The Transparent State: Architecture and Politics in Postwar Germany'

H-German Diefendorf on Barnstone, 'The Transparent State: Architecture and Politics in Postwar Germany'

Review published on Sunday, January 1, 2006

Deborah Ascher Barnstone. The Transparent State: Architecture and Politics in Postwar Germany. London: Routledge, 2005. xviii + 273 pp. $160.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-415-70018-4; $63.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-415-70019-1.

Reviewed by Jeffry Diefendorf (Department of History, University of New Hampshire) Published on H-German (January, 2006)

Deborah Ascher Barnstone's focus is quite narrow. She is interested in the three national parliaments built in the Federal Republic: the first Bundeshaus in Bonn, designed by Hans Schwippert and opened in 1949; the second Bonn Bundeshaus, designed by Günter Behnisch between 1972 and 1989 and opened in 1992; and the renovated and transformed Reichstag, designed by the British architect Norman Foster and opened in 1999. The design of each, Barnstone argues, was based upon certain premises. Real democracy should be open and transparent, meaning that a citizen should always be able to know what the government and the elected representatives are doing, and this transparency should facilitate the participation of the public in the political process. Translated into architectural design, the nation's parliamentary building should be transparent as well. Glass walls and open, accessible spaces should allow citizens actually to see their representatives at work, and the representatives should be able to see those whom they represent. A glass-enclosed parliament at the same time metaphorically and analogically represents the ideal of open, transparent democratic institutions. These ideas, which constitute an ideology of transparency, Barnstone argues, lay at the heart of the buildings designed by Schwippert, Behnisch, and Foster. Moreover, this ideology of transparency characterized postwar German politics and architecture more than in other western democracies, and "transparency is the basis for a new German myth" (p. 2, reviewer's emphasis). Barnstone declares that her "German Question" is "why transparent ideology has been so persistent in postwar Germany despite all the evidence to suggest that it is flawed, even incorrect" (p. xv).

Barnstone is an architectural historian, and the strongest chapters are those on the buildings by Schwippert, Behnisch, and Foster. She acknowledges that it is not entirely clear just how Schwippert was chosen to build the first Bundeshaus. There was no architectural competition, but Schwippert had solid credentials in Northrhine-Westphalia as a modernist architect. He composed programmatic, polemical essays on the efficacy of glass architecture in producing open politics, and he proclaimed that the transparency of his design, with the glass walls of the plenary hall looking out at an open-air courtyard and the Rhine, was an appropriate turn away from the bombast of the architecture of the Hitler years. Schwippert wanted to design a plenary hall that would reflect the aims of genuine democracy while also, in its modesty, "understatement, impermanence, anti-monumentality" and humility, stand in contrast to Nazi architecture, be sensitive to the conditions of a defeated and horribly damaged country, and acknowledge that Bonn was only a provisional capital (p. 128). An addition to the Pädagogische Hochschule in Bonn, the plenary hall was a rectangular mass with glass on two sides, although sharply defined mullions and drapes limited the sense of complete transparency.

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Diefendorf on Barnstone, 'The Transparent State: Architecture and Politics in Postwar Germany'. H-German. 09-30-2014. https://networks.h-net.org/node/35008/reviews/44464/diefendorf-barnstone-transparent-state-architecture-and-politics Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-German

Competitions were staged for the second Bonn Bundeshaus and the Reichstag renovation, and the idea of architectural and political transparency was a central part of the competition brief for both. Barnstone shows that Behnisch embraced the idea of transparency, though it is less clear that Foster fully bought into the link between transparency and actual democracy. Like Schwippert, Behnisch felt that "political architecture is the manifestation of salient conditions in contemporary politics" (p. 147). His new Bundeshaus was also anti-monumental and understated. Behnisch made even greater use of glass than Schwippert, such that functional and spatial boundaries between meeting rooms, hallways, stairs, and landscaped spaces outdoors in some ways dissolved. However, as Barnstone observes, concerns for security in practice still precluded the public's access to representatives and officials. Norman Foster's original submission for the Reichstag competition called for enclosing the shell of the old building in a glass box, gutting the shell, and constructing new spaces inside. The final design, with the glass dome and transparent lobby entrance, kept much more of the old building intact. Indeed, Barnstone argues that Foster's building is transparent not so much to democracy in action as to history. The existing pre-war elements, combined with the preservation of graffiti scrawled on walls by Russian soldiers, make the Reichstag a "living museum of German history" (p. 189). Thus Foster's Reichstag is both transparent and opaque. The parliamentarians can see the figures of tourists climbing the dome, but the tourists cannot really see into the plenary hall.

These are all useful insights, making me wish for more extended consideration of some of the relationships between architecture and politics in these three cases. There is little sense here of exactly how politically charged the debates over reconstruction and architectural design were in the first decades after the war. The subtitle might lead readers to expect that this book will be a kind of sequel to Barbara Miller Lane's classic Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1919-1945, but they will be disappointed. The statement that "the extent to which the country and its infrastructure were destroyed and needed to be rebuilt is not widely known" (p. 27) suggests that Barnstone is not familiar with the now extensive literature on postwar reconstruction.[1] Schwippert's initial contract for the Bundeshaus predated by several months the completion of the Basic Law, and one suspects that his conceptualization of the plenary hall had little to do with the wording of the constitution. What sorts of contacts did he have with German politicians during the design phase? Why should one assume that Norman Foster, as a non-German, brought "detached objectivity" to his design? What does it mean that, even in choosing architects for highly important state buildings, it is no longer important that German architects be chosen? Were Foster's German associates oblivious to the dynamics of German politics? Did Foster pay any attention to the scandals surrounding Chancellor Helmut Kohl toward the end of his long tenure in office? In conveying the nature and identity of united Germany and united Berlin as its capital, just how important is the Reichstag, given the enormous amount of new construction? A new book on Berlin gives the Reichstag but a single page.[2]

Moreover, a study such as this cries out for a much more extended analysis of the competitions that resulted in the Behnisch and Foster designs. What is known about other entries or the opinions of the competition judges? What is known about the interactions between the judges and the politicians who made final decisions? It is truly bizarre that the initial competition for the second Bundeshaus was held in 1972, but it was not until June, 1987, that the Bundestag decided to replace Schwippert¹s hall with one by Behnisch. Behnisch spent two more years on design work, and the building opened in 1992, when the discussion of moving the entire government, including the Bundestag, to Berlin was already under way. How did the extraordinary political developments of these years influence both

Granted that an ideology of transparency existed and in different ways found its way into the three parliament buildings, Barnstone is constantly forced to equivocate when pushing the link between the ideology, the buildings, and actual political practice. The problems are many. Does architectural form actually shape behavior? Many modernist architects thought so, as did Hitler, Speer, and others serving the National Socialist regime. However, the Nazis built not just monumental, neo-classical structures but also more modernist buildings. And neo-classicism can be found in buildings of both democracies and tyrannies. It is not clear, then, that either glass walls or Greek columns further democracy. (When he was asked if it troubled him to work for the Nazis, Mies van der Rohe, one of the greatest pioneers of transparent buildings, supposedly said: "Michelangelo was not a religious man--yet he worked for the Pope!"[3]) Nor is it evident that transparent buildings are a better metaphor for democratic politics and practices than opaque-walled buildings, such as brick town halls, places where German democracies have often flourished. Indeed, the exclusion of provincial and city parliamentary buildings weakens the argument about the predominance of an ideology of transparency. And Barnstone acknowledges that the East German regime used the same metaphor of transparency in building its national parliament, the Palace of the Republic.

More important still, as Barnstone notes over and over, political transparency was at best an ideal, not a reality, in postwar Germany. The complex workings of the West German polity did not take place in full view of the public but elsewhere, out of sight in government offices, party buildings, social gatherings, and so forth. Barnstone mentions, for example, the role of bureaucrats and lobbyists. In the ideology of transparency, "democratic openness comes from free access to parliament and from the freedom to participate, to share one's views." However, "neither access to parliament nor public expression of views during sessions has ever been possible in West Germany" (p. 116). She might well have observed that, under a system of party discipline, most speeches in Bundestag plenary sessions are not part of a genuinely open debate intended to win the votes of opponents but rather reflect predetermined party positions. (Photos on pages 160 and 171 show Bundestag sessions with most of the parliamentarians absent, an unspoken commentary on the importance of the debates.)

In her attempt to argue the centrality of transparent ideology in postwar Germany, Barnstone stretches the concept, contending that terms like openness, the public Öffentlichkeit( ), pluralism, participation, and accessibility are all really more or less the same as transparency. She sees the unification of the two German states in terms of transparency (East Germany became transparent and dissolved) and in terms of reflection "in the transparent surface of a mirror" (p. 89). She sees as "qualities associated with transparency" freedom of the press and religion, free elections, and freedom to travel (p. 213). Such a broad application of the term reduces the significance of her basic assertion that the ideology of transparency, as opposed to a commitment to democracy, underlies so much of postwar Germany. Most public figures, including those who framed the competitions for the parliamentary buildings, endorsed the goal of a democracy that was open and to which the public had access. That West German democracy has never been perfectly open or transparent, in spite of the use of glass in the plenary halls of parliament, however, does not belie the fact that West German political institutions have functioned remarkably well for fifty years now. The ideal is not a bad one, but West German practice has not been bad either. Some constitutional provisions, such as the 5- percent rule used to preclude the proliferation of parties, have been emulated in other democratizing

The lengthy discussions of the German constitution or German politics, furthermore, are often not very illuminating. (Three of the eight chapters have more to do with politics than architecture.) For example, Barnstone notes that when Behnisch's Bundeshaus design was approved in 1987, West Germany's successful "democracy was fifty years old. It was almost three times the age of Weimar when that regime collapsed, and four times the age of the Third Reich at the end of the Second World War" (p. 79). A minor matter perhaps, but not very good math. The Reichstag was the place where the national parliaments of the Second Empire and Weimar Republic met, and, of course, neither was a successful democracy. The building was never used for parliamentary meetings by Hitler. Is it correct, then, to see the Reichstag as the "antithesis" of "democratic values" (p. 2)?

In sum, then, Barnstone makes too much of the fact that the reality of German politics is not perfectly transparent and thus falls short of the ideal, and I find the argument that the ideology of transparency has been the basis of the founding myth of postwar Germany unconvincing. She is right that many architects and politicians called for transparency and openness and that this influenced the design of the three parliament buildings. To win commissions, architects must serve their clients. Whether their buildings succeed in fulfilling the aims of both architects and politicians, whether architecture shapes political behavior, or whether architecture accurately reflects political culture are other matters.

Notes

[1]. It is also curious that Barnstone uses Charles Wighton'sAdenauer: A Critical Biography (New York: Coward-McCann, 1963) rather than more recent and extensive works, such as Hans-Peter Schwarz, Adenauer 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1986-1991).

[2]. Karen E. Till, The New Berlin: Memory, Politics, Place (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005).

[3]. Quoted by Elaine S. Hochman, Architects of Fortune: Mies van der Rohe and the Third Reich (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989), p. 283.

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Citation: Jeffry Diefendorf. Review of Barnstone, Deborah Ascher,The Transparent State: Architecture and Politics in Postwar Germany. H-German, H-Net Reviews. January, 2006.URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11337

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