Alexander von Senger

The Swiss Reinsurance Company ( Swiss Re ). Main building from 1911 to 1914.

Hugues Rodolphe Alexandre von Senger (born May 7, 1880 in Geneva , † June 30, 1968 in Willerzell near Einsiedeln ) was an architect and architectural theorist in Switzerland and Germany under National Socialism.

Life

Senger, the eldest son of the composer Hugo de Senger , was born in Geneva. He graduated from Collège Calvin with a humanistic and a technical Matura. He then studied at the ETH Zurich , where he obtained his architectural diploma in 1904 as a student of Gustav Gull . After an internship abroad, he settled in Zurich as a freelance architect. Together with Richard Kuder , he submitted a design to the architectural competition for the post office building, main train station and administration building of the SBB in St. Gallen in 1907 and was subsequently entrusted with the further planning of the St. Gallen train station. The execution happened in 1911-13 without kuder.

In 1911, Senger was commissioned to erect the administration building of the Swiss Reinsurance Company , an insurance building on the outskirts of Zurich, which is also required to have neo-baroque shapes. At that time he was already well known as a conservative architect. Roderich Fick worked in his Zurich office from 1910 to 1912. In Switzerland he belonged to the New Building group for cultural ideals, for racially pure style and nationality . He complained that after the Zimmerwald conference organized by National Councilor Robert Grimm , the SPS turned more and more to communism and in 1916 the first unrest flared up in the clock town of La Chaux-de-Fonds .

Senger increasingly came into conflict with modern architecture in Switzerland; After a series of articles in La Suisse Libérale , in which he attacked Le Corbusier as “Lenin of architecture”, he was able to publish a volume with Crisis of Architecture , which was distributed free of charge to Swiss authorities.

In 1931 Senger, together with other National Socialist architects such as Eugen Hönig , Konrad Nonn , German Bestelmeyer and in particular Paul Schultze-Naumburg in the Kampfbund Deutscher Architekten und Ingenieure (KDAI), a subdivision of the National Socialist Kampfbund for German culture , campaigned against modernist currents in architecture . Racist attacks by these architects against the International Style were repeatedly printed in the propaganda newspaper Völkischer Beobachter . In particular , they attacked the group of architects “Der Ring” and attacked Walter Gropius as an “elegant salon Bolshevik” or the Bauhaus as the “cathedral of Marxism”. Senger coined the term "Baubolshevism", directed against Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, analogous to the defamatory term " cultural Bolshevism ".

With the help of political contacts with Alfred Rosenberg and Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Senger was appointed to the chair for building research at the Technical University of Munich , which had been set up especially for him , where he was less noticeable for his content-related contributions or his teaching activities than for his intensive informer work for the Gestapo . The equally convinced National Socialist Bestelmeyer protected him. In 1938 he was appointed full professor . Due to his deficits in teaching, some of his areas of responsibility were outsourced to other chairs or fulfilled through teaching assignments. After the war he was released and not reinstated.

In the Soviet occupation zone , Senger's Rasse und Baukunst (Gäßler, Munich 1935) was placed on the list of literature to be segregated. In the German Democratic Republic , this list was followed by Krisis der Architektur (Rascher, Zurich 1928) and Die Brandfackel Moskaus (Verlag Kaufhaus, Zurzach / Switzerland 1931).

Senger returned to Switzerland at the end of the war; there he published the murder of Apollo in 1964 , in which he insists on his positions against Dadaism , Bauhaus and Esprit nouveau . A pamphlet Des Sengers Fluch appeared in 1965; So far, however, there has been no scientific examination of the significance of Sengers for Swiss and German architectural history.

Private

Alexander von Senger was married three times. With his first wife, nanny Karoline Emma Agthe (born October 31, 1883), he had five children born between 1906 and 1915. With his second wife Leonie Zuberbühler (* July 21, 1885) he had four children, including Hugo Hermann von Senger (* September 14, 1920). With his third wife Dorothee Maria Charlotte (Doris) (born June 9, 1909) he had two children, including Harro Heinrich Alexander von Senger, who was born on March 6, 1944 .

Works

buildings

St. Gallen train station

Haus zur Linde (renovation)

• 1911–1913: St. Gallen train station in St. Gallen
• 1911–1914: Headquarters of the Swiss Reinsurance Company (Swiss Re) in Zurich-Enge , Mythenquai
• 1912–1918: Conversion of the house to Linde in Kaiserstuhl AG

Fonts

• 1928: Crisis in architecture (Zurich)
• 1928: Oriental buildings. Association of Swiss Architects
• 1931: Moscow's fire torch (Zurzach)
• 1934: Baubolshevism . In: National Socialist Monthly Books, 5th year (1934), p. 497 ff.
• 1935: Race and Architecture. About the aim of German architecture.
• 1964: Murder of Apollo: The struggle of imperialist and decadent circles against the beautiful and the good. Thomas Verlag Zurich

literature

• Isabelle Rucki, Dorothee Huber (Hg): Architectural Lexicon of Switzerland - 19./20. Century. Birkhäuser: Basel 1998, ISBN 3-7643-5261-2 .
• Stanislaus von Moos : The Singer's Curse. In: Art News. Lucerne. Published by Kunstkreis Luzern, Issue 2/3, 1965.
• Michael Hagemeister : The "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" in court. The Bern Trial 1933–1937 and the “Anti-Semitic International” . Zurich: Chronos, 2017, ISBN 978-3-0340-1385-7 , short biography p. 570

Web links

• Literature by and about Alexander von Senger in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Ernst Klee : The cultural lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 567.
2. ↑ Murder of Apollo, p. 52
3. ↑ ^{a b} Winfried Nerdinger , Katharina Blohm (ed.): Architekturschule München 1868–1993. 125 years of the Technical University of Munich. Klinkhardt & Biermann, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-7814-0350-5 , p. 105.
4. ^ Nerdinger: Architekturschule , p. 113.
5. ^ Letter S, list of literature to be discarded. Published by the German Administration for Public Education in the Soviet Occupation Zone. Second addendum after the ...
6. ^ Letter S, list of literature to be discarded. Published by the Ministry for National Education of the German Democratic Republic. Third addendum as of 1 ...
7. ↑ www.geneall.net accessed on November 5, 2013
8. ^ Heraldry: Photos of coats of arms in an architectural context, documentation and database
9. ↑ culture / ns ( Memento of the original from January 1, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.