by Philipp Blom
Before the war, Gropius had been working in the office of Peter Behrens, a proponent of a new, unornamented style of architecture. Among his colleagues at Behrens’s firm were Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and the young Swiss architect Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris, who would later become famous under his adopted name, Le Corbusier. In 1915 Gropius married Gustav Mahler’s widow, Alma, with whom he had had an extramarital relationship since before the composer’s death in 1911.
Invited to become director of the Weimar arts school by its former head, Henry van de Velde, Gropius threw himself into the task of conceiving of a new way of teaching and producing art, objects of daily use, houses, and urban spaces. To help him build an institution that he hoped would become a center for a new kind of aesthetics, he invited some of the most prominent artists of the day to teach there, among them Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, and Oskar Schlemmer.
The ideas underpinning the Bauhaus project were utopian, and they evolved together with the cultural debates in Germany and beyond. Initially, the leading lights of the Bauhaus school were inspired by the British Arts and Crafts movement, with its emphasis on freeing objects from the factory, reclaiming functional beauty, and promoting craftsmanship over soulless mass production. “The artist is an intensification of the craftsman,” wrote founder-member Walter Gropius. Iconic objects conceived by Bauhaus designers and built in its workshops—Marcel Breuer’s steel-and-leather easy chair or the Bauhaus building in Dessau and the masters’ houses surrounding it—have left an indelible mark on modernist aesthetics, precisely because they form an intersection between craft and art, utility and beauty.
This early vision eventually began to shift, following the pull of ideas fashionable at the time. The Bauhaus had always had authoritarian aspects, with its “masters” and its inflexibility in aesthetic questions. Indeed, the majority of Bauhaus teachers pursued a very German, almost Wagnerian idea of a total work of art, an all-encompassing approach to aesthetics that went beyond objects and buildings and moved into dance, music, and social concerns, creating an integrated vision of life. While ideas of craftsmanship and social engineering continued to play an important role, some of the teachers and students were clearly interested in a purely mechanical aesthetics inspired by the idea of the human body as machine, as attested by their robotic stage productions and by movements and proportional studies by Oskar Schlemmer and his students. The benign artistic dictatorship of truth and beauty that was the Bauhaus school began to make its own contribution to the great theme of man and machine.
The Bauhaus experiment was to last only until 1933, when the Nazi government, which considered it both suspect and an ideological rival, forced it to close down. Even before then, however, it had changed significantly. So many big, artistic personalities in so small a space and often forced together in a curious mixture of socialist experiment and German academy had always presented plenty of problems, but eventually, and partly in response to commercial pressures on the school, the designs increasingly gravitated toward mass production. The great attention to proportion, volumes, and detail that constitutes the secret of the beauty of Bauhaus design was often trumped by more mundane concerns.
Gropius had left the Bauhaus in 1928 to pursue an independent career, which was also increasingly oriented toward large-scale settlements and housing for the working classes. In doing so he abandoned much of his earlier insistence on craft and individuality and turned to prefabricated components as the quickest and easiest way of alleviating the housing shortage. Even the layout of the buildings themselves was partly determined not by the needs of their future inhabitants but by the most efficient ways of utilizing building machines, materials, and workers during the construction process.
If Walter Gropius came to compromise his earlier ideas, the same could not be said for the second great proponent of rationalist building, Le Corbusier, whose enthusiasm for building on a huge scale and according to industrial necessities was so boundless that he simply defined a house as “a machine for living in.” While the majority of his architectural output consisted of individual houses, Le Corbusier’s real passion was for designing or redesigning whole cities according to his own principles, which revolved around efficiency, clean lines, and meticulously planned intersecting zones of life, work, and transport. Earlier than most of his colleagues, he had understood that cars would change the way cities were planned, built, and inhabited, and he fully embraced the new means of transport, which would emancipate individuals and make them infinitely mobile.
In 1922, Le Corbusier presented his Contemporary City, a plan for a huge new metropolis for three million people built around cruciform towers surrounded by streets on multiple levels, much like the Metropolis in Fritz Lang’s film was to be. When the architect found that his project did not excite the general enthusiasm he had hoped for, he went a step further and publicized an initiative that was certain to attract publicity. Financed by a French manufacturer of cars and airplanes, he developed the Plan Voisin, a grand scheme for rebuilding Paris by simply tearing down most of the buildings on the Right Bank and replacing them with a series of eighteen high-rise buildings arranged like so many building blocks.
When Le Corbusier introduced his Plan Voisin at an exhibition in 1925 by exhibiting a sixty-foot diorama of the new, imaginary Paris, the response from responsible politicians was a mixture of genuine horror and derision. Paris, that most graceful of cities, was not to make way for a modernist nightmare, even if it would rid the inner city of its small, cluttered streets, much as Baron Hausmann had done in other parts of the city two generations earlier. The architect was undaunted by this predictable reaction to his elaborate pipe dream; his self-confidence was apparently as indestructible as his zeal for grand projects.
Brutalist modernism: The Swiss architect Le Corbusier proposed razing Paris to the ground and building a series of skyscrapers and highways in its place.
Pushing for a realization of his dreams, Le Corbusier sought alliances wherever they appeared most promising. His sweeping architectural ideas and his emphasis on discipline and radical, rationalist solutions attracted the applause of the French journalist and writer Georges Valois, founder of Le Faisceau, a fascist organization whose journal, Nouveau Siècle, not only distinguished itself though its strident anti-Semitism and nationalism but also reprinted Le Corbusier’s plan and ideas. The architect cultivated this promising connection. In 1934 he would lecture in Italy, as Mussolini’s guest.
In Britain, the modernism of the metropolis with its machines and robots was seen with considerable skepticism. Some enthusiastic intellectuals such as George Bernard Shaw were ardent supporters of what they saw as the great Soviet experiment for the future of humankind, but grand solutions have never found favor in a country and a culture so quintessentially empirical, individualist, and attached to custom. There were also other, more pressing concerns at hand. In 1926, a general strike paralyzed the country, and the economy was ailing. But the almost universal enthusiasm for a new, automated world as well as the Soviet excesses already becoming apparent did not go unnoticed.
Aldous Huxley had read Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We—or at least George Orwell would later claim he had. In 1931, while living in Italy, Huxley began work on a novel about a future world state whose population is universally happy. People are divided into castes. Everyone knows his or her place, functions reliably, and is policed, just in case. There is no jealousy, sex serves only for recreation, and everyone is free to consume soma, a happy-making drug. The idyll is disturbed when a boy from a faraway land, whose mother used to be part of this somnambulist society, is brought to London and is unable to cope with this world empty of emotions, individuality, and personal attachment. Eventually the relentless and merciless happiness of the majority breaks him. The novel, published in 1932, was called Brave New World.
From Frankenstein’s monster to the unhappy Aelita, Queen of Mars, from the demonic false Maria in Metropolis to R.U.R.’s murderous ro
bots, the technological utopias of the interwar years and their visions of New Men were fraught with deep anxieties about the future. Fear and suspicion poisoned the political climate, too, as no utopia but one’s own was deemed innocent, rational, or even moral. In many societies, particularly those whose borders had been redrawn and whose institutions were deeply weakened, this climate of simmering hatred erupted into violent conflicts. Neighbor was pitted against neighbor and brother against brother in Europe’s civil wars—nowhere more so than right at the heart of the continent, in Austria.
·1927·
A Palace in Flames
It was an unsettled time. You never knew which party was the strongest. You never knew which one to join.
—Helmut Qualtinger, Der Herr Karl, 1963
“THE FILES ARE BURNING!” THE MAN REPEATED AGAIN AND AGAIN, “all the files!”
“Better than people!” a young man in the crowd shouted back at him angrily before being swept along by the rush of bodies and the shouts warning of renewed attacks by police shooting into the crowd.
The young man was Elias Canetti, then a student, who recounted this episode in his autobiography. It was July 15, 1927, and the crowd had converged from all sides on the Palace of Justice in Vienna. They had arrived with grim determination in front of the grand building. Nothing would stop them. Fearing the worst, the social democratic mayor of Vienna had clambered atop a fire truck and implored the angry crowd to disperse. Instead, they broke through the gates of the building and started ripping up files and throwing them out of the windows, smashing furniture, and destroying whatever else they could lay their hands on.
The burning Palace of Justice in Vienna became a symbol of Austria’s fratricidal internal conflicts.
Then a new plan swept around the crowd, whispered or shouted from one angry mouth to the next: “We’ll smoke them out!” Someone laid the fire. Soon the windows were bursting with the heat, and dark smoke billowed into the street. The fire brigade, already on standby, attempted to intervene, but their path was blocked by the demonstrators. The firemen were forced to watch helplessly as the first red flames leaped through the roof and the draft of the fire swept up thousands of sheets of paper like so many confused birds. The Palace of Justice was burning.
The reaction was swift and cruel. With the express consent of the chancellor of the young republic, Ignaz Seipel, police were ordered to shoot into the crowd. Mounted officers and platoons armed with rifles turned the ensuing skirmishes into a bloodbath. Fleeing demonstrators were shot in the back; the crowd melted away but formed anew; angry demonstrators jeered at their pursuers before running off; one man beat his chest with his fists and shouted, “Right here! That’s where you have to shoot!” At the end of the day, eighty-nine demonstrators lay dead, and hundreds more were injured.
The deadly confrontation of July 15 was the consequence of a different, earlier shooting, during which an eight-year-old boy and a war veteran had been killed. On July 14 their murderers, two men belonging to a paramilitary organization, had been acquitted of all charges, a decision that provoked the march on the Palace of Justice. For the young Canetti, this day as part of a crowd, this experience of being swept along, of belonging to something bigger, stronger, and strangely impersonal, was life-changing. In his later work, he would return to this defining day over and over, including in his study Masse und Macht (Crowds and Power) and in his novel Auto da Fé, in which a library is burned by a mentally unhinged scholar.
Canetti was not alone in seeing the blaze as a powerful symbol for a social and political catastrophe. The great Austrian novelist Heimito von Doderer, still almost unknown today in the English-speaking world, was deeply moved by the events surrounding the burning of the Palace of Justice, as was the famously acerbic publicist Karl Kraus. So, too, were thousands of others, most of whom would not commit their locked-up feelings to paper but would carry them into the following years like so many incendiary bombs.
Not for decades had the Austrian capital been as close to full-blown civil war as on this hot summer’s day. The events leading up to it bolster the claim made by Karl Kraus that Vienna was “an experimental station for the apocalypse,” a political and cultural microcosm of societies torn between recovery and collapse, between hope and hatred, and between socialism and fascism.
Two factions, both with armed paramilitary wings, confronted each other with implacable hatred in Vienna and throughout the country: a largely urban movement comprising social democrats, socialists, communists, and various splinter groups, and a conservative, Catholic, and often fascist faction with particularly strong support in rural areas and among the petty bourgeoisie.
The conflict was nothing less than a battle for the country’s soul. Its origins lay in the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire after the defeat of the Central Powers a decade earlier. Until 1918, the empire had covered 20 percent of Europe’s territory, from the deep forests of Transylvania to the Swiss border, and from the northern regions of Bohemia, just south of Dresden, to the Adriatic coast of Bosnia and Montenegro. Largely rural and in many places economically backward, the empire had always been a problematic political entity, often caught up in internecine warfare between different ethnic groups struggling for more influence, more recognition, or outright independence, but this difficult legacy had also been the source of its cultural richness in such cities as Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Czernowitz, Trieste, and Lemberg (now Lviv in Ukraine).
Habsburg culture was as multifaceted as the ethnicities contributing to it, and in each of the cultural centers a variety of languages, religious and cultural practices, geographic origins, historical identities, and political allegiances created a cultural life of almost unparalleled diversity, as groups and individuals not only competed with one another but also enriched the common cultural sphere and created new forms of expression. Prague, for instance, despite its relatively modest two hundred thousand inhabitants, of whom only a very small percentage had ever gone on to higher education, boasted two universities, one teaching in German and one in Czech, and a general cultural landscape doubled along the language divide.
Economically, the Habsburg Empire was unable to compete with its neighbor Germany, but nonetheless it was expanding rapidly. Coal and steel from mines in Silesia (in today’s Czech Republic) fueled industrialization, while the eastern territories of Hungary and modern Romania were mainly agricultural, so much so that during the early twentieth century the Habsburg Empire was the only European producer actually exporting grain—all others had been relying on imports, mainly from Russia and Canada, since before the Great War.
When the empire was dissolved after the war, this economic system was shattered. Comprising territory that was a mere 12 percent of the former empire, Austria no longer had access to the rich deposits of coal and ore in what was now the independent state of Czechoslovakia, and it had also lost its breadbasket in the east. What remained, the Austrian First Republic, was a sparsely populated alpine land with a capital, Vienna, designed to rule an empire, but with no empire now to rule.
The young republic faced a mountain of problems: the war had been ruinously expensive as well as cruel, and the state was practically bankrupt—so much so that the reparation payments demanded of Austria in the Treaty of Versailles were tiny in comparison to the sums demanded from Germany, despite the fact that guilt could be laid at the feet of the Habsburg military just as much as at those of the warmongers in Berlin.
But there were problems greater than economic uncertainty. Nobody had wanted this Austria. For monarchists, and to some degree for the educated bourgeoisie who were partly monarchist and partly international, Habsburg’s greatness lay in its authority over the vast variety of cultures it had administered and controlled, a situation that had many similarities with Britain’s colonial empire. The bourgeoisie had no interest in a small, national state called Austria, and neither had the more internationally oriented educated elite, particularly if they were assimilated Jews.
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sp; German-speaking nationalists, on the other hand, had traditionally looked toward Germany, dreaming of a unification of German-speaking peoples; they wanted no separate Austrian nationality at all. Finally, the workers and the left-leaning elements of the middle classes had hoped for a revolutionary state with an international orientation.
All of these groups were now disappointed. The new state of Austria was seen as little more than a sad and truncated fragment of the former Habsburg lands, an administrative area without any real identity. The school maps from which Austrians had learned their geography before 1918 had not even shown an “Austria,” but only the individual states and duchies—Upper Austria, Lower Austria, Tyrol, Carinthia, Salzburg, et cetera. All they had in common was that most of them had predominantly German-speaking populations, despite the fact that the border regions were often mixed and riven by nationalist strife: Tyrol had a large Italian minority, Carinthia was home to many Slovenes, and a large, mainly German-speaking part of western Hungary was to become part of Austria by referendum in 1921.
The obvious challenge for the postwar republic was to provide the new country with a national identity, to invent what it meant to be an Austrian. The two main political forces had very different ideas about this. The socialists, who held a solid majority in Vienna and who had been gaining in strength elsewhere, particularly in industrial areas in upper Austria, wished to transform the new nation into a modern socialist republic with an international outlook, allied with the Soviet Union. For conservatives this was anathema. Austria in its modern form, they argued, might be a tragedy and a travesty of history, but its people must be faithful to their historical identity, which had emerged from Catholicism and was rooted in the rural areas, where the peasants lived—or so it was claimed—according to the age-old virtues and traditions of an authentic Austrian life.