The design-style created by the German Bauhaus school is today established as modernist icon, not to say cliché. Apart from the functional elegance of its designs, and the striking art many of its protagonists produced, Bauhaus acquired this standing in part through the way the political history of the school could be aligned with a conventional modernist narrative.
As an architect I think at the center of architectural work is: 'this is good because I think it is good'; a totalitarian pretence, often aligned with dictators, kings, bishops, oligarchs ... in times when survival is dire. Reaching out to design for the many maybe honest, but is easily decaying into propaganda.
There is a novel by Brigitte Reiman, “Franziska Linkerhand”. ( in German, Linkerhand means left hand). The story is situated in the GDR in the early 60-ties. A just graduaded architect - Franziska Linkerhand- becomes the right hand of the superviser of the construction of Eisenhütenstadt. Her prof was someone who has some likening to herr Ehrlich. Interesting.
A fascinating story - I'd like to read the book by Von Borries and Fischer. However, I think this account of the Total Theater project is not quite adequate. Piscator was a leftist, a collaborator with (and influence upon) Bertolt Brecht. This of course doesn't mean that either he or the projects he commissioned can't have been totalitarian. Ehrlich's design, though, is not uniquely overbearing in its concern with the totality of theatrical space but rather slots neatly into a series of radical designs indebted to Meyerhold's innovations in the USSR. The key idea in these designs was that of placing theatrical action in the midst of the spectators, rather than safely behind a proscenium, thus simultaneously "baring the apparatus" and turning the audience itself into part of the spectacle. Look, for example, at the extraordinary design that El Lissitzky proposed for Sergei Tretyakov's "I Want a Child!" in 1926 (sadly never realized). Devin Fore has recently published a suggestive article called "Proletarian Feedback" on the insistence of specular mirroring in the early Soviet public sphere. Forced intersubjectivity of this sort may of course be its own nightmare, as the Moscow show trials would ultimately prove, but in the late 1920s nothing was yet set in stone. The difference of Lissitzky's design from the Bauhaus theater, though - and here I do agree that Fischer's design is perhaps more incipiently totalitarian - is that the elements he submits to total order are the technical elements of the medium, rather than active relations between members of the audience (and between the audience and diegetic space). In this sense, maybe it's correct after all to say that the postwar subsumption of Bauhaus utopianism to what Guy Debord called spectacle was inscribed from very close to the beginning, though whether this in itself marks a step on the road to totalitarianism is another conversation.
This was a great read Mr. Tooze, it always blows my mind how some just "survived" then others were not able to at all. When I lived in Stuttgart I became a fan of Bauhaus after visiting the Weissenhof Siedlung, such timeless design.
The uninformed reader can take a lot of outright erroneous conclusions from this article, so it is important to put things into their due context:
1) art and culture play a very minor, if not borderline insignificant, role in History. If we sift through individual cases of artists, we will found a lot of mind blowing, spectacular cases. That doesn't mean we found some kind of secret or lost link to the History of Mankind;
2) contrary to the postmodern ideology (which is the dominant ideology in the West since the 1970s), art is very limited in its possibilities. There are a lot of evolutionary convergence in Art History (including here architecture). It is very common for one given art manifesto, tradition or style to serve completely different, if not outright political opposite, ideologies. History proves human imagination is extremely limited in scope, not unlimited, as the postmodernists claim; humans tend to like the same things, and it is the minor variations of these same things that appear to the individual as a huge difference, but that's because of the intimate, personal nature of art and culture, not because of some great movement of History;
3) the association of Modernism with Totalitarianism is a very old mantra of postmodernism and represents no intellectual or academic novelty. The demonization of Modernism as Totalitarianism insinuates it was some kind of Communist-Fascist conspiracy whose goal was to create a mindless, hive-mind society, of which liberalism - the cult of the individual (individualism) - represents its counterweight. The fact is the process of industrialization of the end of the 19th Century to the first half of the 20th Century was happening with or without the blessing of the artist class; the artists were mainly trying to not lose the train of History, to not disappear from History, and not to lead it; that was the case even in the early Soviet Union. Rule of thumb: artists are marginal actor in History; you cannot write a General History from the point of view of art or, for that sake, culture -- it is only the economy that allows for such History to be written (thus confirming Marx's theory that economy has the last word);
4) there is absolutely no problem with the demonization of Modernism per se. Everybody will create the narrative in their own minds that make them sleep the best possible at night. That's human nature: Reason is not innate, but learned. However, it is important to highlight that Modernism is dead almost 60 years now: everything that happened from the late 1970s to our present time is on the postmodernist proverbial bill. We cannot blame all the economic and political crises that have been happening for these last 40 years on “Totalitarianism” (Modernism); it will simply ossify and convert into a curse word, akin to “Satanism” to the modern Christians and far-rightists;
5) artists are not special. They are just normal people trying to make a living from their craft. They are not a door or window to something transcendental (a genius). That's a liberal Cold War era propaganda. No matter the era, the artist will always want three things: 1) fame (adoration from the public), 2) a lot of money (wealth) and 3) the love of women (or their feminine analogue, if the artist is a woman). They have concrete economic and political interests as any other class;
6) every point above are equally valid to ideology. Ideas are only relevant in History when they convert to something concrete, to a concrete political-economic movement. Otherwise, they are just some grandiose narrative in some individual's mind. Ideas are not the motor of History: economy is, and will always be. History is not the progress of ideas, but the progress of the development of the productive forces.
Thanks Adam, I am amazed how you dig up storries like this one. He seem not to feature in any of the German media not even die Zeit
His lige’s storry would be worth a serious movie, so much grey and European history
Fascinating! Who knew? Thanks
As an architect I think at the center of architectural work is: 'this is good because I think it is good'; a totalitarian pretence, often aligned with dictators, kings, bishops, oligarchs ... in times when survival is dire. Reaching out to design for the many maybe honest, but is easily decaying into propaganda.
There is a novel by Brigitte Reiman, “Franziska Linkerhand”. ( in German, Linkerhand means left hand). The story is situated in the GDR in the early 60-ties. A just graduaded architect - Franziska Linkerhand- becomes the right hand of the superviser of the construction of Eisenhütenstadt. Her prof was someone who has some likening to herr Ehrlich. Interesting.
Thanks for the history lesson.
Maravilloso texto! 👏🏼
A fascinating story - I'd like to read the book by Von Borries and Fischer. However, I think this account of the Total Theater project is not quite adequate. Piscator was a leftist, a collaborator with (and influence upon) Bertolt Brecht. This of course doesn't mean that either he or the projects he commissioned can't have been totalitarian. Ehrlich's design, though, is not uniquely overbearing in its concern with the totality of theatrical space but rather slots neatly into a series of radical designs indebted to Meyerhold's innovations in the USSR. The key idea in these designs was that of placing theatrical action in the midst of the spectators, rather than safely behind a proscenium, thus simultaneously "baring the apparatus" and turning the audience itself into part of the spectacle. Look, for example, at the extraordinary design that El Lissitzky proposed for Sergei Tretyakov's "I Want a Child!" in 1926 (sadly never realized). Devin Fore has recently published a suggestive article called "Proletarian Feedback" on the insistence of specular mirroring in the early Soviet public sphere. Forced intersubjectivity of this sort may of course be its own nightmare, as the Moscow show trials would ultimately prove, but in the late 1920s nothing was yet set in stone. The difference of Lissitzky's design from the Bauhaus theater, though - and here I do agree that Fischer's design is perhaps more incipiently totalitarian - is that the elements he submits to total order are the technical elements of the medium, rather than active relations between members of the audience (and between the audience and diegetic space). In this sense, maybe it's correct after all to say that the postwar subsumption of Bauhaus utopianism to what Guy Debord called spectacle was inscribed from very close to the beginning, though whether this in itself marks a step on the road to totalitarianism is another conversation.
This was a great read Mr. Tooze, it always blows my mind how some just "survived" then others were not able to at all. When I lived in Stuttgart I became a fan of Bauhaus after visiting the Weissenhof Siedlung, such timeless design.
The uninformed reader can take a lot of outright erroneous conclusions from this article, so it is important to put things into their due context:
1) art and culture play a very minor, if not borderline insignificant, role in History. If we sift through individual cases of artists, we will found a lot of mind blowing, spectacular cases. That doesn't mean we found some kind of secret or lost link to the History of Mankind;
2) contrary to the postmodern ideology (which is the dominant ideology in the West since the 1970s), art is very limited in its possibilities. There are a lot of evolutionary convergence in Art History (including here architecture). It is very common for one given art manifesto, tradition or style to serve completely different, if not outright political opposite, ideologies. History proves human imagination is extremely limited in scope, not unlimited, as the postmodernists claim; humans tend to like the same things, and it is the minor variations of these same things that appear to the individual as a huge difference, but that's because of the intimate, personal nature of art and culture, not because of some great movement of History;
3) the association of Modernism with Totalitarianism is a very old mantra of postmodernism and represents no intellectual or academic novelty. The demonization of Modernism as Totalitarianism insinuates it was some kind of Communist-Fascist conspiracy whose goal was to create a mindless, hive-mind society, of which liberalism - the cult of the individual (individualism) - represents its counterweight. The fact is the process of industrialization of the end of the 19th Century to the first half of the 20th Century was happening with or without the blessing of the artist class; the artists were mainly trying to not lose the train of History, to not disappear from History, and not to lead it; that was the case even in the early Soviet Union. Rule of thumb: artists are marginal actor in History; you cannot write a General History from the point of view of art or, for that sake, culture -- it is only the economy that allows for such History to be written (thus confirming Marx's theory that economy has the last word);
4) there is absolutely no problem with the demonization of Modernism per se. Everybody will create the narrative in their own minds that make them sleep the best possible at night. That's human nature: Reason is not innate, but learned. However, it is important to highlight that Modernism is dead almost 60 years now: everything that happened from the late 1970s to our present time is on the postmodernist proverbial bill. We cannot blame all the economic and political crises that have been happening for these last 40 years on “Totalitarianism” (Modernism); it will simply ossify and convert into a curse word, akin to “Satanism” to the modern Christians and far-rightists;
5) artists are not special. They are just normal people trying to make a living from their craft. They are not a door or window to something transcendental (a genius). That's a liberal Cold War era propaganda. No matter the era, the artist will always want three things: 1) fame (adoration from the public), 2) a lot of money (wealth) and 3) the love of women (or their feminine analogue, if the artist is a woman). They have concrete economic and political interests as any other class;
6) every point above are equally valid to ideology. Ideas are only relevant in History when they convert to something concrete, to a concrete political-economic movement. Otherwise, they are just some grandiose narrative in some individual's mind. Ideas are not the motor of History: economy is, and will always be. History is not the progress of ideas, but the progress of the development of the productive forces.
"Once again Ehrlich found a way to survive." I wonder what Brecht's Soldat Schwejk would have made of this sentence.