Kurt Liebknecht
.jpg)
Kurt Liebknecht , also Curt Liebknecht , full birth name Otto Wilhelm Curt Liebknecht (born on March 26, 1905 in Frankfurt am Main ; died on January 6, 1994 in Berlin ), was a German and from 1937, when he was naturalized in the USSR, also a Soviet architect .
As a university professor and president of the Deutsche Bauakademie (DBA) as well as a functionary of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (including a member of the Central Committee of the SED ), in the 1950s and 1960s he made a decisive contribution to the direction of the building industry in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) in the field of cultural policy. a.
In his architectural style , Liebknecht was shaped by very different currents in architectural modernism , which, when looking at life over almost the entire 20th century , portray themselves as ambivalent . Initially, in his early years as an architect, he was influenced by important figures in his field such as Mies van der Rohe , Poelzig and May until the early 1930s, close to the schools of New Objectivity and New Building, as well as constructivism developed in the early Soviet Union . In the further course of the Stalin era, it was shaped in the USSR from around the middle to the end of the 1930s by Socialist Classicism , the architectural expression of Socialist Realism , on which it essentially orientated itself in the early GDR.
Academic and political career
Origin, youth, training and first construction projects (1905–1931)
Kurt Liebknecht was a son of the chemist Otto Liebknecht and his wife Elsa Liebknecht, b. Friedland. Due to his extended family on the paternal side - as the nephew of the 1,919 murdered KPD -Mitbegründers and chairpersons Karl Liebknecht and last USPD chairpersons Theodor Liebknecht and as a grandson of the SPD co-founder Wilhelm Liebknecht - he was familiar with a ProMinent socialist environment marked .
Kurt Liebknecht grew up in Frankfurt am Main, where his father worked in a senior position as chief chemist in the research department of the German Gold and Silver Separator ( Degussa ) between 1900 and 1925 . In Frankfurt, he also laid the Abitur, and worked about six months in Maurer - and carpenter - craft before he moved to Berlin in 1924, where he attended the Technical University studying architecture began. In 1927, he briefly completed a practical phase of study in the office of the well-known architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe . In a student competition in 1928, he won first prize for his design for a public building in Malchin, Mecklenburg . In 1929, his final took place with the degree of Diplom - Engineer . He then worked for Hans Poelzig's renowned architecture firm until 1931 . As an employee of the Poelzig team , for example, he was responsible for the interior design of the Berliner Rundfunkhaus . After working as a government building manager in the service of the Free State of Prussia , Liebknecht passed the examination to become a government master builder and managed the new building for the university women's clinic in Berlin. Later on, in addition to general urban planning, construction projects in the healthcare sector , in particular functional buildings - especially hospitals - were one of his focal points and the most important specialist area in Liebknecht's architectural work.
Work and exile in the Soviet Union (1931–1948)
From 1931 to 1948 Kurt Liebknecht stayed primarily in the Soviet Union for professional reasons . His last visits to Germany during the Weimar Republic date back to 1932 in Berlin and 1933 in Hamburg. After the seizure of power of Hitler and the Nazi Party in his home, he was a socialist opponents of the Nazi regime and " half-Jew necessarily" (son of a Jewish mother) from 1933 exile in the USSR. In the National Socialist German Reich , in the run-up to the German attack on the Soviet Union, he was officially listed as a beneficiary of the enemy from 1941 at the instigation of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in the " Special Wanted List USSR" of the Secret State Police (Gestapo).
In the USSR over the years he was entrusted with various government building projects in leading positions. In 1931/32 he first worked for an international team around the urban planner Ernst May , who, together with other German architects, had been recruited by the leading building policy bodies of the CPSU in 1930 to support the urban modernization of the Soviet Union (see also subsection of Ernst May Article ). Liebknecht was assigned to the hospital construction group of the so-called "second May group" under the direction of Werner Hebebrand as contract architect in Moscow , the capital and the seat of government of the USSR. In addition to his work there, in 1931, together with his Dutch colleague Marinus Gewin, he also submitted a competition design for the planned but unrealized monumental building of the Soviet Palace in Moscow. In 1932 Liebknecht moved to the commission for project planning norms of the People's Commissariat for Health Care , where he acted as head of the foreigners ' activity (for terminology see socialist active ). As an employee of the project planning facility of the People's Commissariat for Transport and Communications , he was responsible from 1933 for the planning of clinics, residential and administrative buildings in various cities in the Soviet Union, including B. in Magnitogorsk and the then Stalinsk (today: Novokuznetsk).
As an emigrant and “deserving collaborator in the construction of socialism in the USSR”, Kurt Liebknecht received Soviet citizenship in 1937. However, in the course of the Stalinist "purges" , specifically the so-called Great Purge (Russian Большая чистка, Bolshaya chistka) - also known as the Great Terror - the Stalinist interior authorities targeted it . Under the "operation for capture of repressive action on German national that are espionage against the USSR suspicious" (NKVD order no. 00439) Liebknecht 1938, on assembly of the Soviet MOI ( NKWD arrested) under the charge of espionage of a to Sentenced to prison. He was one of the victims of the so-called " German Operation ", which was officially directed against alleged agents and spies of the German Reich, but actually mainly concerned Soviet citizens of German origin and emigrants from Germany as well as specialists who moved to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s had come to help build socialism - attributes that formally fit Kurt Liebknecht (see also subsection in the article Great Terror ). After the dismissal of the NKVD chief Nikolai Jeschow at the end of 1938, the Stalinist "purges" subsided by around the beginning of the Second World War in September 1939. Liebknecht was released from prison after 1½ years and rehabilitated.
In the course of his rehabilitation at the end of 1939, he was appointed head of the health and social facilities department at the All-Union Academy for Architecture in Moscow. After the Second World War had been extended to the territory of the USSR with Germany's attack on the Soviet Union ( Operation Barbarossa ) in early summer 1941 , he was commissioned to develop underground medical supply facilities in cooperation with the Red Army . In the course of the further advance of the Wehrmacht in the direction of Moscow, the All-Union Academy - including Liebknecht and its employees - was evacuated to the Kazakh city of Tschimkent . After the turn of the war in Stalingrad , the academy was moved back to Moscow in 1943. In view of Germany's foreseeable defeat in the war, Liebknecht met Wilhelm Pieck there in 1944 , who five years later would become the first (and only) President of the GDR . At the time when he met Kurt Liebknecht for the first time in Moscow to discuss ways of participating in the reconstruction of post-war Germany , Pieck was chairman of the KPD in exile and a high-ranking representative of the Communist-dominated National Committee Free Germany . For the time being, however, Liebknecht stayed in the Soviet Union even after the war and received his doctorate in June 1945 with a doctoral thesis on hospital construction in Central Asia.
In 1946/47 he prepared his return to Germany. As a freelancer for the Soviet information office and as an expert on construction issues in the German editorial team of Radio Moscow , Liebknecht visited the Soviet-occupied eastern sector of Berlin on various occasions . His discussions were characterized by negotiations on the establishment of a building academy as a scientific institution for theoretical principles and their practical implementation during reconstruction. During these exploratory visits , he was appointed deputy head of the Institute for Construction of the German Academy of Sciences in Berlin (East), which was newly opened in July 1946 by order of the Soviet military administration (SMAD), and was appointed secretary of the "Health Facilities" division.
Functional and teaching activities in the GDR (from 1948)
In 1948 Kurt Liebknecht finally returned to Germany in the Soviet zone of occupation at the time and joined the SED the following year. In May 1947 the German Economic Commission was founded according to an SMAD order , which existed until the constitution of the GDR two and a half years later and from 1948 took over government-like tasks for the newly founded East German state. In this commission Liebknecht acted as the main department head for the design of the main administration building .
After the founding of the GDR on October 7, 1949, he was also entrusted in a leading position with state projects and offices. Initially, until 1951 he was director of the Institute for Urban Development and Building Construction in the Ministry of Construction (see subsection listing of the GDR's ministries of industries ). In this function, Liebknecht, as an experienced expert and specialist in Soviet urban planning, took part in the almost seven-week trip of a government delegation to the USSR under the direction of Construction Minister Lothar Bolz in April / May 1950 . During this state excursion , which led to Moscow, Kiev , Stalingrad (today: Volgograd) and Leningrad (today: Saint Petersburg), the architectural specifications in the “large socialist brother state” were examined and studied. The results of the study tour that went a little later " 16 principles of urban design " of the GDR forth, among other things, the basis for the redesign of the previous year after the then Soviet leader Berlin East (to) named Stalin Allee (formerly Great Frankfurter Straße , since 1961 Karl-Marx-Allee ) into a representative boulevard also used for propaganda purposes .
Furthermore, in 1950 Liebknecht received a research contract to analyze polyclinic facilities in the state of Brandenburg . He was also commissioned by the GDR government to prepare for the establishment of the German Building Academy (DBA), which was finally opened in January 1951. At the same time Kurt Liebknecht was appointed professor and in April of that year the first president of the DBA. As such, with his theses on the “artistic character of urban planning” and its “national traditions” in the 1950s, he determined the academic orientation of architecture studies in the early GDR. Through his subsequent membership in the artistic-scientific council of the Ministry of Culture , he was involved in the state management: He also held the office of acting head of the architecture council at the Council of Ministers of the GDR ; In 1952 he became a member of the executive committee of the Society for Cultural Connection with Abroad . In addition to these primarily academic and cultural-political management tasks, he completed a distance learning course in politics between 1950 and 1954 at the Karl Marx University of the Arts (PHS), which is subordinate to the Central Committee of the SED . From 1954 to 1963, from 1954 to 1963, Liebknecht himself belonged to the SED Central Committee, which had between 90 and 120 members from the fourth party congress of the SED .
After the end of his tenure as president of the DBA, he headed the Institute for Theory and History of Architecture there from 1961 to the end of 1963 , before taking over the rectorate of the newly founded Institute for Technology in Healthcare Buildings, which he held until his retirement in 1970 held. He then continued to work on the DBA committees. After his retirement in 1972, he remained a member of the board of directors in the Association of Architects of the GDR (BdA / GDR), which was split off and re-established in 1952 as a result of the division of Germany from the Association of German Architects, which still existed in West Germany . Otherwise Liebknecht worked as a freelancer after 1972 . In 1986 he published his autobiography under the title My Moved Life in the publishing house for construction in East Berlin.
Kurt Liebknecht died a little more than three years after German reunification in early 1994 at the age of 88 in Berlin.
Fonts (selection)
- Health building - design under the conditions of Central Asia ; Moscow 1945 (doctoral thesis)
- Questions of German architecture and town planning ; 1952 (co-author)
- Soviet architecture ; 1953 (co-author)
- Architecture manual ; 1954 (co-author)
- The national tasks of German architecture ; German Building Academy 1954
- Architecture and urban planning in the GDR ; 1959 (co-author)
- Building policy and building science in the first years of the GDR ; East Berlin 1980
- My busy life ; Autobiography, Verlag für Bauwesen, East Berlin 1986, ISBN 3-345-00039-3
Awards
After his retirement in 1970 , Kurt Liebknecht was awarded the following medals and decorations of the GDR (see list of state and non-state awards of the GDR ):
- 1970: Patriotic Order of Merit in silver
- 1971: Schinkel Medal (analogous to the historical Schinkel Prize in the West German Federal Republic)
- 1975: Patriotic Order of Merit in Gold
- 1980: Karl Marx Order
- 1985: Star of Friendship between Nations
literature
- Simone Hain, Peter Erler: Liebknecht, Kurt . In: Who was who in the GDR? 5th edition. Volume 1. Ch. Links, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-86153-561-4 .
- Andreas Schätzke: Return from exile. Fine artists and architects in the Soviet Zone and the early GDR , Reimer Verlag, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-496-02675-8 , pp. 129–141
- Kurt Liebknecht 1905–1994 , in: Bauwelt , issue 5/1994
- Kurt Junghanns : German Architects in the Soviet Union during the First Five Year Plans and the Patriotic War. In: Scientific journal of the University of Architecture and Building Weimar , 29 (1983) 2, pp. 121–140
Web links
- biographical-lexical article on Kurt Liebknecht by Antonela Saravanja at the Institute of Art and Building History / Department of Art History at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (kg.ikb.kit.edu)
- Kurt Liebknecht. In: arch INFORM .
- Kurt Liebknecht Archive in the Archive of the Academy of Arts, Berlin
- On the role of Kurt Liebknecht in building policy in divided Berlin (www.doppeles-berlin.de)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Soviet style / architecture: Cold ashes and spit . In: Der Spiegel . No. 34 , 1951 ( online - political commentary article).
- ↑ Birgit Bertsch-Frank: A somewhat unusual career. Otto Liebknecht ; in Mechtild Wolf (ed.): Always an idea better: Researcher and inventor at Degussa ; Frankfurt am Main, Degussa AG 1998 (pp. 54–75)
- ↑ Nikita Ochotin, Arsenij Roginskij: On the history of the "German operation" of the NKVD 1937-1938 . In: Hermann Weber, Ulrich Mählert (Ed.): Crimes in the name of the idea . Pp. 143–189 and 316–319 (first publication in the Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung . 2000/2001, pp. 89–125).
- ↑ Günter Peters: “National, classicist and progressive building tradition”. On the building history of Berlin's Stalinallee 1949–1955. In: Berlin monthly magazine ( Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein ) . Issue 3, 2001, ISSN 0944-5560 , p. 54–56 ( luise-berlin.de ).
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Liebknecht, Kurt |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Liebknecht, Curt; Liebknecht, Otto Wilhelm Curt |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German architect |
| DATE OF BIRTH | March 26, 1905 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Frankfurt am Main |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 6, 1994 |
| Place of death | Berlin |