Memory and historicism: Reading between the lines of the built environment, Germany c. 1900

Representations

Volumn 88, Issue , 2004, Pages 26-54

  Umbach, Maiken ^a  

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EID: 29144520923     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rep.2004.88.1.26     Document Type: Article

References (121)

1. This approach was pioneered by Walt Whitman Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto (Cambridge, 1960)
2. See also Karl Wolfgang Deutsch and William J. Folz, eds., Nation Building (New York, 1966)
3. S. N. Eisenstadt and Stein Rokkan, eds., Building States and Nations (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1973)
4. Charles Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, N.J., 1975)
5. and Hans Ulrich Wehler, Modernisierungstheorie und Geschichte (Göttingen, 1975)
6. Pierre Nora, ed., Les Lieux de Mémoire, 3 vols. (Paris, 1984-92)
7. translated as Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past (New York, 1996), is shorthand here for a whole body of new literature on memory
8. Several large-scale collaborative projects modified Nora's prototype to come to grips with other national memory cultures, such as Hagen Schulze and Etienne François, eds., Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, 3 vols. (Munich, 2000-2001)
9. Mario Isnenghi, ed., Luoghi della memoria, 3 vols. (Rome, 1997-98)
10. and, in a somewhat different political mode, Raphael Samuel, ed., Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, 3 vols. (London, 1989)
11. Further projects are currently in progress; see Benedict Stuchtey, "European Lieux de Mémoire," conference report, German Historical Institute London Bulletin 24, no. 2 (2002): 121-25
12. Additionally, there is a large and rapidly growing body of work on collective memory and commemoration. Particularly influential examples include Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago, 1992)
13. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, rev. ed. (London, 1991)
14. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1992)
15. John R. Gillis, ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton, 1994)
16. Alon Confino, "Collective Memory and Cultural History: Problems of Method," American Historical Review 105 (1997): 1386-1403
17. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (Cambridge, 1995)
18. Such work frequently draws upon a sensitivity to the operations of power in and through space, as exemplified in Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (London, 1976)
19. An excellent example of such a new history of political space is Chandra Mukerji, Territorial Ambitions and the Garden of Versailles (Cambridge, 1997)
20. Georg Iggers, The German Conception of History: The National Tradition of Historical Thought from Herder to the Present, rev. ed. (Middletown, Conn., 1983)
21. Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience (Paris, 1889). Resisting the more radical irrationalism of Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, Bergson insisted that his aim was an "exact" description of the experience of the duration of time. Time was "concrete" and "given," and "intuition" the proper mode of analyzing it. Bergson recognized both intuition and science as ways of understanding a single reality yet since science was also a means to control reality, it was more illusory than the profounder insights given to us by intuition
22. Compare Roland Kany, Mnemosyne als Programm. Geschichte, Erinnerung und die Andacht Zum Unbedeutenden im Werk von Usener, Warburg und Benjamin (Tübingen, 1987)
23. and Louis Rose, The Survival of Images: Art Historians, Psychoanalysis, and the Ancients (Detroit, 2001)
24. Recent decades have seen a revival of interest in Aby Warburg's original conception of art history. As part of this process, the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek in Hamburg was carefully restored and a series of Warburg conferences were heid
25. see for example Horst Bredekamp, Michael Diers, and Charlotte Schoell-Glass, eds., Aby Warburg: Akten des internationalen Symposions, Hamburg, 1990 (Weinheim, Germ., 1991)
26. Dag T. Andersson, "Destruktion/Konstruktion," in Michael Opitz und Erdmund Wizisla, eds., Benjamins Begriffe, 2 vols. (Frankfurt am Main, 2000), 1:147-85
27. Cf. Alexander García Düttmann, "Tradition and Destruction: Benjamin's Politics of Language," MLN (special issue on Walter Benjamin) 106, no. 3 (1991)
28. Heinrich Kaulen, Rettung and Destruktion, Untersuchungen zur Hermeneutik Walter Benjamins (Tübingen, 1987)
29. Walter Benjamin, "Über den Begriff der Geschichte," in Ein Lesebuch, ed. Michael Opitz (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), 665-76
30. Cf. Krista R. Greffrath, Metaphorischer Materialismus: Untersuchungen zum Geschichtsbegriff Walter Benjamins (Munich, 1981)
31. Gérard Rulet, "Benjamins Historismus - Kritik," in Uwe Steiner, ed., Walter Benjamin, 1892-1940, zum 100. Geburtstag (Bern, 1992), 103-22. An English translation of Benjamin's Theses on History by Dennis Redmond is available on the Internet at www.efn.org/dredmond/Theses_on_History.PDF
32. The term pictorial turn was coined by W.J.T. Mitchell in his Picture Theory (Chicago, 1994)
33. Modeled on Richard Rorty's linguistic turn, it denotes a new appreciation of visual sources as evidence in historical and cultural studies, outside the disciplinary boundaries of traditional art history. Peter Wagner, Reading Iconotexts: From Swift to the French Revolution (London, 1995), challenged conventional history's reluctance to engage with visual sources as evidence in its own right when he described the relationship between text and image as "a history of iconoclastic oppression in which pictura is denounced as fictura" (169)
34. See also Ernest B. Gilman, "Interart Studies and the Imperialism of Language," Poetics Today, 10 (1989): 5-30
35. Michel Foucault in The Order of Things, trans. A. Sheridan (New York, 1973)
36. W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago, 1986)
37. Neil Levine, "The Romantic Idea of Architectural Legibility: Henri Labrouste and the Neo-Grec," in The Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, exhibition catalog (London, 1977), 325-416, quote 327-29
38. This connects with a well-established tradition in German scholarship that, in moving beyond traditional style-oriented art history, foregrounded the social function of buildings. Cf. Reinhard Bentmann and Michael Müller, Die Villa als Herrschaftsarchitektur. Versuch einer kunst- u. sozialgeschichtlichen Analyse, rev. ed. (Frankfurt, 1991)
39. (with a special chapter on the Gründerzeitvilla, 132-40)
40. A seminal study on the cultural politics of feudalization is Ute Frevert, Ehrenmänner: Das Duell in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (München, 1991)
41. translated by Anthony Williams as Men of Honour: A Social and Cultural History of the Duel (Cambridge, Mass., 1995)
42. In his influential 1909 essay "The Industrial State," Friedrich Naumann, MP for the Progressive People's Party, argued that only the economy had become industrial, whereas politically and culturally Germany was still ruled by aristocratic agrarian elites and their reactionary values. The task for the future was to create an "industrial state," that is, a political order that would truly reflect the interests and values of those who defined Germany economically and socially; Friedrich Naumann, "Der Industriestaat" (1912), in Werke (Cologne, 1964-), vol. 3, Politische Schriften, 42-70
43. Muthesius's dismissal of "style" in architecture dates back to his pamphlet Stilarchitektur und Baukunst. Wandlungen der Architektur im 19. Jahrhundert und ihr heutiger Standpunkt (Mühlheim-Ruhr, Germ., 1902)
44. Between 1907 and 1926, Muthesius published more than six hundred articles and reviews in sixty different newspapers and journals and gave countless public speeches and lectures, thus establishing himself as the leading critic of contemporary arts and crafts, architecture, and industrial design in Germany. Selections of these have been edited by Hans-Joachim Hubrich, Hermann Muthesius: Die Schriften zu Architektur, Kunstgewerbe, Industrie in der "Neuen Bewegung" (Berlin, 1980)
45. On Muthesius's life, compare Julius Posener, Anfänge des Funktionalismus: Von Arts and Crafts Zum Deutschen Werkbund (Berlin, 1964)
46. Julius Posener, From Schinckel to the Bauhaus: Five Lectures on the Growth of Modern German Architecture (London, 1972)
47. John Vincent Maciuika, "Hermann Muthesius and the Reform of German Architecture, Arts, and Crafts, 1890-1914" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1998)
48. Fedor Roth, Hermann Muthesius und die Idee der harmonischen Kultur: Kultur als Einheit des künstlerischen Stils in allen Lebensäuß erungen eines Volkes (Berlin, 2001)
49. Hermann Muthesius, Der Kunstwart 17 (1904): 469
50. quoted in Matthew Jefferies, Politics and Culture in Wilhelmine Germany: The Case of Industrial Architecture (Oxford, 1995), 50-51
51. Levine, "Romantic Idea of Architectural Legibility," 332
52. The debate is documented in Michael S. Cullen, Der Reichstag. Die Geschichte eines Monumentes, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart, 1990)
53. Heinz Raack, Das Reichstagsgebäude in Berlin (Berlin, 1978)
54. and esp. Tilmann Buddensieg, Die Kuppel des Volkes. Zur Kontroverse um die Kuppel des Berliner Reichstages, in Berliner Labyrinth. Preußische Raster (Berlin 1993), 74-82
55. A detailed discussion of the planning of the new Hamburg Town Hall can be found in Joist Grolle, ed., Das Rathaus der Freien und Hansestadt Hamburg (Hamburg, 1997)
56. An extensive documentation of all these projects is Martin Damus, Das Rathaus: Architektur- und Sozialgeschichte von der Gründerzeit zur Postmoderne (Berlin, 1988)
57. see also G. Ulrich Großmann, "Die Renaissance der Renaissance-Baukunst," in Ulrich Großmann and Petra Krutisch, eds., Renaissance der Renaissance: Ein bürgerlicher Kunststil im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1992), 1:201-19
58. Matthew Jefferies, Imperial Culture in Germany, 1871-1918 (Basingstoke, U. K., 2003), esp. 194-99
59. Cf. Joan Campbell, The German Werkbund: The Politics of Reform in the Applied Arts (Princeton, 1978), esp. 3-81 on the pre-1914 era
60. Compare Joan Campbell, Joy in Work, German Work (Princeton, 1989)
61. and Frederic J. Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture Before the First World War (New Haven, 1996)
62. The most authoritative modern study of Schumacher is Hartmut Frank, ed., Fritz Schumacher: Reformkultur und Moderne (Stuttgart, 1994)
63. See also Jennifer Jenkins, Provincial Modernity: Local Culture and Liberal Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Hamburg (Ithaca, 2003), esp. 261-93
64. Hermann Hipp, "Fritz Schumachers Hamburg: Die reformierte Großstadt," in Magnano Lampugnani and Romana Schneider, eds., Moderne Architektur in Deutschland 1900 bis 1950: Reform und Tradition (Stuttgart, 1992), 151-83
65. and the conference proceedings Zur Aktualität der Ideen von Fritz Schumacher: Akten des Fritz-Schumacher-Colloquium 1990 (Hamburg, 1992)
66. Fritz Schumacher, Stufen des Lebens. Erinnerungen eines Baumeisters, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart, 1949), 384
67. The quotations represent a cross-section of judgments reached in the following works: Karin Wiedemann, Von der Gerichtslaube zum Sievekingsplatz: Gerichtsgebäude in Hamburg (Hamburg, 1992)
68. Volkwin Marg and Gudrun Fleher in Architektur in Hamburg seit 1900, new ed. (Hamburg, 1968), esp. 21
69. Hermann Hipp, Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg: Geschichte, Kultur und Stadtbaukunst an Elbe und Alster (Köln, 1989), esp. 213
70. Ralf Lange in his Architekturführer Hamburg (Stuttgart, 1995) esp. 55
71. Volker Plagemann, Kunstgeschichte der Stadt Hamburg (Hamburg, 1995), esp. 256 and 259
72. Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London, 2003), 144
73. On the architecture of world exhibitions, see Bjarne Stoklund, "The Role of International Exhibitions in the Construction of National Cultures in the Nineteenth Century," Etnologia: European Journal of Ethnology 24, no. 1 (1994): 35-44
74. Bernhard Rieger, "Envisioning the Future: British and German Reactions to the Paris World Fair in 1900," in Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the Late-Victorian Era to World War II, ed. Bernhard Rieger and Martin Daunton (Oxford, 2001), 145-64
75. and Winfried Kretschmer, Geschichte der Weltausstellungen (Frankfurt am Main, 1999)
76. The notion of the city as spectacle is explored for late-nineteenth- century Paris by Vanessa R. Schwarz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley, 1998)
77. Arturo Soria y Puig, ed., Cerdá: The Five Bases of the General Theory of Urbanization (Madrid, 1999)
78. On the Renaixença, see Miquel Arimany, La Renaixença, avui (Barcelona-Sarrià, 1960)
79. Lluis Permanyer, Barcelona modernista (Barcelona, 1993)
80. Antoni Rovira i Virgili, Els Corrents ideològics de la Renaixença catalana (Barcelona, 1966)
81. Joan R. Varela, La Renaixença: la represa cultural i política, 1833-1886 (Barcelona, 1991)
82. Emili Giralt et al., Romanticisme i Renaixença, 1800-1860 (Barcelona, 1995), esp. the chapter by Feran Sagarra, "Arquitectura i Urbanisme," 162-204
83. and, on one of the Renaixença's seminal buildings: Antoni Sàbat, Palau de la Musica catalana (Barcelona, 1974)
84. Cf. Juan Miró y Murtó, El Palacio de Justicia y la Ciudad de Barcelona (Barcelona, 1883)
85. and Maiken Umbach, A Tale of Second Cities: Autonomy, Culture, and the Law in Hamburg and Barcelona in the Long Nineteenth Century (forthcoming)
86. Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (London, 1997)
87. and Iggers, German Conception of History
88. Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1981)
89. Ilse Möller, Hamburg (Stuttgart, 1985), 71. The unprecedented dockworkers' strike of 1896/97 was but one symptom of this development; the 1890 elections, when the SPD won all direct mandates for the all-German parliament, another
90. Das Hamburger Gewerkschaftshaus. Ein Führer durch das Hamburger Gewerkschaftshaus (Hamburg, 1914), 6
91. Compare also Elisabeth Domansky, "Das Hamburger Gewerkschaftshaus, " in Arno Herzig, D. Langewiesche, Arnold Sywottek, eds., Arbeiter in Hamburg (Hamburg, 1983), 373-84
92. The union cartel's own guidebook to the building expressed this skepticism, noting that aesthetically "little reference was made to the simple and beautiful thought of the outstanding strength of the working class which ought to have been captured in this building"; Das Hamburger Gewerkschaftshaus, 13-14
93. The local SPD newspaper raised a similar point: "The exuberant splendor of a modernized baroque does not seem to be the most adequate monument to the working class struggle for the betterment of the social order"; Hamburger Echo, at the inauguration of the Trade Union Hall, 1906
94. quoted from Deutscher Gewerbschaftsbund, ed., 75 Jahre Gewerkschaftshaus Hamburg (Hamburg, 1982), 14. And in 1911, the German socialist leader Clara Zetkin commented that "the style of our trade union, popular and commercial buildings differs little from their bourgeois counterparts. . .
95. In other words, if we take style to be the visual expression of inner life, it seems that the working class has thus far failed to find an adequate architecture to correspond to its spiritual life"; quoted from Romana Schneider, "Volkshausgedanke und Volkshausarchitektur," in Lampugnani and Schneider, Moderne Architektur, 184-99, quote 189
96. Ralf Lange, Architekturführer Hamburg (Hamburg, 1995), writes: "Artistically the ornate building with its baroque forms and art nouveau decorations was trapped in petty bourgeois notions of respectability and self-representation. . . . It was to be another two decades until the unions' self-confidence was expressed in independent architectural designs such as those of Max Taut, Erich Mendelsohn or Hannes Meyer" (78)
97. The Senate and Lower Chamber of the Hamburg government managed the architectural competition, in direct contravention of the usual procedure, whereby such decisions were made by the Hochbauamt, the city's building office, which was responsible for the other two justice palaces on the Forum. The history of the planning of the High Court and the extensive debates over many of its individual features is documented in the Staatsarchiv Hamburg, Akte Baudeputation B626 (1885-1912). For the commissioning of the building, see fol. 84, 12 April 1889
98. Nikolaus Pevsner, Pioneers of Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth, 1975)
99. A brief survey of these developments is provided in the introduction to Karl Schefold, Orient, Hellas und Rom in der archäologischen Forschung seit 1939 (Bern, 1949)
100. Theodor Wiegand, Die archaische Porosarchitektur der Akropolis zu Athen (Kassel, 1904) examined the archaic temples of the Athenian acropolis (made of poros, unlike the classical temples, which were made of marble)
101. Cf. Carl Watzinger, Theodor Wiegand, ein deutscher Archäologe, 1864-1936 (Munich, 1936)
102. Hans Schrader, Archaische Marmor-Skulpturen im Akropolis-Museum zu Athen (Vienna, 1909)
103. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust II, act 2, Klassische Walpurgisnacht, Pharsalische Felder, verses 7241-48, in Werke. Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. Erich Trunz, 10th ed. (Hamburg, 1948-60), 3:222
104. Commenting on this passage (verse 7197-98), Trunz quotes K. Reinhardt, who argues that the apparent contradiction between the sphinxes' claim that they have been killed by Hercules and their claim that their presence is everlasting refers to the difference between a historical time, initiated by Hercules, and a mythical time, which has no clear beginning and end points; Werke, 3:568
105. Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus (Ann Arbor, 1990), 60
106. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Kleine Schriften und Briefe, ed. Wilhelm Senff (Weimar, 1960), 149-50
107. Faust II, verse 7242
108. Louis Rose, Survival of Images, 17
109. Joyce, Rule of Freedom, 233
110. Hence Warburg's interest in the serpent rituals of Navahos and Pueblos in New Mexico and Arizona; and, by extension, the symbolic signification of the snake as an image-language in European culture; Aby Warburg, Schlangenritual: Ein Reisebericht, new ed. (Berlin, 1988)
111. Compare also Martin Diers, "Von der Ideologie- zur Ikonologiekritik: Die Warburg-Renaissancen," in A. Bernt et al., eds., Frankfurter Schule und Kunstgeschichte (Berlin, 1992), 19-39
112. K. W. Forster, "Die Hamburg-Amerika-Linie, oder: Warburgs Kulturwissenschaft zwischen den Kontinenten," in Aby Warburg: Akten des internationalen Symposions Hamburg 1990 (Weinheim, 1991)
113. and Rudolf Wittkower, Allegory and the Migration of Symbols (New York, 1977)
114. As an architectural idiom, "between-the-lines" was coined by Daniel Libeskind, who used it as a title for his Jewish Museum extension project in Berlin. Libeskind explores this notion and debates it with Jacques Derrida in Daniel Libeskind, Radix-Matrix: Architecture and Writings, ed. Alois Martin Müller (Munich, 1997)
115. Daniel Libeskind, "World Trade Center Design Study - Text," http://www.daniellibeskind.com
116. The topos of nature as an architectural force can be traced back to antiquity. Its origins have famously been discussed by Ernst Robert Curtius, Europäische Literatur und lateinisches Mittelalter (Bern, 1954), 527-29, who traced it back to the Platonic conception of God as demiurge, which is as constructor and architect. According to Curtius, this notion of an architect-god, which informed both Eastern and Western civilization, originated in a primitive religion centered around the craftsman-god. Parallel to this religious line, almost as a logical extension, Curtius argued, the notion of nature as constructor and architect developed
117. According to Oskar Walzel, Das Prometheussymbol von Shaftesbury zu Goethe, 3rd ed. (Munich, 1932), 11-15, the image of "universal plastick nature" can be traced through the eighteenth century and culminated in F. W.J. von Schelling's assertion that the universe itself was the most perfect work of art
118. The category of "Heroic Modernism" was developed by Charles Jencks, Modern Movements in Architecture (Harmondsworth, 1985). The label refers to classical modernism in its most radical, uncompromising, and triumphalist mode. Yet it is confusing, in that the term "heroic" suggests that modernism's chief characteristic, the triumph of abstraction, can be likened to an achievement that is by definition idiosyncratic: the "heroism" of an individual
119. On the 1919 Bauhaus manifesto, see Michael Siebenbrodt, ed., Bauhaus Weimar: Designs for the Future (Ostfildern, Germ., 2000)
120. and Gillian Naylor, The Bauhaus Reassessed: Sources and Design Theory (London, 1985)
121. Cf. Daniel Libeskind, The Jewish Museum Berlin (Berlin, 1999)