6. Into Exile: with Gropius and Wachsmann to the New World
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MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies 6. Into Exile: With Gropius and Wachsmann to the New World Walter Gropius, Konrad Wachsmann Published on: Apr 23, 2021 License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0) MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies 6. Into Exile: With Gropius and Wachsmann to the New World National Socialism and the Exodus of Talent Upon the assumption of power by the National Socialists in Germany in 1933, there followed an event unprecedented in the history of modern civilization, an event whose ultimate dimensions of personal tragedy have tended to overshadow and obscure its enormous cultural import in all fields of creative human endeavor, and not least in architecture. We are talking of the exodus, voluntary or enforced, of the cream of German intellectual and creative talent, its widespread dispersion throughout the world, and the cultural dislocation and the cultural crossfertilization inherent in this dispersion, in what Sibyl Moholy-Nagy wryly called “the Diaspora”—a term normally applied to the exile of the Jews, but which she here chose to give the wider connotation of the “scattering of the faithful.”1 The cruel weight of Nazi policy and practice fell first, and most heavily, upon the Jews. By 1933 the first measures had been taken “to foster Jewish emigration from Germany and Austria,” which by 1941 were to result in more than half a million leaving.2 Some of these “measures” were cooperative, if not disinterested, as we have seen in the case of the Palestine prefabs; others were of a more coercive and increasingly brutal nature. As a resuit of these oppressive measures, wrote historian Cecil Roth, “within little more than a year upward of seventy thousand German Jews had left the country. The majority were not artisans or merchants, as might normally have been expected, but professional men—University professors, physicians, surgeons, lawyers, art experts, writers, journalists: in many instances men of international reputation, who had given up their best years and devotion to Germany’s service. By the end of 1933 there can have been few countries in the world where some famous German-Jewish scientist or scholar was not at work.”3 But it was not only the Jews who were leaving Germany. Their massive exodus was accompanied by a sporadic flow of emigration, of smaller proportions, it is true, but of tremendous cultural significance, of German gentiles who found “Nazi Germany intolerable. These were the artists and intellectuals, usually of liberal or socialist political persuasion or association, who for motives of conscience, professional frustration, or the sheer necessity of survival in the face of such a harsh regime, chose, or were forced, to leave their native land and culture and expose themselves to the “agonies of the creative mind made homeless.”4 2 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies 6. Into Exile: With Gropius and Wachsmann to the New World Prominent among both groups of exiles—Jewish and non-Jewish—were the architects, and especially those architects who had constituted the vanguard of the Modern Movement. There were many reasons for this. As we have already seen, in the closing years of the Weimar Republic unemployment among architects was endemic as the effects of worldwide depression were increasingly felt in the German building industry. Opportunities for employment were manipulated, and in selected instances further restricted, when the Nazis came to power. Jewish architects were excluded from professional practice by the discriminatory membership requirements of the regulatory body, the Reichskammer der bildenen Künste; radical architects of non-Jewish origin, on the other hand, although not “legally deprived of the right to practice . nevertheless received no new commissions after 1933.”5 Among the Nazi ideologists, although there was far from a consensus on this issue, there was a growing tendency to join with such architectural reactionaries as Schultz- Naumburg and his circle, in their attack on the new architecture. The Modern Movement, as a facet of the International Style, had generated a considerable amount of hostility in chauvinistic, conservative circles; this view was expressed not only in the party press but in professional journals. Many of the new architecture’s most prominent achievements moreover were in the arena of public housing, cooperative ventures in socially inclined municipalities, and in attacking the architecture, the Nazi propagandists were attempting to denigrate, if not demolish, these potent symbols of socialist achievement. But this hostility was directed even more to the architects than to the architecture. Most of the prominent architects of the avant-garde were, in Nazi eyes, irredeemably tarred with the socialist (hence, “Bolshevist”) brush. The Modern Movement’s left- wing origins, in the Novembergruppe and the Arbeitsrat für Kunst, had not been forgotten, nor forgiven, by the National Socialists. Der Ring, that organization formed by Gropius, May, Taut and Wagner in 1926 to protect the position of the modernists within the architectural profession, was looked on with deep suspicion, especially due to its international links through CIAM, as an organization subversive in the political as well as the artistic sense. And then there was the Russian connection.6 Many of the leading German architects had always expressed an open interest in, if not a sympathy for, the experimental new society in the Soviet Union. In the 1920s and continuing into the early 30s, the radical German architects—Gropius, Mendelsohn, Meyer, Poelzig, Breuer—had actively participated in Russian competitions and projects: the Leningrad factory of Mendelsohn, the Palace of the Soviets competition, the Kharkov State Theater. Then, probably most damning of all, from the Nazi point of view, was the 3 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies 6. Into Exile: With Gropius and Wachsmann to the New World actual presence in the Soviet Union of Ernst May, Hannes Meyer, and Bruno Taut, with their teams of German architects, directly participating with their Russian colleagues in the design and planning of the cities of the socialist “new world.” Of these architects very few in fact were Jewish, but it helped in their vilification if the racial label (hateful in Nazi eyes) were falsely attached to all of them (if May, for instance, were caricatured as a Bolshevist, complete with Jewish skullcap), so that a hysterical propaganda campaign would be waged against the so-called “Jewish-Bolshevist” nature of radical architecture and its principal proponents. Under this intense pressure, economic, political, racist and architecturally reactionary, the exodus of the German architects began.7 Erich Mendelsohn, sensitive to peril and doubly vulnerable as a Jew, was one of the first to leave Hitler’s Germany, and in 1933 moved to London. There he was joined, within the next few years, by Walter Gropius, and his former Bauhaus colleagues Marcel Breuer and Moholy-Nagy; by the architectural historians Nikolaus Pevsner and Rudolf Wittkower; by Arthur Korn and several other architects, in a small but highly esteemed coterie of architectural émigrés.8 London, for many of these, was a congenial but temporary way station before threatening war clouds and beckoning opportunities drew them on to the United States. There, Bauhaus design teachers Josef Albers and Herbert Bayer, and photographer Walter Peterhans, had already settled, and by 1938 they were to be joined not only by the Bauhaus people from London but by Mies van der Rohe and Ludwig Hilberseimer, who, together with Martin Wagner, had left Berlin to emigrate to America. Erich Mendelsohn, who had personal ties and professional connections with the land of Israel (including the Schocken family for whom he had built a notable chain of department stores in Germany) commuted between England and Palestine before settling down for a few highly creative years in Jerusalem. In Palestine there had by this time gathered an extraordinary concentration of architectural talent, the only group of exiles from Germany who were at once no longer in exile but at home, emotionally speaking, if not culturally. Alexander Klein, pioneer analyst of functional dwellings and a major collaborator in the development of the Siedlung, came to Haifa where he taught for many years at Israel’s Institute of Technology, the Technion. Also to Haifa came Adolf Rading, a non-Jew, after he and Hans Scharoun had been dismissed from their posts at the Breslau Academy. Bauhaus graduates Arieh Sharon, Shmuel Mestechkin, and Munyo Weinraub returned home to join a large number of recently emigrated German-Jewish architects of advanced ideas, such as Joseph 4 MIT Press Open Architecture and Urban Studies 6. Into Exile: With Gropius and Wachsmann to the New World Klarwein and Heinz Rau. Little wonder that, even till today, Haifa and Tel Aviv have areas that are almost museum precincts of “Bauhaus vernacular.” Of the German architects in Russia, all were disillusioned by the deteriorating situation as Stalin ever more firmly seized the reins of power. Meyer returned to Switzerland. May and Bruno Taut were refused reentry permits into Germany but left Russia nevertheless, May eventually to spend many years in East Africa, Taut to live, until his death in 1938, in Istanbul. This outflow of architectural talent, which we have briefly sketched out here, had two immediate, connected, and predictable results. The first was a dramatic dimunition of German creative power,9 for though occasional works of architectural merit continued to be produced, even under the National Socialists, the heart and spirit went out of the Modern Movement at whose center German architects had once stood. Conversely, however, there was a massive infusion of the radical spirit into the architectural Diaspora, which transformed architectural theory, teaching, and practice in countries as far apart culturally as the United States, on the one hand, and Palestine, on the other.10 6.1 Bauhaus faculty, Dessau, 1926.