolution’, which had taken place inWilhelmine Germany, and left its profound mark on the economy and socialmores, as well as political, legal and administrative institutions.⁵ In the wake

Kevin Repp, Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity: Anti-Politics and the Search forAlternatives, 1890–1914, Cambridge, 2000.

² On the cultural politics of feudalization, see Ute Frevert, Ehrenmänner: Das Duell in derbürgerlichen Gesellschaft, Munich, 1991, translated as Men of Honour: A Social and Cultural Historyof the Duel, Cambridge, Mass., 1995.

³ Carl Schmitt’s concept of the antechamber of power has been applied to an analysis of thepolitical structure of the Prussian court, albeit for a slightly earlier period, in Brendan Simms, TheImpact of Napoleon: Prussian High Politics, Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Executive, 1797–1806,Cambridge, 1997, and his Struggle for Mastery in Germany 1779–1850, New York, 1998. Theclassic account of military influence on German decision-making and the army’s role as the truestembodiment of the state and ordained protector of national interest is Gordon Craig, The Politicsof the Prussian Army, 1640–1945, New York, 1955.

⁴ Fritz Fischer famously suggested that the political elites of Wilhelmine Germany had sys-tematically driven Europe into the First World War, in his Der Griff nach der Weltmacht: DieKriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen Deutschland, 1914–18, Düsseldorf, 1961. Subsequent historians,expanding on this theme, suggested that this decision represented a necessary deflection of the socialtensions that had built up during Germany’s ‘blocked modernization’. Karl Dietrich Bracher firstproposed this view, and it achieved iconic status in Hans-Ulrich Wehler’s Das deutsche Kaiserreich,1871–1918, Göttingen, 1973.

⁵ Most notable among these are David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of GermanHistory: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany, Oxford and New York, 1984;Richard Evans, Rethinking German History: Nineteenth-Century Germany and the Origins of theThird Reich, London and Boston, 1987; and, more recently, Eley, Society, Culture, and the State,

4 Introduction

of this revision, a new generation of cultural historians have emphasized themodernism, not the traditionalism, of German bourgeois culture in the periodfrom 1871 to 1914. Some of these studies are devoted to what we may callthe social history of Wilhelmine politics.⁶ Others, focusing more on intellectualhistory, have taken issue with Fritz Stern’s view of Wilhelmine Germany asdriven by a politics of cultural despair, portraying, if not as altogether progress-ive, in terms of ‘light and dark, backward and forward’.⁷ Particular attentionhas been devoted to what was at the time called ‘ethics reform’, a bourgeoisproject for revitalizing the public sphere in non-partisan ways.⁸ And finally,a new type of cultural history has drawn attention to the role of the localityas a site for progressive bourgeois reform.⁹ Of course, none of these scholarswould dispute that the German experience of industrialization, urbanization,etc., was more abrupt than that of Britain, which is most frequently invoked asthe Western prototype. Yet it now seems that for contemporaries, this chronolo-gical compression served to dramatize, not dilute, the experience of modernity.Dramatic economic and social transformations went hand in hand with thedevelopment of a distinctly modern consciousness, which is here referred to asmodernism. In other words, the modernism that was defined and constituted inWilhelmine Germany denotes first the perception of modernity, and second a setof cultural and political strategies employed to interpret and master the changesbrought about in this way. Wilhelmine Germany became the site for a seriesof modernist experiments, both cultural and political, which shaped notionsof the modern in ways which, if less spectacular than those of the inter-waryears, were at least as profound. As Repp has suggested, not only Weimar

pp. 1–42, 67–103. See also Volker Berghahn, ‘The German Empire, 1871–1914: Reflections inthe Direction of Recent Research’; and Margaret L. Anderson, ‘Reply to Volker Berghahn’, CentralEuropean History 35/1 (2002), pp. 75–82 and 83–90; and James Retallack, ‘Ideas into Politics:Meanings of Stasis in Wilhelmine Germany’, in Geoff Eley and idem, eds., Wilhelminism and itsLegacies: German Modernities, Imperialism and the Meanings of Reform, 1890–1930, New York andOxford, 2003, pp. 235–52.

⁶ Exemplary works of this kind are Eley and Retallack, Wilhelminism and its Legacies; Young-Sun Hong, ‘Neither Singular nor Alternative: Narratives of Modernity and Welfare in Germany,1870–1945’, Social History 30/2 (May 2005), pp. 133–53; and Dennis Sweeney, ‘Liberalism, theWorker and the Limits of Bourgeois Öffentlichkeit in Wilhelmine Germany’, German History 22/1(2004), pp. 36–75.

⁷ Suzanne Marchand and David Lindenfeld, ‘Germany at the Fin de Siècle: An Introduction’, inidem, eds., Germany at the Fin de Siècle: Culture, Politics, and Ideas, Baton Rouge, 2004, pp. 1–34,quote p. 10. Another exciting new intellectual history of this period, which challenges the classicalopposition between irrationalism and modernism in German culture through an innovative studyof social practices of cultural consumption, is Corinna Treitel, A Science for the Soul: Occultism andthe Genesis of the German Modern, Baltimore and London, 2004.

⁸ An excellent survey of the debates and activism surrounding the cause of ‘ethics reform’, whichforegrounds the role of sexuality, is Tracie Matysik, Reforming the Moral Subject: Ethics and Sexualityin Central Europe, 1890–1930, Ithaca, 2008.

⁹ Examples of this strand are Jennifer Jenkins, Provincial Modernity: Local Culture and LiberalPolitics in Fin-de-Siècle Hamburg, Ithaca, 2003; and Jan Palmowski, Urban Liberalism in ImperialGermany: Frankfurt am Main, 1866–1914, Oxford, 1999.

Introduction 5

Germany, but imperial Germany should be thought of as Europe’s ‘laboratoryof modernity’.¹⁰

This approach not only seeks to reintegrate modern German history with thehistory of the West. It also seeks to convey a more richly textured and historicallyprecise understanding of modernism itself. Bruno Latour, commenting on thediscrepancies between unifying theories of modernity and its complex andcontradictory reality, concluded that ‘we have never been modern’.¹¹ Not allscholars have gone this far, yet most now place the plurality of modernistexperiences at the heart of their analyses. Modernity has come to be seen as ‘amatter of movement, of flux, of change, of unpredictability’.¹² Some, such asMarshall Berman, have made the case for subdividing modernity into multiplestages,¹³ while others portray ambivalence as modernity’s operative principle.¹⁴Reinforcing this theoretical trend towards pluralism is the trend towards micro-histories of the reformist milieu, which zoom in on the role of particularreformers, particular sites, or particular organizations, many of which we shallencounter in this study. This differentiation not only enriches our understandingof modernism in general: it also opens up new perspectives on varieties ofmodernism that were distinct from the more widely known orthodox modernismthat dominated research for many decades: the so-called ‘International Style’and what, after Charles Jencks, has been dubbed ‘Heroic Modernism’.¹⁵ Longdecried as ‘reactionary’ by the guardians of modernist ideological purity, a range

¹⁰ Repp, Reformers, firmly locates this period of German history within an analytical frameworkof modernity; the same author’s forthcoming study Berlin Moderns: Art, Politics, and CommercialCulture in Fin-de-Siècle Berlin, appropriates the classical Weimar label ‘laboratory of modernity’ forGermany’s Wilhelmine years.

¹¹ Bruno Latour, Nous n’avons jamais été modernes, translated as We Have Never Been Modern,Cambridge, Mass., 1993.

¹² Scott Lash and Jonathan Friedman, ‘Subjectivity and Modernity’s Other’, in idem, eds.,Modernity and Identity, Oxford, 1992, p. 1. Postmodernism, or more specifically, texts such asJean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, translated by GeoffBennington and Brian Massumi, Minneapolis, 1984, have inspired reconceptualizations of themodern. One of the most important forums for this debate is the journal Modernism/Modernity,published by Johns Hopkins University Press since 1994. See especially Lawrence Rainey and Robertvon Hallberg, ‘Editorial—Introduction’, Modernism/Modernity 1/1 (1994), pp. 1–3; and SusanStanford Friedman, ‘Definition Excursions: The Meanings of Modern, Modernity, Modernism’,Modernism/Modernity 8/3 (2001), pp. 493–513. Another excellent overview of the debate that paysparticular attention to the French and German contributions to the debate is Wolfgang Welsch,ed., Wege aus der Moderne: Schlüsseltexte der Postmoderne-Diskussion, Weinheim, 1988.

¹³ Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, New York,1982.

¹⁴ This approach is represented by Eric Rothstein, ‘Broaching a Cultural Logic of Modernity’,Modern Languages Quarterly 61/2 (2000), pp. 359–94. Bernard Yack, The Fetishism of Modernities:Epochal Self-Consciousness in Contemporary Social and Political Thought, Notre Dame, 1997, arguesthat postmodernists have fetishized modernity in such a way as to obscure the very feature to whichthey first drew our attention, namely its heterogeneity.

¹⁵ The category of ‘Heroic Modernism’ is developed by Charles Jencks, Modern Movements inArchitecture, Harmondsworth, 1985. The label refers to classical modernism in its most radical,uncompromising and triumphalist mode. Yet it is confusing, in that the term ‘heroic’ suggests that

6 Introduction

of ‘alternative’, ‘domestic’, ‘medieval’ or ‘vernacular’ modernisms have recentlybeen unearthed by historians in search of a different modern legacy, better suitedto today’s postmodern sensibilities.¹⁶

While there is an emerging consensus that pre-war German bourgeois mod-ernism was profoundly important and influential, it is still proving hard tocapture its distinguishing features in precise historical categories. Several recentstudies have tried to tease out the national specificity of this project, and locatedit in the strong sense of a political ‘mission’ with which day-to-day objects wereinvested. They suggest that, for ordinary Germans, as well as for a variety ofGerman political regimes, from Wilhelmine Prussia to the two post-war Germanstates, modernity ‘began at home’, and modernism’s first political challenge wastherefore the reform of living culture, or Wohnkultur. As Katherine Pence putit, German modernism ‘seems to embody a project of aggressively forging linksbetween private households and the national community in new ways throughthe powerful symbols of material culture. The common understanding of thehome as nucleus of the nation is recast for the age of consumerism so that properuse of material goods forms the basis of familial and national well-being.’¹⁷ In2007, the journal German History published a special issue, exploring how thepeculiarity of this German approach operated across conventional period divides.Comparing German reformers of the 1910s and the 1950s, Jennifer Jenkinssuggested that, although ‘two wars, dictatorship and genocide separate theseexamples’, they ‘display interesting and surprising points of connection. Bothfocused on the importance of transforming and modernizing the culture of thehome through the reform of domestic objects, and both insisted on the nationalparameters of this project.’¹⁸

This nexus found its first institutional manifestation in an organization calledthe Deutscher Werkbund, and it is therefore unsurprising that it has been at thecentre of much academic debate. Founded in 1907, the Werkbund’s purposewas to bring together designers and manufacturers, who would collaborate inproducing modern ‘quality work’, both for domestic consumption and to boost

modernism’s chief characteristic, the triumph of abstraction, can be likened to an achievementwhich is by definition idiosyncratic: the ‘heroism’ of an individual.

¹⁶ On medieval modernism, Michael T. Saler, The Avant-Garde in Inter-War England: MedievalModernism and the London Underground, Oxford, 1999. On vernacular or regional modernism,Kenneth Frampton, ‘Critical Regionalism: Modern Architecture and Cultural Identity’, in idem,Modern Architecture: A Critical History, rev. edn., London, 1992, pp. 314–27; and MaikenUmbach and Bernd Hüppauf, eds., Vernacular Modernism: Heimat, Globalization and the BuiltEnvironment, Stanford, 2005. On traditionalist modernism, Vittorio M. Lampugnani, ed., ModerneArchitektur in Deutschland, 1900 bis 1950: Expressionismus und Neue Sachlichkeit, Stuttgart, 1994.On alternative modernism, Leif Jerram, Germany’s Other Modernity: Munich and the Making ofMetropolis, 1895–1930, Manchester, 2007.

¹⁷ Katherine Pence, ‘Commentary: Modernity Begins at Home’, German Studies AnnualConference, San Diego, 2002, cited in Jennifer Jenkins, ‘Introduction: Domesticity, Design and theShaping of the Social’, special issue of German History 25/4 (2007), pp. 465–89, quotation p. 471.

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 467.

Introduction 7

German exports. This programme was not targeted at heavy industry: consumergoods, manufactured with traditional German solidity yet the latest technologies,were to usher in a new golden age. In promoting this aim, the Werkbundwas not alone: many organizations sprang up that sought to improve consumertaste in order to create a market for such quality work. These fundamentallybourgeois associations generated a wave of enthusiasm for the ‘pedagogic’ projectof teaching consumers to furnish their homes in a style befitting their modernidentities. Some, such as the Dürerbund, far outstripped the Werkbund in termsof the size of its membership.¹⁹ However, the Werkbund’s particular importancestemmed from the fact that many of its members were industrial corporations:by 1914, they included AEG, Siemens, Bosch, BASF, and Mercedes Benz. TheWerkbund’s policies therefore had an immediate impact on production, withouthaving to rely on individuals to make aesthetically ‘correct’ consumer choices.Moreover, the Werkbund also had powerful political backers. The German statelooked to this organization to promote Germany’s exports and status in the world.In doing so, industrialists and politicians tapped into a more idealist reformistimpulse, which had been devised by the Werkbund’s founding members, andwhich aimed at the wholesale transformation of modern subjectivities.

The Werkbund’s influence and success is one of the most distinguishingfeatures of German modernism in the early twentieth century: it gave the sum ofexperiments in architecture and design an organizational framework and sense ofintellectual coherence rarely seen in other countries. As Stanford Anderson putit: ‘within the Deutscher Werkbund, unusual intelligence was brought to bearon modern production’.²⁰ Art historians have therefore widely described it as amilestone in the evolution of a modern, functionalist aesthetic.²¹ Supporting thisassessment are numerous political histories of the Werkbund, which foregroundits role as an engine of modernization, promoted by German elites eager for theircountry to ‘catch up’ on the international stage.²²

¹⁹ John Maiciuka, ‘The Domestic Interior in Wilhelmine Germany’, German History 25/4(2007), pp. 490–516. On these ideologically related cultural reform associations, see GerhardKratzsch, Kunstwart und Dürerbund: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Gebildeten im Zeitalter desImperialismus, Göttingen, 1969.

²⁰ Stanford Anderson, Peter Behrens and a New Architecture for the Twentieth Century, Cambridge,Mass., and London, 2000, p. x.

²¹ Julius Posener, Anfänge des Funktionalismus: Von Arts and Crafts zum Deutschen Werkbund,Berlin, Frankfurt a.M. and Vienna, 1964; idem, ‘From Schinckel to Bauhaus: Five Lectures onthe Growth of Modern German Architecture’, Architectural Association Papers 5 (London, 1972);Joan Campbell, The German Werkbund: The Politics of Reform in the Applied Arts, Princeton, 1978,esp. pp. 3–81 on the pre-1914 era; idem, Joy of Work, German Work, Princeton and Oxford,1989. See also W. Fischer, ed., Zwischen Kunst und Industrie: Der Deutsche Werkbund, exhibitioncatalogue, Munich, 1975; Stefan Muthesius, Das englische Vorbild: Eine Studie zu den deutschenReformbewegungen in Architektur, Wohnbau und Kunstgewerbe im späten 19. Jahrhundert, Munich,1974; and K. Junghanns, Der Deutsche Werkbund: Sein erstes Jahrzehnt, Berlin, 1982.

²² Wolfgang Hardtwig, ‘Weltpolitik, liberaler Nationalismus und Kunst: Der DeutscheWerkbund’, in Helmut Berding, ed., Nationales Bewußtsein und kollektive Identität: Studienzur Entwicklung des kollektiven Bewußtseins in der Neuzeit, Frankfurt a.M., 1994, pp. 507–40.

8 Introduction

More recently, the focus of research has shifted, placing more emphasis on howthe Werkbund and its protagonists fit into a wider cultural history of the Germanbourgeoisie. As we shall see, this has opened up an important new perspective,although not all studies reflect the same change in sensibilities. Indeed, some newwork seems barely touched by the demolition of the Sonderweg. Mark Jarzombek,for example, portrays the Werkbund as a propaganda tool with which theGerman bourgeoisie created a ‘fiction of unity’ that substituted for ‘real’ politicalachievement. In subtitles such as ‘Authoring Praise’, ‘The Jargon of Unity’ and‘Proclaiming the Happy Modernity’, he captures the self-interested manipulationand the false consciousness that drove this type of bourgeois modernization.²³For Werner Oechslin, the Werkbund represents an example of a Nietzschean‘will to power’, evidence of a deep-seated pathology of the German bourgeoisie.²⁴Barbara Miller Lane sees the Werkbund as part of a broader German malaise,which she calls ‘national romanticism’: an unstable and aggressively irrationalmindset that helped prepare the way for the Third Reich—although she deniesthe inevitability that some studies have ascribed to this development, by pointingout that a similar disposition led to a democratic and peaceful form of nationalculture in Scandinavia.²⁵ Frederic Schwartz’s influential study also treats theWerkbund critically, albeit from a different perspective.²⁶ His emphasis is notso much on nationalism, as on the commodification of art in the hands of thebourgeoisie. Drawing on the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, Schwartzdiscusses the Werkbund and the Bauhaus within the context of capitalism’stendency to subjugate artistic freedom to the dictates of bourgeois profit. In hisaccount, eccentric figures operating at the margins of the Werkbund, such asKarl Ernst Osthaus, who defended the ‘auratic’ work of art, emerge as the trueprogressives, who challenged Muthesius’s championing of the logic of capitalistproduction.²⁷

²³ Mark Jarzombek, ‘The Kunstgewerbe, the Werkbund and the Aesthetics of Culture in theWilhelmine Period’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 53/1 (March 1994), pp. 7–19,and idem, ‘The Discourses of a Bourgeois Utopia, 1904–1908, and the Founding of the Werkbund’,in Francoise Forster-Hahn, ed., Imagining Modern German Culture: 1889–1910, Studies in theHistory of Art, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Symposium Papers 31, Washington,1996, p. 53.

²⁴ Werner Oechslin, ‘Politisches, allzu Politisches: Nietzschelinge, der Wille zur Kunst und derDeutsche Werkbund vor 1914’, in Hermann Hipp and Ernst Seidl, eds., Architektur als politischeKultur: philosophia practica, Berlin, 1996, pp. 151–90. In this essay, Oechslin argues that WalterGropius and Siegfried Giedion systematically repressed the Werkbund’s history as the embarassingly‘dark’ roots of German modernism, which was driven by the ‘chauvinistic’ and ‘irrational’ ideas ofLangbehn and Nietzsche.

²⁵ Barbara Miller Lane, National Romanticism and Modern Architecture in Germany and theScandinavian Countries, Cambridge, 2000, esp. ch. 1.

²⁶ Frederic J. Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture before the First WorldWar, New Haven and London, 1996.

²⁷ A more detailed version of this argument is developed in Frederic J. Schwartz, ‘Der Schleierder Maja: Karl Ernst Osthaus, das Deutsche Museum für Kunst in Handel und Gewerbe undder Werkbundstreit’, in Michael Fehr, Sabine Röder and Gerhard Storck, eds., Das Schöne und

Introduction 9

A generally more sympathetic approach has emerged in historical worksthat foreground chronological specificity. For Matthew Jefferies, WilhelmineGermany produced a reformist culture which deserves to be studied very muchin its own right, rather than as a half-baked version of later modernisms.²⁸Fritz Schumacher, co-founder of the Werkbund and Building Director inthe city of Hamburg from 1911 to 1933, has attracted particular attention.Building on earlier German scholarship, especially that of Hartmut Frank, newcultural historians such as Jennifer Jenkins discuss Schumacher, alongside AlfredLichtwark, Hamburg’s Art Museum’s director, as a pioneer in the developmentof what she calls ‘provincial modernity’: a version of the modernism characteristicof pre-First World War Germany, which was broadly liberal in provenance, tooklocal sensibilities into account, and which sought practical solutions to socialquestions.²⁹ In the same spirit, conferences on the topic have been dedicated torecovering the positive aspects of Schumacher’s political vision.³⁰

Even more attention has been devoted to Hermann Muthesius, who wasnot only the spiritus rector of the Werkbund, but also its most prolific publicspokesman: between 1907 and 1926, he published over 600 articles and reviewsin 60 different newspapers and journals and gave countless public speechesand lectures. A full survey of the specialist literature dealing with this oeuvreis beyond the scope of this introduction.³¹ Yet two recent works can serve toexemplify major trends in this field. Fedor Roth takes Muthesius’s recurrenttrope of ‘harmonious culture’ as his starting point.³² Like Oechslin, Roth detectsan affinity with Nietzsche, but he does not dismiss Muthesius’s project as acase of pathological hyper-nationalism. Roth examines how Muthesius invoked‘culture’ to counter the threat of social fragmentation which he perceived asa feature of the emerging political mass market in Wilhelmine Germany. InRoth’s account, Muthesius’s aims are credited with truly utopian ambitions,but also condemned for their ‘naïveté’, which consigned the Werkbund to the

der Alltag: Die Anfänge des modernen Designs 1900–1914, Cologne, 1997, pp. 409–27. For a fulldiscussion of Osthaus’s role in these debates, see Chapter 5 of this study. On the problem ofalienation and capitalism, compare also the more orthodox Marxist analysis of Junghanns, DerDeutsche Werkbund.

²⁸ Matthew Jefferies, Politics and Culture in Wilhelmine Germany: The Case of IndustrialArchitecture, Oxford and Washington, 1995.

²⁹ Jenkins, Provincial Modernity; Hermann Hipp, ‘Fritz Schumachers Hamburg: Die reformierteGroßstadt’, in Lampugnani and Schneider, Moderne Architektur, pp. 151–83; Hartmut Frank, ed.,Fritz Schumacher: Reformkultur und Moderne, Stuttgart, 1994, which includes a full overview of theextensive specialist scholarship on Schumacher by historians of architecture and urban planning.

³⁰ For example, Zur Aktualität der Ideen von Fritz Schumacher: Fritz-Schumacher-Colloquium1990, Hamburg, 1992.

³¹ On Muthesius’s writings, see Mitchell Schwarzer, German Architectural Theory and the Searchfor Modern Identity, Cambridge, 1995. On his biography, see Julius Posener’s writings, such asAnfänge des Funktionalismus and ‘From Schinckel to Bauhaus’.

³² Fedor Roth, Hermann Muthesius und die Idee der harmonischen Kultur: Kultur als Einheit deskünstlerischen Stils in allen Lebensäußerungen eines Volkes, Berlin, 2001, esp. pp. 265–78.

10 Introduction

dustbin of failed cultural experiments: the tension between individual stylisticexperimentation and modernism as a ‘collective fate’ remained unresolved.³³ Inthis view, Muthesius’s advocacy of ‘typification’ remained an isolated ineffectivegesture, unable to fill the ‘spiritual gap’ at the heart of the whole Werkbundproject.³⁴

Roth’s analysis of the sources is exemplary. Yet like Schwartz, he postulatesa fundamental incompatibility between individual artistic creativity and thecollectivist logic of modernism. Both treat ‘individualism’ as a utopian ideal,and neither recognizes its embeddedness in the political project of liberalism,or ‘Bürgerlichkeit’, which, this study will argue, is the foil against which theWerkbund is best interpreted. Before developing this critique, however, a fewmethodological remarks are required.

In moving beyond general theories of modernity and its pitfalls, manyhistorians have looked to written texts by bourgeois reformers active in theWerkbund in order to reconstruct their ideological intentions. This has led tonuanced accounts, which have overturned many old clichés about Germany’s rolein this formative phase of Western modernism. Yet it has also entailed the dangerof equating rhetoric with reality. Most of the protagonists of this movementwere practitioners first, and writers only second (or third). With no aspirationsto literary originality or theoretical sophistication, authors such as Muthesiusinvariably relied on a conventional political rhetoric of the day, in which it is easyto identify traces of irrational, Nietzschean nationalism. These were not confinedto that social milieu, nor for that matter to Germans. An unqualified relianceon such written sources, therefore, tends to overshadow the practice-orientedand profoundly rational nature of bourgeois reformism. As if to counteract thisdanger, John Maciuika provocatively and emblematically entitled his study ofthe Werkbund Before the Bauhaus, thus highlighting the modernizing dimensionof the organization’s activities.³⁵ Although the title seems reminiscent of themuch older teleological trope of the ‘pioneers of modern design’, Maciuika’sdetailed analysis does not rely on a theory of inevitable progress, but on a wealthof official records.³⁶ As he repeatedly stresses, it was the Prussian governmentthat commissioned Muthesius to reform arts and crafts education in Prussia, andwho sent him on a reconnaissance mission to England. In doing so, it not onlyrecognized the genius of an individual: it threw its weight behind the institutionof the Werkbund. By focusing on this official political patronage, Maciuika

³³ Roth, Muthesius, pp. 265 and 268. Similarly, according to Roth, the seeming ‘objectivism’[Sachlichkeit] of Muthesius’s modernist aesthetics was in reality a highly artificial construct reflectinga ‘narcissistic, collective self’. Ibid., p. 268.

³⁴ Ibid., p. 272.³⁵ John V. Maciuika, Before the Bauhaus: Architecture, Politics, and the German State, 1890–1920,

Cambridge, 2005.³⁶ Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius, rev.

edn., Harmondsworth, 1975.

Introduction 11

uncovers a causal connection between the success of German modernism andPrussian political ambitions, challenging the traditional view of pre-war Prussiaas a bulwark of cultural traditionalism and reactionary politics. What was truefor government was also true for German industrialists, who proved importantbackers of modernism. The appointment of Peter Behrens as artistic director ofthe AEG electricity works was the most dramatic, but by no means an isolatedexample of major German corporations trying to cash in on the cultural prestigeof the Werkbund.³⁷

Yet these kinds of sources also entail problems. This is apparent when itcomes to defining the modernist project itself. In Maciuika’s account, Prussianemployees figure as the pioneers of a modernism that was almost entirely rationaland forward-looking. This assessment is based on a literal reading of key termsin the sources, most importantly ‘functionalism’ and ‘objectivism’. Preciselybecause both concepts transcended Werkbund circles, and became central tothe German modernist imagination throughout the twentieth century, they aredifficult to pin down historically if detached from the material culture theywere employed to describe. Functionalism soon became an extremely value-ladenterm, summarizing everything that postmodernists later attacked in the kindof faceless, global modernism that is usually traced back to the Bauhaus.³⁸Thus, to describe Muthesius and, by extension, the Prussian government thatemployed him, as functionalists, conjures up implications that can be deeplymisleading. As this study will argue, in the bourgeois milieu of the earlytwentieth century, functionalism meant anything but technical reductionismand abstraction. Rather, it denoted the ‘appropriateness’ of objects to a specificway of life and political disposition. Emotional and moral categories, suchas comfort, sobriety, and tradition and rootedness, were central to this—andmany of these were conceived in a spirit of classical idealism so central to theGerman education system at the time. In this way, appropriateness could be theprecise antithesis of the common view of Bauhaus-style modernism as universal,technical and emptied of all emotion or sense of place and time.

³⁷ Behrens became chief designer for the AEG electricity works. In this capacity, he not onlydesigned several famous industrial buildings, such as the Turbine Hall, but also several linesof company products, as well as the accompanying advertising campaigns and the firm’s logo.While most classical studies, such as Stanford Anderson, Peter Behrens and a New Architecturefor the Twentieth Century, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 2000, see Behrens primarily as anarchitect, several monographs, articles and collections consider his design oeuvre, notably: AlanWindsor, Peter Behrens: Architect and Designer 1868–1940, London, 1981; Tilman Buddensiegand H. Rogge, eds., Industriekultur: Peter Behrens und die AEG 1907–14, Berlin, 1980; FredericJ. Schwartz, ‘Commodity Signs: Peter Behrens, the AEG, and the Trademark: His Designs forGerman Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft’, Journal of Design History 9/3 (1996), pp. 153–84;Giovanni Anceschi, ‘The First Corporate Image: Peter Behrens and the AEG’, Domus 605 (1980),pp. 32–4; and Hans Georg Pfeiffer, ed., Peter Behrens: ‘Wer aber will sagen, was Schönheit sei?’Grafik, Produktgestaltung, Architektur, Düsseldorf, 1990.

³⁸ On the misunderstanding and mythologizing of ‘functionalism’ as an icon of modernism, seeStanford Anderson, ‘The Fiction of Function’, Assemblage 2 (1986), pp. 19–31.

12 Introduction

The analysis of Muthesius’s practical work as an architect, which was a radicalantithesis to the Bauhaus style, can clarify the time-specificity of the bourgeoisethos that underlay this kind of modernism. And it shows why contemporarywriting about material culture should not be detached from a close analysis ofthe material culture itself. As we shall see, other bourgeois modernists, such asFritz Schumacher, Alfred Lichtwark, Karl-Ernst Osthaus, Peter Behrens, RichardRiemerschmid, to name but a few, had one thing in common: all saw themselvesas practitioners first, and writers only second. Reading the texts in connectionwith the objects not only helps to overcome the danger of teleological readingsof the sources. It also helps circumvent the opposite pitfall, which arises fromthe fact that, when writing, Werkbund activists frequently relied extensivelyon very dated clichés and rhetorical tropes. One of the favourites was thenotion of ‘improvement through culture’, which was plucked from GermanEnlightenment writings predating the Werkbund’s activities by over a century.³⁹It is often difficult to distinguish what was merely conventional and what wasnew and distinctive about the resulting texts. By contrast, even a layman wouldbe able to recognize almost any material object or design emanating from theWerkbund as a distinct product of its age.

For this reason, this study is based on the premise that cultural history needsto engage directly with the visual qualities and the materiality of the objectsand spatial designs that constituted the practice of bourgeois modernism. Thisbrings two methodological paradigms into play. The first, which is indebtedto art history, and has sometimes been called the ‘pictorial turn’, has madefew inroads into historical studies to date.⁴⁰ Although the ‘linguistic turn’ hadput forward a sustained critique of the idea that written sources always haveobjective and unambiguously accessible meanings, historians often continue todefend their prioritizing of texts by pointing to the ambiguity of images. Thisprivileging of the written over the visual is a constitutive part of the hermeneutictradition, and has become second nature to the discipline to such an extent thatsome critics have detected an ‘imperialism of language’.⁴¹ It is certainly true

³⁹ For a fuller analysis of the Enlightenment sources of this project, see Chapter 6 of this study.⁴⁰ The phrase ‘pictorial turn’ was coined by W. J. T. Mitchell in his Picture Theory, Chicago

and London, 1994. Modelled on Richard Rorty’s ‘linguistic turn’, it describes a new appreciationof visual sources as evidence in historical and cultural studies, outside the disciplinary boundaries oftraditional art history.

⁴¹ Maiken Umbach, ‘Classicism, Enlightenment and the Other: Thoughts on DecodingEighteenth-Century Visual Texts’, Art History 25/3 (2002), pp. 319–40. The phrase ‘imper-ialism of language’ is cited from Ernest B. Gilman, ‘Interart Studies and the Imperialism ofLanguage’, Poetics Today 10 (1989), pp. 5–30. The same problem is famously discussed in MichelFoucault, The Order of Things, translated by A. Sheridan, New York, 1973, as well as W. J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology, Chicago, 1986. Peter Wagner, Reading Iconotexts: FromSwift to the French Revolution, London, 1995, observed that the relationship between text and imagehas been ‘a history of iconoclastic oppression, in which pictura is denounced as fictura’ (p. 169).He is himself less pessimistic about the ‘translatability’ of the visual into the verbal, if the two aredefined as idioms in Derrida’s sense (traversing both the pictorial and the lexical field), rather than

Introduction 13

that any direct engagement with the visual introduces the need for an additionallayer of translation: not only from historical diction into modern analyticallanguage, but from a non-verbal to a verbal medium. Some of the interpretationsof visual material put forward in this study therefore evade hard categories of‘proof’. Yet even the briefest sketch of the rhetoric associated with the Werkbundshows that the written sources relevant to this enquiry are deeply problematicwhen detached from the objects they described. None of the interpretations of,say, Muthesius’s own writings that we have already cited capture entirely whatwas most characteristic about this form of bourgeois modernism. The fact thateven the most discriminating and carefully researched of these recent studies ofMuthesius conclude with such wildly contradictory assessments is testament tothis problem. In fact, writings by bourgeois modernists from this era represent arather dilettantish hotchpotch of various fashionable ideas of the time, and thereis no coherent doctrine, no hidden philosophy, behind them that we can uncoverto explain away these contradictions.⁴² Like advertisements, such texts drew on adiverse set of popular sentiments and tropes to promote the products and designsof the Werkbund to as wide an audience as possible. To be sure, they tell ussomething about the intentions of their authors. But their historical and politicalspecificity can be thrown into much sharper relief if they are analysed alongsidethe actual objects and spaces which they were meant to promote and legitimate.This study therefore borrows from the methods of art history and cultural studieswhen it comes to interpreting some of the messages and psychological subtextsencoded in the symbolic language of forms.

A second, and equally important methodological inspiration comes fromwithin the historical discipline. Political historians have recently become moreattentive to the role of material culture as a historical ‘actant’.⁴³ Many practitionersof this approach have taken the notion of so-called ‘liberal governmentality’ astheir point of departure. Focusing mainly on nineteenth-century English andAmerican cities, they suggest that such urban spaces were not only the objectsof reform, to be improved in the name of a pre-defined canon of liberal aimsand objectives, but themselves a method, or ‘technology’, of government.⁴⁴ Vast

in terms of traditional genres (ibid., pp. 170–1). Compare Jacques Derrida, Psyché: Inventions del’autre, Paris, 1987, p. 106.

⁴² For a modern, edited selection of Muthesius’s writings, see Hans-Joachim Hubrich, HermannMuthesius: Die Schriften zu Architektur, Kunstgewerbe, Industrie in der ‘‘Neuen Bewegung’’, Berlin,1980. Muthesius’s own collection of his newspaper cuttings is preserved in the Werkbund ArchivBerlin, which subsequent chapters will frequently draw upon. On Muthesius’s life, compare JuliusPosener’s many writings, such as ‘Hermann Muthesius’, entry in Architect’s Yearbook 10 (1962),pp. 45–61; and idem, Anfänge des Funktionalismus.

⁴³ The phrase is borrowed from Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists andEngineers through Society, Milton Keynes, 1987, who introduced the neologism ‘actant’ as a neutralway to refer to actors irrespective of intentions, in both the human and material worlds.

⁴⁴ Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City, London and New York,2003; Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom, Cambridge, 1999.

14 Introduction

expense and organizational efforts created the infrastructure that allowed for theseemingly uninhibited flow of people and things. In this way, the appearance of‘a free society can be created, running according to its own laws and patterns,and the leviathan socio-technical intervention maintaining it remains hidden’.⁴⁵Otter suggests that the ‘liberal city’, thus understood, consisted of differentspatial configurations that corresponded to a hierarchy of different sensoryperceptions.⁴⁶ The senses of proximity, such as smell, were replaced by a newdiscipline with which ‘the respectable mastered their passions in public spacesconducive to the exercise of clear, controlled perception: wide streets, squares andparks. In their homes, separate bathrooms and bedrooms precluded promiscuityand indecency.’⁴⁷

As yet, there are few comparable studies on German cities, yet some excitingnew work is now appearing that adopts a similar perspective, for example, onthe history of the urban slaughterhouse.⁴⁸ This transformation of people insubcutaneous ways is akin to what Elias described as the process of civilization:the creation of an ‘order sui generis, which is more compelling and stronger thanthe will and reason of individual people composing it’.⁴⁹ Yet where Elias sawsubjugation, the Foucauldian notion of governmentality draws our attention toa more subtle process, by which subjects are imperceptibly conditioned to makeseemingly ‘voluntary’ decisions, which always conform to notions of rationalityand restraint that are essential to the smooth functioning of liberal politicalsystems. This perspective allows us to appreciate the specific modernity of suchindirect means of governance. It is thus well suited to capturing the liberal andforward-looking side of German bourgeois modernism, without denying thestrong element of social control and the centrality of the state underlying thewhole project.

Yet this study sees itself not only as an application of the model of liberalgovernmentality to the German case, but also as a critique of it. Most existing workin this vein has focused on schemes designed to free the city of that which was notbourgeois: disorder, the slum, sensory degradation, and so forth. Undoubtedly,controlling the Other was one important aspect of bourgeois modernism. Andit is clear that its champions associated the need for sensory discipline withpolitical discipline. ‘The bourgeois capitalist’, Hermann Muthesius wrote in1899, ‘will see his capital well invested, when it serves to give his workers a

⁴⁵ Chris Otter, ‘Making Liberalism Durable: Vision and Civility in the Late Victorian City’,Social History 27/1 (January 2002), pp. 1–15, quotation p. 5.

⁴⁶ Ibid. ⁴⁷ Otter, ‘Making Liberalism Durable’, p. 3.⁴⁸ Dorothee Brantz, ‘Animal Bodies, Human Health, and the Reform of Slaughterhouses in

Nineteenth-Century Berlin’, Food and History 3 (November 2006), pp. 193–215.⁴⁹ Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process, 2 vols., translated by Edmund Jephcott, edited by Eric

Dunning et al., Maldon, Oxford and Carlton, 2000, ii: State Formation and Civilization, esp. p. 230.An interesting recent application of Elias’s model to the historical analysis of German society isMary Fulbrook, ed., Un-Civilizing Processes? Excess and Transgression in German Society and Culture:Perspectives Debating with Norbert Elias, Amsterdam, 2007.

Introduction 15

well-ordered and happy life, thus containing two threats which would otherwisespread: drunkenness and Social Democracy.’⁵⁰ Yet, however important thiscontrolling, anti-revolutionary instinct may have been, there is also a danger that,in focusing on liberalism’s Other alone, we conceive of the bourgeois mindset asan automatic product of modernization, or capitalism. This study will argue thatGerman bourgeois modernism was not the inevitable precursor of neo-liberalglobal capitalism, but a highly specific and hotly contested historical construct,which changed significantly even in the few decades under consideration here.The creation of bourgeois modernism in the cities of Germany not only requireda sophisticated socio-technical infrastructure. The bourgeois life, which was‘performed’ in these spaces, was itself a complex, and contested, ritual. Itsmeaning was not set in stone, but defined only in and through its constantperformance—and it was continually changed, modified, and renegotiated.⁵¹This process, rather than a single idea or ideology, shaped the physical fabric ofthe modernist city: not only as the infrastructure for modernity, but also as atheatrical stage of bourgeois identity performances.

To conceive of modernism in this way is to redefine its relationship withmodernization. Many scholars have simply treated them as analogous. Spatialabstraction and a rupture with the past have long been presented as inevitableand inescapable consequences of modernization, and hence also modernism. InTherborn’s words, modernity was an epoch fundamentally different from ‘andpossibly better than the present and the past. The contrast between the past andthe future directs modernity’s semantics of time, or constitutes its binary code.’⁵²This resulted in a functional understanding of time and a corresponding modernsubjectivity. In his classical account, E. P. Thompson argued that, with the riseof modern capitalism, life came to be organized around the clock and calendar.⁵³Reinhart Koselleck proposed a similar, yet less economically-determinist thesisby suggesting that during the decades following the seminal ‘modernizing’ eventof the French Revolution, the experience of time ‘accelerated’.⁵⁴ Thus, time andspeed became the constitutive features of modernity, and modernism has been

⁵⁰ Hermann Muthesius, ‘Das Fabrikdorf Port Sunlight bei Liverpool’, Centralblatt der Bauver-waltung 25/19 (1 April 1899, Berlin), pp. 146–8.

⁵¹ Simon Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class, Manchester, 2000.⁵² Göran Therborn, European Modernity and Beyond: The Trajectory of European Societies,

1945–2000, London, Thousand Oaks and New Dehli, 1995, p. 4.⁵³ E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present 38

(1967), pp. 56–97. This classical account has been intensively scrutinized and criticized since, forexample by David S. Landes, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of the Modern World, rev.edn., Harvard, 2000. Compare also Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, ‘The Spaces of Clock Time’, inPatrick Joyce, ed., The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences, London,2002, pp. 151–74.

⁵⁴ Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft: Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, Frankfurt a.M.,1979. This hypothesis has been criticized by Wolfgang Ernst Becker, Zeit der Revolution!—Revolutionder Zeit? Zeiterfahrungen in Deutschland in der Ära der Revolutionen 1789–1848/49, Göttingen,1999.

16 Introduction

read as the mirror image of this reality. Stephen Kern suggested that the ‘spirit’ ofmodernism could best be captured in terms of ‘the miles of telephone wires thatcriss-crossed the Western world [ . . . that stand for] the vast extended present ofsimultaneity’.⁵⁵ Futurism’s obsession with speed, movement and technology isoften cited as the most blatant example of this direct correspondence betweenreality and perception.⁵⁶

The same correlation has been claimed for the problem of place. In clas-sical accounts, the nature of modernity is characterized as cosmopolitan, thestyle of modernity as international, and the archetypal site of modernity asthe city—‘where we can interact with strangers without becoming friends’, asRichard Sennett wrote, paraphrasing Simmel.⁵⁷ The city here figures not as aconcrete ‘place’, but as a disembodied, ideal-typical sphere of rational discourse,whose participants remain anonymous and develop no emotional attachmentsto the physical and social environment. In this view, modernity provides nohome—domesticity is the antithesis of this concept of the modern.⁵⁸ Haber-mas famously described this configuration as the ‘structural transformation ofthe public sphere’.⁵⁹ In the public sphere of modernity, reasoning individualsengaged in a universal process of emancipation from the authorities of absolut-ism, feudalism and obscurantism and, last but not least, the restrictions of place.In political terms, too, modernization was associated with shifting geographicalscales that imply progressive abstraction. Modernization theorists pointed tonineteenth-century European nation-building as the first stage of a universal-izing process that led from pre-modern to the modern political affiliations.⁶⁰Identification with the nation-state, which overrode older loyalties to the sphereof one’s immediate social experience in the locality or region, turned, to useEugen Weber’s famous phrase, ‘peasants into Frenchmen’.⁶¹ At the same time,it meant that the collective which defined one’s identity was no longer one thatcould be experienced in any concrete sense—it was not the lived environmentof the locality, but the imagined community of the nation, which existed only

⁵⁵ Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918, Harvard, 1983.⁵⁶ A rich documentation of evidence for the role of speed and movement in modernist aesthetics

and thought is provided in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay and Edward Dimendberg, eds., The WeimarRepublic Sourcebook, Berkeley, 1994.

⁵⁷ Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man, New York, 1977.⁵⁸ Christopher Reed, ed., Not At Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and

Architecture, London, 1996.⁵⁹ Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, translated by Thomas

Burger, Cambridge, 1992.⁶⁰ On modernization theory, see W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-

Communist Manifesto, Cambridge, 1960; Philip Abrams, Historical Sociology, Ithaca, 1983; MustafaO. Attir, Burkart Holzner and Zdenek Suda, eds., Directions of Change: Modernization Theory,Boulder, Colo., 1981. An excellent survey of the connection between modernization and nation-building is Geoff Eley and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Becoming National: A Reader, New York,1996.

⁶¹ Eugen Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914,London, 1979.

Introduction 17

in abstraction. A century later, this transformation evolved to a stage when eventhe nation-state was dismissed as too delimited, and replaced by pan-nationalinstitutions and global networks as the organizing paradigms of the modern.

By contrast, this study defines the sense of place and time as central tomodernism, which is here regarded not as a mirror image of the modern world,but rather as a project of performative recovery of place and time as dimensionsof the social psyche under the changing conditions of modernization. Chapter 2begins this analysis by focusing on changing configurations of the past in thebourgeois modernist milieu. Entitled ‘The Sense of Time: Configuring Historyand Memory in the City’, it examines the embeddedness of modernist responsesto the changing sense of time in mainstream bourgeois culture of the earliernineteenth century. Historicism, a method of historical investigation pioneeredby Leopold von Ranke, was a brainchild of nineteenth-century positivism, andtreated the past as objectively and entirely knowable.⁶² Because it echoed thisapproach, historicism in architecture, often known as Beaux Arts, has been seenas ‘imperialist’ in its dealings with the past, exploiting history as a reservoir ofstyles to be employed and combined as suited the needs of the present. This isusually contrasted with a modernist perception of time, which emerged in theearly twentieth century and was centred on the notion of memory. Understoodas a long duration, to borrow a term from Henri Bergson, it resisted the tendencyto subdivide the past into distinct epochs. Avant-garde literature offered narrativemodes, such as the ‘stream of consciousness’, which mobilized intuition ratherthan science as a key to representing the past.⁶³ As that which, according tothinkers such as Aby Warburg, is sub- or semi-conscious, memory also resistedthe notion that the past could be known completely, and its fragmentary andplural nature undermined the universalizing lexicography of historicism.

Several scholars have suggested that the transition from historicism to thememory tropes of vernacular revival architecture was integral to the developmentof architectural modernism, because it emphasized the distance of the past, andthis prepared the way towards a jettisoning of history and the forward thrust ofmodernist thinking.⁶⁴ This chapter argues that, instead, bourgeois modernismwas marked by a series of incorporations of the past both as history and asmemory. Hence, the transition from historicism was less abrupt than modernistpropaganda implied. In this context, the emergence of a new idiom, here calledmeta-historicism, is particularly important. Where historicist buildings from

⁶² Georg Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thoughtfrom Herder to the Present, rev. edn., Middletown, Conn., 1983.

⁶³ Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, Paris, 1889.⁶⁴ Compare S. Anderson, ‘Memory without Monuments: Vernacular Architecture’, Traditional

Dwellings and Settlements Review 11/1 (1999), pp. 12–22 and idem, ‘Memory in Architec-ture/Erinnerung in der Architektur’, Daidalos 58 (1995), pp. 22–37; and, for the high modernistperiod, Francesco Passanti, ‘The Vernacular, Modernism, and Le Corbusier’, Journal of the Societyof Architectural Historians (JSAH) 4/56 (1997), pp. 438–51.

18 Introduction

the 1860s simply appropriated historical precedents from different periods, thischapter argues that a new, meta-historicism of the years around 1900 juxtaposedsuch historical allusion with a new layer of memory tropes. This prepared the wayfor the early bourgeois modernists, who did not so much reject historical formsas transform them into cultural ‘archetypes’, supra-historical motifs of an archaicnature which resisted academic periodization. True, allusions to diffuse, longuedurée memories replaced the more ostentatious forms of stately historicism.Yet history continued to provide a sense of structure, against which the moreamorphous narratives of memory could be posited as a kind of counterfoil.I argue that history, rational and accountable, was the domain for expressingspecific political content, Bildung, and bourgeois individualism. It entered into asymbolic dialogue with the representation of memory, which was at once moresubjective, less reflected, and more collective than the former. This juxtapositionof memory and history allowed the reformers to create a visual vocabulary thatcould be experienced rather than just deciphered, and at the same time, tightly tocontrol the meaning that emerged from the experience of the built environment.

Chapter 3, entitled ‘The Sense of Place: Representing the Local in theModern City’, approaches bourgeois modernism through another of its definingtensions, that between a sense of place and the abstraction of space, between thevernacular and the universal. Since 1990, scholars such as Applegate and Confinohave shown that German notions of Heimat and localism contributed to theconsolidation of the modern nation-state.⁶⁵ Building on such work enables usto jettison older notions of the continued importance of place in debates aboutGerman identity as backward-looking, nostalgic or symptomatic of a ‘reactionarymodernism’, which led to the völkisch ‘blood and soil’ ideology of the Nazis.⁶⁶

⁶⁵ Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat, Berkeley, 1990; AlonConfino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany and National Memory1871–1918, Chapel Hill and London, 1997; Jenkins, Provincial Modernity; Georg Kunz, VerorteteGeschichte: Regionales Geschichtsbewusstsein in den deutschen Historischen Vereinen des neunzehntenJahrhunderts, Göttingen, 2000; Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions ofGlobalization, Minneapolis and London, 1996, especially section on ‘The Production of Locality’,pp. 178–99.

⁶⁶ Typical examples amongst primarily historical studies of the Heimat idea are Edeltraut Kluet-ing, ed., Antimodernismus und Reform: Zur Geschichte der deutschen Heimatbewegung, Darmstadt,1991; and W. Hartung, Konservative Zivilisationskritik und regionale Identität am Beispiel derniedersächsischen Heimatbewegung 1895 bis 1919, Hanover, 1991. Heimat is portrayed as proto-and/or pro-fascist in D. Kramer, ‘Die politische und ökonomische Funktionalisierung von Heimatim deutschen Imperialismus und Faschismus’, Diskurs 6–7 (1973), pp. 3–22; David von Reeken,Heimatbewegung, Kulturpolitik und Nationalsozialismus: Die Geschichte der ‘Ostfriesischen Landschaft’1918–1949, Aurich, 1995; and J. A. Williams, ‘The Chords of the German Soul are Tuned toNature: The Movement to Preserve the Natural Heimat from Kaiserreich to the Third Reich’,Central European History 29/3 (1996), pp. 339–84. An excellent new study challenging thesecategorizations is William R. Rollins, A Greener Vision of Home: Cultural Politics and EnvironmentalReform in the German Heimatschutz Movement, 1904–1918, Ann Arbor, 1997. See also DavidMidgley, ‘Los von Berlin! Anti-Urbanism as Counter-Culture in Early Twentieth-Century Ger-many’, in Steve Giles and Maike Oergel, eds., Counter-Cultures in Germany and Central Europe:From Sturm und Drang to Baader-Meinhof, Oxford, 2003, pp. 121–36.

Introduction 19

But Heimat was not only integral to modern nationalism: it was also a constituentpart of bourgeois modernism. Moreover, Heimat should be seen as one variantof an international vernacular revival around 1900, through which modernistmovements throughout the West reconfigured the sense of place.

In this chapter, this process is dissected into three phases, each associated witha paradigmatic location. The first is the city of Hamburg, boasting a long historyas an autonomous city-state. After 1871, much building activity in the city wasdevoted to celebrating past ‘Hanseatic’ glory, thus countering pressures for closerintegration into the nation-state. In the early decades of the twentieth century,and especially under the direction of Werkbund co-founder Fritz Schumacher,this historical revivalism was transformed into something profoundly modern.The civic ideals of the patrician city republic were redefined so as to appeal to awider public, notably the vast (and mostly working-class) immigrant populationin the industrializing city. The idiom of Heimat presented an opportunity toredefine civic particularism as a localism that spoke to modern subjectivitywithout presupposing privileged political status. Thus, in Hamburg, traditionalcivic loyalties were absorbed into a modernist agenda.

The sense of place became a vital ingredient for modernism more generally;where it did not connect with strong local traditions, a localist imaginationwas substituted for them. This was the case in the second case study analysedin this chapter: Berlin. Here, Hermann Muthesius played a leading role inconstructing a model architecture for Berlin’s new suburbs, in which rural andurban motifs were creatively intermingled to create a regionalist iconography.In the absence of a distinctive urban history to which to appeal, the vernacularidioms invented in this setting were more generic, and openly acknowledgedtheir English inspiration. But Muthesius was also an outspoken critic of the BundHeimatschutz, which he regarded as reactionary. His own architectural workattempted to translate the rural vernacular into a specifically urban, bourgeoiscontext, which used Heimat only as an allusion or quotation, fusing it witha discourse of technical functionalism and urban sociability. In this way, adistinct Berlin vernacular emerged: less instantly recognizable than the Hanseaticvernacular, but an integral part of a political project that was no less place-specificthan that of Schumacher.

The third case considered in this chapter is Hagen. If bourgeois modernism wasabout the need to create a regionalist base for the politics of modernism, then theRuhrgebiet presented a paradigmatic challenge. In this region, industrializationhad principally evolved outside traditional urban structures. Cities such as Hagenwere new, industrial creations. Moreover, the heavy industry which dominatedthe region’s economy was harder to connect with vernacular traditions than high-quality, low-volume manufacturing. Karl Ernst Osthaus, who set out to inventa modern Ruhr-vernacular and unite the dispersed industrial settlements into acoherent whole, thus faced an enormous challenge. As patron and collector of thearts, sponsor of commercial art and model housing developments, educational

20 Introduction

reformer, and, last but not least, initiator of the Ruhr settlement plan, he hopedto transform the Ruhr-area into a distinctive region, with Hagen as its culturalfocus. The shifting terminology that Osthaus himself employed to describe therole of place in this project—ranging from ‘bergisch region’, via ‘WestphalianHeimat’, to the ‘märkisch style’—indicates the extreme degree to which any senseof place in this setting was invented. This may have been one of the reasons whyOsthaus’s projects achieved much less public resonance than analogous attemptsin older German cities. Nevertheless, the long-term impact was significant, withkey elements of Osthaus’s plan being realized after the First World War.

Chapter 4 is entitled ‘Nature and Culture: Greening the City’. In thebourgeois modernists’ programme, nature was widely invoked as an antidote tothe supposed artificiality of a pseudo-aristocratic, conventional and historicistmentality that one sought to overcome in the name of modernism. At the sametime, Idealist notions of culture were crucial tools for creating order and structurein the new, liberal world. Just as history served the bourgeois modernists asa necessary counterpart for memory, culture became a counterpart for nature.It was characteristic of this outlook that culture and nature were not mergedinto a single, holistic world view—as adherents of the Heimatschutz movementoften demanded—but that the tension between the two poles was deliberatelysustained. The cityscape that emerged from this imperative was marked byarchitecture and spaces of a strange hybridity. Three exemplars are analysedin this chapter. The first section is dedicated to the garden-city movement inGermany. Imported from England, the garden city seemed to offer the idealsynthesis of the rural and the urban form for the project of vernacular modernism.Yet, as the fate of the first German garden city at Hellerau reveals, the experimentwas short-lived, at least from the point of view of bourgeois modernists. The visionof small-scale self-sufficiency proved incompatible with the realities of urban lifein one of the world’s most rapidly industrializing nations. Riemerschmid’s modelfactory at Hellerau failed to bridge the gap between traditional handicrafts andthe memory of the ‘home town’ on the one hand, and mass urbanization andindustrialization on the other. Hence, reformers such as Muthesius quicklydistanced themselves from this experiment, which increasingly turned into anesoteric artists’ colony.⁶⁷

The chapter then turns to the next step in the evolution of the nature–culturedichotomy: strategies developed to bring nature into the fabric of existing,industrial cities. This ‘greening’ of the city took place on multiple levels. First,there were small, private gardens, which, in the work of Muthesius, the Gersonbrothers and others, came to define suburbia as a zone where nature was embraced,yet strictly regimented and ‘civilized’. Second, there were schemes to introduce

⁶⁷ Marco De Michelis and Vicki Bilenker, ‘Modernity and Reform, Heinrich Tessenow andthe Institut Dalcroze at Hellerau’, Perspecta 26 (1990): Theater, Theatricality, and Architecture,pp. 143–70.

Introduction 21

nature into large public spaces in the core of the city. Here, Schumacher’s workin Hamburg led the way. In vast urban parks, canals, basins and waterworks,the alleged healing potential of nature—physical and psychic—was mobilized.In the new parks and on the banks of the Alster, citizens of all classes wereencouraged to mingle and experience a new sense of freedom within the city.At the same time, these spaces, too, were subject to tight visual regimentation.Rectangular shapes, symmetry, central perspective, bombastic granite walls thatframed a little neighbourhood stream, and other such devices inscribed idealizedpatterns of physical and social ‘order’ onto the green zones.

A similar dialogue between nature and culture, relegated to the purely symboliclevel, drove the installation of animal sculptures in many of the city’s publicsquares and places. Thus, nature itself was reconfigured. If the nature imaginedby garden-city constructors still bore some resemblance to the actual landscape, inthe modernist city, the representation of nature became a topos that was located,above all, in the imagination. Like memory, it alluded to a quality of humansubjectivity beyond the rational. The highly contrived quality of Muthesius’sgardens, Schumacher’s parks and rivers, and finally, Ruwoldt’s statues, spoke tothe ‘natural’ in the human mind rather than to nature as seen in the landscape.Nature became a spiritual locus, which ‘liberated’ untapped human instinctsand energies, but, in representing them, also controlled them. This ‘spirit ofnature’ was, as the third section of this chapter argues, also combined with thatwhich was furthest removed from the idea of an authentic landscape: industryand technology. Exemplary industrial architectures, such as the Spinning FactoryMichels and the Wireless Transmission Station at Nauen, are analysed to showhow nature was invoked as a spiritual principle even in this most rational andabstract of architectural genres.

Chapter 5 analyses the designed object, and in doing so, returns to the originalagenda of the Werkbund. It asks whether the strategies developed in the fieldsof architecture and urban development, as analysed so far, helped develop alanguage of forms for mass-produced objects that was recognizably modernwhile integrating place, memory and nature. Product designs championed bythe Werkbund were driven by the perceived challenge of globalization, whichnecessitated a new awareness of cultural specificity.⁶⁸ Most of the reformerswholeheartedly supported the project of economic imperialism, a concerted

⁶⁸ According to Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeff G. Williamson, ‘When Did Globalization Begin?’,NBER Working Papers No. W7632, April 2000, the nineteenth century witnessed ‘a very bigglobalization bang’. Globalization is here defined as trade expansion driven by the integration ofmarkets between trading economies. The take-off began around 1830 in the agricultural sector;the market for manufactured goods followed suit some decades later. On globalization in thelater nineteenth century, see James Foreman-Peck, ed., Historical Foundations of Globalization,Cheltenham, 1998; Carl Strickwerda, ‘The World at the Crossroads: The World Economy andInternational Relations in two Eras of Globalization, 1890–1914 and 1989 to the Present’, workingpaper, University of Kansas; Hans Pohl, Aufbruch der Weltwirtschaft: Geschichte der Weltwirtschaftvon der Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg, Stuttgart, 1989; and Maiken Umbach,

22 Introduction

campaign for the ‘Germanization’ of the world by exporting distinctly nationalproducts. Yet most did not feel that the ‘nation’ could bring about the recoveryof the cultural specificity that was seen as a prerequisite for such products. Eventhough Muthesius demanded the creation of national ‘types’, national styles andnationalist symbols played a subordinate role in the development of this newlanguage of forms. The space of the nation, after all, was itself an abstraction. Bycontrast, the vernacular provided a language that was specific to place: a place ofactual experience, such as the locality or region. Indeed, in the strictest sense, thevernacular was the domestic—vernacular, after all, derived from the Latin verna,and originally denoted things coming from or pertaining to the home.⁶⁹ For thereformers, the private house was the epitome of vernacular culture. Hence, theirdecision to approach the improvement of object design through a large-scalereform of domestic architecture in the city was fully within the logic of theirthinking.

While the vernacular was widely accepted as the basis from which to reformmaterial culture, within these parameters, two distinct approaches took shape,which were based, in part, on different readings of modernity itself. For Muthesiusand his allies, the problem was the alienation of the worker from the product,which was characteristic of highly mechanized industrial production. Usinghandicrafts tradition as a basis for object design would overcome this problem,because the vernacular object would naturally express the worker’s identity, hissense of place, memory and nature. The chapter then traces the rival positionthat was developed by Karl Ernst Osthaus. This opposition may seem surprising.It is widely believed that the famous 1914 controversy that split the Werkbundevolved around the conflict between the ‘freedom of art’ and the dictates ofeconomic rationality, and that Muthesius’s leading opponent was Henri van deVelde, not Osthaus. This chapter argues that this polemical clash distracts froma more fundamental division, pertaining not to the freedom of the artist, butto the role of commercial culture in modernity. For Muthesius, the problemof alienation was to be approached from the point of view of production; hehad much less to say on the issue of consumption. Indeed, Muthesius washighly suspicious of consumer culture, fashion and advertising, which he saw asa continuation of the alienated ornamental culture of past epochs. For Osthaus,by contrast, the commercialization of culture held the potential to democratizemodernity, by dissolving the aura of ‘high art’, which (like Muthesius) he sawas the spiritual ally of the ancien régime. Osthaus sought to develop a designaesthetic that took its inspiration from advertising and shop window displays.This dichotomy has an analogy in the discourse of present-day ‘vernacular

‘Made in Germany’, in Hagen Schulze and Etienne Francois, eds., Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, 3 vols.,Munich, 2000–1, vol. ii, pp. 405–38.

⁶⁹ For an etymological discussion of the ‘vernacular’ see Umbach and Hüppauf, ‘Introduction’in idem, Vernacular Modernism, Stanford, 2005, pp. 1–24, esp. p. 9.

Introduction 23

modernism’. On the one hand, the paradigm of ‘critical regionalism’ defines thevernacular as a particularism of place and memory that can act as a corrective tothe globalizing abstractions of the modern.⁷⁰ On the other hand, scholars such asBrinkerhoff Jackson employ the term vernacular to denote—even celebrate—theculture of the everyday, as opposed to high culture, and see in popular culturethat which is truly universal, and precisely not particularist.⁷¹

Chapter 6, ‘Governmentality and the Spaces of Bürgerlichkeit’, draws togetherthe different strands of the analysis to locate the reformers’ project more pre-cisely in the political landscape of Wilhelmine Germany. Hermann Muthesiusdescribed his ambition as the creation of a bourgeois society. Yet the Germanconcept he employed was ‘bürgerlich’. This distinction is central to the inter-pretation proposed in this chapter. For the German term bürgerlich referrednot, as many historians have assumed, to bourgeois as a class identity, muchless to an inevitable product of the rise of capitalism. Rather, it denoted acollective political aspiration of the type identified by Pocock and Foucault.⁷²It originated in the eighteenth century, and is perhaps best translated as liberalcitizenship, although it far exceeded the limits of liberalism as an organizedpolitical movement.⁷³ Bürgerlichkeit designated an attitude, a lifestyle and ahabitus that were self-consciously modern, yet firmly grounded in notions ofself-control, discipline and rootedness. It was ‘liberal’ in so far as it was predicatedon a notion of ‘character’ that was a prerequisite for the transformation of directrule to mediated or liberal government.

⁷⁰ The term ‘critical regionalism’ was originally coined by architectural theorists AlexanderTzonis and Liane Lefaivre, yet it is more prominently associated with Kenneth Frampton’s writings,such as ‘Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance’, in H. Foster,ed., Postmodern Culture, London and Sydney, 1985, pp. 16–30, and ‘Critical Regionalism: ModernArchitecture and Cultural Identity’, in idem, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, rev. edn.,London, 1992, pp. 314–27. Frampton’s paradigm has since inspired several, at times critical,investigations into contemporary architectural regionalisms, such as a dedicated special issue on‘Critical Regionalism’ in Arcade: The Journal for Architecture and Design in the Northwest 16/4(1998).

⁷¹ John Brinkerhoff Jackson, A Sense of Place, a Sense of Time, New Haven, 1994, esp. pp. 154–63,and idem, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, New Haven, 1984.

⁷² Michel Foucault, ‘Governmentality’, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller,eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, Chicago, 1991, pp. 87–104, and J. G.A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce and History, Cambridge, 1985. An interesting comparison of bothapproaches is Graham Burchell, ‘Peculiar Interests: Civil Society and Governing the System ofNatural Liberty’, in Burchell et al., The Foucault Effect, pp. 119–50.

⁷³ Gotthold Ephraim Lessing termed a new literary genre ‘bürgerliches Trauerspiel’, whichdesignated a moralizing, sentimental play in a domestic setting. Although the word contained asocial dimension, aristocrats were encouraged to behave in bürgerlich ways; the paradox is exploredin Michael Stürmer, ‘Bürgerliche Fürsten’, in Wolfgang Hardtwig and Harm-Hinrich Brandt, eds.,Deutschlands Weg in die Moderne: Politik, Gesellschaft und Kultur im 19. Jahrhundert, Munich, 1993,pp. 215–22. On the same problem in a French revolutionary context, see T. C. W. Blanning,The French Revolution: Class War or Culture Clash, Basingstoke and New York, 1998. By contrast,Jürgen Habermas, The Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of BourgeoisSociety, translated by Thomas Burger, Cambridge, Mass., 1989, conflates civic, civil, domestic andbourgeois in the concept of bürgerliche Gesellschaft.

24 Introduction

This chapter exemplifies the connection between this political project and thecultural manifestations of bourgeois modernism by focusing on interior spaces.The home was the site where new behavioural patterns were first developed, whichthen governed public conduct. A close reading of Muthesius’s prototypical musicchamber demonstrates the centrality of sensory discipline to the formation ofbürgerlich subjectivity. Yet the chapter also finds important divergences betweenthe literature on liberal governmentality and the realities of reform in WilhelmineGermany. Rose suggested that liberal subjects were governed ‘by throwing a webof visibility over personal conduct’.⁷⁴ The opening up of spaces, inside the houseand in the city at large, was undoubtedly an important ambition of bürgerlichreformers in this period. Yet Wilhelmine liberals did not believe that freedomalone could be relied upon to consolidate a liberal order. The new visual opennesswas constantly kept in check by the invention of new ordering mechanisms,both of a physical and of an ideal-typical kind. The actual performance ofmusic in these intimate spaces, and the socio-psychological impact ascribed tothem by contemporaries, serves as an example of the Janus-faced nature ofBürgerlichkeit, conjuring up the very ghosts which it then sought to tame. Adeeper and potentially destabilizing experience of the self was central to theconstitution of bürgerlich subjectivities. Only in a second step did orderingprinciples and disciplining devices then act upon this newly destabilized andhighly individualized self to achieve a new sense of collective order.

In the inter-war years, these ordering mechanisms became more pro-nounced—to the extent that many of the pre-war reformers eventually returnedto history and symmetry in ways that were barely distinguishable from nineteenth-century historicism. It would be misleading, however, to interpret thesedevelopments during the Weimar years merely as a conservative turn in thebürgerlich milieu. This becomes clear in the Epilogue to this study, whichcompares the project of bürgerlich modernism with the Nazi regime’s culturalpolitics. The Werkbund was assimilated into the National Socialist state withrelative ease. Some scholars have therefore suspected strong ideological con-tinuities between both projects.⁷⁵ In particular, the aim to overcome alienationthrough ‘joy of work’ has been read as a precursor of the infamous motto atAuschwitz’s gates, ‘Arbeit macht frei’.⁷⁶ Such claims of continuity not only

⁷⁴ Rose, Powers of Freedom, p. 73.⁷⁵ On the Werkbund during the Nazi regime, see Sabine Weissler, ed., Design in Deutschland,

1933–45: Ästhetik und Organisation des Deutschen Werkbundes im ‘Dritten Reich’, Giessen, 1990. Onthe continuity thesis, see Oechslin, ‘Politisches’. On Heimat and modernism in Nazi architecture,see Tilman Harlander, Zwischen Heimstätte und Wohnmaschine: Wohnungsbau und Wohnungspolitikin der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus, Basel and Boston, 1995. A fuller survey of the literature isincluded in the Epilogue of this study.

⁷⁶ For the tendency to portray the Werkbund’s significance as part of a uniquely Germanteleology, see Holger Schatz and Andrea Woeldike, ‘Deutsche Arbeit und eleminatorischer Anti-Semitismus: Über die sozio-ökonomische Bedingtheit einer kulturellen Tradition’, in Jürgen Elsässerand Andrei S. Markovits, eds., Die Fratze der eigenen Geschichte: Von der Goldhagen-Debatte zum

Introduction 25

deny the open-endedness of all historical development. They also rest on theassumption that cultural politics are defined by ‘ideas’; the idea of Heimat, forexample, is one on which such continuities have frequently been pinned.⁷⁷ Yeton closer inspection, it is impossible to find any modernist movement around1900, in Germany, in any other European country or in the United States,that did not incorporate some of the language and symbols of the vernacularrevival. Such cultural resources only achieved political significance in distinctiveconstellations. Bürgerlich modernism was one such constellation, which workedby finely balancing history and memory, order and nature, nation and region, theprogressive and the archaic. A very different set of constellations characterizedthe Nazi cultural politics.

This difference is illustrated by a comparison between Fritz Schumacher andFritz Höger, focusing on their use of red brick, the archetypal Heimat material.For Schumacher, red brick was the vernacular material ideally suited to theproject of liberal, bürgerlich reform. It invoked civic identities that had developedover time; by drawing on these memories, the abstract modern city could betransformed into a topos of collective identification. At the same time, Schumacherargued that brick forced a modernist discipline upon the architect, by exposingstructural composition. It was an antidote to the follies of historicism, and hencethe concomitant of a new form of rational urban planning. For Höger, red brickwas something quite different. Where Schumacher saw civic memory, Höger sawthe archaic memory of human existence (and later gave these theories a racisttwist). Where Schumacher saw liberal, rational progress, Höger conjured up anemphatically anti-rational vision of collective salvation. Höger’s bricks becamethe building blocks of a political project that replaced history with archetypes,and progress with spectacularization. Bourgeois modernists had emphasized thetensions between the defining parts of their project: place and space, history andmemory, nature and culture were not synthesized, but juxtaposed in a perpetualdialogue. Höger, by contrast, fused the elements of his building ideology intoa whole. This aspiration to unity, or totality, lent itself to collaboration with atotalitarian regime, an aim vigorously pursued by Höger, even if his vision clashedwith the more classicist line supported by Speer and Hitler. By comparison, theproject of Bürgerlichkeit, for all its techniques of exclusion and mechanisms ofcontrol, remained a complex, pluralist, and contested ritual. This ritual wasconstantly performed, refined, adjusted, and redefined. And in the process, thecity was reshaped to serve as its appropriate stage.

Together, these chapters do not seek to explain material culture: instead,they look to material culture to do the explaining. The very ambiguity of suchevidence is also its asset: what the visual loses in precision, it gains in sensitivity,

Jugoslawien-Krieg, Berlin, 1999, pp. 103–23. More nuanced is Campbell, Joy of Work, GermanWork.

⁷⁷ See note 65.

26 Introduction

thus changing so much more quickly than the written word. We are faced witha mélange of traditions invented, remembered, half-forgotten; identities triedout, and half-discarded; futures imagined, planned, defended, half-abandoned.The uncertainty associated with this method opens up some new perspectivesonto modernism itself. Its material culture permanently reconstituted itself, andin the act of viewing, was reconstituted yet again. Ambiguity was therefore itsessential nature. This realization can serve to steer us away from models thattreat modernism as either a ‘cause’ or an ‘effect’ of modernity. Modernism didnot cause historical developments, be they democracy, fascism or consumerism.Yet it was also no mirror image of a modern historical reality already outthere. Modernism is, itself, history: a series of social, cultural and politicalinterventions, which we can best approach through a careful analysis—or ‘thickdescription’—of its empirical manifestations. This is the approach adopted inthis book.