Ornament as Crisis: Architecture, Design, and Modernity in Hermann Broch's "The Sleepwalkers"
232
Ornament as Crisis: Architecture, Design, and Modernity in Hermann Broch's "The Sleepwalkers"
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780810131897 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/11/2016 |
| Pages: | 232 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d) |
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Ornament as Crisis
Architecture, Design, and Modernity in Hermann Broch's The Sleepwalkers
By Sarah McGaughey
Northwestern University Press
Copyright © 2016 Northwestern University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8101-3189-7
CHAPTER 1
Searching for the Spatial Representation of Modern Experience in 1888: Pasenow oder die Romantik
Early in the first novel, 1888: Pasenow oder die Romantik (The Romantic), the narrator of The Sleepwalkers describes life in 1888 in Berlin with an architectural metaphor. The metaphor depicts the emotional and psychological state of the title figure and representative of his time, the Prussian military officer Joachim von Pasenow: "Es war irgendein Pfeiler des Lebens brüchig geworden, und wenn auch noch alles an seinem alten Platze stand, weil die Teile sich gegenseitig stützten, so war mit dem vagen Wunsche, daß auch das Gewölbe dieses Gleichgewichts noch bersten und die Stürzenden und Gleitenden unter sich begraben möge, zugleich die Furcht aufgekeimt, daß solches sich erfüllen werde, und es wuchs die Sehnsucht nach Festigkeit, Sicherheit und Ruhe" (KW 1: 36). Both in its parts and as a whole, the vault as metaphor represents Joachim's self and his experience of the world around him. The vault is a structure which produces a large, open space unobstructed by multiple supportive columns through the use of balance. It eliminates the need for massive supporting walls, allows for smaller columns to support high ceilings, and distributes the weight of the building equally throughout its arched structure. In Joachim's description above, however, the structural integrity of the vault is at risk due to crumbling supports. Joachim's reaction to this moment of instability is to vacillate between accepting the loss of balance and struggling to maintain it. In his daily life as it appears in the pages of the novel, this moment of suspended collapse reflects his inability to make a decision to embrace a new life as he walks through Berlin, travels to his family's estate, and falls in love. He is unsure whether he should uphold the expectations of his family and marry Elisabeth von Baddensen, a woman of his social status, or remain in a relationship with the urban and lower-class Ruzena and reject his traditional duties as a military officer and son. Thus, both Joachim's and the narrator's architectural and spatial descriptions become a physical representation of his conflict in preparing a life in a modern world.
The choice to represent Joachim's historical condition with a vault couches the period within a long and significant architectural tradition. With origins in early architecture, the vault was particularly popular in the Romanesque and Gothic periods. As an architectural element, the vault references religion due to its common use in temples, synagogues, churches, and other religious buildings, but its shape and history also refers to the past, the cave, and the womb. All three references associate a sense of security with the vault and tie Joachim's contemporary experiences in Berlin and at his Prussian country home to a past associated with Christian values and eroticism. However, the vault and its historical implications are immediately placed into question with Joachim's recognition of its instability. As the quote above indicates towards its conclusion, Joachim acknowledges that he has a choice in how to approach his vault-like life. On the one hand, he understands the tenuousness of its structural integrity and wishes for true collapse. On the other hand, he is afraid of the consequences instability may have on his life. Joachim's indecisiveness is associated with two physical and geographical spaces he negotiates in the novel — Berlin and his parental home. Ultimately, Joachim's need for security, balance, and quiet prevails. This disparity in setting allows the narrative to explore Joachim's personal conflict through a conflict in architectural style and the emergence of new spatial meanings at the end of the nineteenth century. Indeed, these spaces and architectural representations of the rural and urban, I argue, are essential to understanding Joachim's modern experience at the same time as they illuminate the period as one in which the city is growing rapidly and in visual force.
With this early reference to architectural detail, the novel stresses the unique connection between architecture and contemporary culture and society. It assumes that architecture represents its period and the individual's experience of that period. In Joachim's case, the vault illuminates his life's fluctuation between chaos and possibility and between balance and security. Born and raised on his family's estate east of the Elbe River until he was sent to military school (Kadettenanstalt) in Culm, Joachim is forced to make a decision to follow the path chosen by his social class, Prussian tradition, and his father or to embrace an alternative life that rejects class boundaries and rules. In addition to the vault metaphor, these two choices are represented spatially and architecturally by placing his new home in Berlin in contrast to his childhood home in the Prussian countryside, Stolpin. Over the course of the novel, Joachim travels often from Berlin to the Pasenow family estate. It is the overwhelming visual and architectural force of this experience that ultimately causes Joachim to take a stance of resistance, in which he seeks refuge in the nostalgia associated with his rural, traditional childhood home and its architectural styles.
On a broader historical level, Joachim's architectural metaphor appears in a Berlin characterized by architecture constructed under the reign of Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm III. The Berlin urban landscape of 1888 is punctuated by the cultural and governmental buildings of the early nineteenth-century architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel. With buildings such as the Friedrichswerder Church and the Berlin Playhouse (Schauspielhaus) and other major architectural monuments, Berlin showcased new styles grown out of Neoclassicism and historicism with their references to Italian Classicism, Gothic architecture, and other historical styles. Style and architectural change was underway, however, due to the demands of an increasing population and to new technological and theoretical approaches to architecture. As the nineteenth century progressed, architectural studies established architectural history as a series of periods, each associated with a specific style. This understanding of architectural history produced an almost frantic search among late-nineteenth- and early twentieth-century architects and architectural theorists for an emerging style in order to be the first to characterize the time and its culture. In the endeavor to link the cultural moment to a unique architectural style, architects explored new forms and revisited older styles. In their search, architects turned to the new technologies of the nineteenth century, in particular to glass, steel, and reinforced concrete. Despite these efforts, a new style had not yet emerged by the 1880s, in part because Berlin exhibited more immediate architectural needs than those solved with the creation of a new aesthetic style. A dramatic increase in city population and the formation of new districts required an increase in residential construction. Apartment buildings and private homes thus constituted the majority of architectural development in Berlin and its surrounding districts by the 1880s. Domestic building was accompanied by a rise in reforms of the domestic interior. The U.S. publication of Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe's work on kitchen management and design, for example, and the English design reform movements of John Ruskin and William Morris, all of which had appeared in the nineteenth century, became accessible to German-speaking architects, writers, and home owners at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century and contributed to new conceptions of the organization and decoration of the domestic interior. Residential building programs emerged at the same time as the public began to debate the style and purpose of architecture. In this context of architectural change and public discussion, architecture was to complete urban planning, to renew itself aesthetically and structurally through the use of new materials, and to demonstrate the city's and Prussia's status as a cultural and political center. All the while, bourgeois culture continued to expect private spaces for family and repose from the bustling city life. In a Berlin dominated by such diverse architectural concerns, Joachim's conflict between family tradition and change takes shape.
Specifically, Pasenow contributes to this architectural discourse on two levels. Through descriptive passages of character experiences, the narrative presents an architectural landscape and setting for the action of the novel. These same passages, however, are matched with reflections on their place within architectural history and are set within a philosophical discussion of architecture at the end of the nineteenth century. Thus, the variety of characters' experiences and perspectives on architectural experience generate both commentary on the state of architecture in contemporary culture and an informed architectural theory of modernity at the end of the nineteenth century. The novel's urban and rural structures and experiences, accompanied by detailed descriptions of aristocratic homes, are reflections on social, architectural, and personal themes within modernity. Ultimately, three spatial spheres — the urban, the rural, and the domestic — form a constellation of representations of modern dualisms of interior and exterior, privacy and publicity, self and body, and individual and community.
The richness of experiences and relationships in this novel stem from Joachim's experiences, which constitute the main narrative of the novel. How he perceives the world, however, stands in contrast to how his story develops. As the novel progresses, there is an ever-growing gap between Joachim's experience from his perspective and the representation of that experience. To complicate this already unique narrative, Joachim's view of 1888 Berlin is accompanied by the experiences of other characters of his generation, Elisabeth von Baddensen, Eduard von Bertrand, and Ruzena. Previous scholarship on these characters focuses on the dialectic nature of their relationships and looks either to differences in the spaces they inhabit or their psychological qualities. The relationships, however, generate more than mere oppositional categories common in conceptions of modernism. Joachim's choice of the vault as a metaphor of his experience shows that there are a range of possibilities produced as a result of the tension at points along the arch. A closer look at the relationship of the novel's figures to the spaces they inhabit illuminates a complex constellation of character experiences in and theories about modern life. Furthermore, the gaps between experience and representation coalesce around spatial and architectural forms and experiences in the novel.
Architecture as a Reflection of Its Time: Styles at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
The intellectual and critical contrast to Joachim is Eduard von Bertrand, who was Joachim's classmate in military school. Bertrand's thoughts on the social interaction of his time provides an alternative view to that of Joachim's vault as it intersects with contemporary architectural discourse. Standing on the street looking up at Ruzena's apartment window, Bertrand notes the complexity of the relationship between individuals in society: "Bertrand fiel es auf, daß überhaupt so viele Menschen verschiedener Zeitalter zugleich miteinander lebten, und sogar gleichaltrig waren: deshalb wohl ihrer aller Haltlosigkeit und die Schwierigkeit, sich miteinander rational zu verständigen; merkwürdig nur, daß es trotzdem so etwas wie eine menschliche Gemeinschaft und überzeitliche Verständigung gibt" (KW 1: 90). Bertrand notes that despite and because of varied approaches to life, the past, and the present, individuals of the same age struggle to understand and communicate with one another. Significantly, Bertrand is positioned outside on the street when he makes his characterizing remarks about the culture of his time, in marked contrast to Joachim, whose architectural metaphor places him within the crisis of his time. Bertrand's statement echoes many theories of modernity; a view that also appears in Loos's "Ornament and Crime." Loos is more specific in his phrasing and provides dates to exemplify Bertrand's observation: "Das tempo der kulturellen entwicklung leidet unter den nachzüglern. Ich lebe vielleicht im jahre 1908, mein nachbar aber lebt um 1900 und der dort im jahre 1880." As in Bertrand's view of his time, Loos sees a contradiction between a lack of rational communication and a timeless understanding among individuals' echoes. Loos's description emphasizes that this state must be overcome and that contemporary culture suffers from this condition of its individuals living in different time periods, whereas Bertrand's words are less dismissive. Loos sees a need for everyone to fit into the present, as Patrizia McBride has underscored with an analysis of Loos's writings in her " 'In Praise of the Present': Adolf Loos on Style and Fashion." McBride explains Loos's insistence that clothing makes a man "inconspicuous" (unaufällig) in order to provide him with "the ability to fit in, to enter into a dialogue with a specific environment or social group in a contemporary manner." Clothing locates the three men described in "Ornament and Crime" in a present in order to facilitate effective communication and their contribution to contemporary cultural development. An essential difference between Loos and Bertrand's evaluations of the contemporary state of affairs appears here. Loos's argument is that this state of culture justifies the need for drastic change through the determination and use of distinct social "masks" that simultaneously protect the personal and interior life of the individual and allow for clear social roles and cultural engagement. Bertrand's comment, however, points to the preservation of a common culture despite the difference in his contemporaries' historical development. Indeed, in Bertrand's formulation the different historical development of individuals is not something that can be changed or masked; it simply is. Broch's novels reflect Bertrand's approach to culture — each figure of The Sleepwalkers has a personal reaction to the streets of Berlin or to homes. In this, the figures depict counter-modernities; they both contradict typical constructions of modernism as well as represent various experiences of multifaceted modern life.
Bertrand's comment applies specifically to his interactions with Ruzena and Joachim, but its description of the period is indicative of a deeper insight into a contemporary culture defined by the challenge of creating common forms of understanding through linguistic, and architectonic, representation. The period's most referenced literary example of an inability to communicate is Hugo von Hofmannsthal's "The Letter of Lord Chandos" (1902, "Ein Brief"), whose author later became the subject of Broch's cultural biography Hugo von Hofmannsthal and His Time (1946–47, Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit). Hofmannsthal's letter is written by the fictional Lord Chandos and is addressed to his mentor, Francis Bacon. Chandos decries his writer's block and does not identify it as a lack of words, but as an inability to use words to create unity of experience: "Mein Fall ist, in Kürze, dieser: Es ist mir völlig die Fähigkeit abhanden gekommen, über irgend etwas zusammenhängend zu denken oder zu sprechen." The disunity of time and the inability of language to make up for this lack of unity is debilitating for Lord Chandos. Indeed, he gives up on his writing projects and turns to the tasks of his daily life.
The lack of unity in word and thought established in the Chandos letter as well as Loos and Bertrand's descriptions of their time appears within architecture and with its discussion of ornament as a form of expression. Nineteenth-century architecture and architectural theory promoted a prolific use of ornamentation, mixing past styles and rediscovering past theories of architecture in an attempt to create new expressive combinations. Late nineteenth-century critics and architects criticized Wilhelminian (Gründerzeit) architecture as styleless, dominated by so many different historical styles that it was no one style itself. Thus, the same aspects of an architectural period that allowed for a plurality (even unity) of meanings and possibilities through combinations of past architectural styles constituted a crisis in architectural expression. The abundance of ornamentation involved in creating buildings that fused historical trends ended in two radical reactions — a call for one unifying new ornamentation to define a style for a new period of architecture and a call for the elimination of ornamentation altogether. This perspective on Wilhelminian architecture persisted into the early twentieth century and constitutes the architectural pendant to the work of Loos and Hofmannsthal, both of whom react in a similarly radical way to the pluralism inherent in culture — radical standardization of forms or the rejection thereof.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Ornament as Crisis by Sarah McGaughey. Copyright © 2016 Northwestern University Press. Excerpted by permission of Northwestern University Press.
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