“let us consciously be ‘imaginary architects’! We believe that only a total revolution can guide us in our task. Our fellow citizens, even our colleagues quite rightly suspect in us the forces of revolution. Break up and undermine all former principles. Horse Shit! And we the bud in fresh dung.” Bruno Taut
“together let us desire, conceive and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise towards heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith” Walter Gropius
Welcome to The Weimar Spectacle, where I explore the brief and extraordinary life of the Weimar Republic. I’m Bremner Fletcher Duthie, singer, actor and theatre maker. I’ve spent years performing songs and theatre from the Weimar period, and I’m inspired and maybe more than a little obsessed by that moment in time.
Listen to Bremner's two albums of Weimar Cabaret songs
https://songwhip.com/bremnerduthie/bremner-sings-weill
https://songwhip.com/bremnerduthie/bremner-sings-kurt-weill-vol-2-moon-faced-starry-eyed
“Long Live Utopia!” So said Bruno Taut, ground breaking Weimar Architect, and in this episode we’ll be taking a look at the Utopian Architecture of the Weimar Republic, that, despite its utopian yearnings, still managed to navigate the dull needs of city bureaucracies and day to day practicalities of construction to provide new, modern homes for a people yearning for a whole new way of living. This will be a photograph heavy episode, so I’ll be speaking about the hopes and dreams of the architects and designers, but I’ll let the buildings speak for themselves, and you’ll find pics of most of the buildings mentioned here on my website at bremnersings.com. And I’m squeezing this episode in the middle of a 6000 mile tour performing in cities across the USA and in Canada, so forgive the delays in new episodes. Life on the road tends to be hectic..
So, my big, big idea for these podcasts, is that the Weimar Republic invented everything about the modern world, and we are all still dealing with the possibilities and problems it gave to us. To prove this possibly unprovable idea, I’ll be exploring the arts, politics, science, architecture, social innovations of the Weimar period, and of course, the terrible and irresistible rise of the Nazi Party. So, if you’re a low income housing advocate struggling to get a single building completed in your NIMBY neighbourhood and you’re curious about how the Weimar planners got so much done, or you’re a new home buyer about to gut that old wreck of a home and start afresh, and you’re curious about how Weimar designers made practical, beautiful homes filled with light, then this is the podcast for you.
In 1918 hundreds of thousands of soldiers were returning from the trenches and killing fields of the Great War.
They had been told to go back to their villages and simply restart their pre-war lives. Instead they found themselves returning to a revolution in progress. A revolution in culture, social ideas, new technology invented by the demands of the war, and a revolution in politics, sexuality and gender ideas. And many chose to make new choices about their lives. Often that was to stay in the rapidly growing cities, and search for employment in the new industrial economy, also now centered around the cities. They recognized correctly that cities would be the places of ambition and possibility in the modern age.
However, in those cities housing was in crisis. Berlin, between 1816 and 1910 increased in size by 17 times, from 250000 to 3.7 million, and in 1918, the homes and tenements which held that new population were mostly built in the mid-1800’s and were falling into disrepair from overcrowding and lack of investment from Landlords.
Americans might be familiar with the shocking and yet tragically beautiful pictures that Jacob Riis made in the 1880’s of the terrible conditions in the lower East Side in NYC, with immigrant families crammed into filthy rooms without toilets or proper cooking facilities. In Germany a similar expose happened with photography used in a series of surveys of living conditions in the early 1900’s, studies commissioned by health insurance companies concerned about the living conditions of their poorer clients. Although Landlord groups went to court to attempt to suppress the findings and photographs, it became evident to all that serious change was needed.
Making matters much worse, was the fact that new housing construction effectively stopped in WW1. Most construction laborers had been conscripted into the army, and many died at the Front, in 1914 there were almost 5000 new buildings completed in Berlin, and in 1918 only 50 were finished.
The new Weimar government made housing a priority. As with everything with the Weimar government, it was a mix of wild, revolutionary and idealistic beliefs that human beings deserved better living conditions than the nightmares of the tenements of Berlin, and also a realization that if they wanted to stay in power they would have to provide for their electoral base. And by any measure they made extraordinary achievements. By the end of the Weimar era, in about 13 years, 2.5 million dwellings had been built in Germany, with most of them having some kind of government funding for their construction. That meant new, modern housing for 9 million people, who for the first time had indoor plumbing, electricity and gas.
Those achievements all came with huge ideological fights about how people should live. In those 2.5 million homes, the state was essentially creating a new way of living for its population, a new mold for its working population. Every choice about those new homes was debated, from how to design a kitchen, to how many interior doors a home needed, to what color was morally acceptable on the outside wall of an apartment.
It's easy to be casual about these achievements and debates today when we take toilets and hot water and electric lighting for granted, however, I have a clear memory of a time when I lived in an old apartment on the edges of Paris, and at a dinner at our home, with several people I didn’t know well, I criticized the huge, looming, concrete apartment complex just north of us.
Well, it turned out that one of our guests had grown up in that complex, and, while he cheerfully agreed that they were not the most beautiful buildings in the world, he explained that those homes had changed the lives of his family as they escaped buildings where entire floors of apartments shared the same toilet, and cooking happened on old smoky stoves, and electricity and hot water were unknown. They had been happy to swap aesthetics for hygiene and less overcrowding, and, if I understood him correctly, for the sense that they were now included in the modern era.
For the Weimar dreamers however, aesthetics were not decorative frills, they believed that humanity deserved and needed beauty in and around their homes. They insisted that living in beautiful surroundings would make people better citizens and contribute to the growth of the human spirit. And they insisted that it was time to apply the new scientific principles of the modern era to the home, so they commissioned time and motion studies to make sure that homes were efficient and functional, and they rethought the basics of how buildings were made so the materials could be mass produced in factories rather than made by craftsmen on site. The word that ran through all their designs was ‘Organic’, meaning never giving up on some connection with the natural, both in the building’s forms, in the access to nature, and in the way that buildings would respect human needs and desires. And their guiding slogan for these new homes was “Licht, Luft, Sonne” – Light, Air, Sun”. However, in among these slogans and ideals, the trick was how to balance those big ideals with actually being able to afford to build homes for 9 million people.
So, I’m going to take a look at four architects and designers, Bruno Taub, who created extraordinarily livable, innovative apartment complexes that you can still visit in Berlin today.
Erich Mendollsohn, who created commercial architecture that transformed the way we shop and consume and still influences commercial design.
Walter Gropius, whose Bauhaus building was a kind of perfect break with all previous human structures, and whose teachings were perhaps more influential than his buildings,
and Margaret Shutte-Lihotzky whose rethinking of interior design, especially kitchen design transformed the lives of women in the home, and still looks like the basis for every trendy Ikea kitchen ever.
And maybe the most important thing to remember about them is that they’ve just gone through the horrors of WW1, either actually in the trenches, or as part of the Total War effort that had taken over every aspect of German society by the end of the war.
So, me, I like to walk. My visits to new cities involve long aimless wandering that usually end with me lying on a hotel bed wondering why or why oh why my feet hurt so freaking much. Despite the pain, I think walking and getting lost means you stumble on things that you’d never find in a tourist guide. Especially now when the internet tourist industry is a horror show of shallow, rapacious bloggers and AI generated content, all relentlessly directing us towards nothing but endless opportunities to spend, consume and click. So, I remember my first visit to Berlin, when in the middle of a day-long walk, I stumbled onto one of Bruno Taub’s Weimar apartment blocks: Oncle Toms Seidlung in the southwest of the city.
Modest, often long, lovely apartment blocks of three or four stories with balconies, recessed windows, and with exterior walls painted in large blocks warm pastel colors, sometime with gently curving lines that followed the movement of the streets, and surrounded by trees and small greenspaces.
In comparison to the heavy stone architecture of central Berlin, with four or five story buildings that loom over the street with heavy ornamented facades and massive almost church-like communal doors that throw you out directly onto the sidewalk,
well, it seemed like I’d walked through a portal into some calm, clean alternate world. And indeed, a commonality between all the architects and designers that I’m going to mention is something that’s almost invisible to our modern eyes, and that’s a lack of ornamentation on the exterior. So, a complete break with the historical references on almost every other building from earlier times, which are covered in details that are often have no function except to reference even older styles, whether statues, or steeples, or peaked roofs. It’s a radical break in history which goes along with the radical changes in politics, society and culture of the Weimar era.
Bruno Taut started his career as a complete idealist. His first sketches of his ideal architecture are huge crystal structures built atop the Alps, looking more than a little like Superman’s arctic lair, and they seem completely mad, but then again, after the horrors of WW1 trench warfare, perhaps huge bright, crystal buildings high up a green mountain might have made a lot of emotional sense.
He started a group of equally idealist artists, designers and architects who communicated in what they called the Crystal Chain letters. Letters filled with dreams of idealistic artistic revolution: Hermann Finsterlin said, “If you don’t long for the impossible, how can you achieve the possible” and Wenzel Hablik said “Your ideas should be as irresponsibly free as a bird… let us create a fresh atmosphere, a pure aura of sprit, wit and joy…. Come and join the struggle against all things negative and corrupting. Join the struggle, preach, rejoice, blow the trumpet! Speak out in a hundred persuasive tongues. Sacred duties! You must speak out…. We should be teaching people how to be happy – man and woman, girl and child. Speak out! Speak out! Delight in existence – in the universe – in being and in perishing. We should be expunging the thought of war from the hearts of all mankind! Where are you, prophets? The heralds of a the new life, telling of the new sounds – moons- and stars! The millions await you!” Okay, it’s a little bit over the top, but overall, Wenzell would get my vote.
Strangely, despite his wild idealism, it turns out that Bruno Taut is very, very good at …bureaucracy! In Berlin he takes a post that has the very, very unglamourous, non-utopian sounding description of ‘working with a mixed-financed cooperative company with a mission to build low and medium income housing’. And his ability to balance visionary ideas with the practical needs of human beings, the need for social reform and the ability to make buildings that cities could afford, well all that adds up to produce some of the most innovative and livable buildings ever made. Two of his best in Berlin are still standing, despite the Allied Fire Bombings at the end of the war. Onkel Tom’s Seidlung in the southwest and the Hufeisen, or Horseshoe building in the southeast.
I’ll put pics on the website, since I’m fairly crap at describing buildings, but overall the goal of the two buildings were always to provide reasonably sized, sunny homes, with close access to nature, with modern appliances to help the work of women in the home, and with a total rethinking of the way a modern family uses a home, intended for a ‘modern working family’ with only two children, who, according to the architects anyway, wanted to live in clean modern homes without a million knickknacks and paintings and heavy wooden furniture. The ‘Horseshoe’ building is just as described: a huge horseshoe shaped building, with the interior apartments staring into a small wooded parkland. It’s part of a huge development all designed by Taut and one other architect with the priority being access to greenspace, schools, medical facilities, common spaces and athletic facilities.
Next, lets chat about the amazing Margaret Shutte-Lihotzy next, since we’re discussing the new living space for the new ‘modern family’. Shutte-Lihotzy was born in 1897 near Vienna.
She was the first female student at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, apparently only squeaking in because of a personal letter of recommendation from the painter Gustav Klimt. She studied architecture and wrote, “They thought that I would starve to death. Nobody could imagine hiring a woman to build a house in 1916—not even myself.” She focused on social housing and wrote "I was convinced that the economic independence and self-realization of women would be a common good, and that therefore the further rationalization of household labor was imperative,". Apart from being an incredible bad-ass and a resistance fighter in WW2, she is most known for her work in Frankfurt where she came up with the so called Frankfurt Kitchen. The city was dealing with the terrible conditions of living for the working class. Visiting existing sites, Margarete was astounded by the living conditions. She said, "I didn’t yet know the great Heinrich Zille quote, 'You can kill a person with an apartment just as well as with an axe,' but I felt it," She used time and motion studies to come up with a small but practical built-in kitchen that could be mass produced for working class apartments. She based her design on a railroad dining car kitchen, using small spaces to their maximum potential but using mass production to construct attractive, colorful spaces. 10,000 of these kitchens were installed, and if you walk through any Ikea in the world today, you’ll see that her practical, minimalist, functional aesthetic lives on.
Though, she had mixed feeling towards the end of her life, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky said at the age of 101, “If I had known that everyone would keep talking about nothing else, I would never have built that damn kitchen!” and insisted “I am not a kitchen.”
If you’re in Vienna, you can get a feeling for her work from visiting the 592-square-foot apartment on Vienna's Franzensgasse in which she lived for the last 30 years of her and the MAK – Museum of Applied Arts, houses a replica of the Frankfurt Kitchen in the MAK Design Lab. I’m performing in Minneapolis this week, and I was amazed to stumble upon another replica of her kitchen that made it to the Institute of Art here. I’ll put pictures on the site.
Next, lets touch on Erich Mendelsohn. He also served in the trenches of the front lines during WW1. After, in an act of ambitious modernist prophecy, he founded his architectural office on Nov 9th 1918, the same day as huge demonstrations were happening across Berlin and the new German Republic was declared.
Mendelsohn was another practical idealist who wanted a break with the past, which is a way one could describe so many people in the Weimar Republic. He writes, ‘It is unthinkable that we can turn back time… unthinkable that we leave unused the greatly broadened possibilities of technology. That we see the machine as the enemy of humanity, instead of as our powerful tool that we need to master… unthinkable that we base our personal lives on some original and ancient fatherland, instead of trusting the keys to modern times, for this modern time is our own time’. His most memorable works are the new huge department stores in large German cities.
To be honest, I find it difficult to see the innovation in close-up images of these buildings, which is simply a measure of how influential they were, since they resemble so much modern construction. It’s not till you pull back and see them surrounded by the rest of the old German city, and you see that they actually look like they have been dropped in from an alien civilization, they are such a radical break with the past.
Massive, organic flowing walls of glass and concrete opening in and out from the interior spaces and out into the streets, allowing the human gaze to move in and out, and also for light to flow in during the days, and the new electric light to flow out at night.
One of his first buildings was the the Einstein Tower, a housing for a telescope meant to confirm Einstein’s theories of relativity. Mendelsohn wanted to create a structure which would reflect those theories and he came up a dynamic, organic structure of a central observatory tower with rings of windows, on top of a wavelike platform to house the laboratories.
And to create it, he decided to use modern sculpted reinforced concrete, which, unfortunately, was not yet up to the demands of the building, so the building was immediately beset by numerous structural flaws, and it wasn’t until the 1999 rebuild that it finally was solid and secure. The Einstein Tower was a bold statement of intent and ideas. An experiment about how we might all live in the modern era: wild expressionist buildings filled with modern decorative elements that express the inner needs and wants of the people in the building. Perhaps if it hadn’t been so flawed, we’d all now be living in huge swooping, poetic, deeply-meaningful organic structures. However, it was sadly not to be. Pure functionalism, as represented by the International Style won out in the end, and so instead, we’re essentially living in Walter Gropius’s world.
So, Walter Gropius, is a contradictory and brilliant character, and maybe in the end most influential through his teaching and ideas, and not necessarily just from his finished buildings. And indeed, while Taub and Mendellsohn and Schott -Levitzky had huge influences over the modern era, it’s not totally wrong to say we live in Gropius’ world. Born in 1883, he trained in the same architecture studio as architects and thinkers Mies Van Der Rohe and Le Corbusier. His first works were industrial buildings like the Fagus Factory, which at the time was praised for its “unprecedented sense of openness and continuity between inside and outside”.
He also served in the trenches of the WW1, and immediately after took a position as Chairman or at the Weimar Academy of Fine Arts, and stated its mandate as: "Art and the people must form an entity. Art shall no longer be a luxury of the few but should be enjoyed and experienced by the broad masses. The aim is an alliance of the arts under the wing of great architecture." In 1925 the school moved to Dessau, and there Gropius created what is perhaps his best work, the Bauhaus Art School Building, where the most extraordinary feature of the complex is the huge glass curtain of the workshop.
The support columns of the building were set facing inward to allow for an uninterrupted glass facade to stretch over all three floors as well as the entire length of the building, changing the relationship between the inside and outside, giving freedom and clarity, transparency, lightness and flatness, and in one fell swoop, changing all previous ideas of aesthetics, with an almost brutalist absence of ornamentation. At the Bauhaus school, no matter what focus they had, in a kind of rebirth of the old craft schools, students studied all disciplines: painting, sculpture, printmaking, architecture, and professors were encouraged to mingle and work side by students. Gropius wrote “Art itself cannot be taught, but craftsmanship can. Architects, painters, sculptors are all craftsmen in the original sense of the word.”
Bauhaus aesthetics endorsed simplicity, honesty and purity. Ornamentation, grandiose elements and “pointless gesture” were discouraged as bourgeois excesses and just plain bad art. Form would follow function.
Now all of this sounds amazing, and the buildings are simply gorgeous, and working within them must have been an extraordinary pleasure, after the ‘Dark Satanic Mills’ of the industrial revolution.
And they were well meant, as Gropius said “We want to create the purely organic building, boldly emanating its inner laws, free of untruths or ornamentation.” The nagging question is how did those gorgeous, idealistic socialist buildings transform into the endless lines of featureless glass boxes that today characterize cities around the world. The perfect image of that transformation might be the clean lined, geometric Gropius designed METLIFE building that looms over the ornate Beaux Arts Grand Central Station in NYC.
The clean, un-ornamented new dominating the overblown old. And, at the time, a gorgeous revolutionary statement of intent. However, repeated infinitely around the world…. Well, I have no words for how much I hate those cityscapes.
So, after he fled Germany in 1934, Gropius became head of the Harvard School of Architecture in Mies Van Der Rohe took over in Chicago and they both immediately replaced the traditional Beaux Arts curriculum with their own fundamentals of design. The International Style, as it came to be known, took off across America’s, and then the world’s urban landscapes, filling street after street with unending boxy buildings composed of steel, concrete and glass. Personally, I think the tendency to blame Gropius or Mies Van Der Rohe is off the mark, and gives them a dictatorial power that they didn’t have, though, from what I’ve learned about the vast ego of Architects, perhaps they really, really wished they had. I’d personally throw the blame on the fact that endless shitty rip-offs of those initial gorgeous buildings with flat roofs, glass facades, built of steel frames and concrete, with no external ornamentation, produced from stock pieces made in factories, were massively cheaper to build, and capitalism simply swooped in and decided that this was how we were going to all live, and used the theories of the Bauhaus school as justification for telling us that we were all old-fashioned if we dared to like older Beaux-Arts design or desire some new version of modern living.
Recently, I was walking through Venice Beach in a LA, and was bitterly amused to watch that as the wealthy Google programmers move in to the area, the lovely old arts and crafts bungalows are being torn down, and what they are building for themselves are some of the most boring modernist boxes imaginable, using the worst aesthetics of the International School. Gropius said “A modern, harmonic and lively architecture is the visible sign of an authentic democracy.” And his personal home followed his own aesthetic perfectly:
Well, there is something darkly amusing about watching some of the most powerful people in the modern information age barricade themselves into a featureless concrete blocks, thinking they are making bold statements about how modern they are.
Or maybe I should be more positive and think that, however corrupted, what is still enduring is the socialist myth and the aesthetic that Bruno Taut, Margaret Shott-Livetzsky, Erich Mendelsohn and Walter Gropius came up with in those revolutionary days of the Weimar Republic.
All of Weimar’s architectural creativity stopped with the rise of the Nazi Party. Which is interesting, since National Socialism’s stated aim was to help the workers of Germany, and Weimar architecture had been so successful in doing that. However, ideology trumped practicality and no matter how successful the new modern buildings had been in actually helping give people a chance to live a modern life, the Nazis were not going to accept those new ideas. Which makes me think, as the whole world right now faces a massive housing shortage, what are we going to build? Will we build practical, lovely new homes that prioritize community, and human centered functionality, that help create neighbourhoods and allow the inhabitants access to light and sun and green space, and give people a sense of self respect, or will we build profitable expensive, identical monstrosities which sell a shallow dream of shining marble kitchen countertops, brand new appliances and high speed internet to make people forget that they are living in dysfunctional buildings that, despite floor to ceiling windows, are actually designed to separate them from the world and kill communities and connections between people.
So, once again, if some of the concerns and desires in these stories seem familiar, well they should, because I believe the Weimar Republic helped give birth to the modern world.
Thanks for listening. Hit subscribe or follow if you want to know when the next episode appears. I don’t have any advertising budget for this show or really a budget at all, I’m just some obsessed singer repurposing an old microphone, so if you leave a review on your app, or hit the star button, it really encourages the podcast to be found by other listeners, or just forward a link to a friend, that’d be great. And I hope you’ll join me in the coming months as I explore more about the strange birth, life and death of an experiment in creating a new society.
I’ll put images for this episode onto my website: bremnersings.com.
And who am I to discuss Weimar? Well, I’m not a sociologist, a political scientist or an historian. I’m an obsessive artist. A singer, play-write and cabaret performer who has been obsessed with the arts and music of the Weimar republic all my life. I’ve recorded three albums dedicated to the music of this time and particularly the music of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. If you want to listen to them, just search for Bremner Fletcher Duthie in any music streaming site, and you’ll find all my albums. And if you want to know more about my work, see the images from the period, or suggest a specific Weimar subject for an episode, check out bremnersings.com
Join me next time for another walk through the amazing creative madness of 1920’s Germany.