Photograph: courtesy of Oxford University Press

german cities and bourgeois modernism, 1890-1924
maiken umbach

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, xii and 254 pp., 55 b/w ill., £ 61
ISBN: 978-0-19-955739-4

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Overviews of the architectural developments during the first decades of the twentieth century were traditionally framed as the triumphal rise of the International Style. For instance, in Germany, Bauhaus dominated the scene, while the Deutscher Werkbund was reduced to a mere precursor of later modernist tendencies. A younger generation of architectural historians, such as Harmut Frank, Wolfgang Voigt, Barbara Millar Lane, Frederic Schwartz, or John Maciuika, have seriously revised this rather one-sided account by showing that architects including Richard Riemerschmid, Hermann Muthesius, and Fritz Schumacher formed a highly interesting reformist current that belonged neither to nineteenth-century historicism and eclecticism, nor to a blatant avant-garde movement.

In German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism, 1890–1924, Maiken Umbach approaches these architects from a different, but equally revisionist angle. As an historian who subscribes to the revision of the Sonderweg thesis, Umbach argues that the German Empire should not be considered an anti-modern regime, but that Wilhelminian Germany should be seen as Europe’s ‘laboratory of modernity’ where ‘a silent bourgeois revolution’ developed (p. 3–5). Accordingly, the Werkbund has to be understood as part of a liberal renewal movement. To understand this reformist project, the author does not limit herself to studying the written statements of the main participants, which she even disqualifies as ‘a rather dilettantish hotchpotch of various fashionable ideas of the time’ (p. 13), but also explicitly examines the actual ‘objects and spaces’ that were created by these architects and designers. And instead of writing another history of the Werkbund, or analysing its main representatives, her book has a thematic approach. The chapters deal with the sense of time, the sense of place, nature and culture, the designed object, and the spatial politics of Bürgerlichkeit.

Although one could disagree with some of Umbach’s methodological preferences, her analyses produce some highly interesting new insights. Thus, in the first chapter, entitled ‘The Sense of Time: Configuring History and Memory in the City,’ Umbach argues that at the end of the nineteenth century historicism was challenged by a new intellectual preoccupation with memory. This is illustrated in a detailed analysis of the Hanseatic High Court building in Hamburg, which was built in 1903 by Lundt and Kallmorgen in an archaic and severe classicist style. The mysterious statues on the building and in the surrounding park seem to refer to a ‘mythological memory’ that defies periodization. Unlike the allegorical statues adorning earlier buildings, these sculptures could not be decoded by referring to a canon of historical knowledge that was familiar territory for the well-educated classes, but appealed to a more intuitive and at the same time more democratic collective memory. The author thus concludes that the combination of references to both history and memory in buildings such as the High Court show that the transition from historicism to modernism ‘was less abrupt than modernist propaganda implied’ (p. 17).

Another insightful chapter discusses the bürgerliche aspects of this artistic trend. According to Umbach, the reformist architects probably valued the transformation of daily conduct more than the direct exercise of power. And this could be achieved especially in the domestic sphere, to which they devoted much of their creative attention. In an extensive examination of some of Muthesius’ best-known villas in Berlin-Nikolassee, Umbach demonstrates how the architect carefully designed these bourgeois homes with their rather unconventional layout and functional decoration. The austere music chamber in particular was the place for a new type of sociability that was intended to replace the ‘mock-feudal habits’ of the upper classes. Thus, the musical soirée, in the ‘privacy of the bourgeois home,’ became the ‘training ground for the new bürgerlich lifestyle’ (p. 175).

Umbach’s analysis of Muthesius’ work from the years immediately before the First World War is based on an impressive body of primary sources, but she also refers to a wide variety of possible precursors and contemporaries. At the same time, she discusses present-day interpretations by architectural historians, while applying concepts from Benjamin, Elias, and Foucault. This is characteristic of her approach, and produces some fascinating results. Sometimes, however, her analyses seem rather impressionistic and even questionable. For example, in her conclusion Umbach states that bourgeois modernism was defined by ‘the tension between history and memory, between order and nature, between nation and locality, between the progressive and the archaic,’ and that it did not ‘seek to establish a fiction of unity, but sought to make these paradigmatic oppositions visible, resulting in a dialogical and dialectic structure’ (p. 207). Considering the strong longing for organic unity and the overcoming of social fragmentation at the time—which were clearly present in the ‘dilettantish’ statements of these bourgeois reformists—this interpretation would have sounded very strange to most of her protagonists.

Nonetheless, Umbach’s plea to re-evaluate the contribution of this generation of reformist architects and designers in the development of twentieth-century modern art and architecture seems fully justified. Umbach proposes the use of the term ‘bourgeois modernism’ to define the content of their reformist art. It seems to me that she is right in emphasising both the liberal and bourgeois tenor of their work and its progressive and innovative character. Why, then, not accept the term Reformarchitektur, as used in German discourse? Another option would be to use the term ‘regionalism,’ which is in use in Spain and France, to characterise this same type of reformist architectural trend. One could argue that in Germany there was no clear equivalent for the neo-Normand and neo-Basque styles in France, but at the same time architects such as Muthesius, Riemerschmid, and Schumacher also believed that buildings should be adapted to their natural surroundings, and that if possible local building traditions and materials should be used. Although Umbach’s analyses are not always totally convincing, they are certainly thought provoking and worth considering.

Eric Storm
Institute for History, Leiden University