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Erich Mendelsohn’s Modernism: The Historical Roots of Neues Bauen Architecture

Erich Mendelsohn engaged a modernist vocabulary for the renovation of C. A.

Herpich Sons, Furriers (fig. 5.1) on the Leipzigerstraße in 1924, down the street from

the Wertheim department store. Where Alfred Messel had knowingly engaged an

historicizing idiom, as I argued in the last chapter, the sleek lines and the economy of

Fig. 5.1. Erich Mendelsohn, C. A. Herpich Sons, Furrier, Leipzigerstraße, Berlin, renovation 1924-28.
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Mendelsohn’s functionally determined ornamentation announced a progressive and

forward-looking architecture. Or so it would seem. I want to claim that Mendelsohn

grounded his modernist vocabulary, not on a total rejection of the past, but on a

reformulation of a consecrated tradition with German roots. Where Messel had

searched in the architecture of a distant German past, Mendelsohn reshaped Karl

Friedrich Schinkel’s neo-classicism, an adaptation that seemingly eschewed historical

reference—so prominent in Messel’s articulation—and that was suitable to the new

materials and building techniques of the post-war period. Where Messel had

foregrounded the historical, and had organized the building’s elements in a modern

spirit, I want to claim that Mendelsohn foregrounded the new, its components

organized along classical (and thus) historic lines, reversing the accents of his

predecessor’s formulation.

While I argued that Messel, working for a Jewish patron, sought to create a

contemporary space for Jewish contemporary activity grounded in a mythologized

German past, I want to claim that Mendelsohn, also working for a Jewish retailer,

formulated a tactic, one that announced the future, even as it articulated its

foundations in the past. I am not claiming that Mendelsohn’s deployment of a

modernist architectural vocabulary accounts for all post-war architecture; rather that

he adapted his modernist vocabulary for this project and the others discussed here for

specific contexts and conditions. This specificity is necessitated by the degree of

integration of Jews to German society; the conditions that determined Jewish

separateness had almost disappeared. But the history and the remnants of that history

still required, I believe, different approaches to specific situations that are the subject

of this chapter.
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The hybridity of the Herpich store’s vocabulary was embedded in the project

itself that consisted in the transformation of existing buildings with a new façade. The

company, founded in 1835 by Carl August Herpich, also sold clothes and luxury

carpets. The renovation of the adjacent townhouses that the store had first occupied in

1875 into a single large store was undertaken during the first period of economic

stability following the end of World War One. As with other Kaufhaus in the

neighborhood, Julius Herpich hired an architect for the renovation, engaging Erich

Mendelsohn, whose exhibition of architectural drawings at the Paul Cassirer Gallery

in Berlin in 1919 and the Einstein Tower project had recently received visible

acclaim and criticism.1

Kathleen James characterizes Mendelsohn's work as dynamic functionalism.

His approach incorporated stylistic experimentation that took into account

innovations in standardized construction techniques, and the assimilation of disparate

influences from the surrounding environment; it encompassed efficient spaces, the

latest mechanical imagery, and implemented the attitude of making "life far from the

factory floor thrilling rather than threatening."2 Although Mendelsohn maintained an

independent practice, his battles for permits for this project were an important factor

in the founding of the Ring, a professional association dedicated to the promotion of

Neues Bauen of the 1920s, the architectural expression of the Neue Sachlichkeit.3

In the Herpich store renovation, Mendelsohn designed a facade to incorporate

three existing Wilhelmine townhouses and added two additional floors. Although it

can be assumed that this decision to renovate rather than to demolish and rebuild was

one taken by the patron rather than the architect, its realization is a literal example of

Walter Benjamin’s formulation of the marriage of the old and the new. James points
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out that in this project Mendelsohn was one of the first postwar German architects to

exploit the lightness and transparency of the steel frame. He proposed a curtain of

travertine, ornamented with bronze sills around the openings, suspended from the

steel frame above an almost fully glazed ground story, made of a single pane of glass

broken by the thinnest of mullions and two inset entrances. This glazing allowed the

interior to be flooded with light and to minimize the boundary between merchandise

and customers. The night lighting integrated into the architecture accented the façade

as screen (fig. 5.2). The horizontals of Mendelsohn's façade made up of sweeping

curves redefined the street as, according to James, a narrow, tightly bounded stream

of cars and people.

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Fig. 5.2. Erich Mendelsohn, C. A. Herpich Sons, Furrier, Leipzigerstraße, Berlin, nightview.

The horizontality was reinforced by the store name stretching above the ground floor

windows, effectively using the storefront as advertising.4 Mendelsohn had adapted

this idea from the designs of the Werkbund and American advertising.5 As I argued in

the last chapter, the architecture of the department store can be understood as part of

the marketing strategy of retailers in general, and of department stores in particular.

The explicit use of the storefront as a space of signage where the store name was

displayed as advertising, in conjunction with the presentation of consumer goods,

signaled an alignment of interior and exterior. The store’s retail function—and the

accompanying phantasmagoria—were displayed directly on the street.

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Benjamin’s description of the experience of the street and its storefronts,

discussed in the context of the Paris arcades, confirm the effectiveness of

Mendelsohn’s articulation of this permeable zone between the inside and the outside:

Streets are the dwelling place of the collective. The collective is an eternally

unquiet, eternal being that—in the space between the building fronts—

experiences, learns, understands, and invents as much as individuals do within

the privacy of their own four walls. For this collective, the glossy enameled

shop signs are a wall decoration as good as, if not better than, an oil painting

in the drawing room of a bourgeois...More than anywhere else, the street

reveals itself in the arcade as the furnished and familiar interior of the

masses.6

Benjamin understood the new architecture of the Neues Bauen to have performed a

break with the paradigms of nineteenth-century architecture. Buck-Morss formulates

Benjamin's reflections on the transformation of ornamentation succinctly:

The twentieth-century stylistic revolution changed all this. Masks, casings,

and surface ornamentation disappeared. Function became visible. The new

sensibility penetrated the most habitual experiences of everyday life, and

thereby into the collective unconscious.7

If, for Benjamin, "the twentieth century, with its porosity, transparency, light and free

air made an end to living in the old sense,” it also presented the pedestrian, the

passer-by and the consumer with more immediate and direct entreaties to the

fulfillment of consumer desires.8 The use of glass and iron evident in Mendelsohn’s

façade had nothing of the discretion of Messel’s dissimulating architecture, nor the

ostentation of Sehring’s hyperventilated encasing.

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The Herpich store introduced a new aesthetic into a commercial zone where

the architectural vocabulary was laden with historical references, as in the Wertheim

store, or heavy in ornamentation, as in the Tietz store facade, even though the

architecture of both these stores was innovative in some way. The Herpich store

eschewed both historical reference and ancillary ornamentation, investing instead in

the principle of design following form, on the one hand, and design following the

transformations of urban life which the automobile and mass consumption were

exercising on urban centers. As Benjamin notes, at least in Germany where the social

tensions that had erupted in the Revolution of 1918 had not yet been resolved, the

new architecture corresponded at least to the wish images that the Revolution had

unleashed.

But for all the newness of Mendelsohn’s design, I think it is possible to find a

predecessor in Karl Friedrich Schinkel, the designer of the new houses of culture that

acted as crucibles of a nascent German nationalism in a post-Napoleonic, modern

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Fig. 5.3. Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Neuer Pavillon im Schloßpark, 1824-25.

Prussian state. The Neuer Pavillon im Schloßpark (fig. 5.3) was built behind the

Schloß Charlottenburg between 1824-25 and is an example of Schinkel’s

precociously modern classicism, one that was transmitted to the Neues Bauen group

by Peter Behrens via his transitional style. Behrens transformed late austere and

repetitive Schinkel-esque classicism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century

architecture to the techniques of mass-production.9 Schinkel’s Neuer Pavillon, bereft

of most of the imposing signs of his neo-classicism as, for example, his Museum am

Lustgarten (fig. 3.9)—the colonnade reduced to framing the openings of the upper

storey, and residual window entablatures—rehearses the predominance of linear

design and flat surfaces of the Neues Bauen. The repetition of forms enhances the

proportions of the building in both its horizontal and vertical movements that in turn

contribute to its sense of unity. Indeed the austerity of Schinkel’s pavilion makes
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Mendelsohn’s Herpich store façade and its richness of line and material baroque in

comparison.

While the rhetoric of the new may have been propagated by the Neues Bauen

school and subsequently perpetuated by observers and commentators, the links to

classicism and specifically to its German version via Schinkel, would reinforce once

more Benjamin’s observation of the powerful admixture of the old and the new.

While the new style purged itself of direct historical references to rely directly on

design, this was already an inherent strategy of classical design, even as Messel’s

references enlisted the classical precedents for validation. Schinkel’s exercise in

restraint predates the paring down of design elements to reinforce the presence of the

architectural event. The power of Mendelsohn’s design did not only emerge from its

lean surface that embraced the vocabulary of the changing streetscape. It also

engaged an architectural precedent that created a context for itself within German

cultural history without acknowledging it. Given the post-war penchant to look to the

future, it is not surprising that the influence of the past was rendered invisible.

When Mendelsohn took on the Herpich store, he had experimented with the

renovation of an older building where he had used the façade for the display of

corporate identity. His 1922-1923 collaboration with his assistant Richard Neutra and

the sculptor Rudolf Paul Henning to renovate the Mossehaus, the Berlin headquarters

of the Rudolf Mosse Advertising and Publishing Company, was the first of two
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Fig. 5.4. Anonymous, untitled, Berlin, Leipzigerstraße and Friedrichstraße, c. 1910. The Rudolf Mosse
firm occupied the corner building, still bearing the name of its former occupant.

projects undertaken for this firm. The second commission was a housing project for

the real estate arm of the company realized in 1926-1928. After having opened an

office in Berlin in 1867 (fig. 5.4) in the heart of the commercial district where it had

played a large part in developing new advertising and related marketing strategies,

Rudolf Mosse’s company became Germany's first international advertising firm. In

1871 it launched the Berliner Tageblatt, a left-liberal paper whose coverage included

culture and politics; it became the leading quality newspaper in Berlin and acquired

national importance.10 The publishing firm then started the Berliner Morgen-Zeitung
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in 1889, and acquired the Berliner Volks-Zeitung in 1904, the last two directed,

respectively, at the middle and working classes.

This chain was challenged by the newspapers of Leopold Ullstein (1826-

1899), a paper merchant from Fürth, who founded his publishing house in Berlin in

1877 with the Berliner Zeitung. Ullstein also launched the Berliner Morgenpost,

Berliner Zeitung am Mittag, and Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung. He entered into direct

competition with the Berliner Tageblatt when he bought Berlin’s oldest newspaper,

the Vossische Zeitung in 1914, edited by Georg Bernhard.11 That Rudolf Mosse and

Leopold Ullstein “brought out the most influential liberal newspapers” in Berlin is

not surprising to the historian Monica Richarz. She traces back the presence of Jewish

printers and publishers in the city a number of centuries, at least as far back as the

time of Moses Mendelssohn.12 That the Jewish entrepreneurial community supported

liberal economic policies, using the press to advocate their viewpoint, as I will argue

below, shifts the relationship Richarz wishes to establish. Without denying the

cultural specificity of some Jewish publishing activities, the bourgeois use of the

press to create a public sphere to advance their interests conforms with the argument

Habermas establishes proposed in relation to the transformation of the function of the

press in the eighteenth century.

Rudolf Mosse's son-in-law, Hans Lachmann-Mosse, assumed the directorship

of the company when Rudolf Mosse died in 1920, and, having been cut out of the

editorial board by the will, turned to the real estate arm of the company. The historian

Werner E. Mosse specifies however that Lachmann-Mosse ran the company into the

ground with unsound speculative projects, first mortgaging assets, then contracting

debt, finally playing with the company’s finances, including taking money out of the
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pension fund. In 1922 Lachmann-Mosse hired Mendelsohn—whose design for the

Einstein Tower had been covered by the Berliner Tageblatt in the summer of 1921—

and his associates to renovate the Mossehaus building that the firm had occupied in

1874, located in the Kreuzberg neighborhood, the heart of the newspaper district.

Neutra worked on the top two storeys and the design of Lachmann-Mosse’s office;

Henning contributed the tile design of the canopy—a short-lived collaboration.13

Fig. 5.5. Erich Mendelsohn, Richard Neutra, Paul Henning, Mossehaus renovation,
Jerusalemerstraße 46-47 and Reinhold-Huhnstraße, Berlin, 1922-3.

The Mossehaus project was in essence a retro-fit of the façade that had been

redesigned by the firm of Cremer and Wolffenstein between 1901 and 1903,
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Mendelsohn’s work centering on the main entrance that had been damaged in the

Sparticist revolt of 1919 (fig. 5.5). The two additional floors were integrated by

emphasizing what would become Mendelsohn’s signature horizontal curves; he used

this tactic of literally fitting the new on the old in his work on the Herpich store.

While I believe that one could argue (for or against) the aesthetic merits of this

project, part of the interest of this renovation is the bringing together of the concept of

the building’s street front as a carrier of the company name. The façade functioned as

an advertisement of the enterprise that specialized in advertisement and publishing

and that had participated in the transformation of newspapers into an advertising

vehicle, more evident in the photograph of the detail of the main portal (fig. 5.6). The

use of lettering
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Fig. 5.6. Erich Mendelsohn, Richard Neutra, Paul Henning Mossehaus renovation, Jerusalemerstraße
46-47 and Reinhold-Huhnstraße, Berlin, 1922-3. Detail.

to advertise the building is of the same order as the use of newspapers to advertise

commodities; that the façade of a newspaper building was engaged in this strategy

corroborates this role.14 This is not to say that the commercial names of buildings had

not already appeared on the streetscape, as the image of the earlier pre-war Mosse

building reveals (fig. 5.4). Mendelsohn’s design however, transformed the function of

the earlier building’s lettering from that of identification, to one of advertising on the

Mossehaus. Mendelsohn’s design orchestrates the parts of the building, particularly

those of the renovation, to lead the eye to the main doorway, announcing the

enterprise at the site of the entrance. Mendelsohn’s sense of advertising extended to

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the promotion of his own work. He commissioned Arthur Köster to photograph his

buildings. Not only was Mendelsohn’s work reproduced in the publications of the

Mosse chain, it also appeared in the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung of the rival Ullstein

chain.15

When the integration of Mosse’s advertising venture into services offered by

newspapers is placed in the context of the development of the department store in

Berlin and the concomitant use of advertising by the retailers to reach (or to create) a

consuming public, the transformation of the functions of the press as an instrument in

the public sphere can be traced. While the press, according to Habermas, had earlier

had a commercial function in the dissemination of commodity information in the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, members of the German bourgeoisie had begun

to transform the press in the eighteenth century. It became a forum to critique the

state’s interference in the private sphere, that is the commodity market; the critique

subsequently targeted other issues of governance.16 John L. Snell proposes that the

direction of Prussian journalism in the early nineteenth century was also influenced

by the anti-French tendencies it exhibited during the occupation; following liberation,

the Prussian press pursued nationalist themes, in some instances calling for

representative government.17 Until unification, according to Snell, national unity and

to a lesser extent, representative government dominated the liberal press. The

transformation of the press from an instrument of public critique to a vehicle of

advertising ran parallel to the political transformations of German unification, the

proclamation of a constitution in 1871 that established a nominally constitutional

government, and the development of institutions of representative government,

including the establishment of political parties in the 1860s. Although the bourgeois
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revolution in Germany led to limited political gains, the political institutionalization

of important liberal demands and the means for their implementation removed the

urgency for the press to act as a political tool. By mid-century the educational

reforms undertaken by Humboldt at the beginning of the century had promoted the

mass circulation of newspapers. The space of newspapers was available for the

circulation of mass produced consumer goods. As has been noted, Benjamin and

Habermas observed that when consumer demands and desires began to be addressed

through a public instrument, the formerly critical edge of this instrument of the public

sphere was dulled; it transformed what had been a critical public sphere into a realm

of private fantasy. Mosse’s founding of his advertising agency, his promotion of

newspapers as advertising vehicles, the founding of a Berlin newspaper, the first in a

chain, all in the late 1860s and the 1870s, lends a concrete example for Habermas’s

analysis. Mendelsohn’s deployment of building surfaces as a site of advertising was a

further transformation of public spaces for marketing functions.

If the fore-going analysis describes in very general terms the transformation of

the role of the press in the nineteenth-century, it is useful to examine what was meant

by the term liberal in the German context, a term used in characterizing the Mosse

and Ullstein families of publications. It is also a term used to describe the political

views of the German middle classes of the nineteenth century. This review is

prompted by a lack of clarity in the description of the politics of the fore-mentioned

newspaper chains. Thus from Monica Richarz’s demographic point of view, these

newspapers (as did other cultural publications and the socialist press) offered

employment—as editors, freelance contributors, and critics—to Jewish university

graduates of humanities programs who were unable to secure employment in the

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universities or the civil service.18 In other words they provided “liberal” professional

openings for the Jewish intelligentsia who sought alternative careers to those in

business and finance available to them through their community. Kathleen James

bases her characterization of the Mosse newspapers as liberal in part on the work of

the historian Werner Mosse. The latter points out that the Mosses and the Ullsteins

did not seek commercial titles, as has been noted for entrepreneurs engaged in other

fields. “Not infrequently, being ‘oppositional’ in their attitudes, they would disdain

‘distinctions’ conferred by the imperial authorities.”19 Mosse and Ullstein, in other

words, identified less closely with Germany’s imperial policies than did other

entrepreneurs such as the war contractors and the financiers who, as noted in the

preceding chapter, were much more tightly bound up with policies of state. Michael

Brenner is even more vague in his characterization of the term liberal. “Politically,”

he writes, “it meant supporting liberal political parties made up for the most part of

bourgeois, German-speaking Jews. From the point of view of religion, being liberal

meant being open to the reform of the religious rituals and liturgy in synagogues and

cemeteries.”20 These impressionistic aspects of liberal attitude require a more

rigorous examination.

German political liberalism developed in the context of a conservative, indeed

reactionary, Prussian political system characterized by moments of political reform

that focused primarily on the dissolution of corporatist structures.21 The strongest new

political sentiment to emerge in the early nineteenth century, not necessarily in

opposition to either of these movements, was German nationalism. Ignited by the

French occupation, this nationalism expressed the desire for the unity of the myriad

German states. Aspects of the cultural dimension of this movement were discussed in
 238

chapter 3. This call for unity struggled against the Partikularismus and small state

fragmentation reinforced by independent administrative structures that resulted in a

pervasive presence of authority, if not of authoritarianism, in German political and

social culture. But German nationalism and hostility towards the French also included

suspicion of what was understood as a French concept, that of individual liberty. In

the ensuing struggle through the nineteenth century around these two concepts,

German unity and popular sovereignty, specifically, the enfranchisement of the

population, the former took precedence.22

Liberalism in the period from 1815-1848 came to be identified with these two

options, German unification and freedom from political intervention of the state and

the estates in matters of political, religious, and economic affairs, though liberals

were suspicious of, if not hostile to, democratic representation. Liberals however did

argue for legal equality before the law and in dealings with the police. This did not

imply a democratic principle of political equality, or the kinds of political institutions

this would entail, specifically proportional representation and, in the German context,

constitutional monarchy. The notion of political equality, to be expressed by

universal and equal, direct and secret suffrage, was not adopted as a policy by a

German political party, the Social Democrats, until late in the nineteenth century.23

The aborted 1848 Revolution was followed by a political reaction that

discouraged and at times actively suppressed political associations for a decade. By

the late 1850s, a conjunction of political and social factors—including French

military campaigns on the borders of German states—led to the formation of

nationalist political parties in which liberals were central. The Progressive Party

(Deutsche Fortschrittspartei), a coalition of liberals and democrats formed in June

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1861, created the largest block of voters in Prussia’s Chamber of Deputies despite the

skewed three tier voting system that should have favored conservative delegates.24

This party’s parliamentary success was short lived. In parliamentary terms,

Bismarck’s need for allies in his bid to create German unity and to subsequently

fashion the German state led to his strategically working with the liberal parties in the

1860s and 1870s. Although Bismarck had a constitution drawn up by liberals for the

North German Confederation subsequently adopted for the Reich that included

universal, equal and secret suffrage for the Reichstag, the Reichstag’s powers were

extremely limited. For example, the upper chamber of the Reich, the Bundesrat,

whose representatives were appointed by the German states, maintained a veto over

measures that would interfere with the states’ rights. Thus, Prussia continued to

exercise a three tier voting system and to maintain exclusionary criteria in matters of

state appointments. Liberals left the Fortschrittspartei and its democrats in 1867 to

form the National Liberal Party when Bismarck’s military policies proved popular

and contributed to a drop in the older party’s representation. The National Liberals

were the largest bloc in the Reich’s new parliament, and defended the interests of

industry and trade. They collaborated with Bismarck in his Kulturkampf against the

Catholic Church, and supported Bismarck’s repressive anti-socialist legislation,

which from 1878 to 1890 attempted unsuccessfully to destroy the Social Democratic

party of Germany’s working classes.25 This alliance of convenience lasted until 1878,

even as the National Liberals continued to struggle for control over the military

budget. Bismarck, in a reversal of policy, turned elsewhere for support for anti-liberal

protective tariff legislation, including the Catholic Center that also represented

agrarian interests. This led to the parliamentary decline of the National Liberals.26
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Against this background, Peter Pulzer’s characterization of the liberalism of

the Mosse and the Ullstein newspapers of the first decades of the twentieth century

can be contextualized. For Pulzer, these publications spoke for the urban bourgeoisie

that favored trade and industry over agriculture and an extension of parliamentary

over executive power. Their business sections favored the workings of a free-market

economy. On questions of the colonies, the navy, social reform and relationships with

the SPD, the “Berliner Tageblatt took a more right-wing line” than Ullstein’s

Vossische Zeitung.27 (As noted above, the Berliner Tageblatt led by Wolff adopted

anti-militaristic opinions toward the end of World War I.) These views were held by

the majority of Berlin’s Jews, although there were Jews prominent in the SPD and

those who supported more conservative policies. Seen in this historical light,

Mendelsohn’s retrofit of the Mosse publishing firm headquarters with a modernist

façade that advertised its occupant and its products conforms to the political and

economic views of its promoter.

These political and economic allegiances of the majority of Berlin’s Jewish

community, identified specifically with Mendelsohn’s patrons, suggest the sources of

the architect’s political choices that conjoined with other factors influencing his

career decisions. Although Mendelsohn was professionally associated with the other

modernist architects working in the city, he did not collaborate with them or enter

into the bureaucratic structures of municipalities dominated by the Social Democrats,

where Walter Gropius and Bruno and Max Taut, for example, pursued their careers in

the post-war period. Working in a community that was traditionally aligned with the

Liberal parties and historically excluded from government and educational positions,

Mendelsohn found work only with Jewish patrons. When a semblance of economic
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stability returned to Germany, and capital was available for housing projects to meet

the increasing demand on the city’s housing stock, Mendelsohn worked for a private

developer while Gropius and the Tauts participated in the municipally funded

housing projects, discussed below. Mendelsohn’s housing project incorporated

amenities that accorded with liberal economic views, amenities that were absent in

the municipally sponsored housing units, as will be discussed more fully below.

The development arm of the Mosse group, the

Wohnhausgrundstücksverwertungs A.G. (WOGA), commissioned Mendelsohn for a

second project. WOGA was developed on the last open city block located on the

Kurfürstendamm, the elegant boulevard running from the city's commercial heart to

its wealthy western suburbs including Charlottenburg. The boulevard, laid out

between 1882 and 1887, was lined with elegant apartment buildings and many cafés,

and developed as the site of an alternative culture to the academies, museums and

opera houses in the core of the old city. It became the center of Berlin's new

consumer culture of the 1920s—cafés, cabarets, restaurants, shops, hotels, the city's

first major cinemas, and as was discussed in the preceding chapter, department stores.

Prewar façades were refaced in new architectural styles, the antithesis of Friedrich

Schinkel's pre-industrial court centered city.28 Jewish and non-Jewish middle classes

had been moving to and developing the western suburbs of Charlottenburg,

Schöneberg and Wilmersdorf, incorporated into the city with Berlin’s expansion in

1920, where they represented 20% to 25% of the neighborhood population. The upper

classes lived in Dahlem and Grunewald. Mitte, still the location of Jewish

institutions, became home for immigrants and the lower middle classes. 29
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This shift to the western suburbs is, I believe, part of a separation of the Jewish

middle class from the Jewish working classes, the newly arrived Jewish immigrants

mainly from Eastern Europe, and the poor. The neighborhoods beyond Mitte,

including the Nicolaiviertel, the first Jewish neighborhood, and the one that

developed around the Oranienburgerstraße, came to be known collectively as the

Scheuenenviertel (the Shed Quarter), so called because animals had been housed

there in the eighteenth century. By the turn of the twentieth century, Ostjuden—

Yiddish speaking immigrants from Poland, Hungary and Russia—who by 1925 made

up a quarter of the city’s 170,000 Jews, settled, according to Brian Ladd, “in the

narrow streets behind Alexanderplatz …already Berlin’s most notorious slum.”30 The

Ostjuden, according to Michael Brenner, threatened the “survival of the Jews who

had been living in Germany for some time already.”31 Various German-Jewish

organizations tried to limit the influx of Jews from Eastern Europe, an effort that

echoes the role of the officials of the Jewish community policing the entry of new

residents during the eighteenth century. The segregation in the 1920s was effectively

enacted by higher rents.

The block developed by WOGA was bounded by Cicero, Paulsborner and

Albrecht-Achilles streets and faced the Lehninerplatz. The block had been acquired

by Rudolf Mosse by 1904. The plot was located in the suburb of Wilmersdorf,

incorporated into the city in 1920, the same year Felicia Lachmann-Mosse, Rudolf's

adopted daughter, inherited it. The elder Mosse had first rented it out as a fairground,

and then in 1908, had rented it to the Neue-West-Eisbahn which offered tennis courts

in the summer and an ice-skating rink in the winter.32

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Fig. 5.7. Erich Mendelsohn, WOGA, Berlin, Cicerostraße, Berlin, 1925-31.

Mendelsohn's modernist designs for the block sought to integrate residential

and retail functions (fig. 5.7). It included a courtyard in the middle of the block to

ensure the maximum light and air and provided an alternative to the traditional urban

block organized around a courtyard, incorporating an aspect of the garden city

principles. Just as modernism was rooted in an historically grounded German neo-

classicism, so Mendelsohn’s courtyard designs were inflected by debates and

discourses that developed around housing types in the nineteenth century. His design
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also dramatized the cinema and the cabaret on street side; the block included the

Universum Cinema (fig. 5.16), the Komiker Cabaret, a café-restaurant, an apartment

hotel, and a shopping street accessible from the Kurfürstendamm by Mendelsohn, and

apartments by Mendelsohn and Jürgen Bachman. WOGA had initially hired Jürgen

Bachman for development of the site but was dissatisfied with his proposals. James

suggests that Mendelssohn, having heard of the project, offered his services.

Bachman remained responsible for the design of apartment blocks on Albrecht-

Achillesstraße and Paulsbornerstraße; Mendelsohn was responsible for the over-all

design and the buildings facing Kurfürstendamm and Cicerostraße. The site was

developed with profitability of the commercial venues in mind by providing ground

floor retail spaces as well as the dynamic introduction of an alternative architectural

style that contrasted with that of the Kurfürstendamm's highly ornate apartment

buildings. This represented a mix of expensive residential and commercial uses and

was regarded as one of the most coherent integration of residential and commercial

functions, even if after 1929, most of the retail spaces, with the exception of the

cinema and the café, proved difficult to rent. Mendelsohn's Cicerostraße apartment

block was designed in relatively the same exterior style, flat-roofed and with little

ornamentation, as the tiny apartments for workers being built in the suburbs, such as

those being designed by Taut and Wagner. The apartments however were much more

spacious: the two-and-a -half room apartments offered 76 square meters; the four-

bedroom, 135 square meters.33 They also offered the amenities of downtown living, a

privilege reserved for the middle and upper classes since the mid-nineteenth century.

While a Jewish developer hired a Jewish architect to design a housing complex with

commercial and retail spaces in a neighborhood with a significant Jewish population,

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this can be understood as contingent to the integration of the Jewish middle class to

other middle classes moving away from the city center into newer neighborhoods.

The specifics of the architectural adaptations are aspects of the integration of Jewish

historical experience and an understanding of German culture, or, more specifically,

Mendelsohn’s synthesis of modernist design in commercial venues.

In effect, the modernist architectural design of WOGA and the incorporation

of aspects of garden city principles in building the complex around a courtyard were

related both to the immediate need for housing in Berlin, and the development of

different housing types in Berlin beginning in the nineteenth century. One of the

building types that preceded Mendelsohn’s design for the mid-city block was

developed by Alfred Messel, architect of the Wertheim store, who incorporated

prototypical garden city principles. They provide a precedent of an urban housing

type, but one financed in a different way and built for a different class of resident. A

discussion of these provides some contrast with which to consider Mendelsohn’s

project. Messel’s housing projects were initiated by well-intentioned liberal middle

class (non-Jewish) reformers, whose goal was to provide adequate housing for the

working classes, thereby transferring middle class values to these targeted occupants.

The values of these non-Jewish liberal middle-class associations differed from those

of Jewish liberalism; although there was a commitment to the idea of financial self-

sufficiency in the field of housing, moral values addressing character that the

beneficiaries needed to attain were embedded in these discourses.

By the end of the 1880s, German housing reformers had begun to consider the

possibilities of the city block within the urban context, referring to existing English

workers’ housing as model. Conventional middle-class thinking favored the cottage

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ideal, but reformers in Berlin required a solution that would overcome the prohibitive

costs of the cottage in the urban context, and considered such desirable factors of the

tenement as proximity to places of work and shopping. Messel, a member of the

Verein zur Verbesserung der kleinen Wohnungen (VVkW) from its founding in 1888,

had already worked on a model working-class tenement for the Deutscher Verein für

Armenpflege und Wohltatigkeit (DVfAW), an organization interested in investing in

limited dividend housing for the working classes.34 This latter organization

collaborated with the Frauenverein Octavia Hill, whose mission was to rehabilitate

and administer existing property using the voluntary assistance of middle-class

women to collect rent in the way pioneered by the English reformer Octavia Hill. In

1890 these two associations decided to develop a project to Messel’s design on a site

donated by the financier Valentin Weissbach that was finally realized in 1899-1905.

The project consisted of 388 dwellings, and included a kindergarten and a bathhouse,

all of this available to workers at lower than market rental rates.35

Messel was hired by the Berliner Spar- und Bauverein, a housing cooperative

founded in 1892 whose members included apprentices, shop assistants and junior

clerks, first for a project on the Sickingenstraße in the Moabit district in 1895, and for

another one in the nearby Proskauerstraße in 1897-8 (fig. 5.8). In these projects

Messel rethought the design of the Mietskaserne, the rental barracks erected on deep

city blocks that were born of Berlin’s industrialization, the dwellings organized

around a series of small courtyards that provided little light and ventilation. Messel

also reworked the organization of the apartments of the four and five-storey buildings

that in the worst cases were often divided by a communal corridor, huddled around

courts that were little more than light-wells. For the Proskauerstraße project Messel
 247

planned the dwellings around a huge planted court of over 40 meters in width,

leaving open one of the sides of the block to improve lighting and ventilation. All the

dwellings were self-contained, and, what was rare in working–class housing, had a

view onto both the court and the street. Combining the courtyards around a central

location into a large

Fig. 5.8. Alfred Messel, Proskauerstraße Miethaus, Berlin, 1897-8.

open space was an innovation taken up in subsequent housing projects. Each unit,

which measured roughly 31 square meters, half of the size of Mendelsohn’s

Cicerostraße apartments, had its own washroom, a luxury for working-class

tenements at the time. The block also provided facilities such as kindergartens,

communal wash- and bathrooms, common rooms and meeting rooms, a library, six

shops, a pub, and a kindergarten with access to the courtyard, all of which

encouraged community life.36

The project that Messel realized for the VVkW and its associates in 1899-

1905 on the Kochhahnstraße and the Weissbachstraße proposed a slight variation on

the design of the central courtyard (fig. 5.9). Its planted central courtyard was
 248

completely enclosed by the residential dwellings, and a communal building served

numerous functions, including housing a kindergarten, that were run by the

Frauenverein Octavia Hill. As with the earlier development, apartments occupied

both sides of the building, were provided with toilets, and offered amenities that

approximated those of the cottage ideal, symbolized in part by the cottage design of

the communal building and the planting on the exterior edges of the courtyard.

Messel’s eclecticism, at work in the Wertheim store, was also evident in these

housing projects. In the Proskauerstraße

Fig. 5.9. Alfred Messel, Kochhahnstraße and Weissbachstraße Miethaus, Berlin, 1899-1905.

project, the references to medieval gabled roofs and accentuated dormers of domestic

architecture, and the cottage building in the Weissbachstraße project work to

rehabilitate the reputation that tenement housing suffered at the time by referring to

more storied and colorful historical moments, ones that preceded Germany’s

industrialization.37
 249

Messel’s and other similar projects led to the founding in Berlin of the

Deutsche Gartenstadtgesellschaft in 1902. This was modeled on Ebenezer Howard's

Garden Cities Association set up in England in 1899.38 Although the movement was

important within architectural circles, it had limited impact on issues such as land

reform and city planning where other organizations, such as the Verein für öffentliche

Gesundsheitsflege (VföG), were more active and effective.39 According to the

architectural historian Barbara Miller Lane the German garden housing movement

developed within a National Romantic perspective that embodied nationalist

sentiment, concerns about healthy living conditions in response to industrialization

and urbanization, and modernist design. The prototype of home for German architects

was the village rather than the isolated farm or the wilderness, leading to the

Siedlung, or settlement, designs.40 Initially seeing itself as a propaganda society, the

aim of the Gartenstadtgesellschaft was to promote the development of a German

garden city movement, promoting industrial decentralization and an even distribution

of industry through the planned development of garden cities.41 Mendelsohn’s

adaptation of this model within the urban context, while preserving a number of its

principles that provided salubrious living conditions, also located his complex within

a national tradition.

These principles were based on romantic beliefs, centered on a faith in the

restorative powers of pre-industrial nature, and articulated in the writings of Ebenezer

Howard (1850-1928). Expressing his middle-class concern for the working classes,

Howard wrote that the garden city was a means "of replacing the intolerable squalor

and deprivation endured by the urban working classes by a vigorous and healthy life

in close communion with the land and the countryside. The political pressures
 250

building up amongst the working classes would thus be dispelled..." 42 Howard,

formulating two ideas concerning new communities and decentralization already in

circulation in the nineteenth century wanted to replace the disproportionate growth of

very large cities with clusters of physically distinct but economically and socially

interdependent new towns that might grow to a quarter of a million people. They

would incorporate large areas of open space and would stand on communally owned

land, "clusters of beautiful home-towns, each zoned by gardens", ringed by an

agricultural belt with a population not exceeding thirty thousand.43 Although many of

Howard's original ideas were watered down or abandoned in their adoption and

subsequent implementation by the reform housing movement, the ideas of

decentralization continued to be central to the Deutsche Gartenstadtgesellschaft, and

to those other movements which adopted principles of planned decentralization.44

Howard's views appealed to the Gartenstadtgesellschaft, politically aligned

with the less radical wing of the SPD. White characterizes this movement's approach

as didactic, deterministic and paternalistic, as it sought to use the instruments of

capitalism to resolve the problems generated by capitalism. White, describing the

nature of middle-class concern for the working classes, writes, “the industrial worker

would be saved from the Marxists and the demagogues of the revolution by the

benign guidance of the intellectual. Not only would he be saved, but he would be

reformed in his habits and his modes to conform to a pattern of taste established for

him by intellectuals."45 This attitude of concern for the welfare of the working

classes, articulated from at least the middle of the nineteenth century was strongly

motivated by an interest in forestalling social unrest.

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Fig. 5.10. Bruno Taut, Falkenberg, Berlin, 1913-14.

In 1912, the Deutsche Gartenstadtgesellschaft commissioned Bruno Taut, who

was advisory architect to the society from 1912 on, to design the Falkenberg estates

(fig. 5.10). The first phase included twenty-six terrace houses and eight flats in two-

storey buildings. In 1914 the second phase comprising 93 units was built on

Gartenstadtstraße, varying from one-room flats to five room houses, all incorporated

into terraces. The various types were scattered throughout the estate, thus promoting a

vigorous social mix between family houses and single-room flats. There were

variations in house size and form, held together however by roofline and materials

and enlivened by a play of muted colors.46 This housing project in northeast Berlin

came closer to realizing the cottage ideal, whereby every family would live in its own

autonomous dwelling, than Messel’s tenement designs. In Falkenberg a more

spacious arrangement of the units was possible, that functioned with an intelligent use

of planting, and variety and rhythm of design, including a rusticity dissimulating the

proximity to the city. At best however, this could serve as a model for its residents
 252

who came from the upper end of the working classes and from the lower middle

classes.

It was this developing housing type that Mendelsohn adapted to the project on

the Kurfürstendamm, a model whose mid-town location favored Messel’s more

space-efficient apartment block over Taut’s row cottages but that was designed

nonetheless to provide comfortable opportunities for city living. Messel’s projects

incorporated community services—kindergartens and meeting halls—that in the

Jewish community were provided by the Berlin Gemeinde (community government),

funded by taxes levied on community residents. These services were part of the

traditional Jewish kehilah (network of Jewish community organizations) that

appeared with the resettlement of Berlin. Mendelsohn, then, adopted the principles of

the garden city model, but proposed retail outlets following the liberal economic

model, executed in a modernist style. Despite anchoring these choices in the German

cultural landscape, these were not choices that met with approval across the entire

political spectrum.

These housing projects from the late 1880s to the 1920s provide examples of

design solutions that share garden city principles, but this review provides only

glimpses of the social dimensions of the housing situation in Berlin, a situation that

has been represented as a crisis. The onset of this housing crisis coincided with the

industrialization and rapid urbanization of Prussia and the other German states that

began in the 1830s and accelerated in the 1840s. Industrialization transformed Berlin,

previously known as a Residenzstadt as well as a garrison town, the two inexorably

intertwined, into a city of Mietskaserne, or rental barracks that housed the increased

number of workers, including those employed in the garment trades and its retail
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sectors. Werner E. Mosse and Monica Richarz enumerate the numbers of workers

employed by Jewish firms, and although some of these workers were Jewish,

Richarz’s account of Jewish occupations suggest that few Jews were employed in

these positions. Mosse describes the contributions that led to Jewish entrepreneurs

being accorded KRs and GKRs, one of which was providing employment. These

entrepreneurs continued to fulfill one of the expectations of the admission of the Jews

to Berlin, creating employment.47 If the German-Jewish literature celebrates the

Jewish role in creating employment in the capital and Jewish real estate developers, it

ignores the abysmal housing conditions of these workers.

Fig. 5.11. Map of Berlin 1861. The exterior line indicates the extent of the city’s expansion.

Familienhäuser or tenement housing for poor workers initially appeared in the

1820s on the outskirts of Berlin in the city’s first industrial suburbs to the north of the
 254

city (fig. 5.11).48 By the 1840s, hemmed in by land not available for development,

blocks of tenements built around one or more courtyards, known as Mietskaserne or

rental barracks, gradually became denser and more insalubrious (fig. 5.12).49

The proliferation of these blocks was encouraged by the underdeveloped state

of city planning in Berlin.50 An ambitious city extension plan for Berlin was drawn

up between 1858 and 1862 that incorporated many of the suburbs into the city (fig.

5.11), an expansion that omitted however some of the poorer outlying industrial

suburbs.51 The proliferation of Mietskaserne was furthered encouraged by the

drawing up of a

Fig. 5.12. Images of living conditions in Berlin in the 1920s.

city plan that the Prussian government ordered the Berlin Polizei to produce. This

large-scale extension plan was entrusted to James Hobrecht (1825-1903), an official

in the Polizei building department with training in architecture and civil engineering.

Hobrecht's Bebauungsplan (physical development plan) was published in 1862 and

stayed in force until 1919 with only minor revisions. Its provisions for the layout of

streets exacerbated the ensuing development of large housing blocks, including the

Meyers Hof development (fig. 5.13).52

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The representation of the Meyers Hof development on the Ackerstraße in the

neighborhood of Wedding that housed more than 2,000 people, centers on the axis

through the succession of courtyards of the seven buildings of the project. There were

six five-storey rows with small apartments, consisting of a parlor, a smaller room and

a kitchen, the latter on one side of a public central corridor, the parlor on the other.

The

Fig. 5.13. Meyers Hof, Ackerstraße, Wedding, plan and profile, 1874.

parlor and the smaller room were often let out to lodgers, the tenants sleeping in the

kitchen. Night workers might also rent out one of the rooms during the day. Women

and, after school, children would do piece work for the retail clothing industry in the

parlor during the day. Shops occupied the ground floor of the front building. The

seventh building housed commercial premises on two storeys and housed the building

manager and bath-cabins for the tenants on the third. The courtyards contained

gardens, toilets and refuse boxes.53

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The impulse for housing reform to address situations like the Meyers Hof

came from sources that included liberal industrialists, and workers in the field of

sanitation, and academics.54 These reformers did not include members of the Jewish

community who supported their own welfare institutions, and who were excluded

from many professional organizations. The reformers’ solutions for housing for the

working classes combined the interests of the latter with those of the middle classes.

The idea of housing associations financed by the upper and middle classes through

share offerings, interest and amortization to be paid through affordable workers' rent

arose in the 1840s; this approach combined liberal and conservative thinking, in

offering help from the upper classes but in rejecting charity as a solution.55 The

Verein für Sozialpolitik, an association that included many university professors,

advocated public intervention in society, including regulatory legislation, and in the

economy in response to social problems generated by industrialization. They

applauded Bismarck’s social legislation as it was introduced in the 1880s. The Verein

published its influential national investigation into housing problems in 1886.56 By

the 1870s the housing problem also began to be understood in medical terms.57 The

health of the population was considered sufficiently important to argue for

government intervention, and to propose setting aside the rights of property owners in

order to protect those without property.58

The housing situation was addressed by the government when Bismarck

responded to what he perceived as the electoral threat of the growing social

democratic parties. He introduced repressive anti-socialist legislation and a series of

social welfare measures. Beginning in 1883, Bismarck, with the support of the

Conservative, (Catholic) Center and National Liberal Parties in the Reichstag, passed
 257

a series of laws dealing with compulsory social insurance for old age, sickness and

accidents, financed by contributions from workers, employers and the government,

legislation that was completed by 1890. The imperial government granted

cooperatives limited liability status—protecting individual members—in legislation

of 1 May, 1889 and allowed the state's social-insurance funds to advance loans to

cooperatives at advantageous rates of interest, under the Invalidity and Old Age

Insurance Act of 1890.59 The anti-socialist legislation authorized states to abolish

social democratic organizations on the pretext that they threatened the integrity of the

nation. The targets included party organizations, trade unions, and their publications.

Members thought dangerous to the public order could be banished.60 Although the

Liberal Party’s alignment with Bismarck on this issue can be understood as being

political—that is, as a way of maintaining influence—Liberals were not necessarily

democrats, as discussed above. Bismarck’s legislation was meant to preclude social

unrest and co-opted the socialist parties, just as his constitution recognized Jewish

political rights, without dismantling traditional professional restrictions.

The insurance act, in effect, signaled an important change in approaches to the

housing problem, that of the necessity of state intervention to supply capital for

workers' housing. This addressed the inability of the working classes to achieve the

significant capital formation necessary for land purchase and building construction—

a repudiation, or at least a recognition of the limitation, of the earlier self-help

philosophy of conservative propertied classes—and the unwillingness of the private

sector, with the exception of workers' quarters built by industrialists, to meet the

housing needs of the working classes. This legislation then had the effect of

stimulating the creation of a number of new cooperatives whose goal was the creation
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of non-profit housing, the Baugenossenschaften. It also stimulated those societies

already active to provide more housing in the 1890s for the upper end of the working

class and the lower end of the middle classes. Three types of cooperatives emerged:

those that built for home-ownership such as the Berliner Baugenossenschaft, the

Spar- und Bauverein, who sponsored Messel’s Proskauerstraße project that built for

rent, and the Beamtenwohnungsverein or white-collar housing society. The

significance of these projects lay in the model they provided.61 Although there are a

number of differences between the sponsoring organizations, it was these types of

associations that commissioned Messel and Taut to design the housing projects of the

pre-war period discussed above. And it was to these workers’ building societies that

Wagner, in his municipal building position, turned in the post-war period in order to

initiate Berlin’s Siedlungen.

World War I exacerbated a housing crisis that already existed in Berlin, as

even greater numbers of the rural population flooded into urban areas to find work in

war industries.62 In response the Prussian Lantag, faced with this aggravated wartime

housing crisis, passed a law in March 1918 based on the right of every citizen to a

sound dwelling within one’s means. The law set up a program of state loans to the

cooperative building societies and required the establishment of regional and

municipal supervisory agencies, Wohnungsfürsorgegesellschaft, to oversee the

planning and financing of publicly aided dwelling construction. The Prussian

mechanisms were adopted on a federal basis in October of the same year. After the

November Revolution of 1918, the German monarchy was replaced by a

constitutional and democratic government elected by universal suffrage, replacing

after more than sixty years the three tier voting systems of municipalities and state
 259

governments. Article 155 of the 1919 Constitution of the Weimar Republic

incorporated the right to a sound dwelling and established through administrative

rulings a set of minimum standards for public housing, which gave priority to small,

single-family dwellings in a suburban setting.63 The discourses initiated and

promoted by professional associations in the nineteenth century became state policy

in 1919.

If the new constitution enfranchised the working classes and recognized their

housing needs, it also lifted the last restrictions to Jewish participation in public life,

matching the process initiated in the Stein-Hardenberg reforms. Article 136 of the

new constitution of the republic removed confessional restrictions to the appointment

of state officials; Article 137 guaranteed the autonomy and the equality of religious

bodies. In practice however the force of tradition maintained a preponderance of state

appointees from the Protestant landed nobility and the upper middle classes, despite

the demise of the monarchical state, and a continuing reticence to appoint Jewish

faculty outside of the science departments in German universities.64 The franchise

was extended to women in 1925.65 The constitution of the Weimar Republic thus

incorporated the principles of equal and universal representation, laying the

foundation for democratic structures, but in turbulent economic and social conditions

that did not permit them to flourish.

Stabilized social and economic conditions spawned a building boom in

Germany between 1924 and 1930 in both the public and private sectors to meet the

pent-up demand, encouraging both Erich Mendelsohn’s project for the Mosse

development group, and Wagner and Taut’s design for the Berlin-Britz housing

project who shared a similar architectural vocabulary and a housing type.66 This
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project was undertaken by the largest building society, the "Gehag" or Gemeinnützige

Heimstätten-Aktiengesellschaft, responsible for more than seventy per cent of housing

in the new architectural style.67 The Gehag was founded in 1924 as a merger of many

of the older building societies; the housing projects were funded by Berlin's socialist

trade unions, a workers’ bank as well as the Berlin Wohnungsfürsorgegesellschaft. In

other words, at least in the case of Berlin, union organizations and their funding arms

constituted the motor for these projects, with city funding supplementing this effort.

Martin Wagner’s involvement in these projects was a result of his election as

Civic Councilor for Building for the city of Berlin in 1926.68 The Ring, the

professional association of modernist architects promoting Neues Bauen, the

architectural expression of the Neue Sachlichkeit, the new objectivity or

functionalism, had helped install Martin Wagner in this position, replacing

Wilhelmine architect Ludwig Hoffman, who held this office from 1896 to 1924. This

municipal office supervised the city's building inspectors, and designed schools,

hospitals and other civic buildings.69 The members of the Ring included the

modernist architects Peter Behrens, Otto Bartnig, Walter Gropius, Hugo Häring, Mies

van der Rohe, Hans Poelzig, Erich Mendelsohn and Bruno and Max Taut.70 Walter

Gropius, the Ring’s leader in the post-war period, formulated a program of socially

conscious architecture in order to play a part in the political revolution taking place in

Germany late in 1918. According to Gropius, the society created out of war and

revolution required an architecture devoid of all association with past traditions and

their association to an outworn system of values.71 Gropius wrote:

We want to create a clear organic architecture, whose inner logic will be

radiant and naked, unencumbered by lying facades and trickeries...an

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architecture whose function is clearly recognizable in the relation of its forms.

...the modern factory or modern dwelling (must) be the expression of its time:

precise, practical (sachlich), free of superfluous ornament, effective only

through the cubic composition of the masses. 72

Gropius, in formulating the educational program of the arts and architecture of

the Bauhaus wished to bring art and architecture into the service of society, to

overcome alienation, to replace competition with cooperation in material life, and to

re-engage personal responsibility in political life. The encounter with the political,

economic, and material realities of construction projects transformed the rhetorical

theorization of the immediate post-war period of the architects, even if architectural

historians have clung to the initial pronouncements as the idealized conditions of the

projects’ realization. Mendelsohn’s professional alignment with this group

demonstrates his support of these social aims, confirmed by his engaging a modern

architecture to transform society. The deep roots of German modernist architecture in

a national tradition and the nineteenth-century sources of the garden city building

type belie the polemical break with the past of Gropius’s declaration however.

At Wagner's request, the Gehag hired Bruno Taut in 1924, who ran the entire

housing program until 1933. One of Taut’s projects was the Hufeisen Seedling in

Berlin-Britz begun in 1925. It contained several thousand units and was conceived as

garden suburbs (fig. 5.14). It contained three-storey apartment buildings—a fourth

floor was empty and was intended for storage or drying laundry—separated by lawns

and gardens and constructed on wide streets and boulevards with carefully arranged

major spaces. The rows of large apartment blocks, despite efforts to achieve variety in
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Fig. 5.14. Bruno Taut, Hufeisen Siedlung, Berlin-Britz, 1924-27.

design and site planning, Lane concludes almost apologetically, produced an

impression of massiveness and repetitiveness unavoidable in projects of this size.73

The scale of the project reflects the increased rationalization of production techniques

and distribution of materials and labor, as well as the burgeoning needs to which the

projects needed to respond. Although there is no documentation to ascertain the

origin of the aerial view, its bird’s eye view suggests that the photograph was taken

from an airplane, another sign of the modernity of the projects. The ubiquity of this

photograph of the unusual horseshoe shape, accentuated from the air divesting it

thereby of the repetitiveness that Lane suggests, reflects the acuity of the architects in

the nature of photographs as means of publicity, if not of propaganda, in this

politically charged period. In retrospect, this initially documentary photograph

announcing an architectural accomplishment became engaged in a political struggle

between the conservatives and their supporters against their perceived enemies.
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Walter Benjamin characterized this type of enlistment as the politicization of the

aesthetic.74

Economy and efficiency in construction and planning produced small

standardized units which contained the same amenities but were a little larger than

those designed earlier by Ernst May for the projects initiated in 1925 in Frankfurt,

where a progressive municipal housing policy had been in place before the war.75 The

simple forms of this housing and its furnishings were adaptable to the perceived

potentialities of the prefabrication and industrial design. Gropius, May, Taut, and

other leaders of

Fig. 5.15. Bruno Taut, Hufeisen Siedlung, Berlin-Britz, 1924-27, detail.

the New Architecture, according to Lane, transformed these more traditional forms

into modules susceptible to a repetitive geometry and to industrial production. 76

While the living conditions of the rental units were noticeably improved over those of

the rental barracks, the details of the photographs of the horseshoe building show,
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that as in Messel’s projects aimed at the working classes, the amenities provided were

basic (fig. 5.15).

While the Berlin-Britz housing development is often celebrated for having

provided decent housing to a large number of workers at affordable prices, the

technological advances of the building techniques employed for its realization were

in fact limited initially by the resistance to the project from within the city

administration and the private developers. The private developers, for example, who

did not want to participate in the non-profit housing sector, attempted to discourage

materials suppliers from working with the trade unions. Municipal authorities in

Berlin, who might have funded social housing, were reticent to invest directly; this

discouraged the development of mass production housing techniques even greater

than the scale of the Berlin-Britz project. While some advances in building

construction techniques were effected, such as the mechanization of soil removal,

economy was maintained by limiting the number of designs to four.77 Lane identifies

Wagner as a pioneer in the development of economical methods of building

construction, but other architects, such as Ernst May who was already at work on the

ground, had developed rationalized building methods. Returning to the claim by

Gropius cited above concerning the “new” economy of design and its accompanying

shedding of ornamentation, it is possible to see this pronouncement not only as an

aesthetic proclamation but one where production and material costs have been

considered. Stripping away ornamentation increases the amount of standardized

material that can be prepared prior to construction, decreases construction time and

the specialized labor necessary to install it. Taut introduced color to the window and

doorframes in the Onkel Tom’s Hütte project in Berlin-Zehlendorf, an economical

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means of effecting variety.78 I would also like to suggest that it is possible to see

beyond this proclamation of the new and to detect the influence proposed in relation

to Mendelsohn’s Neues Bauen design, that of Schinkel’s neo-classicism. Not only is

Schinkel’s design spare and free of ornamentation, relying on its openings to provide

rhythm, it could not articulate its cubic volume any more clearly. I do not want to

suggest that Schinkel initiated a style—for a style requires the kind of scale of

building projects that characterized the post-war period—but Schinkel’s design

provided a precedent, ready to be used for the more pragmatic building programs of

the new republic.

In this light Lane’s claim that the development of the new architectural style

was "to a considerable extent the product of the new political and social situation

which gave rise to the massive public building programs" needs to be thought within

a larger historical context. Her conclusion that "Gropius and Taut had correctly

foreseen the dependence of the revolution in style upon a new political and social

policy" neglects both the social conditions that preceded the period and the

framework in place into which this school of architects stepped.79 Even the writings

of the Neues Bauen architects lost their revolutionary zeal and became pronouncedly

technical in the late 1920s, in contrast to the earlier ideological tracts of the teens and

early part of the decade, before these architects were able to put theory into practice.

Faced with the need to build so much housing quickly, their efforts were directed to

developing correspondingly efficient building techniques; the flat roof and

standardization of units that grew out of this response became in turn the prime

architectural targets of National Socialist propaganda. It was argued that the flat roof

was not appropriate for the German climate, that it was practical only in southern
 266

climates and was thus an "oriental" form. Gropius in turn argued that flat roofs had

been used in Germany for over a century, as the example of Schinkel’s pavilion

demonstrates. Paul Schultze-Naumburg, formerly a progressive historicist architect

prominent in the pre-war period, became the Nationalist Socialist's architectural

spokesperson in the early thirties. Re-inflecting the discourse of the cottage ideal,

Schultze-Naumburg described the German house as one that “gives one the feeling

that it grows out of the soil ... It is this that gives us our understanding of home

{Heimat}, of a bond with blood and earth (Erden)" He described the mass public

housing projects as "the work of the nomads of the metropolis who have lost entirely

the concept of the homeland, and no longer have any idea of the house as inherited, as

a family estate." Further, these designs "make sleeping, eating, and drinking...into a

business, [and] put the whole of life on a purely materialistic basis..." to be replaced

by a "soulless, godless, and mechanical world.”80

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Fig. 5.16. Erich Mendelsohn, WOGA, Universum Cinema, Berlin, 1926-28.

Mendelsohn’s architecture for the apartment complex of the metropolis was

also designed in this soulless fashion, despite its alignment, as I have suggested, with

other German traditions. The WOGA not only provided amenities and services as did

both Messel’s and Taut’s projects, it also provided spaces for businesses, and, in

incorporating the Universum cinema, provided a venue for escape to fantasy (fig.

5.16), a medium that was to be effectively appropriated by the National Socialist

regime.

Mendelsohn, following the lead of other German architects, used less

expensive exterior lighting effects rather than American architectural ornament to

create the impression of palatial surroundings for this theater. The Universum Cinema

was built for UFA, Germany's internationally recognized film production company.

Mendelsohn’s design for the two-storey building containing the cinema included
 268

shops with fronts built along one street, fire exits on the sides giving onto apartment

complex, and a remarkable façade. Mendelsohn also used floodlights at night in a

dramatic way. As he had for other buildings, his signage added to the shape of the

building, while

Fig. 5.17. Erich Mendelsohn, WOGA, Universum Cinema, lobby, Berlin, 1926-28.

inside lighting effects sustained the magic of the movies. The exterior was clad in red

brown brick. The ventilation shaft served as a billboard and as advertising for the

building’s function. The interior design of the lobby, the balconies and the auditorium

emphasized curves and lighting to direct traffic and attention, and to create

atmosphere (fig.5.17).81 Different philosophies directed the choice of amenities

offered in privately-developed housing and in public housing. A spirit of public

improvement, rooted in nineteenth-century bourgeois values, informed the

 269

Siedlungen. Access to goods and services, informed by a history of entrepreneurs

providing these to German society, motivated their inclusion in a mid-town complex

that served long-time urban residents.

Kathleen James identifies Mendelsohn’s incorporation of entertainment

facilities in the apartment complex executed in a modern architecture style to be a

part of his larger celebration of the cycles of mass production and mass consumption,

as I belive his work for the Mosse group embodies. Mendelsohn believed that within

an expanding but often dehumanizing capitalism, mass production offered the best

hope for a more democratic society. As with other German Jews, the attacks upon the

effects of modernization made by Nazis and anti-Semites "buttressed Mendelsohn's

belief in an economic system whose unalloyed identification with Enlightenment

rationalism as a humanist project he might otherwise have questioned.”82 It would

perhaps be more straightforward to make the claim that it was this economic system

that had empowered those initially disenfranchised in the German context to gain

access to the equivalents of political power. The design vocabulary for the privately

developed WOGA complex was not ideologically specific; it was available for other

projects but, as I have been arguing, its adaptation by a Jewish architect for a Jewish

developer was informed by their community history in Berlin.

When the Nazis came to power, they never abandoned the modern style

completely; rather, in the debate over style, they allied themselves with the enemies

of the Weimar Republic and its social democratic base, including those conservatives

architects who had been left out in the 1920s building boom. Taut and Mendelsohn

left Germany in 1933, the former for Russia and the latter for England, unable to

practice under the National Socialist regime. Although the target was ostensibly
 270

Neues Bauen architecture that betrayed German tradition, promoted forms of

metropolitanism, and undermined attachment to the soil, these arguments were

conjunctural. Nazi architectural policy was not coherent and the regime sponsored

some modernist projects in the 1930s. Rather social democrats and Jews were two of

the enemies of the Nazi regime in a country where democratic institutions and

constitutional rights had taken root too recently to resist the social and economic

turbulence that marked the post war period.

1
Kathleen James, Erich Mendelsohn and the Architecture of German Modernism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997) 141. Erich Mendelsohn was born on March 21, 1887 in
Allenstein, East Prussia. Mendelsohn's father was a merchant who was also active in civic life, his
mother a musician; they had six children. In 1907 Mendelsohn studied economics at Munich
University; beginning in 1908 he studied architecture at the Berlin Technical University for two years,
then completed his studies at the Technical University in Munich, and obtained his degree in
architecture in 1912. He met Luise Maas, a cellist, whom he married in 1915. He was enlisted for
military service with the Engineers in 1914, and after training, was sent to the Russian Front where he
was stationed until 1917. He subsequently served on the Western Front until November 7, 1918. He
started practice as an architect on November 9, 1918.
The well-received exhibition sponsored by the Paul Cassirer Gallery in Berlin in 1919,
Architecture in Steel and Reinforced Concrete, included expressionistic renderings of ideas for
architectural projects, many emblazoned with the curved facades that would become characteristic of
his realizations. Early projects included a hat factory, built for Friedrich Steinberg's Hermann &
Company in Luckenwalde (1921-1923); the Einstein Tower at the Astro-Physical Institute in Potsdam
(1920-21), a commission he received through his friendship with Professor E. Finlay-Freundlich, a
professor of astronomy and collaborator of Albert Einstein, who had published his theory of relativity
in 1919; and additions in collaboration with Richard Neutra to the Berliner Tageblatt on
Jerusalemstraße (1923) discussed below. Arnold Whittick, Eric Mendelsohn (London: Faber & Faber,
1940) 34-79.
Mendelsohn’s work in department stores was not limited to renovation. He was subsequently
hired to design the Schocken flagship department store in Stuttgart as well as other stores in Germany.
Salman Schocken was the tenth son of a village shop owner; he founded his first store in 1904 in
Oelsnitz. Other brothers opened shops in other towns, providing, as with other department stores, the
best goods at the lowest prices, and offering a wide variety of brands. All goods were bought through
the Zwickau store (originally started by a brother in 1901) ensuring uniform quality across the chain.
James 169. For a fuller discussion of work Mendelsohn accomplished for the Schocken chain, see
James 169-90 and Wolf Von Eckardt, Eric Mendelsohn (New York: George Brazilier, 1960).
2
James 3.
3
James 115.
4
James 112, 113, 142, 144.
5
James 148. The Deutscher Werkbund was founded in October1907, an outgrowth of the Exhibition
of Applied Arts in Dresden of 1906. The association brought together architects, designers, critics,
painters, craftsmen and industrialists who sought to reconcile industrialization with the preservation of
 271

a national craft-based artistic tradition, and to improve the standard of taste in manufactured goods. Its
early founders included Peter Behrens, Peter Bruckman, Friedrich Naumann and Karl Schmidt. Its
1914 exhibition included Behrens, Walter Gropius and Bruno Taut. James 22, Barbara Miller Lane in
National Romanticism and Modern Architecture in Germany and the Scandinavian Countries (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 144.
6
Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, tr. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge and
London: Harvard University Press: 1999) M3a, 4, 423.
7
Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge,
Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1989) 295.
8
Benjamin V, 292, quoted in Buck-Morss 303.
9
Peter Behrens (1868-1940) was one of the older influential members of this group and an important
transitional figure in the movement from late Schinkel classicism to architectural modernism. Behrens
moved to Berlin in 1908 from Düsseldorf, where he had been director of the Düsseldorf School of the
Applied Arts from 1903 to 1907. In his new position he was director of architecture and design for
Rathenau’s AEG (Allgemeine Elektricitätsgesellschaft). Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Le
Corbuisier worked in his atelier between 1908 and 1912. Lane National Romanticism 352, n 173.
10
Its editor from 1906 through the Weimar period was Theodor Wolff, Rudolf Mosse’s nephew.
Wolff’s views were liberal, discussed more fully below, but he became more anti-militaristic and
democratic as talk of peace arose in 1917. W. E. Mosse, Jews in the German Economy: The German-
Jewish Economic Elite 1820-1935 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) 360, Peter Pulzer, Jews and the
German State: The Political History of a Minority, 1848-1933 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992) 171, 205.
Pulzer dates the founding of the Berliner Tageblatt as 1872. See also W. E. Mosse, “Rudolf Mosse
and the House of Mosse, 1867-1920,” Leo Baeck Yearbook IV (1959), 237-9.
11
Peter Pulzer, “Legal Equality and Public Life,” in Steven M. Lowenstein, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Peter
Pulzer, Monica Richarz, Integration in Dispute, 1871-1918 (New York: Columbia, 1997), vol. 3 of
German-Jewish History in Modern Times ed. Michael A. Meyer, 192, W. E. Mosse 180, n.17, 191, n.
33, 360. See also Hermann Ullstein, The Rise and Fall of the House of Ullstein (London: n.d.). For the
effects of the depression on publishing Modris Eksteins, The Limits of Reason. The German
Democratic Press and the Collapse of Weimar Democracy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975).
12
Monika Richarz, “Occupational Distribution and Social Structure,” Integration in Dispute 51. Other
Jewish firms in publishing include the literary house of S. Fischer Verlag, and that of Bruno Cassirer.
13
James 88-102, W. E. Mosse 165, 180, n.17, 370, n. 72. Mendelsohn had difficulty working with
collaborators, including Richard Neutra. Although other factors contributed to his disinclination to
work on the municipally sponsored housing projects, Mendelsohn’s personal disposition might also
have contributed to his pursuing his career individually. For Richard Neutra, see Thomas Hines,
Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture: A Biography and History (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1982).
14
James 90, 101, 148. James does not emphasize the relationship between the façade as advertising
and the advertising function of the newspaper as much as I think it warrants.
15
James 6. Mendelsohn published three books with Mosse, one a conventional monograph and the
other two illustrated with photographs of his travels to the United States and the Soviet Union. See
Cervin Robinson and Joel Herschmann, Architecture Transformed: A History of the Photography of
Buildings from 1839 to the Present (Cambridge: MIT Press). Mendelsohn’s publications include Neue
Haus – Neue Welt (Berlin: Mosse, 1932) and Rußland –Amerika—Europa: ein architektonsicher
Querschnitt ([1929] Basel: Birkhäuser, 1989).
16
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category
of Bourgeois Society, tr. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989) 22-7.
17
John L. Snell, The Democratic Movement in Germany, 1789-1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1976) 37. For other aspects of the press, see Alex Hall, Scandal, Sensation, and Social
Democracy : The SPD Press and Wilhelmine Germany 1890-1914 (Cambridge ; New York :
Cambridge University Press, 1977), James N. Retallack, Notables of the Right : The Conservative
Party and Political Mobilization in Germany, 1876-1918 (Boston : Unwin Hyman, 1988); David
Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century : A History of Germany, 1780-1918 (New York : Oxford
University Press, 1998), and Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Practicing Democracy : Elections and
Political Culture in Imperial Germany (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 2000).
18
Richarz 58.
 272

19
James 90, W. E. Mosse 162.
20
Michael Brenner, “The Weimar Years,” Jews in Berlin 144.
21
The military continued to play an important role in the Prussian state, immune to the corporatist and
constitutional changes of Prussian society. Snell 8.
22
Snell 4-5, 19-20. Snell provides a focused discussion of the emergence of liberalism, the policies it
represented, its place in the political spectrum, and its alignment with political activity.
23
Snell 27-8.
24
The first national party was the Nationalverein, formed in 1859, a coalition of nationalistic liberals
and democrats. However it proved ineffective in entering parliamentary politics. Snell 130-45.
Instrumental in the founding of the party were Gabriel Riesser and Moritz Veit. Its program called for
equal rights for all religious denominations. Peter Pulzer Jews and the German State 86.
While the Fortschrittspartei was ready to defend the right of the chamber to approve all
budgets and engaged the Minister-President Bismarck over military expenditures—an approval it
withheld for five years in reaction to which Bismarck used discretionary funds from state railways—it
was unwilling to commit to the extension of suffrage and other constitutional change, including
increasing the power of representative institutions. Snell 160.
25
The SPD was formed by the 1875 union of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein, founded by
Ferdinand Lasalle in 1863, and the Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei, founded in 1869 by Karl
Liebknecht and August Bebel. Both parties advocated democratic suffrage, but the former was willing
to support Bismarck’s unification ambitions, while the latter was anti-Prussian. The two parties united
in a meeting at Gotha, whose program Marx attacked in his 1875 "Critique of the Gotha Program" for
not being radical enough, and formed the Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei Deutschland, renamed in 1890
as the SPD. Snell 189-94, Karl Marx: Selected Writings ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1977) 564-570.
26
Snell 166-77, 220-1. Given the antagonism between the Liberals and Catholics following
unification, it is perhaps useful to rehearse the origins and nature of that conflict since, while they are
political, the fault line is also a religious one, and involves a question of supranational loyalties. The
Catholic Center party was formed in 1870. Its leaders regretted that Catholic Austria remained outside
the Empire; Catholics being a majority in states such as Baden and Bavaria, they believed in states’
rights; they were devoted to the supranational authority of the Papacy; and they were a minority (one
third) in the Reich headed by Protestant Prussia. The formation of the Center party and its strong
showing in the first Reichstag where it was the second largest party, supplemented Bismarck’s
suspicions of Catholic France and Austria. He engaged what came to be called a Kulturkampf to assure
Catholic submission to the new Reich, backed by nationalist liberals and progressives, who viewed a
confessional party with suspicion. Laws of May 1873 mandated state supervision of the education of
priests and pastors, and empowered the state to veto the appointment of church officials. Dismantling
some of the last powers of the church as a separate estate, laws of 1874 made civil marriage
compulsory, and the state took over the registration of births and deaths. Snell 119-80.
27
Pulzer Jews and the German State 171.
28
James 115-7.
29
Richarz, “Demographic Developments,” Integration in Dispute 32-33.
30
The removal of the slum “became the goal of Berlin’s only slum clearance project before World
War II.” The heart of it was leveled in 1906-8, but the Ostjuden gathered in neighboring streets and the
name of the quarter followed them. Additional clearance took place in the 1930s when the Nazis
linked the “neighborhood’s seedy reputation with its Jewish population.” The neighborhood also
housed the headquarters of the Communist party, the Karl-Liebknecht –Haus, as of 1926.The name
Scheuenenviertel now applies broadly to the neighborhood encompassing the cemetery, the Neue
Synagoge, and the area between Tucholskystraße and Grosse Hamburgerstraße. Brian Ladd, The
Ghosts of Berlin: Confronting German History in the Urban Landscape (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1997) 113-4.
31
Brenner “The Weimar Years,” Jews in Berlin 121.
32
James117.
33
James 119-25.
34
The membership of the Verein zur Verbesserung der kleinen Wohnungen came from an established
organization, the Central Verein für das Wohl der arbeitenden Klassen (CVWaK) founded in 1844 by
a number of industrialists concerned over the ill effects of industrialization. Its aim was to provide a
 273

framework for those who benefited from industrialization to help the working classes that would work
as a defense against French socialist ideas, a recurrent theme of nineteenth-century reformers. The
Central Verein dealt with an array of issues including working conditions and housing problems and
solutions, encouraging the founding of local associations to deal with issues on a practical and local
level. Nicholas Bullock and James Read, The Movement for Housing Reform in Germany and France
1840-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) 29-30.
35
Bullock and Read 82, 233.
36
Bullock and Read 82-4, 133, 153, 236. Messel’s housing projects are discussed only in the context
of German housing reform, never in the context in which the Wertheim store or the palatial homes of
other Jewish patrons figure. While these are different building types, the mutually exclusive spheres
suggest class tensions.
37
Goerd Peschken, “The Berlin ‘Miethaus’ and Renovation,” Berlin: An Architectural History, ed.
Doug Clelland (London: Architectural Design, 1983) 49, affirms the reference to Berlin domestic
architecture, a feature common to restored areas of German towns and cities, such as Brandenburg,
that unlike Berlin have preserved their medieval past.
38
The founders of the German society were a group of poets who set up a colony at Friedrichshagen,
near Berlin, in 1888, the Friedrichshagener Dichterkreis, based, according to Iain Boyd White, on the
principles of a return to Nature, cooperation, and traditional craft and community values. Iain Boyd
White, Bruno Taut and the Architecture of Activism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)
8-9. Its members included a group of wealthy Berlin intellectuals of socialist inclination who belonged
to the Neue Gemeinschaft, a literary society led by the brothers Heinrich and Julius Hart. Anthony
Sutcliffe, Towards the Planned City: Germany, France, the United States and France 1780-1914 (New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1981) 41.
39
Bullock and Read 173.
40
Lane 80.
41
White 11.
42
Ebenezer Howard, Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform (London: 1898) 128 quoted by
Sutcliffe 64.
43
Sutcliffe 64-6.
44
Sutcliffe 41. Georg Simmel, comparing the virtues of small town with life in the metropolis,
elevated the “slower, more habitual, more smoothly flowing rhythm of the sensory-mental phase of
small town and rural existence.” Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” [1903], On
Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, (1908) 1971) 325.
45
White 11-2.
46
White 16, 29-31. Heinrich Tessenow designed one house in the first phase. Given the social status of
the members of the Deutsche Gartenstadtgesellschaft and the type of resident who subsequently
resided in the Falkenberg estate, I surmise that a limited dividend company was set up to finance the
development, given the commonality of this type of financing.
47
Bullock and Read 17, Richarz, “Demographic Developments,” Integration in Dispute, W. E. Mosse,
Jews in the German Economy.
48
These were erected by Baron von Wülknutz near the Hamburger Tor (number 13 on the map above,
figure 8)—one of the two gates through which Jews had to enter before the emancipation of 1812—in
a part of Oranienburger Vorstadt called Voigtland. Other industrial suburbs developed north of the
Spandauer Viertel and Friedrich Wilhelm Stadt. Bullock and Read 19-24.
49
Bullock and Read 19-24, Sutcliffe 15. For the most part, this situation was regarded at the time as a
moral problem. The conservative Wilhelm Riehl wrote in Die Familie (1854): "It would not be
surprising if gradually the architecture of the tenement block does not lead us all to the barracks of
socialism: the poor man can bear this living together in a mass community even less than the rich
man...Architecturally even the central areas of our cities have been made to look like the courts or
closets of some Jewish Ghetto." Wilhelm Riehl, Die Familie, vol. 3 of Naturgeschichte des Volkes als
Grundlage einer deutschen Social-Politik (Stuttgart and Ausburg: 1855) 196-7, quoted in Bullock and
Read 76.
50
The 1794 Allgemeines Landrecht für die Preußischen Staaten had enhanced municipal
responsibilities by defining the powers of local administrative units—the Polizei, a term that refers
both to the administrative office and the policies it administered. Stein’s Städteordnung of 1808
created largely independent municipal administrations, Selbtsverwaltung, for urban communities,
 274

subject to a degree of State supervision. Berlin's Polizei continued to be administered directly by the
Prussian government. It could establish Fluchtlinien, the boundaries of areas of land to be reserved for
use as new public thoroughfares in and around towns. Berlin set up an administration that also
included a building committee, Baudeputation, to administer such things as street-paving, drainage
and public walks, and the office of town surveyor, Baurat. These, and other regulations in the
following decades, ensured development on municipally planned streets, providing piped water,
sewerage and gas supplies, aspects that assured planned development but not its quality. .Sutcliffe 11-
19.
51
The industrial suburbs were excluded from the expansion by the reactionary Prussian state, reluctant
to strengthen the possibility of a socialist municipality more than a decade after the Revolution of
1848, even though the three tier electoral system—maintained in Berlin and Prussia until the
constitution of 1919—favored the wealthy classes. Rudolf Wolters, Stadmitte Berlin: Stadtbauliche
Entwicklunsphasen von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Tübingen: Verlag Ernst Wasmuth, 1979)
158, Ladd 21-2.
52
Ladd 57, 91, Sutcliffe 20-1. Hobrecht’s plan provided for streets between twenty-five and thirty
meters wide, and for immense blocks, many of them two hundred by three hundred or four hundred
meters deep, in order to reduce street-building costs. The plan also provided for a number of huge
squares. This network was drawn as a grid to which narrower side streets and planted spaces would be
added when building took place, but such refinements did not take place. Polizei authorities, who
remained responsible for building the streets until the enactment of the Fluchliniengesetz in 1875, cut
costs to the minimum; thereafter the Berlin municipal authorities, who assumed the responsibility for
regulating street lines, also followed these non-interventionist policies. The publication of the plan
spurred real estate speculation as developers bought land in anticipation of the city’s provision of
services.
The Fluchliniengesetz of 1875 and the earlier Enteignungsgesetz of 1874 allowed for the appropriation
of land for streets and for the general provision of traffic. This was effected by providing powers that
enabled municipalities to expropriate and redistribute or amalgamate plots of land along city lines as
well as to assess property owners for the costs of streets and sewers. Even with these powers, Berlin's
authorities, compared to those of Frankfurt, were slow to assemble city land in order to develop
coherent planning and housing and land use policies, in part because of the resistance of property
owners. This reluctance on the part of the government to use its power to intervene in what was
considered the private sphere resulted in the spread of Mietskaserne which were built to the maximum
height allowed but could spread deep into the interiors of the block through a series of small
courtyards. This building pattern stayed in place in both the expanded Berlin of 1861 and its industrial
suburbs. Land remained in the grip of speculators. Bullock and Read 7, 93, 158-9, 181-2.
53
Peschken 54, Bullock and Read 129-30.
54
These discourses dealing with population and its management, according to Michel Foucault,
initiated outside political networks by professionals and, in the field of housing reform, eventually
adopted by the state became public policy, or Polizei. For Foucault, the generic name, police, means
the "ensemble of multiple regulations and institutions...in the eighteenth century...mechanisms serving
to ensure order, the properly channeled growth of wealth and the conditions of preservation of health
'in general'." The health and well being of populations, Foucault continues, "comes to figure as a
political objective which the 'police' of the social body must ensure along with those of economic
regulation and the needs of order." Foucault “Truth and Power,” Power/Knowledge: Selected
Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980) 170-
1.
55
Bullock and Read 25-6. Self-help cooperative societies appeared in the 1840s encouraging workers
to put money aside for anticipated transitional periods, for example, as developed by G. S. Liedke. In
1845 the first call for a housing association to provide well-constructed buildings for workers was
made by Victor Aimé Huber, Huber a professor of Romance Philology in Berlin and member of a
conservative circle in the early 1840s around Friedrich Wilhelm IV (1840-1857). He eventually
distanced himself from this milieu where the idea of state intervention in the housing situation was
resisted because housing was understood as a responsibility of the family, and thus of the private
sphere. Victor Aimé Huber, "Über Innere Colonisation," Janus 1846, v. 1, nos. 7 &8, 193-222, 225-55,
cited by Bullock and Read 28.
 275

The Berliner gemeinnützige Baugesellschaft (BgB), Berlin's first non-profit building society, was
launched in February 1847 as a joint stock company with a dividend limited to 4%, complemented by
a tenants' cooperative. Bullock and Read 30, 33, 111, 246.
56
Sutcliffe 24, Bullock and Read 4, 65-6. The VfSP published a series of reports on local housing
conditions in various towns and cities with a wealth of information never before available, gathered by
academics perceived as being outside of the arena of party politics and developers’ interests.
57
Sanitation as a set of instruments for improving living conditions was being developed in England in
the 1830s, under the leadership of Edwin Chadwick who made the link between contagious diseases
and the water supply. His Report on the Sanitary Condition of Great Britain of 1842 made sanitary
conditions a national concern. Ladd 37, Bullock and Read 3.
58
Bullock and Read 2-5. The Verein für öffentliche Gesundsheitsflege (VföG), founded in 1867,
brought together doctors, sanitarians, engineers, architects and municipal leaders. The association
integrated the sanitary aspect of housing reform contributing to higher standards in layout and
construction of new buildings, and the creation of instruments to control over-crowding, maintain and
improve sanitary conditions, and demolish offending properties. Berlin passed an ordinance in 1887
standardizing building height and with provisions for light and air. Many of the sanitary issues around
air and light, for example, which had been engaged in hospital design in the 1850s, re-emerged in
discussions about housing in the 1870s. Ladd 43, 51, 95, 80.
Dr. S. Neumann published Die Berliner Volkszählung vom 3 Dezember 1861 im Auftrag der
städtischen Volks-Zahlung-Commission (Berlin: 1863), containing, for the first time city-wide
information on housing conditions. Dr. W. Strassman, in a paper delivered to the VföG, attacked the
combined effect of the vitiated air and the vitiated ground of the Mietskaserne, together with high
density, leading to the lowest life expectancy in Europe and America. W. Strassman and E. Von
Haselberg, "Anforderungen der öffentlichen Gesundheitspflege an die Baupolizei in Bezug auf die
neue Stadtteile, Strassen und Häuser" VföG 8, 1875, 56, cited in Bullock and Read 79. This
contribution was part of a widespread set of beliefs about the beneficiary effects of Licht und Luft
(light and air), already circulating in England in the 1840s. Ladd 45.
59
Sutcliffe 41-2, Bullock and Read 9, 235, Snell 197-8. The Allgemeines Landrecht of 1794 had
provided for the setting up of cooperatives but did not accord them legal status--which prevented them
from borrowing money--nor did it declare a statute of limited liability. Legal status was granted only in
1867 by Prussia. Bullock and Read 223.
60
Snell 196-7.
61
The members of the Vaterländischer Bauverein, founded in 1902, was made up of trade unionists
and Christian nationalists; Beamtemwohnungsverein zu Berlin, founded in 1900, built for a more
affluent market of clerical and white-collar workers, including government employees. Bullock and
Read 235-6, 248. Industrialists also created workers’ housing in the form of small village-like
communities, such as that begun by the Krupp Steel Works in Essen in 1892. Lane National
Romanticism 146.
62
Changing social patterns, including early marriages and the disintegration of large families added to
the demand for small dwellings. After the war, soldiers returning from the front required new homes in
a city (and a nation) where there had been no construction between 1914 and 1918. Building supplies
were also in short supply. Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany 1918-1945
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968).
63
Lane 88, 244, n. 3, Klauss Homann and Ludovica Scarpa, “Martin Wagner, The Trades Union
Movement and Housing construction in the first half of the Nineteen Twenties,” Berlin: An
Architectural History.
64
Pulzer Jews and the German State 271-286. The First World War, the Revolution and the abdication
of the Kaiser, and the founding of the Weimar Republic are extensively treated elsewhere. Pulzer 207-
71 for Jewish participation in the war economy and political parties, Craig 299-373 for the role of the
military.
65
Jews in Berlin 146.
66
Although the mechanisms were in place, loans from the state insurance funds were not available
during the inflationary period that followed World War I, caused by the massive reparations that the
Allies had imposed on Germany. A rigid system of rent controls, enacted between 1917 and 1922,
discouraged private initiative in residential construction, and worked against space redistribution
within existing buildings. The housing program did not begin to function until February 1924 when a
 276

controversial new tax, the Hauszinssteuer—intended to replace state insurance funding—amounting to

approximately fifteen per cent on rents of previously erected dwellings, made large sums available for
new dwelling construction. Public funds raised in this way were used in 70% of housing production
during this period from 1924 to 1930. Although this tax was opposed by homeowners and investors,
even their opposition was fairly weak given the severity of the housing crisis. These tax revenues were
lent on favorable terms to the building societies, administered by the Wohnungsfürsorgegesellschaft.
American loans negotiated under the Dawes Plan in 1924 also helped to stabilize the inflation that had
wracked German currency since the end of World War 1. Lane Architecture and Politics in Germany
88-9, James 141.
67
The public building program emphasized the role of the cities, of state funding, and the Neues
Bauen architects in the new construction of the 1920s that included hospitals, schools, market halls,
public baths, and stadiums. Public housing formed the largest proportion of public construction
however. In Berlin, of the 150,000 housing units built between 1926 and 1932, ninety per cent were
constructed with public funds, although according to Homann and Scarpa, these funds were only
sporadically available. More than 14,000 dwelling units were built between 1924 and 1933 by Neues
Bauen architects. The impetus for a new style in public housing came from the building societies, not
from the city's building administration where conservative views held sway until the late 1920s, unlike
many other German cities, such as Frankfurt where the SPD had been elected into office. Lane
Architecture and Politics in Germany 87, 103, 246 n. 32, Homann and Scarpa 59.
68
This is the title of the position according to Klauss Homann and Ludovica Scarpa, 59. James
identifies Wagner’s position at the time as director of one of the subsections of the municipal building
administration in Berlin-Schöneberg, 3. Elsewhere, she identifies this office as that of City Architect,
110. In Lane’s more recent publication, National Romanticism, she indicates that Wagner was made
director of the central building administration in 1927, 112.
69
James 110-4. Hoffman’s work included the realization of the Pergamon Museum (1912-1930),
working with Alfred Messel’s 1907 last and unrealized design when the latter died. Hoffman also
erected the Märkisches Museum (1899-1908), a history museum for the province of Brandenburg, on
the south side of the Spree, now the home of the city’s history museum. Lane National Romanticism
212. In Lane’s more recent publication, Hoffman is not represented as being conservative.
70
James 3. For Behren’s role as a transitional figure for this generation see the preceding chapter.
71
Lane Architecture and Politics in Germany 4, 41.
72
Lane Architecture and Politics in Germany 67.
73
Lane Architecture and Politics in Germany 104, 107, 109, 247.
74
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” (1936) Illuminations,
ed. Hannah Arendt, (New York: Schocken Books, 1978) 217-251.
75
The amenities included in the Frankfurt projects included central heating, public washing machines
in some projects, a modern bath, a novel feature in low-income housing, and a standardized built-in
unit of modern kitchen equipment known as the Frankfurter Küche, set in Pullman kitchens which
were minimum-sized. A large undivided living and dining room compensated for the reduction of
space in the kitchen and the bedroom of earlier traditional designs. Lane Architecture and Politics in
Germany 99
76
Lane Architecture and Politics in Germany 102, 109, Lane National Romanticism 276, Bullock and
Read 181-3, 276.
77
Homann and Scarpa 58-60.
78
I learned that residents of the dwellings were being encouraged to repaint the original colors in a
visit to the estates in the summer of 2000. The project was largely middle class.
79
Lane Architecture and Politics in Germany 87.
80
Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Das Gesicht des deutschen Hauses, Munich 1929, 90, 9, 10 quoted in
Lane Architecture and Politics in Germany 139
81
James 157-165. The Universum is currently a theater. Most of the shops were now occupied in the
summer of 2000, and the complex along the Kurfürstendamm was somewhat run down. The apartment
complex however was well maintained.
82
James 4.