Werner Hegemann

Werner Hegemann (born June 15, 1881 in Mannheim , † April 12, 1936 in New York , NY ) was an urban planner, architecture critic and political writer.

As an urban planner, Hegemann was an internationally known figure, a contemporary figure as an architecture critic and, as a writer, belonged to the group of left-wing liberals who sought to strengthen the Weimar Republic .

Family, studies

As one of the younger sons of a factory owner, Hegemann attended schools and boarding schools in various German countries due to the divorce of his parents. The death of his father in 1900 made him financially independent and after graduating from high school in 1901, a semester in Berlin and military service, he spent two years in Paris and traveling. In Berlin his uncle, the architect Otto March , had offered him a replacement family and aroused his interest in art and architecture.

After hearing Charles Gide in Paris and Simon Patten in Philadelphia, Hegemann decided to study economics in Berlin, Strasbourg and Munich. In 1905 he married the teacher Alice Hesse - she too enrolled in economics - and in 1906 their daughter Ellis was born. Hegemann received his doctorate in 1908 under Lujo Brentano and Walter Lotz with a thesis on Mexico's gold standard .

urban planning

USA 1909

In 1908 Hegemann traveled to the USA with his family . Impressed by progressivism , he was interested in social policy . He visited the recently established Housing Inspection in Philadelphia, reported on the municipal exhibition of the Municipal Art Society and the Committee on Congestion in New York . Here, together with March, the idea of ​​presenting the plans of the Berlin competition for a complete development plan to the public in a first international urban development exhibition was born. March, already leading when the competition started, proved to be an influential organizer here too. Hegemann applied in Boston to participate in the 1915 City Exhibition , a philanthropic venture that aimed to make Boston a model city by 1915, and became a member of the Exhibit Committee.

Berlin 1910–1912

At the end of 1909, at the age of twenty-eight, Hegemann was appointed General Secretary of the International Urban Development Exhibition. The exhibition, which opened in May 1910, showed the Berlin competition plans, German and international examples of architecture and urban planning; it was repeated that same year in Düsseldorf and partially shown in London. Hegemann was not only their press spokesman , but also acted as a guide for a large audience from foreign trade visitors to political associations.

His success in public relations earned him the job of drafting the official presentation of the exhibition. His two volumes, Der Städtebau , 1911 and 1913, are considered to be a “founding document of the subject”. Hegemann gave the new discipline not only a tradition, but also a social mandate with its cultural-historical narrative - a mixture that delighted his reviewers.

Hegemann, who - at an unknown point in time - joined the SPD , worked in 1912 for a building cooperative that implemented a reform settlement project, that of "mixed construction". However, his attempt to translate the popularity gained with the exhibition into concrete local political goals failed. He founded the Propaganda Committee for Greater Berlin , an early form of citizens' initiative , and was able to convince Käthe Kollwitz to draw his own poster and sign. The meetings of this committee caused a sensation, but could not influence the political decision-makers in favor of a targeted housing and green space policy.

USA 1913-1920

As a result, Hegemann returned to the United States in 1913, now alone, as his travels ruined the marriage. On the recommendation of Wilhelm Marx , he was invited by the People's Institute of New York under its director Frederic C. Howe to give lectures on urban planning in American cities. His tour began in New York City and has taken him to over twenty cities. Hegemann amazed his hosts with the fact that he got his own picture on site without any problems and attached more importance to the infrastructure than to the appearance. In his lectures he debated the opportunities and dangers of the respective urban development and advised against imitating European models.

In the end there was an engagement in the west coast cities of Oakland and Berkeley , which commissioned him with a large planning report (published in 1915). Here Hegemann developed a strict hierarchy of the planning areas and called for the cooperation of urban groups to steer urban development, the turn from inner-city embellishment to the optimization of the ensemble of urban functions.

For the return journey, Hegemann chose the Pacific route. At the beginning of the First World War , his German ship was arrested and the passengers interned in Mozambique . He managed to escape as a stowaway on board a sailor that landed him in the American southern states. Back in New York, he went freelance as a planning consultant.

In 1916, Hegemann founded his own company with the landscape architect Elbert Peets , which specialized in suburban settlements. After a brief commitment to a factory settlement of the Kohler Co. in Wauwatosa , Wisconsin , the company achieved success with the order for Washington Highlands (1916-1919), while two other large plants could not be completed due to the economic crisis. The development of a former farm, today protected as a historical monument, combines elements of formal with informal landscaping and modern settlement planning, which ranges from terraced houses to property .

When the order situation deteriorated, Hegemann & Peets devoted themselves to a collection of excellent examples of American architecture and urban planning. Their thesaurus American Vitruvius, published jointly in 1922, with 1200 illustrations, introduced the perspective of the strollers in the city with Peets' sketches of his European trip , while Hegemann commented critically on the models. The typological and broad overview - square, building group, street, green and city map - contributed to the self-discovery of the new discipline by expanding its agenda. Initially not well received, the book's reputation rose when it was recommended for the basic collection of every specialist library in 1923.

In the meantime, Hegemann had met his second wife, Ida Belle Guthe, who was also a teacher. They married in 1920 and were to have four children. Hegemann set out with her to return to Germany after a long stay in Italy.

architecture

links

To reintroduce himself to Europe, Hegemann was helped by the appointment to publish the catalog for the urban development exhibition in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1923. It went back to contacts from 1910, and Hegemann once again met architects and planners from all over the world, which he used for his subsequent work.

As a result, he published a German edition of the American architecture joint venture in 1924 . It was directed against the European avant-garde and its American heroes Frank Lloyd Wright and Louis Sullivan in order to break a lance for the Beaux Arts style of the American Renaissance . Strongly rejected by the modern - so Adolf Rading wished that such books should be burned - the work with its typological breadth conveyed a realistic picture of American building activity.

critic

In 1924, Hegemann was the publisher of the well-known architecture magazine Wasmuths MONTHLY FOR BUILDING ART and urban planning, which was also published by Wasmuth Verlag . The extraordinarily high number, stylistic range and international origin of the buildings discussed made the journal he edited an exceptional phenomenon among contemporary journals. With a literary-polemical style of criticism, which was sharply differentiated from the manifesto style of the modern, Hegemann opposed formal modernism and academic traditions and voted for a moderate modernity. "Le journal, c'est un monsieur" was what J. J. P. Oud heard in 1927 say about Hegemann.

Hegemann also encouraged people who think differently to write to him. He staged disputes for the sake of the subsequent contributions and discussions, and he criticized by omission - architects of the ring were seldom discussed - as by protection, such as the Stuttgart school . In this, too, highly controversial, the initiators of the CIAM even saw him as an “archenemy”, and he succeeded in stimulating the debates so that Paul Westheim called him “a born opponent”.

At times associated with the conservative group of architects Der Block , from 1930 Hegemann turned to the metropolitan modernism of Erich Mendelsohn and the brothers Hans and Wassili Luckhardt , in which he recognized a coming classic in order to emphatically support them. Therefore, his editing of the architecture magazine ended in 1933 with a critical settlement with Paul Schmitthenner , who, long patronized by Hegemann, had committed himself to Adolf Hitler .

writer

Books

Hegemann made his debut in 1924 as a political writer under the pseudonym Manfred Maria Ellis . He criticized the idealistic tradition of German political thought, which made the past the standard of the present. In fictional conversations with real and imaginary people, he arranged the praise and contradiction of heroes of the revisionist interpretation of history such as Frederick the Great and Napoleon . The highly literary style transferred thought and above all judgment to its reader with a satirical intention; he wanted to educate for democracy.

Hegemann published the alleged German writings by Ellis in an edited version. He expanded the Fridericus of 1925 in the following year, Napoleon appeared in 1927, and in 1928 came The Saved Christ , who let Jesus continue to live as a merciful benefactor and - like works by Grosz and Hasenclever - attracted public prosecutor's investigations, which were discontinued.

Reactions

Hegemann's historical-political writings also made him numerous enemies. Historians in particular vehemently rejected it. Like Emil Ludwig and others, they counted him among the authors of “historical fiction”; "Amateurs" and "hateful opponents of the old empire", so Wilhelm Schüßler .

Hegemann's satires were either not understood as such or were sharply rejected. Nevertheless, he managed to develop a reputation, especially among colleagues, which gave him increasing opportunities to write for political magazines such as Das Tage-Buch and Die Weltbühne .

The stone Berlin

In 1930 Hegemann brought together political and architectural criticism in his book Das Steinerne Berlin , in which he reviewed the history of Berlin's construction. In a satirical shift, he portrayed the Prussian kings as anti-heroes of the bourgeois striving for freedom and at the same time as heroes in comparison to the later indifferent bureaucracy that the “ tenement city” of Berlin had made possible. At the same time, he played Schlüter and Schadow as geniuses with bourgeois virtues in order to portray Schinkel as an aesthetic and political opportunist . He advocated a humane city of property and homes, green spaces and public transport.

Less appreciated by architects and little noticed by historians, the book was praised above all by writers such as Joseph Roth , Franz Blei and Carl von Ossietzky . Walter Benjamin proclaimed Hegemann a "troublemaker before the Last Judgment", and Franz Hessel praised the teaching of the "Tua res agitur!"

Journalism

In 1930 Hegemann had already put a foreword in front of another version of the Fridericus theme, which clearly warned against the Führer cult. In 1931 he attacked Gottfried Benn because of his proximity to National Socialism and predicted the inevitable appropriation as a victim or perpetrator. After a long lecture tour in South America, where he again spoke out against the copy of European aesthetics and planning instruments, he devoted himself increasingly to the warnings against the National Socialists.

Hegemann conceived a series of articles that questioned the historical models of the NSDAP critically and satirically on their suitability: The old Fritz, the first Nazi . This resulted in his last German book, the Unmasked History , which appeared on the day of the Reichstag fire and was still successfully sold under the protection of a satirical dedication to Hindenburg and Hitler.

exile

Due to warnings from his publisher Jakob Hegner , Hegemann left the country in February 1933. He went to Switzerland, where his family followed him in April. At the book burnings of May 10, 1933, Hegemann and Emil Ludwig were named as "falsifiers of history"; in May 1934 his house was confiscated, in June 1935 Hegemann expatriated and in 1938 his doctorate was revoked.

Alvin Johnson invited Hegemann to teach urban planning at the New School of Social Research in New York . In November 1933 the family arrived in New York, and Hegemann, who expressed the hope that Hitler would not rule for much longer than a year and at the same time was certain of the preparations for war, began teaching among numerous German colleagues. In 1935 his former colleague Joseph Hudnut , now dean of the architecture faculty at Columbia University, managed to raise the money to employ Hegemann as a lecturer. Hegemann read about planning in the context of a new curriculum oriented towards the social sciences .

In the USA, Hegemann took up his political criticism again in order to support Roosevelt's New Deal in view of the political experience in Germany . In his last book City Planning Housing from 1936, for example, he postulated that he would succeed Lincoln and the Abolitionists in expropriating slum owners without compensation - once again going politically far beyond the thinking of his allies. The second volume and a large, to the American Vitruvius subsequent Thesaurus contemporary planning was published after his death by his friends.

Hegemann died in New York in April 1936 from complications following pneumonia .

Selection of works

Monographs

as an author

• The American Vitruvius . An Architect's Handbook of Civic Art . Vieweg, Braunschweig 1988, ISBN 3-528-08740-4 .
• American architecture & urban architecture. An overview of the current state of American architecture in its relationship to urban planning . Wasmuth, Berlin 1925.
  • 2nd edition 1927: digitized version of the university library of the Technical University of Berlin .
• City Planning Housing . Architectural Book Publications, New York 1936.
  • Vol. 1 Historical and Sociological .
• The saved Christ or Iphigenies fleeing the ritual sacrifice . Kiepenheuer, Potsdam 1928.
• The book for young people about the great King or Crown Prince Friederich's struggle for freedom . Publisher Hegner, Hellerau 1930.
• Unmasked history . Olms, Hildesheim 1979, ISBN 3-8067-0821-5 (reprint of the Leipzig 1933 edition).
• Facades of Buildings, Fronts of old and modern business and dwelling Houses, 500 Illustrations collected by Werner Hegemann . Ernest Benn Ltd., London 1929.
• Fridericus or The King's Offering . New, ext. Edition. Verlag Hegner, Hellerau 1926 ( digitized version ).
• Napoleon or "kneeling before the hero" . Verlag Hegner, Hellerau 1927.
• Townhouse facades (German edition of Facades of Buildings ). Ernst Wasmuth Verlag, Berlin 1929.
• Report on a City Plan for the Municipalities of Oakland & Berkeley ... np 1915.
• Urban development based on the results of the General Urban Development Exhibition in Berlin . Wasmuth, Berlin 1911–1913.
  • Vol. 1 Berlin . 1911.
  • Vol. 2 Transport, Open Areas Paris, Vienna, Budapest, Munich, Cologne, London, Stockholm, Chicago, Boston . 1913.
• The stone Berlin. 1930, history of the largest tenement town in the world (Bauwelt-Fundamente; 3). Vieweg, Braunschweig 1988, ISBN 3-528-18603-8 .

as editor

• Wasmuth's monthly magazine for architecture (and urban development). Ernst Wasmuth Verlag, Berlin 1924–1933.
• Manfred Maria Ellis: German writings. 2nd Edition. Sanssouci-Verlag, Berlin 1924,
  • Vol. 1 Iphigenia. A comedy .
  • Vol. 2 Iphigenia romanticism, Friedrich legends, Atonement delusion, 1. – 3. of 7 conversations about the king sacrifice .
  • Vol. 3 Friedrich II. As Werther, Christ's salvation from sacrificial death, the last 4 of the 7 conversations about the king's sacrifice .

Essays

• The exhibition for urban planning and urban art in New York . In: Städtebau 6 (1909), pp. 127-131, 146-148.
• The Debasement of the Professions . In: Pierre van Passen, James Waterman Wise (Ed.): Nazism. An Assault on Civilization . New York 1934, pp. 59-75.
• The German house . In: Bauwelt 23 (1932), pp. 1165–1172 (and in: MB 16 (1932), pp. 559–566).
• Emil Ludwig on his fiftieth birthday . In: Die Weltbühne 27 (1931), January 20, pp. 96-100.
• Erich Mendelsohn's Schocken Chemnitz department store . In: Wasmut's monthly magazine for architecture 14 (1930), pp. 345-350.
• Heinrich Mann ? Hitler ? Gottfried Benn ? Or Goethe ? In: Diary 12 (1931), April 11, pp. 580-588.
• The crystalline form of Gothic churches and their forecourts. Considerations on the Ulm Münsterplatz competition . In: Städtebau 20 (1925), pp. 29–44 ( digitized version of the Central and State Library Berlin ).
• Artistic questions of the day when building single-family houses. The successor to Messels , Schultze-Naumburg and Ernst May , flat and crooked roof . In: Wasmuthsmonthshefte für Baukunst 11 (1927), pp. 106–127.
• Mebes , Schinkel , the new Luckhardts , USA and USSR . In: Wasmut's monthly magazine for architecture 16 (1932), pp. 57–65.
• Paul Wolf and Heinrich Tessenow. In: Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst , vol. 11, 1927, pp. 173–182 ( digitized version of the Central and State Library Berlin ).
• Stuttgart shield pranks and Berlin building exhibition 1930 . In: Wasmuthsmonthshefte für Baukunst 11 (1928), pp. 8–12.
• Reichstag tower house . In: Die Weltbühne 26 (1930), March 4, pp. 275–280.
• together with Leo Adler: Warning of "academicism" and "classicism" . In: Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst, vol. 11, 1927, pp. 1–10 ( digitized version of the Central and State Library Berlin ).
• Weimar Bauhaus and Egyptian architecture . In: Wasmuthsmonthshefte für Baukunst , 8 (1924), pp. 69–86.
• An important urban development issue in Berlin: Erich Mendelsohn's Herpich renovation in Leipziger Strasse . In: Städtebau 20 (1925), p. 156 f.

literature

life and work

• Caroline Flick: Werner Hegemann (1881-1936). Urban planning, architecture, politics. A working life in Europe and the USA (individual publications by the Historical Commission in Berlin; Vol. 84). K. G. Saur Verlag, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-598-23228-4 (2 volumes, first comprehensive monographic overview of life and work). Review by Gerhard Knoll in Yearbook for the History of Central and Eastern Germany 54 (2008), pp. 293–306.
• Klaus Kratzsch:  Hegemann, Werner. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 8, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1969, ISBN 3-428-00189-3 , p. 224 f. ( Digitized version ).

architecture

• Werner Oechslin : Between America and Germany: Werner Hegemann's urban planning ideas beyond the question of “modernity” . In: Wolfgang Böhm (Ed.): The building and the city. Articles for Eduard F. Sekler . Böhlau, Cologne 1994, ISBN 3-205-98093-X (texts German-English), pp. 221-251.
• Detlef Jessen-Klingenberg: Camillo Sitte as a "passionate admirer of the baroque". To the reception around Werner Hegemann . In: Karin Wilhelm, Detlef Jessen-Klingenberg (ed.): Formations of the city. Camillo Sitte read on (Bauwelt-Fundamente 132). Bau-Verlag, Berlin 2007, ISBN 978-3-7643-7676-5 ( online ).

planning

• Christiane Crasemann Collins: Werner Hegemann and the Search for Universal Urbanism . Norton Books, New York 2005, ISBN 0-393-73156-1 .

Literary activity

• Christoph Gradmann: Historical fiction. Popular historical biographies in the Weimar Republic (historical studies; 10). Campus.-Verlag, Frankfurt / M. 1993, ISBN 3-593-34881-0 (also dissertation, University of Hanover 1991).

Web links

• Literature by and about Werner Hegemann in the catalog of the German National Library
• Works by and about Werner Hegemann  in the German Digital Library