R.H.I. Read online

  In any case, walking through the city you get a sense of H’s struggles, his dilemmas, his thoughts and arguments with himself and with his circumstances. To walk from the Former Stalinallee to the Former Leninplatz is to move from one thought to a different kind of thought: you move from involuted thought, finely detailed or worked out or troubled, to thought in the form of a simple great and monumental gesture imposed on its flat field. It is as if the distinctions between parts of the city, the walls between them—not walls, but separations and boundaries—somehow map onto the walls and boundaries in H’s own head, boundaries that he couldn’t think through because they ran right through his thought itself, divided it into two or more parts. The thought embodied in the Former Leninplatz dwarfs its people, but it is also the thought of those people made collectively as large as itself, made large somehow by means of the movement implicit in the sweep of the buildings’ curves. I wasn’t sure, even when I wrote this, that it quite made sense. The Former Stalinallee by contrast presented an array of details: windows, decorative motifs and, by the time I saw them, a dense field of overlapping graffiti as high as the arm could reach. The avenue was lined with bare trees, the street widened into itself, allowed room for cars and a broad strip for pedestrians. The buildings were betrayed here and there by their broken artificial tiles: not yet renovated, on a corner here or there the brick could be seen, and over it shattered hollow plastic tile units, browned, bent, clearly left in the sun too long.

  Thought embodied in the shape of a building—the SELF-EXPRESSION OF CARVED SPACE, as if a design could talk, the speaking thought-child of its architect’s thoughts. Something like this struck H first (or so I wrote) during one of those long late afternoons at the café at the Romanesque House, long before the war. He sat while a double vision came to him (had he had too much to drink?), in which the high arches of the café windows were mute matter and, at the same time, idea—visibly so. Weight distributed downwards along the curve, closed by the keystone and supporting it and supporting the weight of the wall above. The structure said, ‘Can you improve on this?’

  H didn’t want to mention the various possibilities offered by reinforced concrete, cantilevering, pilotis … Instead, he said, ‘I don’t like to think that, in building, there are any final solutions.’ This was what he thought! Was it? Then, ‘No, but we can’t leave everything the way it is. Keystones resting on other stones forever.’

  ‘Why not?’

  H said, ‘On that model there’s just one thing piled on top of the other, and what’s at the bottom remains immovably crushed by its work.’

  The arch said, ‘That’s just a metaphor.’

  ‘Of course it’s an elegant structure, distributes its forces gracefully along the curve and …’

  ‘The Romans.’

  ‘Oh, yes. The Romans.’

  H had to admit, if only to himself, that the room’s high ceilings, the flood of yellowing light, offered an expansiveness to the spirit. Why else was everyone drawn here, and not to some dark neighbourhood bar, for their drinks and discussions and to seek out advantageous contacts? The building could take credit for that. But: ‘Yes, it’s a metaphor, but an important one. Capital resting on labour.’

  The arch said, ‘Capital doesn’t rest. In the arch structure, on the other hand, each stone has its place, contributes equally to the final form.’

  H said, ‘People need to see that the old structures can be knocked down.’

  ‘Oh, ah …’

  Here was a strange thing: such thoughts were most palpable in places like these, the culmination after all of something ‘Roman’, built on the static load principle of the arch. Should H even be having a conversation with a building? (We might consider this a way of recording something else: a series of his thoughts; or indeed a genuine conversation that was after all a kind of impromptu performance amongst some members of the crowd assembled at the tables clustered around him, with the role of ‘building’ distributed amongst various acquaintances.)

  H said, ‘I have to concede.’ But, no, he was on to something. ‘There are pictures of buildings light as paper. Buildings whose foundations leave the ground. Not only pictures, of course. But it’s here, in this place, that it’s possible to think through what that means. A building, light and foundationless! I can feel it here. And it’s only because of the way this space is opened up by its arches. How else could we even imagine that a building could … take off?’ Paper, we might say, caught in an updraft.

  The arch said, ‘People think differently in here.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  The arch said, ‘Only here is it possible to really imagine a future in which …’ This had played out as if it were a rhetorical strategy on H’s part. ‘… in which arches are no longer necessary; in which weight is no longer borne by the walls in any case, so that walls can open out onto the world.’

  H didn’t need to say anything. He himself, his thoughts, the thoughts of his colleagues and friends, the crowd, the people here—all of these were part of the building too, fitting its structure neatly, brought along with it, as if the building might be thought of as a kind of track along which its inhabitants (or their thoughts) ran.

  ‘Base and superstructure?’

  ‘If you like.’

  Step inside a building and occupy its thought—breathe it! But what then, when the carved space found, in itself, reason to tear itself down? In its own light-filled space it inspired reason to replace itself. The arch seemed to be in that kind of predicament. That, thought H, was History on the move, and the new forms of building marked the beginning of a new era: the buildings, the carved spaces, were coming closer and closer to thought itself, thinking-spaces as light as thought. There was, thought H, no doubt about it: thoughts and things, things and thoughts—they were finally coming together.

  (Later, during the hours before dawn, the Café’s rooms would be empty. The artists and actors, writers, their various representatives; the crowds of hopefuls wishing to be discovered; the tourists hoping to catch a glimpse of fame … all of these would be absent now and the building returned to what it was, its vectors of forces all adding up to a motionless zero—a sum that meant obliviousness. Even full, this was the Café’s state, and the state of the building as a whole. Its thoughts turned to nothing but its form. If History was present in it—if it was, as H thought, prescient, containing some transcendence of itself within itself—at the same time, it sat unaffected by the movements around and within it. It was a container for the chaos of ambition and idea. An ‘agent’, to be sure, but one that sat bulky at the centre of its networks, or so I wrote. It was necessarily unmoved by the assumption of dictatorial powers by Benito Mussolini in Italy; by the attempted coup in Munich and the publication of My Struggle; it was even unshaken by the rioters as they converged on the building, targeting it for the Jewish and intellectual and Leftist patrons—who soon enough began to turn away from it. In short, it was unmoved by History, it held out against History, held out for a time when History would, or so I thought when jotting my notes, begin to speak with its own language of force, mass and energy.

  (What would this language be? People saw it coming—Brecht, for example, who was a regular at the Café; so that, while the structure was also unaware of the pioneers of aviation who had begun, for the first time, to cross the Atlantic ocean, Brecht began to feel that they would mean a new expression of power. War would no longer only be a matter of horizontal fronts pushed back and forth by the strengths of armies; it would now be able to leap over the front, to be delivered from the sky, directly onto cities and their people.

  (This, again, was History contained in physical forces, available to all sides of the conflict: gravity and the Bernoulli effect and the tension inherent in molecular structures. It was History finding its physical form, again, a form of the possibility of destruction coming indiscriminately down on the people, on the earth, from above. It wouldn’t be long, thought Brecht, or so I wrote, before cit
ies would live under such skies.)

  Die gefühlten Zeichen des Jahrhundertverlaufs. The signs of the century’s movement came to H, not in the form of a plane, and also not directly with Hitler’s rise to power. After all, the latter coincided with the birth of their son, their first child. But it brought him into its purposes—the century enlisted him in its purposes. In fact it was the National Socialists, although through no plan of their own, who enlisted him first. He and Isi moved with the boy into an apartment not far west of the city centre. A couple downstairs—their parents’ age—offered their help with the washing and housework. Their world was woven out of the kindness of those neighbours, and the visits of their ‘circle’ of architect and artist friends, and it seemed possible, for a long time, that nothing—no Hitler, even no plane—could puncture the world, the circle around them.

  They enlisted him, instead, through a series of events, and of judgements and revisions, of exclusions and inclusions over the years of their power. The first sign came early, in the form of a judgement of the Militant League for German Culture that the most recent house H had designed, near Spandau, should be demolished on the grounds of Cultural Bolshevism. The plaster on the walls was still wet at the time of the judgement.

  At once, then, every certainty was reversed. If a newly built house could be proven so vulnerable to an arbitrary and ill-thought idea, then what else might remain standing? And, indeed, would H be able to work now he was marked as a Bolshevik? With the help of the house’s owner, he set to work contacting supporters. A letter was sent to Mies, who lent his voice to the campaign to have the house saved. Members of the circle gathered in Blumenthal’s small studio under the roof of a building in the centre of the city. ‘But,’ said Erich O, ‘what use will Mies be as an ally? He’s already damned.’

  They had regarded the League, not long ago, as something of a joke. What was to be done? They considered how they could pull their cultural weight. But how could they organise anything from this dusty room? They were, for all their conversations about art and the future, only a collection of relatively poor, and to be sure irrelevant, individuals: ‘Nothing we say will have much weight.’

  A silence.

  Blumenthal said, ‘We might not have much authority on cultural grounds, that’s true.’ But then: ‘I think we simply need to appeal to the law. The building was fully approved—surely they can’t just change their minds?’

  As they walked together down the stairs to ground level, H said to Erich, ‘How is your son?’

  ‘Magnificent! More than my match.’

  H laughed. ‘And mine. Growing and strong.’

  It was a conversation, one without sadness, to bury the other one. Their children were the same age. How could they believe that Hitler would last, that he would not be toppled sooner rather than later?

  But then, after all, Erich said, ‘My career is just as doomed. I won’t be able to draw any more, and I’ll be thrown out like scrap.’

  ‘Then what else can you do?’

  ‘Nothing!’ He laughed. ‘I can be a father—but the boy doesn’t pay me so well.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘You had your warning, you have. Mine will come too.’

  H said nothing, only shrugged. He wouldn’t get design contracts now, or at least it would be difficult. But unlike Erich, who made drawings on paper, he could withdraw from his ‘art’ and still practise a technical architecture. The difference settled between them, the fact that they were both aware of: for H, there would still be jobs; there would be buildings—industrial buildings, largely—that had no need of the Nazis’ PSEUDO-ARCHITECTURE. There would be buildings that needed nothing but structure: shaped matter. This, no doubt, would be a way to feed himself, Isi and the children. And Erich? On the other hand (did H say this to him?) Erich could, with any small piece of charcoal and scrap of paper, bring a work into being. He could see his vision through, even if that vision and the end product must be hidden. This was Erich’s own freedom—that his work lived and was complete without the need to be built into the city’s shape. It was in contrast to this freedom that H was being DRAINED OF VISION; his own thought could never be realised in its built form. Here, then, H and his friend represented different MODES OF BEING with regard to the situation in which they found themselves: art’s completion, its withdrawal to a place where spiritual resources remained but material ones failed; and architecture’s loss of spirit, its conversion into mere matter …

  And then, the judgement was reversed. Blumenthal was right: someone had a family contact with an officer in the relevant ministry who, some weeks later, agreed that the house could remain on the grounds that it had previously been signed off. The threat of demolition, however, didn’t need to be carried out for it to have its effect. What remained was a feeling, a sense of the strength of the world. Hitler now meant something new: that all of their certainties would need to be established and defended and argued for by this small, indeed fragile group of people. What could they do? Progressively, galleries and publications were closed, universities and schools put under the administration of the regime. The studios and houses and apartments where they met—the Romanesque Café too—seemed, now, not like the seeds of a future art and a future society, but like the hideouts of a criminal organisation.

  Erster Feuerregen. In the years that followed H found work on the construction of a facility for the production of synthetic benzene. The office—around ten colleagues—worked closely with the scientists; and, in its own way, there was pleasure to be had working here, at the peak of technical development. Structures of all kinds collided in the work: buildings and molecules; matter was moving itself forward. No, no, matter did not move itself. Here, his hands had to divide themselves from his mind, and indeed one part of his mind from another. What moved? There was a pact here, a series of pacts and connections, that, if followed closely, led out—everyone knew it—to AEG, IG Farben and Junkers, and further.

  Finally, with the war’s first bombing, soft deep thuds could be felt rather than heard throughout the city. The immediate effect on the city’s buildings was not that of destruction, but of refortification: thick-walled bunkers, cubes or occasionally towers, with a few slit windows and the heavy look of prisons—these began to be built soon after. Hitler himself took an interest in them, sketching designs. The vibrations that ran through the sandy medium of the city’s foundations joined him to his people. They would wait out the bombs there, or in the U-Bahnhofs, or in their cellars, just as he himself would wait with his staff in his own bunker.

  H himself heard only muffled transmissions; they reached his office, where he was working with Günther W on a housing association commission, something the Nazis had no authority over. Those bombs fell on the airfield, he heard later—though it was impossible to tell the direction from the sounds themselves. At their house to the west, there was no sound at all, only rumour, Isi said when he arrived home. Nonetheless, it was the first taste of war, the first taste of physical forces released onto the city and into their lives. The dumb machinery of Fascism had brought with it another stubborn reality, that of fire. The children were asleep, the youngest two on Isi’s lap on the sofa. They undertook a whispered conversation.

  He said, ‘Are you worried?’

  ‘For myself? No. Not for the children either—we’ll keep them safe.’

  ‘But you’re worried?’

  She smiled. ‘It feels very real, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘As if everything is changing.’

  ‘Not a bad thing in itself.’

  She said, ‘I have the feeling it won’t just be about houses any more. Not for you, or for us. We’ll be talking about other things.’

  ‘We’ve been talking about other things for a long time.’

  She said, ‘Oh, yes, yes of course. Of course we have. But really talking.’ It seemed as if that might be happening, with this conversation—it seemed as if war, whose explosions were finally audibl
e after a year, might add a layer of reality to talk itself. They were sitting in a dark room, and maybe that helped, allowing the words to form solidly in the air alongside the inaudible memory of bombs exploding. The words and the bombs had, in these circumstances, a kind of equivalence—the sort of equivalence between the spoken and physical worlds that H was already sensitive to.

  She said, ‘I hate it, this war. But it’s war, and don’t you think that it’s good that it’s arrived here, with us? Not in some distant place? It’s honest.’

  He said, ‘I think, some time, we might come to feel differently about that.’

  She said, ‘I know.’

  The next move against him, the next judgement, came soon after. It was half expected, but still a surprise. A message was brought to his studio from the so-called Reich Chamber of Culture, late one afternoon. It presented the verdict of a genealogical investigation that he was henceforth to be considered a half-Jew. His membership of the Chamber was to be rescinded, and his licence to practise architecture immediately revoked.

  The surprise was that his political or artistic ideals hadn’t been mentioned. ‘If,’ he said, ‘they had at least come at us for our thoughts, then there would be something to say in response. I didn’t even know him.’

  Isi said, ‘Your grandfather.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She said, ‘He was your grandfather. Don’t disown him.’