Animation, Animism, Animosity in German Architecture and Film–— from Mies to Murnau

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. Dir. F.W. Murnau, 1922. Stills.

6 Malicious Houses: Animation, Animism, Animosity in German Architecture and Film–— From Mies to Murnau

SPYROS PAPAPETROS

Parallel Gestures Frame One: The medium close-up of a curtained window: Through the open frame we see the outline of a row of houses with stubby gables. A beam of light falls diagonally on the façades, unveiling a series of windows. Frame Two: The wide shot of a Biedermeier bedchamber overstuffed with a canopy bed, a heavy armchair, a pedimented mirror, and silhouette portraits on the wall flanking the curtained window. Gradually, a spher- ical object starts rotating behind the ruffled bedclothes. It is the head of Nosferatu staring at the window. The vampire slowly rises, clutches his heart with his left hand, and then starts running. Frame One: But before Nosferatu moves, Murnau’s camera moves and returns to the medium close-up of the window. The screen is gradually invaded by the vampire’s clawed arms. While Nosferatu runs, the raised elbow of his right arm extends parallel to the windowsill, while his left hand still clasps his chest. Just before he slips out of the frame, Nosferatu is immobilized by the sunlight. Reflexively, the vampire’s right arm starts moving upward, and then his whole body starts rotating toward the opposite side of the window frame. When the 180-degree turn is complete, Nosferatu extends his right arm forward until it is parallel with and above one of the slanting house-roofs visible through the window. Holding the same gesture, the vampire vanishes, leaving the window frame unobstructed. Frame Two: Murnau’s camera returns to the wide shot of the interior, where an oblique column of smoke is now rising from the carpet floor. Like Nosferatu’s arm a few moments before, the line of smoke appears parallel with the oblique rooftops visible through the window. Notice that all of these directorial maneuvers appear to be unscripted. In Henrik Galeen’s original film script for F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922), during his death scene the vampire does not run across the room but

Grey Room 20, Summer 2005, pp. 6–37. © 2005 Grey Room, Inc. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology 7 collapses next to Ellen’s bed. Instead of standing up and extending his arm, the vampire kneels down on the ground and tries to “shield himself from the light.”1 Perhaps the ingenious setting of the curtained window—invented by the film’s architect designer, Albin Grau—inspired the change of action: notice that the vampire’s final gestures appear to address the houses behind the curtain frame. Witness the momentous geometry of Nosferatu’s hand signals. Not only does his right hand extend parallel to the slanting rooftop, but the elbow of his left hand holding his heart appears parallel in the same direction. These parallel lines create a contrasting depth. Nosferatu’s arms are in the foreground while the buildings are in the background, yet in the projected screen these asymptotic surfaces appear to be on the same level. As we know from Euclidean geometry, two parallel lines define one plane. Yet here these lines define more than one plane. They extend to a symbolic level, that of language—a form of communication not between two persons but between subjects and things. Arm and roof communicate. Parallel to one another, they are in correspondence. These covert exchanges between living subjects and inanimate objects describe the symptoms of modern animation. Here animation is conceived as the transference of energy from a semidepleted animate subject to its surrounding architecture, which becomes menacingly reinvigo- rated. Nosferatu’s final gesture describes precisely this energy transfer. Top row, left: Nosferatu: With his left hand attached to his heart and his right hand connected to A Symphony of Horror. his houses, the transparent Nosferatu becomes the center of an energy Dir. F.W. Murnau, 1922. Still. Top row, right: Faust. circuit, as if his own inanimation feeds into the buildings’ animism. Dir. F.W. Murnau, 1925. Still. What is the impetus driving these gestures? Arrested between the Bottom row, left: Nosferatu: director’s camera frame and the designer’s window frame, Nosferatu A Symphony of Horror. desperately tries to adjust his body to the set by aligning his arms with Dir. F.W. Murnau, 1922. Still. parts of the décor. In his final moments, the vampire behaves like a Bottom row, right: Eric Rohmer. L’organisation panic-stricken animal trying to blend into its surroundings. Nosferatu’s de l’espace dans le Faust final gesture rehearses his disappearance. The vampire is framed by an de Murnau, 1977. Diagram.

8 Grey Room 20 architecture that stages his demise. Notice that during the brief moment when Nosferatu begins dissolving in the light and becomes transparent, the rear edge of the window frame penetrates his torso precisely at the spot on his chest where the vampire had earlier clutched himself. As in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a wooden stake pierces the vampire’s heart and finally kills the monster. Nosferatu is not only framed but killed by the window. Sunlight began the “death by transparency” story; the window frame completed the plot.2 According to the scenario the houses seen through the window were Nosferatu’s residence during his relocation from his medieval castle in the Carpathians to the nineteenth-century city of Wisborg. As the master dies, he is away from his houses yet reunited with them through a final gesture. His hand signal inscribes his body on the building frame that finally replaces him on the screen. The parallel gesturing of hands and scenery during Nosferatu’s transfiguration scene is not without precedent in the film. In an earlier signature scene, when the vampire mounts the stairs to Ellen’s bedroom, the elbow of his right arm moves exactly parallel to the diagonal handrail of the staircase, as does his left upper arm. The fact that both Nosferatu’s body and the handrail appear as coplanar shadows makes even clearer that such parallel gestures are exercises in projective geometry—they project the outcome of an impeding action. The French director Eric Rohmer detects similar parallel alignments between subjects and objects in Murnau’s next magnum opus, Faust.3 Rohmer shows how gestures in Murnau—from the arms of the pleading Marguerite raised parallel to a temple projected in the background to the hands of the prophet bran- dishing a cross over the heads of a crowd—have the power to organize space as well as extend in time by presaging the ominous outcome of the story. A similar scene from Murnau’s Faust portraying a highly prophetic hand signal helps decipher the cryptic meaning of Nosferatu’s final gesture.4 I refer to the moment when Mephistopheles performs a benediction over the head of the aging Faust, after which the hero regains the powers of his youth. This biblical laying on of hands signifies the passing of a rejuvenating energy, but Mephistopheles’ gesture ultimately proves fatal for Faust. Like Mephistopheles’ hand wave, Nosferatu’s gesture is ambiguous: it signals both a blessing and a curse, a benediction and a malediction, ruin and regeneration. Evil comes from and falls upon the houses cov- ered by the vampire’s arm. The houses are both malicious and accursed. Arm and roof ascend parallel to their destruction. While the vampire vanishes, the houses pledge to avenge the abrupt demise of their master, yet their own future remains equally fragile.

Papapetros | Malicious Houses 9 Turn-of-the-century theorists and architects such as August Schmarsow and Henry van de Velde argued that both line and space originate in human gesture.5 Nosferatu’s inhuman gesture not only organizes filmic space, as Rohmer argued, but also delineates an entire perspective that transcends the filmic screen. “Each gesture . . . each step, each movement is determined with scientific rigor according to the effect it will have on the spectator,” observed a journalist present on the set of Nosferatu.6 Gestures and movements extend beyond the cinematic frame to form a larger architectural construction. I would therefore like to consider Nosferatu’s farewell address as a crucial gesture for the impeding formation (the original Gestaltung) of modern architecture. The vampire’s theatrical transfiguration in front of the curtained window is only the preview of future spectacular architectural events. Perhaps the architectural sequel to Nosferatu occurred not in the stage sets of the endless remakes featuring Count Dracula and other “living dead” but in the domain of modern architecture, which during the time of Nosferatu’s original release in 1922 was staging its own animated battles with numerous building representatives within the region of the “living dead.”

Parallel Houses The four buildings serving as Nosferatu’s residence in Wisborg were in fact salt warehouses in Lübeck, built around the beginning of the eighteenth century. One can see them, along with other gabled houses from the same region, in several early-twentieth-century photographic surveys of Northern European architecture.7 While living in Lübeck in 1903, Edvard Munch produced an ink drawing of the warehouses that the ex-art history student Murnau might have seen.8 However, the Lübeck buildings are not the only models for Nosferatu’s residence. A number of similar architectural models serve as mediators between the nineteenth-century past that Murnau’s Nosferatu portrays and the modernist present that it allegorizes. Listen to the testimony of a contemporary witness: In this age I now inhabit, a persistent feeling clings to me, as though at certain hours of the night and early morning gray, the houses took mysterious silent counsel together with one another. The walls would be subject to faint, inexplicable tremors; strange sounds would creep along the roofs and down the gutter—sounds that our human ears might register, maybe, but whose origin remained beyond our power to fathom, even had we cared to try. Often in my dreams would I witness the ghostly communings of these old houses, and in terror realize that they in very truth were the lords of the street, of its very life and essence, of which they could divest themselves

10 Grey Room 20 at will, lending it during the day to its inhabitants, only to reclaim it plus exorbitant interest, when night came round again.9

The speaker is the narrator of Gustav Meyrink’s novel The Golem—a contemporary psychological version of the medieval Jewish myth, which refers to a living statue in Prague. In Meyrink’s novel, the Golem is not a clay statue, but a ﬁlmic creature (whose elongated bald head bears a reasonable physiognomic resemblance to the equally phantom-like Max Schreck in Murnau’s Nosferatu). The malicious houses causing the narrator the inexplicable hallucinations he reports are the ancient structures of Prague’s Jewish ghetto. Meyrink notes that something “hostile and malicious” in these buildings “permeated the very bricks of which they were composed.”10 Between 1907 and 1913, when Meyrink was writing his novel, most of these buildings built in the baroque period had already been demolished. The “sanitation process” for the center of Prague had started in 1895, and by 1904 only a few of the old structures remained.11 Why then do these crumbling buildings, which are already dead or at least half dead, become so powerful in Meyrink’s novel? Why are harm- less old houses not objects of love and affection but active fulcrums of hostility and aggression? Why are they so malicious? The sinister side of these buildings was made even darker in Hugo Steiner-Prag’s illustrations for the novel. Houses, artifacts, and the aerial spirit of the Golem all seem to be made of the same material, which Meyrink calls “a stone like a lump of fat.” The material melts, is mold- able like clay, mutable like plaster. Surfaces are sliced like paper or Top row: Gustav Meyrink. carved to simulate rock formations. Solid objects melt into liquid and The Golem, 1915. Prospectus ﬁnally evaporate to join the spiritual “beyond.”12 and illustrations by Hugo Steiner-Prag, 1915. The original illustrator for Meyrink’s Golem was the expressionist artist Alfred Kubin. After Meyrink’s endless delays Kubin stepped down Bottom row: Alfred Kubin. The Other Side, 1909. from the project and used his illustrations in his own novel, the anti- Illustrations by the author. modernist antiutopia The Other Side.13 Kubin’s dream city of Perle

Papapetros | Malicious Houses 11 represents another form of architectural vampirism. Everything in this town is old, dead, and reanimated, including houses, clocks, fashions, and the Rembrandt paintings hanging on the walls. “Oh I love old things!” says the narrator’s wife.14 Nevertheless, this “love” will not prevent the “old things” from being sadistically massacred in the novel’s apocalyptic ﬁnale, when the entire city turns into a gelatinous mass of human, animal, and building debris. Kubin creates a psychographic architecture constructed not by building up but by digging out, unearthing, subtracting matter—a paradoxical attempt to create space for the void. This “negative” form of architecture is, to use Freud’s term, taboo: it is prohibited to human habitation. Both Kubin’s and Meyrink’s characters suffer from multiple panic attacks. In the illustrations for both novels, human figures either lean against a wall, as though afraid to step inside a space, or they appear running, as if trying to escape. As human beings flee these buildings, other creatures settle in. In Meyrink it is the spirits and souls, the animas; in Kubin, animals take over the city: deer, ostriches, snakes, and all sorts of insects and marine organisms. Murnau’s Nosferatu suffers a similar animal invasion: not only rats but cats, spiders, horses, and hyenas—animals with which Nosferatu secretly communicates. Animism becomes animalism, animation leads to animalization. The sense of animal devolution extends to the architecture. Meyrink describes the squatting houses of the ghetto as “a herd of derelict animals” and then as “weeds rising from the ground.”15 From the animal to the vegetal, there is the sense of a material recycling as if architecture grazes its own decomposing substance.

The Mimicry of the Inorganic Thus far I have described two types of animation. The ﬁrst is material; Below: Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. it describes metamorphoses, material transmutations from the animate Dir. F.W. Murnau, 1922. Stills. to the inanimate, from the organic to the inorganic, from the amoebic to Opposite: The Golem. the vegetal or the mineral, and so on. The second is temporal; it refers Dir. Paul Wegener, 1920. to revivals, survivals, and temporal reanimations of ancient themes Sets by Hans Poelzig. Stills. inside the chronological collage of modernism. Nosferatu and his houses embody both types of animation. Like Nosferatu, animation and its objects can never have a normal life, and so they live in perpetual afterlife. Animated objects are essentially vampires—a cluster of solidified desires that neither properly live nor die. They prolong themselves indeﬁnitely in what Aby Warburg described as a perpetually “renewed antiquity”—an archaic world that stays repressed and periodically reemerges in a series of spectacular revivals.

12 Grey Room 20 Recall the two interconnected scenes from Nosferatu where Doctor Bulwer demonstrates to a group of students first an insectivorous plant, the well-known Venus flytrap devouring an insect—“the vampire of the vegetable kingdom!”—and, second, a polyp, a small transparent amoeba seen through a microscope capturing a small fish with its pseudopodia—“another vampire . . . transparent, without substance, almost a phantom!” Both vampires of nature are metaphors for the transgressive nature of Nosferatu driven only by the nutritive part of his soul. In his popular Bios: The Principles of the World, the influential biotheorist and natural philosopher Raoul Francé (also well-known in Bauhaus circles) elaborated a new “universal” theory of mimicry.16 From tiny insects imitating decomposing leaves and crayfish emulating seaweeds to the Italian soldiers in the Austro-Italian war enveloped in frog-like suits—all natural bodies sought to imitate something other than what they already were. In order to continue living, organisms had to pose as inanimate and pretend they were dead. Francé argued that this type of mimicry manifested the principle of universal “convergence”: a material osmosis attempting to bring all natural organisms into a common (low) degree of life. Francé’s theory of mimicry extended from living organisms to so-called inanimate nature, such as rock formations, mountains, and sand dunes that disguised themselves as “earth pyramids.” The inorganic appeared to be “lifelessly” creative and playfully architectural. “Anything that bears a weight,” says Francé (following Schopenhauer), “whether it is ice or soil, a tree trunk or the leg of a stork . . . following the functional law of adaptation, everything turns into a column.” This architectural type of mimicry constituted for Francé “the mimicry of the inorganic.”17 According to monist doctrines, there was no distinction between organic and inorganic or animate and inanimate bodies. All nature was one and had a soul. Some of the principles of monism seem to have disseminated into architectural mo[der]nism. The sets for the film Der Golem: Wie er in die Welt kam (1920), by actor and director Paul Wegener, portray a similar material convergence between living bodies and architectural environments. While the story scripted by Wegener has nothing to do with Meyrink’s Golem, the stage set designed by Hanz Poelzig and constructed by his future wife, the sculptor Marianne

Papapetros | Malicious Houses 13 Moeschke, is quite similar to the psychographic architecture of Hugo Steiger-Prag’s illustrations for Meyrink’s novel.18 The rabbi’s official “salon” from Poelzig’s film-set is filled with drip- ping stalactites and furniture whose edges are distorted as if melting or burning, reminiscent of the stalactite ceiling of Poelzig’s famous Grosse Schauspielhaus for Max Reinhardt in Berlin (1919). This is the space where the rabbi discovers to his dismay his daughter’s illegitimate love for a Christian. Although mutant here, form remains ambiguously physiognomic: architectural transgressions project the contravention of social and cultural norms. While Poelzig’s stage set appears organic and animated, the figure of the Golem played by Wegener strives to look as inorganic and stony as possible. During the Golem’s visit to the Christian palace, Wegener stands immobile like a column in front of a wooden door. The door’s tendril ornaments sprout from the Golem’s Egyptian hairdo like the spirals of an Ionic capital. At the end of the scene, the Golem literally transforms into a column when, like Samson, he supports the pediment of the Christian palace. The scene is perhaps an illustration of Francé’s theory of the “column” that every animate and inanimate body strives to imitate. Yet the most effective example of the “mimicry of the inorganic” is the scene where the Golem pursues the Christian intruder on the rooftop of the Rabbi’s tower. All we see in the beginning is an abstract mass of clay camouflaged inside the staircase. Suddenly the head of the enraged Golem emerges and petrifies his enemy (and the spectator). Here the defensive skills of mimicry and camouflage turn into the offensive technique of intimidation.

Tilting Not only objects but also theories and even entire sciences can become the subject of reanimation. Physiognomy, the classical episteme of decipher- ing the inner character of both human beings and buildings according to their external morpho- logical characteristics, acquires a second, almost vampire-like, afterlife during the interwar period in Germany. One of the physiognomic elements weighing on the façades of buildings around Nosferatu’s time was the issue of tilting, the slanting of surfaces—the way that walls, windows, and

14 Grey Room 20 entire buildings deviated from the straight line. Meyrink describes one of the derelict houses of the ghetto as “slanting obliquely, with a roof like a retreating forehead . . . the one next to it jutting out like an eye- tooth.”19 Slanting is obvious in the houses of Poelzig’s set for Der Golem; it expands from the curved rooftops and skewed interior walls of the ghetto houses to the conical hats of the gesticulating rabbis pointing in similarly oblique directions. In the film’s publicity images, the houses transform into oblique flames suggesting the fire that nearly demolishes the ghetto. Just as in Poelzig’s oblique stage set, so too in Kubin’s drawing “From Albania” the slanting of the buildings in the foreground extends to the old woman in the front, the buildings across the street, and the tower in the background.20 Both this and the previous images indicate the pres- Opposite: The Golem. ence of a wind that forces the houses to bend sideways and represents Dir. Paul Wegener, 1920. the agency of animation. However, such an agency is missing in the Sets by Hans Poelzig. Stills. aberrant form of tilting that occurs in Murnau’s Nosferatu. The first time Top: Alfred Kubin. we see Nosferatu’s future residence, the Lübeck warehouses shown From Albania, before 1923. through a window grid appear as if they are tilting when in fact they are Bottom: Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. not. The film’s designers turned the window grid a few degrees to the Dir. F.W. Murnau, 1922. Still. left to produce the slanting effect. The optical manipulation shows that what is biased or off-center is ultimately not the object itself but the entire frame through which we view it. This should warn us not to dismiss these optical effects as mere formal exercises; they reveal social, psychological, and even ethical biases—that is, parts of the larger tilting picture. In his essay on the Expression of the Emotions in Men and Animals, Darwin remarked that “as he had seen in the Chinese . . . an angry man inclines his body towards his antagonist to attack him with his volley of abuse.” As a sign of our animal past, protrusion of the head or the whole body, according to Darwin, is a common gesture of animosity and of the ferociously enraged human being. The exposure of the canine tooth by snarling dogs or hys- terically sneering females mediates the same emotion.21

Papapetros | Malicious Houses 15 In addition to racial and misogynist biases, stereotypes of the oblique weighed on criminal behavior. At the center of the malicious physiognomy are the intensely tilting eyebrows—also typical in physiognomic depictions of anger. This intense frowning became permanently imprinted on the face of the “criminal man,” the “innate” anatomical characteristics of whom were scientifically exposed by Cesare Lombroso in his widely known criminological studies. Tilting becomes inherently sinister.22 The word malicious has a specific connotation in criminology and juridical literature, where it signifies that the criminal act was deliber- ate and willful, driven by a malignant motivation.23 However, when accidents happen and no human perpetrator is in sight, the sinister agency is assigned to objects. In his popular novel Auch Einer, the German philosopher and aesthetician Friedrich Theodor Vischer attrib- utes a demonic element to inert objects, which he describes as “die Tücke des Objekts”—a phrase usually rendered as “the maliciousness of the object.”24 The German word Tücke, however, lacks the intention that “maliciousness” connotes in English. Tücke comes from Tuc, which in High German means a violent movement, a strike coming from an unknown source.25 Vischer’s “striking objects” are usually familiar household items that suddenly refuse to obey our wishes and cause all types of accidents; for example, quills and other pens refusing to write or buttons popping off a pair of trousers. Vischer heroically wars with these sneering objects, and when he finally manages to capture one he shows no mercy. In the opening pages of the book, the hero is exasperatedly looking for his eyeglasses until he finally sees them looking at him right in front of his eyes: “Look right there; Do you see the mockery, the satanic Schaden- freude in this purely demonic glass-gaze? Out with the monster caught-up in surprise!” He held the eyeglasses up high, then let them fall down, and shouting with a festive voice “The death penalty, Supplicium,” he raised his foot and crushed them with the heel of his shoe, so that the pieces of glass flew around in little splinters and dust.26 The sadistic extermination of personal items shows that “the maliciousness of the object” is in fact an excuse for “the maliciousness of the subject.” While on account of his Aesthetic Vischer is considered one of the founders of the psychological theory of empathy, his “maliciousness of the object” shows an antipathy, a fundamental hostility toward the objects of the external world.27 The behavior of Vischer’s narrator shows that when we instinctively attribute an agency to objects something bad is happening to us. The malicious character of an object

16 Grey Room 20 is the instinctive projection of agency precisely when accidents happen and no agency seems to be in sight.

Split Screen Vischer’s demonology was only part of a tilting framework weighing against objects. After the discovery of the unconscious and the inven- tion of psychoanalysis by Freud, the same frame would become thor- oughly inverted. In the second chapter of Totem and Taboo, entitled “Taboo and the Ambivalence of Emotions,” Freud interpreted the malicious character of the ancestral totem with the most cinematographic of all psychoanalytic metaphors, “projection.”28 Projection is the defensive mechanism by which the subject ejects his unwanted internal per- ceptions and displaces them into a building or an object. Primitive man and the modern neurotic transpose their own aggression against paternal authority by housing it in the secure residence of the totem. In certain cases the object functioning as a scapegoat is a piece of architecture. The expiatory building is charged with an original sin, which explains the ambiguous prestige of this structure, encompassing both veneration and guilt. “Do you know the sort of houses you are forced to live in?” asks one of the characters of The Other Side: I can tell you: there is hardly one of them that was not sullied by blood, crime and shame before it was brought to this place. The Palace is patched together out of ruins of buildings that were the theater of bloody conspiracies and revolutions. . . . Fragments from the Escorial, from the Bastille, from ancient Roman arenas, were used in its construction. . . . Paris, Istanbul, and others gave of their worst horrors!29 Combined with animosity, animation here designates not only the transference of agency but the diachronic misplacement of guilt. Architecture, as Kubin shows, has a remarkable ability to house such displacements and ambivalent emotions. My argument is that the ultimate secret that the malicious houses of the early-twentieth-century are housing—once venerated and now hated and despised—is the secret animosity that their inheritors harbor against them, an animosity produced by the descendants’ own primeval crime. Freud’s discovery of the hidden “totem meal,” where the sons unite to kill and eat the father, presages modernism’s own cannibalistic intentions. “What thou hast inherited from thy fathers,/acquire it to make it thine.” This passage from part one of Goethe’s Faust quoted by Freud in the conclusion of Totem and Taboo is also cited by Paul Mebes four years earlier in his ﬁrst preface to Around 1800, perhaps the most well-known

Papapetros | Malicious Houses 17 publication defending traditional building culture in Germany (first published in 1908; then republished in 1918 and 1920).30 The interpre- tations of the two authors are completely different. Mebes asks for the preservation of architectural inheritance and urges other architects to treat “the work of our fathers” with “love and humility!”31 Freud, on the contrary, shows that what the descendants have “inherited” from their fathers has already been destroyed and that what they now have to deal with and “acquire” is the guilt they have introjected. One should not be puzzled by the fact that the same buildings incriminated or massacred by Meyrink and Kubin in their novels are at the same time venerated and treated with respect by Mebes and others in a long litany of illustrated architectural publications from the early 1900s.32 Although benevolent where Meyrink, Murnau, and Kubin are malevolent, these accounts of patriotic architectural nostalgia have the same function. The book-length eulogies are ultimately not reviving but burying, with funerary pomp and photographic circumstance, the buildings they portray. Indeed many of these collections, including Mebes’s Around 1800, conclude with photographs of graves, steles, and other funerary architectural accoutrements.33 This is another case of Victor Hugo’s “Ceci tuera cela.” Here the book does not exactly “kill” the building but performs its last rites and thus announces its death. The architectural folio does not reproduce building models to be imitated but seals and consecrates monuments that will never be built again. The Freudian “ambivalence of emotion” interprets the ambivalent attitude of German modernism apropos of architectural tradition. On the side of history, the emergence of the politics of Heimatschutz, völkisch nostalgia, and historic preservation;34 and on the unrestrained, unconscious space of literature and ﬁlm, the murderous houses of Meyrink, Kubin, and Murnau. The houses are projected on a “split screen.” On the one side “mourning and melancholia,” and on the other the Oedipal aggression of the modernist barbarians insisting on building their new totems in the center of their ancestors’ graveyards. “Mourning, however painful it may be, comes to a spontaneous end. When it has renounced everything that has been lost, then it has con- sumed itself, and our libido is once more free to replace the lost objects by fresh ones equally or still more precious.”35 Mourning, as Freud makes clear here, is not melancholia. Mourning is a dynamic condition leading to new resolutions. The golems, phantoms, and vampires invented by the early twentieth-century literary and cinematic unconscious in an attempt to house the fears and hallucinations of its benumbed subjects function as the concrete allegory of new architecture. Behind the smoke of Meyrink’s “mysterious explosion of the ghetto” emerge the equally transubstantiated objects of modern architecture. While stand-

18 Grey Room 20 ing against the “malicious houses” of the past, modern buildings imitate the old structures’ ambivalent decorum. In Der Golem Meyrink argues that the collective “soul” of his era cannot bear to remain “formless”; it strives “to ﬁnd a deﬁnitive plastic form (Gestalt) by penetrating the wall of actuality”—as a “phantom.”36 The last part of this montage narrative shifts focus onto a modernist architectural project that gives expression to this “phantom-like” Gestaltung.

The Miesian Totem The fourth and last issue of Bruno Taut’s Frühlicht, published in the summer of 1922, dedicated three pages to the designs of two skyscrapers with glass exteriors by Mies van der Rohe.37 One of the projects was Mies’s unsuccessful competition entry submitted in December 1921 for Top, left: Ludwig Mies van 38 der Rohe. Glass Skyscraper an apartment block in Berlin’s Friedrichstrasse. The competition design project, model, 1922. From was a twenty-floor skyscraper with a triangular crystalline plan and was Frühlicht 1, no. 4 (1922), presented by a series of drawings. The second glass skyscraper was ed. Bruno Taut. thirty-floors high with an amoebic curvilinear floor plan for which the Top, right: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Friedrichstrasse architect constructed a model and had several photographs made, two competition project, 1921. of which were displayed in Frühlicht. In the perspective views of the Charcoal Drawing. From drawings made for the first skyscraper, the surrounding apartment Frühlicht 1, no. 4 (1922), ed. Bruno Taut. blocks are indicated only by solid dark silhouettes. In the model the low-rise buildings surrounding the second glass tower, although made Bottom: Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Glass Skyscraper out of wood and plaster, show many more details. According to Werner project, model, 1922. Details. Graef, Mies’s later assistant and coeditor of G, Mies said of these houses, “Most people make drawings and the surrounding buildings pass also as their own.”39 That Mies clearly did not want: “I want to know what my buildings really look like on the vacant lot in question, however hideous their vicinity may be.”40 When the 1922 model was exhibited, the surrounding “hideousness” was noted: Against the glass tower, remarked a critic “how poor [armselig], the small houses with their snug façades and small towers appear.”41 Due to their association with Mies’s competition project, the “poor houses” of the model could be taken to represent the actual buildings of the Friedrichstrasse. A comparison with actual photographs of the area shows clearly that they do not.42 The buildings on that section of the

Papapetros | Malicious Houses 19 Friedrichstrasse in the early 1920s—the Comic Opera, the Savoy, and Top: Ludwig Mies van der Monopol Hotels, the Admiral sports palace and baths—had all been Rohe. Glass Skyscraper recently constructed between 1889 and 1905 and were not “poor” by any project, model, 1922 (View from below). From Frühlicht 1, means. Moreover, Mies’s 1922 model usually appears with two rows of no. 4 (1922), ed. Bruno Taut. surrounding buildings, while the actual Friedrichstrasse plot, apart Bottom: Same photograph from the railway station, had only one. Yet again, in a photograph dis- (uncropped) in The Mies van der Rohe Archive, played on a publicity pamphlet that Mies made from the offprint of an Museum of Modern Art, article on him in the journal Qualität in 1922 (published around the New York (MI 151). same time as the fourth issue of Frühlicht), the model of the glass tower appears framed on only one side by a single block of houses, while the other row is conspicuously missing.43 Changes such as this show that both the glass tower and the surrounding houses are conceived as models for the purposes of photographic reproduction. Indeed, the original model was apparently photographed with at least three different backgrounds in various sessions. Apart from the studio shots reproduced in Frühlicht and Qualität, a series of aluminum prints depicts the model “suspended outside the window” or “inside the balcony” of Mies’s office in Berlin.44 One of these photographs was reproduced in Frühlicht with the caption “Hochhaus von unten gesehen,” and, indeed, as with all the other photographs from the same session, it shows the glass tower “seen from below” without the surrounding houses.45 A comparison between the image published in Frühlicht and the original print reveals that the image was cropped, leaving out a small triangle of what appears to be a lintel. The cropped lintel piece shows that the photographs from this series were probably shot from inside the window, looking out. An interior frame enveloping the model is missing in the publication. Mies staged another photographic session for his glass tower, this time in a real outdoor setting, a Berlin park close to an exhibition hall where the model had been displayed at the time.46 Most of the photographs are taken in broad daylight, apparently following Mies’s intentions to study the model’s glass surfaces in the sunlight.47 Mies makes this intent

20 Grey Room 20 explicit in his text in Frühlicht, and a drawing by Mies’s assistant Sergius Ruegenberg shows Mies studying the model from below with a sun disk pointed from above. Although not a part of this process, the low houses again make their mark in the sketch, as indicated by a small zigzag squiggle next to the skyscraper.48 The Mies archive contains another photograph, perhaps never published, of the model from the same outdoor session in the park, taken late at night without the surrounding houses. The previously transparent tower now appears as an opaque dark monolith. A few gleaming spots on the model’s vertical glazing stripes are the only traces of light in the picture. While totally opaque, the tower blends perfectly with its surroundings. While losing its luminosity, it gains a “dark transparency.” The night tower is as invisible as the morning one. This rare photograph suggests that the glass model was not only an experi- ment with the “interplay of light reflections,” as Mies declared in his

Left: Ludwig Mies van der Frühlicht article, but a play with the theatrical effect of nocturnal 49 Rohe. Glass Skyscraper impressions. Here photography, theater, and cinema are mixed with project, model, 1922. From science. By recording the changes in the appearance and mood of his Qualität 3, no. 5/12 (August 1922–March 1923), ed. Carl skyscraper at various times of the day, Mies seems to construct a scien- Ernst Hinkefuss. tiﬁc ﬁlm about the behavior of his building, just as plant physiologists Right: Sergius Ruegenberg. would do for the movements of a plant. The previously inert tower Drawing, 1923–1926. starts “coming to life” by putting together several sequences of photographs, as in an animated film project. However, the fact that here not all of the photographic documentation is published, that crucial parts are missing or have been concealed, makes this a project in “suspended animation.” More facts are indeed hidden even in the widely known daylight shots. The published reproductions—where the tower appears framed by the two sets of low houses in the foreground and by the (out of scale) trees in the background—are also apparently cropped. The Mies archive contains Mies’s exact measurements for the cropping of these and other prints.

Papapetros | Malicious Houses 21 Nevertheless, in one image reproduced in Cahiers d’Art in 1928, the photograph appears uncropped.50 The difference in this extended (and probably unauthorized) version is that it allows us to see more of the right side of the model, specifically the endings of the plaster houses, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. which exceed the horizontal wooden base of the model. This extension Glass Skyscraper project, of the frame is revealing because it affords the viewer a peek at the other model, 1922. The Mies van der Rohe Archive, Museum side of the houses, which does not exist! The photograph clearly shows of Modern Art, New York that the wood and plaster houses are not three-dimensional models but (MI 148).

22 Grey Room 20 two-dimensional props; they have no volume, only surface. They seem to be made specifically for the camera, and, although less photogenic than the glass skyscraper, they are equal partners in the cinematic ambience of the ensemble.51 Left, top: Ludwig Mies van The flatness of the houses did not prevent Mies from presenting them der Rohe. Glass Skyscraper project, model, 1922. From “live” in an exhibition on “International Architecture” organized by Cahier d’Art 3, no. 1 (August Walter Gropius in 1923, first in the Bauhaus in Weimar and later in sev- 1928), ed. Christian Zervos. eral other venues in Germany. In his correspondence with Gropius, Left, bottom: Detail. Mies gives elaborate directions for the display of his models and notes, Right: Ludwig Mies van der “In this case, I would like to draw your attention to the small plaster Rohe. Glass Skyscraper project model and Office models which seem to me absolutely necessary additions to my work.” Building project model, Mies initially insisted that he travel to Weimar to assemble the models 1923. Installation View. himself (“die Modelle selbst montieren”), but finally he sent one of his Exhibition Internationale Architektur, Bauhaus, assistants with parts of the model to assemble the latter with the parts Weimar 1923. Mies had already shipped.52 In a photograph of the installation in Weimar, the model of the glass skyscraper can be seen from a distance, once again with a row of small houses, forming a new group with the large model of Mies’s 1922–1923 design for a concrete office building. This last model, according to Werner Graef, was colored in red and gray stripes.53 The overall ensemble must have been a rather heterogeneous assemblage of 2-D surfaces and 3-D volumes, theater and cinema—a project suspended between different temporal frames and different degrees of real- ization. “I have tried it myself and the effect is excellent!” comments Mies to Gropius.54 If the effect was “excellent,” it was not because of the immediate visual response created in the spectator but because of the long-lasting “side effects” envisioned by the architect while re- arranging the frames of this assorted ensemble.

“His Name Is Herzog!” We do not know the identity of the traveling assistant who put Mies’s model together for Gropius’s show. Nevertheless, in an interview recorded in 1972, Mies’s former assistant, Werner Graef, divulges some crucial information about the 1922 model to Ludwig Glaeser, the first director of the Mies archive. At some point in the interview Glaeser starts discussing the glass sky-

Papapetros | Malicious Houses 23 scraper that Mies had put at his balcony, and in passing he mentions “the story about the sculptor whom Mies had hired” to make part of the model.55 “His name is Herzog!” Graef interrupts. “Herzog?” asks Glaeser. “Yes, he was an expressionist sculptor, Mies was with him in the Novembergruppe or so.” We can hear Glaeser gasping at this point as if this name was the key to a hitherto hidden world.56 To make sure there was no misunderstanding, Glaeser adds, “You mean the glass skyscraper . . . with the whole Berlin landscape.” “Yes, I know that pre- Top, left: Oswald Herzog. cisely!” insists Graef: “. . . I had met the man briefly through Mies . . . he Photoportrait of the Artist, [Herzog] had told me specifically that he [Mies] told him ‘make me a after 1920. piece of Friedrichstrasse, as it once was; it does not have to be exact, Top, right: Oswald Herzog. only in principle.’ And this he did very well!” “Yes, in the photographs Zeit und Raum, 1928. Cover. it looks very effective!” agrees Glaeser. “Like the stage-set for an expres- Center: Oswald Herzog. Enjoyment (Geniessen), sionist film . . . not the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari [sic], but it could have been 1920. Sculpture. something similar. It is interesting that now we know that man.” Bottom, right: Although little has been written about Oswald Herzog, the expres- Oswald Herzog. Zeit und sionist artist had several remarkable achievements. Born in 1881, Herzog Raum, 1928. Diagrams. was indeed a sculptor and a member of the expressionist circles, specifically the Arbeitsrat für Kunst and the Novembergruppe. His name figures next to Mies in Mies’s records of his activities in the Novembergruppe.57 Herzog also drew several covers and wrote articles for Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm and other expressionist journals.58 However, Herzog is mainly known for his sculpture, small statues with pro- grammatic titles such as Enjoyment, Escape, Ecstasy. He received critical attention both in Germany and abroad, and in 1930 was hailed by an English critic as the leading sculptor of the “German inorganic school.”59 As a Gesamtkunst artist Herzog not only constructed models for architects such as Mies but designed interior spaces, furniture, and façade elements for well- known architects such as the brothers Luckhardt (with whom Herzog did part of the design for the Haus Buchtal) as well as inner décor for Otto Bartning.60 In contrast to some of his more figurative sculpture, most of Herzog’s architectural designs are in a quasi-Cubist style reminiscent of the buildings of the Czech Cubists. While he did become a member of the Nazi party and worked for them until he disappeared

24 Grey Room 20 in 1941, his early sculpture was criticized by the National Socialists and included in the 1937 Entartete Kunst exhibit.61 Most important, Herzog was also the author of four books and numerous articles on art theory.62 He had in fact written an article in the very same issue of Frühlicht in which Mies’s glass skyscraper model (part of which we now know was made by Herzog) first appeared. Although he had no academic education and most of his ideas seem heavily indebted to Kandinsky, Herzog’s writings, even if not exactly original or lucid, are still significant. Herzog combines art theory with Lebensphilosophie, physics, relativity theory, and quantum mechanics: “Life is movement; movement is oscillations. . . . Oscillations are expressed in lines, which then create the expression of form.”63 The artist visualizes these oscillations as energy diagrams, which he then transfers to his sculptures. These abstract lines determine force relations between objects, which are understood as polarities of energy. Polarity of energy applies to Mies’s 1922 model. According to Herzog, artifacts including buildings are not mere things (Dinge); they are Gegenstände—that is, objects, bodies standing opposite or even against (gegen) one another. This oppositional quality in objects is similar to that in Vischer’s work. However, in Herzog this energy is not destructive or “malicious” but dialectical. Art, according to Herzog, is created “by the reliving, the post-experience of an object.” Art signifies “formation [Gestaltung] in the past.”64 The object becomes the fulcrum of dynamic temporal relations. From his chairs to his skyscrapers, Mies’s artifacts are precisely not mere “things” but rather relationship fulcrums much as Herzog would imagine that an architectural Gegenstand should be. Seen in this frame, the glass tower and the low houses of the 1922 glass model are not the arbitrary fragments of a dada-like collage; they are interdependent Gegenstände articulating a structural relationship. Herzog seems to have constructed not only a material but a theoretical frame for Mies’s project. In his article on “Space and Body Experience” published in Frühlicht, Herzog redefines all bodies as embodiments of a “soul” creating spatial energies. The article’s conclusion seems to announce Mies’s glass tower appearing a few pages later. Following certain references to the “space dynamic” of Gothic cathedrals, Herzog redefines artistic creation in quasi-animistic terms: “If you find a soul, then take materials and hide it inside them; it will give form to the bodies it uses.”65 Mies’s glass project seems to have such a hidden soul. The 1922 glass tower is indeed animated, but not because of the amoebic shape of its floor plan or the eerie façades of the surrounding houses. Mies’s tower is animated by the dynamic energy relationship between the two com-

Papapetros | Malicious Houses 25 ponents of his ensemble. Mies’s animation is a static form of movement—a vibration reduced in the edges, an animation produced not by anthropomorphic or physiognomic similarities like the ones traced by Murnau and Kubin but by abstract energy relations created by the juxtaposition of its volumes and surfaces, creating an almost magnetic decorum. The skyscraper and the low-rise houses behave like two isopolar magnets: they are both attracted and repulsed by one another. They are united and yet they stay at a distance as if their positions are firmly fixed by their opposing energy fields. The syndrome of attraction-repulsion is central to understanding the almost circular organization of Mies’s project (in some arrangements the houses are indeed placed almost as radii springing from the tower). While being the prototypical image of modernist alienation, Mies’s inorganic assemblage has the coherence of an organic community. In fact, the ensemble looks like a medieval village with a cathedral rising high in the center and low houses grazing around resembling “the derelict animals” portrayed in Meyrink’s Der Golem. Mies’s group model also looks like a family photograph with the parents surrounded by their sons, except that here it is one of the sons who poses as the father. Remember Freud in Totem and Taboo, “And in the act of devouring him [the father] they [the sons] accomplished their identification with him, each one of them acquiring a portion of his strength.”66 Mies’s Oedipal totem is the very legacy and redeeming executioner of his dying ancestors. In spite of its originality, the Miesian monolith is essentially a reconstructed vampire organism made out of the transubstantiation of the decaying matter of his fin-de-siècle progenitors. Yet in the familial relation enacted by the components of Mies’s ensemble there is a juxtaposition not only with the past or with the other but also with the present and the self. While Graef testified that the houses according to Mies’s intentions were generic models of the Berlin landscape (“Friedrichstrasse or so . . . only in principle”), some of them resemble the “nice classicist villas à la Behrens” (as Werner Graef called them in the same interview), such as the Haus Eichstaedt (1921–1922) or the Haus Mosler (1924–1926) that Mies was still building while he was working on his modernist reinvention, all of them with slanting brick tile roofs. One of Herzog’s plaster houses in the center of the longer Left: Ludwig Mies van row distinguishes itself from the decrepit entourage by its highly pointed der Rohe. Glass Skyscraper project, model, 1922. Detail. roof and a round window at the top. The circular opening is similar to Right: Ludwig Mies van the occuli in the classicist façades of Mies’s signature design for the der Rohe. House for Alois house of the philosopher Alois Riehl built in 1914. It is as if part of the Riehl, 1914.

26 Grey Room 20 miniature houses of the 1922 model by Herzog was created by the decapitation of Mies’s earlier body of work, as if Mies were bidding a Faustian farewell (à la Nosferatu) to his earlier career, while recycling or even cannibalizing his earlier production. In 1923 the skyscraper design reemerges in two drawings made for the cover of G, the review coedited by Mies and Hans Richter.67 Here the low houses appear as a mere black rectangle devoid of any graphic details. This is the ﬁrst time that the low houses were converted from plaster models to drawings, and it represents a significant change. It connotes that the model articulated now in G is that of pure relationship, a relationship whose perpetuity is even linguistic. The vertical tower and the horizontal row of low houses construct a capital L—the L of Gesta-L-tung, a future-in-formation. According to some of Mies’s later collaborators, the ultimate realiza- tion of his 1922 glass projects happened not in Berlin but in New York more than thirty years later with the design of the Seagram Building.68 Here, too, several three- or four-story buildings occupied the surrounding blocks, the most well-known being the three-story racket club facing the skyscraper on Park Avenue, because of which Mies had to renegotiate the position of his tower. The capital L is again present, in more than one way; it almost turns into a “hook” via which the tower wedges its connection with the rest of the city fabric. From the interior, the entire glass entrance appears to act as a frame projecting the historicist architecture across the street. Here we can imagine how the Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. houses represented by the plaster models of the 1922 project might have Drawing for the cover of G (1923), ed. Mies and Hans looked when seen from inside the glass tower. The visual or cinematic Richter. effects of the architecture are not limited to the spectacular qualities of the exterior but extend to the functional mechanism of the interior. The entire building becomes both the screen and the apparatus of projection. Seen in that light, the 1922 glass model is an early cinematographic machine, creatively engineered for the projection of other architectures.

Parallel Action Yet instead of the objects (Gegenstände) opposing the Seagram, one has to go back to the cinematic lineup of houses opposing the glass model of 1922 to fully comprehend the spec- trum of the Miesian projection. More than one commentator has already compared the low “shabby” houses of the 1922 project to Poelzig’s

Papapetros | Malicious Houses 27 Jewish houses for the Golem film set.69 Further, Herzog’s plaster sets seem to be constructed of the same melting matter as Kubin’s demoli- tion city of Perle. They have a malicious grin through their windows similar to Meyrink’s houses of the Jewish ghetto. The similarities extend to Nosferatu’s deceptively slanting Lübeck warehouses, with their brick façades and stubby gables. Significantly, Murnau’s Nosferatu was released in Berlin in March 1922, only a few months before Mies’s project appeared in Frühlicht and at precisely the time when Mies and Herzog should have been preparing the model for its photographic reproduction. Whether Mies had seen Murnau’s film or not, the temporal coin- cidence in the staging of both performances is telling; their formal correlation even more so. Remember Mies’s nocturnal view of his glass tower gleaming among the tree shadows. Rising like a monolith inside a forest, the dark glass building parallels the profile of Count Orlok’s ruinous castle on top of the Carpathians, which is first seen in a night sequence in Murnau’s film. Like Nosferatu, Mies’s glass tower acquires a “second life” at night. In Der Golem Meyrink describes how buildings would become more powerful at night when the evening put “a veil upon their features.”70 Mies’s tower benefits in agency by a similar veiling of its glass fabric. What is lost in transparency is gained in animation. Concerning view angles: The shot of Mies’s skyscraper “von unten gesehen” in Frühlicht is similar to the famous take of Nosferatu walk- ing on the ship deck shot from the ship cabin and therefore also “seen from below.” The worm’s-eye view in both camera angles invokes the same terror of the sublime. Their abnormally enlarged proportions qualify both structures as an Ungeheuer—a monster of immense dimensions. The folds of the vampire’s cloak simulate the curvilinear wings of the glass tower, both fabrics enveloping a substance that is Left: Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. allegedly immaterial. Dir. F.W. Murnau, 1922. Still. In addition to similarities in setting and ambience, Mies’s and Right: Ludwig Mies van Murnau’s projects share certain syntactical similarities concerning the der Rohe. Glass Skyscraper use of the frame. Consider the placement of both sets of model houses project, model, 1922.

28 Grey Room 20 behind a window frame. Mies’s model of the glass tower is framed by the window of his Berlin office where the model was suspended in order to be photographed from below. In Nosferatu, the window of Ellen’s house in Wisborg, as reconstructed by Albin Grau in his studio in Berlin, frames the house replicas of the Lübeck warehouses that were propped behind it. In Mies the window frame was cropped to give the illusion of an outdoor setting; in Murnau it was exposed and flanked with curtains to enhance the illusion of a domestic interior. Both frames, visible or not in the ﬁnal image, create an illusion; they frame a projection, a picture that does not yet exist. The frame has one further function: the rear edge of the window frame penetrates Nosferatu’s body while he dissolves during his transfiguration scene. For a short moment, frame and content appear to merge into an anamorphic assemblage similar to the visions of cubist painters where bodies in the state of extinction are (inter)penetrated by building frames. In the photographs of Mies’s model the low houses present a similar fusion with the glass building when their own frame is pierced by the tower grid. Their blurred outlines, not the luminous ripple of “the light reﬂections” envisioned by Mies, are what we see projected through the glass. However filmic, transubstantiated, or “spiritualized” Mies’s and Murnau’s objects may appear, they also have a physical side; for example, think of the carnivorous plant and the transparent amoeba shown in Nosferatu. Mies was an avid reader of natural philosophy (we know he had almost all of Raoul Francé’s works in his library).71 In its very texture, Mies’s glass tower also resembles the transparent substance of a polyp as conceived in Francé’s biomechanical plasmatics: Like an amoeba, the skyscraper is infinitely divisible into units and modules but is still living in each and every sector. Its innovative mushroom columns represent the evolutionary moment when the amoebic organism starts turning into a vertebrate by acquiring a spine.72 “Unicellular organisms! Sometimes green or golden brown, and then they are harm- less like plants. Sometimes transparent like plants, for these are voracious as wolves, and are the tigers of the world . . . the most voracious carnivora!”73 As Francé attests, transparency is murderous. Like the amoeba of the ego described by Freud in his essay “On Narcissism,” transparent creatures extend their pseudopodia in a seemingly friendly gesture only to capture their victims and throw away their empty car- casses in return.74 In other words, transparent objects are lethal because of the ambivalence of their extensibility—their illusory power of projection. Like the transparent aggressors of Francé, Mies’s glass tower transgresses the magnetic field that isolates it and devours the insect- like houses that surround it. But by doing so, it also inherits something

Papapetros | Malicious Houses 29 of the houses’ venomous maliciousness—the sleeping poltergeist buried in Friedrichstrasse threatening to return. “Architecture . . . is an expression of man’s ability to assert himself and master his surroundings,” Mies said.75 From Murnau’s Wisborg to Meyrink’s Prague, and from Mies’s Berlin to Freud’s modernist Vienna or the primitive jungle of Totem and Taboo, the basic presupposition that the early twentieth century has bequeathed to us is that we are living in a “hostile external world,” that any relation of human subjects to external objects—including buildings—can be only in terms of mastery or destruction (which ultimately proves mutual for both). On the one side expands the two-dimensional space of the infinite projection of narcissism and magic—Mies’s “play of light reflections” on the mirroring surface of his glass Commendatore; and underneath that side (Kubin’s The Other Side) lies the 3-D horror of the “void”—the muddy pond inside the empty Friedrichstrasse plot. Animation is the floatation device used to navigate between these two liquid domains. Film critics observe that Murnau’s Nosferatu is designed upon the narrative principles of parallel action: Nosferatu voyages by ship to Wisborg; his agent foresees his arrival; doctor Bulwer demonstrates his carnivorous specimens; while Hutter races back to his hometown and Ellen waits for him at the shore. All these different scenes, incomplete or nonsensical when seen individually, become meaningful once reviewed as part of a flowing montage where every image portends several inci- dents unfolding through the narrative. Could it be that the principle of “parallel action” permeates not only the film’s story but also the history of architecture? Could it be that the malicious houses of Kubin and Meyrink, the disintegrating façades of Poelzig and Murnau, and Herzog’s plaster models opposite Mies’s glass tower are parts of the same narrative unfolding in parallel action and on multiple levels, just like the ambiguous perspective described in Murnau’s final window scene? In one of the pages in the typescript of Nosferatu, Murnau adds the instruction “With window-frame!” (Mit Fensterkreuz!)—asking for cross-like glazing bars to be put on top of the shot of the Wisborg houses when the litany of coffins parades in front of them.76 Think then of Mies’s own framing techniques, from the shooting of the 1922 glass model to the glazing strips of the Seagram tower. A frame must always be added—an external limit in a perspective that is practically infinite. The two projects describe two parallel frames: Parallel to the curtained window of Murnau’s interior rises the curtain wall of Mies’s glass exterior, ethereal and phantasmatic like one of Adolphe Appia’s Valhallas for Wagner’s Rheingold. The folds in Murnau’s curtained window transform into the ripple of reflections in Mies’s curtain wall. In the window opening from Nosferatu a familiar frame reveals a set of

30 Grey Room 20 uncanny, phantom-like houses. In Mies’s glass tower of the same year the curtain is closed: the phantasmatic uncanniness has been internal- ized inside the frame. The transparency of Mies’s glass tower is both “literal and phenomenal,” as is the transparency of Nosferatu during his final death scene. The space delineated by Count Orlok’s final gesture has proved impossible. The opening left by his disappearance is closed; the cinematic perspective is once more proven false, a mere animation trick. Nosferatu never returns to his ruinous castle in the Carpathians, as Murnau’s last shot would have us believe. Depleted and no longer malicious, the frail vampire finds support in the architecture of the window. Before he turns into smoke, he turns into architecture, and then he dis- appears. He effaces both the architecture and himself with a single gesture. But as Murnau’s close-up shot reveals, Nosferatu does not disappear in front of the window; he vanishes inside the window frame—he slips out of the picture, yet he still sleeps inside the window pane.

Papapetros | Malicious Houses 31 Notes Versions of this paper have been presented at the University of California at Berkeley, Princeton and Harvard Universities, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Research on the topic was supported by the Getty Research Institute, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and Princeton University. For comments I am grateful to my dissertation committee, Anthony Vidler, T.J. Clark, Martin Jay, Anton Kaes, Kaja Silverman, and Kathleen James-Chakraborty; my colleagues at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the director Phyllis Lambert, Stephen Bann, and Martin Bressani; as well as the editors of Grey Room. Photographic material is reproduced with the permission of the Mies Archive at MoMA. Unless noted otherwise, translations from German texts are by the author.

1. “Scene 178 (Ellen’s room): Nosferatu on his knees, supporting himself with one hand on the ground. He raises the other on the direction of the sun to shield himself from the light that brings him death.” See Murnau’s annotated copy of Henrik Galeen’s original manuscript in Lotte H. Eisner, Murnau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 270. 2. The story is well known: Bram Stoker’s widow Florence not only refused the rights to her husband’s novel to Murnau’s producers but also managed to have most of the copies of Nosferatu destroyed after its release. This was one of the more pragmatic rea- sons behind Count Orlok’s transcendental “death by the light” rather than by stake as in the original version of the story. However, Murnau’s close-up showing the window frame piercing the vampire’s heart suggests the window taking its revenge on Stoker’s widow. For the afterlife of Nosferatu, including its clandestine survival as The Twelfth Hour in France, see “The Riddle of Nosferatu,” in Eisner, Murnau, 108–119. For the film’s various restoration projects, see Roy Ashbury, Nosferatu (London: York Press 2001), 46–47. 3. Eric Rohmer, L’organisation de l’espace dans le Faust de Murnau (Paris, Union Générale d’Editions, 1977). 4. The festive midnight affair that preceded the premiere screening of Murnau’s Nosferatu on 4 March 1922 in Berlin started with “a spoken prologue inspired by Goethe’s Faust.” Ashbury, Nosferatu, 43–44. Could this also mean that Nosferatu is a prologue to Murnau’s own Faust, released three years later? The two ﬁlms seemingly communicate by way of parallel framing devices that project the message of each ﬁlm outside its indi- vidual narrative frame. 5. See Henry van de Velde, “Die Linie,” in Essays (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1910); and August Schmarsow, Zur Frage nach dem Malerischen, Beiträge zur Ästhetik der bildenden Künste, Vol. 1 (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1896). For this and other bibliographic sugges- tions and editorial comments I am indebted to Rupinder Singh. 6. Ashbury, Nosferatu, 42–43. 7. See, for example, Die alte Profanarchitektur Lübecks, ed. Max Metzger (Lübeck: C. Coleman, 1911). 8. For comparisons between Murnau’s shots and art historical imagery, see Luciano Berriatúa, Los Proverbios chinos de F.W. Murnau (Madrid: Instituto de la Cinematografía y de las Artes Audiovisuales, 1990); and Eva M.J. Schmid, “Magie der Zeichen; Murnau und die bildende Kunst,” in Klaus Kreimeier, Die Metaphysik des Dekors: Raum, Architektur und Licht im klassischen deutschen Stummfilm (Marburg: F.W. Murnau Gesellschaft, 1994), 49–79. 9. Gustav Meyrink, The Golem, ed. E.F. Bleiber, trans. Madge Pemberton (1928;

32 Grey Room 20 reprint, Dover: New York, 1986), 16. The novel was originally published serially in the periodical Die Weissen Blätter during 1913–1914 and in book form in 1915 by Kurt Wolff Verlag, Leipzig. 10. Meyrink, The Golem, 15. 11. See Ingrid Gloc, Architektur der Jahrhundertwende in Prag; Zur Geschichte der Architektur zwischen Ekletizismus und Moderne im Spiegel der Sanierung der Prager Altstadt (Nürnberg: VDG, 1994). 12. For a reading of the illustrations in Meyrink’s Golem by Hugo Steiner-Prag, Alfred Kubin, and later artists inspired by the novel, see Robert Karle, “Nicht ist phantastischer als die Wirklichkeit; Illustrationen zu Gustav Meyrink’s Der Golem,” Die Kunst 8 (August 1988): 626–633. 13. Alfred Kubin, Die andere Seite; Ein fantastischer Roman (1909) (Berlin: Georg Müller, 1920). Available in English as The Other Side, trans. Denver Lindley (New York: Crown Publishers, 1967). 14. Kubin, The Other Side, 24. 15. Meyrink, The Golem, 15. 16. R.H. Francé, Bios: Die Gesetze der Welt, Vol. 2 (Stuttgart: Walter Seifert Verlag, 1923), 109. The two-volume work presents Francé’s comprehensive theory of “biotechnics,” expanding from galaxies to marine microorganisms, and also includes comparisons with machine design and architecture. For the importance of Francé’s biological theories for the architects of the Bauhaus, see the pioneering study of Oliver Botar, Prolegomena to the Study of Biomorphic Modernism: Biocentrism, László Moholy-Nagy’s “New Vision” and Ernö Kállai’s Bioromantik (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1998), 394–493. 17. Francé, Bios, 108. 18. Although Meyrink’s Golem has few commonalities with Wegener’s Golem, the latter has several minute connections with Murnau’s Nosferatu. For example, Henrik Galeen, the scriptwriter of Nosferatu, had cowritten and directed the first film version of The Golem in 1913. When Nosferatu appeared, critics noted that Murnau’s film “could have come out from Wegener’s workshop.” Ashbury, Nosferatu, 61. 19. Meyrink, The Golem, 15. 20. Alfred Kubin, “Aus Albanien,” in Fünfzig Zeichnungen (Munich: Albert Langen, 1923). The book is a collection of Kubin’s drawings for the review Der Simplizissimus. 21. Darwin explained the leaning forward or backward in animal body posture according to the principle of antithesis: While defending themselves, cats and dogs turn all parts of their bodies, such as ears and tails, inward while when they attack they project the same body parts forward. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 122, 241–247. 22. Among the “anomalies” detected by Lombroso on the heads of “born criminals” were “the oblique eyelids, a Mongolian characteristic” that he illustrated with the portrait photograph of a young Italian criminal with a frowning expression. Gina Lombroso, Criminal Man: According to the Classifications of Cesare Lombroso (New York and London: G. P. Putnam, 1911), 14, fig. 4. 23. See, for example, The Testimony of the Hartford Quakers for the Man Christ Jesus: Vindicated from the Malicious Slanders, Perversions, Confusions, Impertinencies and Idle Quibling of William Haworth an Independent-Preacher (London: s.n. 1676). 24. Friedrich Theodor Vischer, Auch Einer; Eine Reisebekanntschaft (1878; reprint, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1923). 25. The Middle German word Tuc can also mean quick movement, dirty trick, guile,

Papapetros | Malicious Houses 33 malice, prank, habit, kick, and blow. See Friedrich Kluge, Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (Berlin: Gruyter Verlag, 1989). 26. Vischer, Auch Einer, 19. 27. Vischer’s son Robert Vischer used the term empathy (Einfühlung) in his essay Über das optische Formgefühl (Tübingen: H. Credner, 1873). 28. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1950), 61. 29. Kubin, The Other Side, 166. 30. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 158; and Paul Mebes, Um 1800: Architektur und Handwerk im letzten Jahrhundert ihrer traditionellen Entwicklung, 2nd ed. by Walter Curt Behrendt (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1918), xi, 3. 31. Other architectural authors refer to historicist architecture as “the creations of our fathers and grandfathers.” See the preface in Architektur von 1750–1850, ed. André Lambert and Eduard Stahl (Berlin: Wasmuth, 1903–1912). 32. For example, the fourth volume of Paul Schultze-Naumburg’s Kulturarbeiten, on city buildings, included photographs of the same Prague structures caricatured in Meyrink and Kubin. Paul Schultze-Namburg, Kulturarbeiten, Vol. 4 (Munich: G.D.W. Callwey, 1909), 37, 122, 123. 33. See, for example, photographs of monuments in Mebes, Um 1800, 182–189. 34. On the inﬂuence of the Heimatschutz movement on German architectural design see Christian Otto, “Modern Movement and Historical Continuity: The Heimatschutz discourse in Germany,” Art Journal 43, no. 2 (Summer 1983): 148–157. 35. Freud writes these words in his essay “On Transience” (written after but published before “Mourning and Melancholia”), where the psychoanalyst comments on the “building” activity that has to be taken up to replace what “the war has destroyed.” See, Sigmund Freud, “On Transience” (1915–1916), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 14, ed. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1957), 307. 36. Meyrink, The Golem, 28–29; and Meyrink, Der Golem, 36–37. 37. See Bruno Taut, ed., Frühlicht (Berlin) 1, no. 4 (1922): 122–124. 38. For a complete study of the competition, see the catalogue accompanying the exhibition organized by the Bauhaus-Archiv in October 1988, Der Schrei nach dem Turmhaus; Der Ideenwettbewerb Hochhaus am Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse Berlin 1921–1922 (Berlin: Bauhaus-Archiv, 1988). For Mies’s entry, see 106–111. 39. Werner Graef, interview by Ludwig Glaeser, 17 September 1972, tape recording, in Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), Montreal, Ludwig Glaeser’s Research Papers on Mies van der Rohe (1968–1980) (hereinafter referred to as “Glaeser Papers”), Box 3, Item 4. The transcript of this interview is in Box 4, Item 1, 31. 40. Graef made a similar claim in a letter to Ludwig Glaeser dated 6 July 1968. Wolf Tegethoff, “From Obscurity to Maturity: Mies van der Rohe’s Breakthrough to Modernism,” in Mies van der Rohe: Critical Essays, ed. Franz Schulze (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 45. 41. “Geschäftshaus- und Fabrik-Bauten. Ein Rundgang durch die Ausstellung des Geraer Kunstvereins im Städtischen Museum,” newspaper review, in CCA, Glaeser Papers, Box 5, Item 2. 42. Arthur Drexler notices the same inconsistencies between the proposed second scheme and the Friedrichstrasse plan. See Arthur Drexler, ed., The Mies van der Rohe Archive (New York: Garland Publishers, 1986), 62. Wold Tegethoff opines that Mies’s drawings “point to an authentic site,” although “attempts to locate the sight in a 1920’s

34 Grey Room 20 map of the city [Berlin] have so far proved fruitless.” See Tegethoff, “From Obscurity to Maturity,” 44. 43. The three-page article contained photographs of the model and a text titled “Hochhäuser” by Carl Gotfrid. Carl Ernst Hinkefuss, ed., Qualität (Internationale Propaganda-Zeitschrift für Qualitätserzeugnisse) 3, no. 5/12 (August 1922–March 1923): 63–66. From Mies’s business correspondence from that period, we learn that Mies had ordered one hundred and fifty exemplars of this article, apparently to distribute as pamphlets. See, Mies’s correspondence in the Library of Congress, abstracts included in CCA, Glaeser Papers, Box 1, Item 4, 12. 44. See Drexler, The Mies van der Rohe Archive, 62; and Graef, interview. 45. Series of photographic prints, in Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Mies van der Rohe Archive, 16.571–16.578. 46. As Wolf Tegethoff has shown, the iron cupola projected in the background can be identified as the top of the Marine Panorama, which was close to the exhibition hall where Mies’s model was first exhibited in the summer of 1922 in the annual Grosse Berliner Kunstausstellung. See Tegethoff, “From Obscurity to Maturity,” 43. 47. “My experiments with a glass model helped me along the way and I soon recog- nized that by employing glass, it is not an effect of light and shadow that one wants to achieve, but a rich interplay of light reflections. . . . The curves were determined by the need to illuminate the interior, the effect of the building mass in the urban context, and finally the play of the desired light reflection.” Fritz Neumeyer, The Artless World: Mies van de Rohe on the Building Art, trans. Mark Jarzombek (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1991), 240, quoting Mies’s 1922 Frühlicht article. 48. The drawing dates from between 1923 and 1926. It is reproduced in Dietrich Neumann, “Three Early Projects by Mies van der Rohe,” Perspecta 27 (1992): 97; and in Detlef Mertins, “Architectures of Becoming: Mies van der Rohe and the Avant-Garde,” in Mies in Berlin, ed. Terence Riley and Barry Bergdoll (New York: MoMA, 2001), 119. 49. This of course goes against Mies’s own later statements about his 1922 glass model in which (stretching the limits of Freudian negation) he denies any “expressionist intention” or any relation with either Hugo Häring (with whom Mies was shar- ing an office at the time) or Hans Arp (who was in Hans Richter’s circle together with Mies): “I tried to work with smaller areas of glass and adjusted my strips of glass to the light and then pushed them into a (flat horizontal) plasticine plane. That gave me the idea of the curve, and if people now say that I got it from Arp, I can tell it had nothing to do with him. I had no expressionist intention, I wanted to show the skeleton, and I thought that the best way would be simply to put a glass skin on.” “Mies Speaks: ‘I Do Not Design Buildings, I Develop Buildings,’ Architectural Review 144 (December 1968): 451–452; and Spaeth, Mies van der Rohe, 39. 50. Cahiers d’Art 3, no. 1 (August 1928): 34. The original print used for this publication has recently resurfaced in the archives of the Centre George Pompidou, together with all other photographic materials from the archives of Cahiers d’Art edited by Christian Zervos. 51. The houses were reproduced this way in a 1985 reconstruction of the model for Mies’s centenary exhibition in 1986 at MoMA. 52. See the correspondence between Mies and Walter Gropius between 4 June and 27 July 1923, in Library of Congress, Mies’s business correspondence, CCA, Glaeser Papers, Box 1, Item 4. 53. See Graef, interview. The photograph from the Weimar exhibition is reproduced

Papapetros | Malicious Houses 35 in Tegethoff, “From Obscurity to Maturity,” fig. 16; Neumann, “Three Early Projects,” fig. 15; and Mertins, fig. 16. 54. Mies van der Rohe to Walter Gropius, 11 June 1923, CCA, Glaeser Papers, Box 1, Item 4. 55. Graef, interview. 56. In a letter to Glaeser dated 6 July 1968, Graef had mentioned that Mies had the street façades molded by a sculptor, but Graef had not mentioned the artist’s name. See Tegethoff, “From Obscurity to Maturity,” 45. 57. See “Inventory and transcription of Mies van der Rohe’s correspondence including special files on Novembergruppe and BDA,” in CCA, Glaeser Papers, Box 1, Item 6. 58. Oswald Herzog, “Der abstrakte Expressionismus in der bildenden Kunst,” Der Sturm 10, no. 2 (April/May 1919): 29; and Oswald Herzog, “Abstraktion in der bildenden Kunst,” Der Kunsttopf 1, no. 2 (1920): 22–25; as well as numerous covers and illustrations in Der Sturm and other journals. 59. The critic had apparently read T.E. Hulme’s Speculations or Herbert Read’s introduction to the English edition of Wilhelm Worringer’s Form in Gothic, both of which had references to the “inorganic” ambience of German art. See Stanley Casson, “Oswald Herzog and the German Artists of the Inorganic School,” in Stanley Casson, XXTH Century Sculptors (London: Oxford University Press, 1930), 77–87. 60. For Herzog’s collaboration with the Luckhardt brothers, see H. de Fries, ed., Moderne Villen und Landhäuser (Berlin: Wasmuth Verlag, 1925), 80–85. For Herzog’s collaboration with Otto Bartning, including his incomplete Sternkirche (1922) and other projects, see Haus Wylerberg: Ein Landhaus des Expressionismus von Otto Bartning; Architektur und Kulturelles Leben (1920–1926), exh. cat. (Nijmegen, Holland: Nijmegen Museum, 1988), 84–96. 61. The only article published about Herzog (without mentioning the connection with Mies) is the recent account by Klara Drenker-Nagels, “Rhythmus und Dynamik; Oswald Herzog—Ein expressionistischer Bildhauer,” Weltkunst (Munich) 72, no. 3 (March 2002): 397–399. 62. Oswald Herzog, Die stilistische Entwicklung der bildenden Künste: Eine Einführung in das Wesen der Kunst (Berlin: Hause, 1912); Oswald Herzog, Der Rythmus in Kunst und Natur: Das Wesen des Rhythmus und die Expression in der Natur und in der Kunst (Berlin: Steglitz Verlag, 1914); Oswald Herzog, Plastik: Sinfonie des Lebens (Berlin: Twardy, 1921); and Oswald Herzog, Zeit und Raum: Das Absolute in Kunst und Natur (Berlin: Ottens Verlag 1928). 63. Herzog, Der Rythmus, 5. 64. Herzog, “Der abstrakte Expressionismus,” 29. 65. Oswald Herzog, “Raum- und Körpererlebnis,” Bruno Taut, ed., Frühlicht (Berlin) 1, no. 4 (1922): 104–105. 66. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 142. 67. G: Material zur elementaren Gestaltung 3 (June 1924). 68. “It is in fact impossible to reproduce this building because it was never produced itself. . . . You can also say that Mies did do this building some thirty years later when he did the Seagram Building in New York.” Thus Gene Summers stated his opposition to a proposal for the actual building of Mies’s 1921 design in the still vacant Friedrichstrasse plot. See Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: Hochhaus am Bahnhof Friedrichstrasse: Doku- mentation des Mies-van-der-Rohe-Symposiums in der Neuen Nationalgalerie, Berlin, ed. Fritz Neumeyer (Berlin: Wasmuth, 1993), 73.

36 Grey Room 20 69. See Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, 59; and Andres Lepik, “Mies and Photomontage, 1910–38,” in Mies in Berlin, ed. Riley and Bergdoll, 326. 70. Meyrink, The Golem, 16. 71. Fritz Neumeyer reproduces Mies’s notes with his requests to a book dealer for numerous of Francé’s titles. Neumeyer, The Artless World, 102–106. On the relationship between Mies’s architecture and Francé’s writings, see Detlef Mertins, “Living in a Jungle: Mies, Organic Architecture and the Art of City Building,” in Mies in America, ed. Phyllis Lambert (Montréal, New York: CCA, Whitney, H. Abrams, 2001), 598–602. 72. In a collage by Kurt Schwitters the worm’s-eye view of Mies’s 1922 glass tower appears parallel to the photograph of a bone. Kurt Schwitters, ed., Merz 4 (July 1923). 73. Raoul H. Francé, Plants as Inventors (New York: A. and C. Boni, 1923), 26–27, originally published as Die Pﬂanze als Erﬁnder (Stuttgart: Kosmos, 1920). 74. In his essay “On Narcissism,” Freud describes how the ego sends out “the ema- nations of its libido” to other objects of the external world but then withdraws them and withholds the “original libidinal cathexis . . . much as the body of an amoeba is related to the pseudopodia which it puts out.” Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” in Standard Edition, Vol. 14, ed. Strachey, 75. 75. Neumeyer, The Artless World, xi, quoting Mies van der Rohe, “Wir stehen in der Wende der Zeit: Baukunst als Ausdruck geistiger Entscheidung,” Innendekoration 39 (1928): 262. 76. See Eisner, Murnau, 116, 263.

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