Category: Session 1. Architecture of Dialogue

Michael Benedikt

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My talk is in five sections, one in preface, three from the title, and a conclusion.
I try, in the preface, to distinguish between architectural history and architectural theory, with the latter more interested in universal truths and timeless principles. Much of Zevi’s influence rested on his (and others’) theories of architectural space types, in analogy to developments in modern physics and modern art, deployed finally in support of Mendelsohn on the question (understated) of whether there is/was such a thing as Jewish space. Martin Buber, for his part, sought universal truths in Judaism, and had influenced the young Mendelsohn.
I trace that influence not to Buber’s later and (famous) postulation of I-It/I-Thou dialogue, but (1) to the meanings of creativity by humans as versus blind, natural evolution (Mendelsohn leaned strongly to the heroic creator model, as did Buber), (2) to the value of cultural/geographical Zionism as versus cultural assimilation in the diaspora (nearly all Mendelsohn’s buildings appear as though on acropoli, hilltops, tsionut), and finally (3) to the mystical inversion/subversion of scale often involved in the appearance of divinity to human beings: the strong in the gentle, the loud in the quiet, the large in the small, the cosmic micro-encounter between ensouled entities. These “effects” are the ones Mendelsohn turned to late in life. In ways I try to describe, they are evident in the Park Synagogue in Cleveland, Ohio (1950), a building that managed to echo, too, and in the large, Mendelsohn’s earliest sketches. I conclude that “Jewish space” is a possibility which should interest all architects of spiritual or phenomenological bent. Complex and subtle, it remains, however, undertheorized.

Michael Benedikt is ACSA Distinguished Professor of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin. He holds the Hal Box Chair in Urbanism and teaches design studio and architectural theory. He was the Director of the Center for American Architecture and Design (CAAD) and Editor of CENTER: Architecture and Design in America until May 2020. He is a graduate of the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and of Yale University.

Although Professor Benedikt has worked in a medium-sized firm and run a small architectural practice of his own, he is better known for his teaching and writing. His books include For an Architecture of Reality (1987), Deconstructing the Kimbell (1991), Cyberspace: First Steps (1991), Value (1997) and Value 2 (1998), Shelter: The 2000 Raoul Wallenberg Lecture (2001), God Is the Good We Do (2007), and God, Creativity, and Evolution: The Argument from Design(ers) (2008). His most recent book is Architecture Beyond Experience (2020).

Caroline Jessen

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My presentation focuses on the social and cultural environment of Luise and Erich Mendelsohn in Berlin and explores the ways in which they were connected to the Zionism movement in this specific setting. – In 1932, at the end of a relatively short period of time between two World Wars, Bruno Cassirer published »The creative meaning of crisis« (»Der schöpferische Sinn der Krise«), a lecture by Erich Mendelsohn at the congress of the international association for cultural collaboration in Zürich. Some 13 years before, in 1919, Bruno Cassirer’s brother, the art-dealer Paul Cassirer, had featured Erich Mendelsohn’s »Architectures in Steel and Concrete« (»Architekturen in Eisen und Beton«) in his Berlin-based gallery. Looking back at these ›German‹ years in 1937, from Jerusalem, Salman Schocken, by then one of Erich Mendelsohn’s most important business contacts, remembered the impact this exhibition in Berlin – featuring free drawings of imaginary and yet ›buildable‹, mostly industrial buildings – had made on him. – Against this background, my presentation explores how he idea of a modern, and assertive Jewish culture was integrated into a wider aesthetic movement, involving writers such as Else Lasker-Schüler, Martin Buber, Karl Wolfskehl, and others as well as Zionist activists such as Salman Schocken and Kurt Blumenfeld who were deeply aware of the necessity to link their political and social ideas to aesthetic expression. To what extent did central ideas in German culture during the years of the Weimar Republic – such as a new interest in the »Oriental«, a renewed interest in religion, a sense of the need for renewal, (radical) aesthetic and social change, a spiritual home, and a clear-cut break with 19th-century norms – foster Jewish and especially Zionist ideas in Mendelsohn’s circle of friends and business acquaintances? And to what extent is this ›overlap‹ – if only for a relatively short period of time – of Zionist ideas and progressive general culture significant for understanding Erich Mendelsohn’s work and biography?

 

Caroline Jessen works at the Dubnow Institute since October 2021. She studied German literature and art history in Bonn University and St. Andrews, and received her PhD in 2015. Between 2012 and 2021, she worked at the Research Department and the library of the German Literature Archive (DLA) Marbach. Her current project focuses on translocations of archives & collections, especially Salman Schocken’s autograph collection. Publications: Contested Cultural Affiliations: Salman Schocken’s Novalis Collection and the Nuremberg Haggadot from the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, in: The Leo Baeck Institute Year Book 67, (2022), 195–215; Der komplexe Faden der Herkunft: Provenienz (Editorial), in: IASL, no. 1, 46 (2021), 109–130; Contested Heritage. Jewish Cultural Property after 1945, Göttingen 2020 (ed. with Elisabeth Gallas, Anna Kawalko, and Yfaat Weiss).

Regina Stephan

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Mendelsohn’s famous sketches from the Russian front are regarded as the starting point of his revolutionary architecture, with which he succeeded in becoming one of the most influential architects of the Weimar Republic, who was noticed, appreciated, invited to competitions and lectures far beyond Germany. On the Russian front, he developed the repertoire of forms from which he was able to draw in the following years in small-format sketches. They also paved his way into the Berlin post-war art scene – he was one of the co-founders of the Novembergruppe and the Arbeitsrat für Kunst in 1919. The sketches were exhibited in art galleries in 1919, including Paul Cassirer’s gallery in Berlin, and thus perceived as border crossers between art and architecture.
Until now, it was impossible to understand what external conditions on the Russian front enabled Mendelsohn to find time to sketch. How was he able to produce them during night watches? This idea seems downright absurd in view of the usual descriptions of the First World War: sketching during night watches, under constant fire of the front? After all, one usually imagines a military front in the First World War as being characterised by positional warfare, trenches, poison gas attacks and the first tank battles. Films document the highly strenuous operations at the front, the high casualties on all sides and the severe destruction of the landscape and the built environment. Such a front did indeed exist, but in 1917/18 it was mainly in the West – as Mendelsohn himself experienced, when he was transferred to France in 1918.
His sketches, however, were made on the Russian front in 1917. This was already very quiet due to the Russian revolution in 1917. Russia was mainly preoccupied with itself and no longer actively fighting in the war. The front still existed, but there were no more relevant battles. The German troops also kept quiet, had little to do. So Mendelsohn, who led a small unit as a non-commissioned officer, was able to occupy himself with literature on philosophy and architecture, read the Berliner Tageblatt, draw and write a lot.
This lecture aims to draw the attention to the importance of Erich Mendelsohn’s estate, which has been preserved in the collection of the Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. It consists of sketches, lectures, photographs, and correspondence with colleagues and friends, but above all with his wife Luise. Her letters to him are in the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Via the ema.smb database it is possible to read the transcribed and annotated correspondence, consisting thousands of letters. It opens up a very immediate, personal access to informations about all the topics that moved Mendelsohn, especially architecture, of course, but the personal and political situation also play a major role.
The lecture aims to highlight the importance of the Mendelsohn estate for the understanding of his work and to support its nomination as Memory of World.

 

Regina Stephan is an art and architectural historian, 1982 – 1988 studied art history, modern history and didactics of the arts at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) Munich, 1988 Magister Artium with the thesis Das Lustschlösschen Favorite in Ludwigsburg, 1992 doctorate with the thesis Studien zu Waren- und Geschäftshäusern Erich Mendelsohns in Deutschland, both LMU Munich.

1993 – 1999 Researcher and freelancer at the State Palaces and Gardens of Baden-Württemberg and the State Gazette for Baden-Württemberg GmbH, Stuttgart, 1995 – 1999 Lecturer at the Institute for Architectural History at the University of Stuttgart, 2000 – 2008 Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of History and Theory of Architecture at the Technical University of Darmstadt and 2011 Habilitation in Architectural History and Theory by the TU Darmstadt. Since 2008 professor for the history of architecture and urban development at the Hochschule Mainz.

Paul R. Mendes-Flohr

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Man kann keine Kultur mit der Politik machen,
aber man kann Politik mit der Kultur machen.
Theodor Heuss

     The above epigraph, drawn from the writings of the first president of the Federal Republic of Germany, graces a wall of the Savigny Platz S-Bahn station in Berlin.  It expresses an attitude distinctive of Central European intellectuals, especially in the years before the Second World War.  It is an attitude that assumes the supremacy of Kultur, with its unique access to the realm of spirit (Geist) and humanity’s most elevated ideals and values, over politics.  In Zionist circles this attitude was articulated perhaps most eloquently by Martin Buber (1878-1965), who recurrently called upon the movement to adopt a Kulturpolitik, a program to renew Jewish life and institutions by a reformation of Jewish aesthetic and cultural sensibilities.

Though often draped in the language of politics, this attitude reflects a profound ambivalence towards public affairs, a wariness about the wiles of government that reaches back to the German Aufklärung, when the likes of Kant declared that morality and politics were mutually exclusive,[1] a view later echoed by the poet Goethe when he exclaimed that “the man of action is always without conscience.”[2]  This attitude was particularly characteristic of those the historian Fritz Ringer called the “German mandarins,” a self-conscious elite who regarded themselves by virtue of their education and culture as the bearers of the pristine and noble values of society.[3]

_{[1] Kant, To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, Trans., Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2003).}

_{[2] The the locus classicus of this attitude is Friedrich Schiller’s epistolary essay, “On the Aesthetic Education of Man “(1793).  Objecting to what he found to be the outrageous excesses of the French Revolution, Schiller came to the conclusion that “all improvement in the political sphere is to proceed from the ennobling character [through] art.”  Aesthetic Education, trans. E.M Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. 55.}

_{[3] Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins.  The German Academic Community, 1890-1933 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), 1-13.}

 

Paul R. Mendes-Flohr is a leading scholar of modern Jewish thought. As an intellectual historian, Mendes-Flohr specializes in 19th and 20th-century Jewish thinkers, including Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, Gershom Scholem and Leo Strauss.
Mendes-Flohr holds a doctorate from Brandeis University, which was supervised by Alexander Altmann, Nahum Glatzer, and Ben Halpern. Mendes-Flohr taught at the University of Chicago, where he is Dorothy Grant Maclear Professor Emeritus of Modern Jewish History and Thought. He is also Professor Emeritus of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.