Ich war, ich bin, ich werde sein

Mies van der Rohe’s Monument to the November Revolution, 1926, a memorial to German political martyrs, is a stark assemblage of brick masses, almost brutal in execution but enigmatic in its composition. It doesn’t pretend to be anything more than what it is, a stack of rough brick masses, yet it leads to questions you aren’t sure how to phrase, doubts about any answers. Still, it maintains balance and composure in spite of the ambiguity, or, better, because of its ability to recognize, to negotiate it.

My essay on his Brick Country House, built a few years before, led to curiosity about the monument, and I completed the model during our November election, a way to engage myself, fight despondence. Mood here is dark, merely personal, mindless and oblivious, with deep undercurrents of the vindictive, illuminated only by the brightness of shallow simplicities that can only lead to more conflict. The man who exhausted our capacity for outrage has been given a fresh start. We have every reason to expect the worst.

Assembling bricks laid a century ago and trying to find their order put the past in my hands and moved me to thoughts of the present. There are similarities, ominous familiarity. In both periods a democratic state is stressed, brought to peril by a process that appears to be inexorable. As I built, moved blocks in my mind, looked back, tried to look forward, history felt like nothing more than a series of discontinuous fractures where I could gain no purchase. Now, as then in Germany the last years of its republic, we have been bombarded with toxic nonsense, and it is hard to find the words. Thought, language have degraded past meaning.

A fascist is unconcerned with the connection between words and meanings. He does not serve the language; the language serves him. 

Timothy Snyder

Making the model itself was difficult for many reasons, and I struggled to comprehend Mies’s decisions and represent them. But I had to involve myself somewhere, do something with my hands, my head. The process was not wholly restorative but at least I gained a measure of commitment and completion, however rough my model, how uncertain I remained about building it throughout. Construction is one proof of our existence that may yet help us look ahead, keep hope in suspension for another time. At the very least we must not put aside, not surrender, not forget, but remember. Remembering is a matter of keeping the past, the present alive.

I was, I am, I will be

History, if it is to mean anything, requires careful inspection, close attention to details, full understanding of context, thorough analysis of factions and forces, of major figures, their actions, their character, their motives, with these a degree of dispassionate remove along with sensitivity to the lives of the masses who endure its unfolding—none of which I will manage here. But, too briefly, too roughly, the November Revolution refers to a series of events at the end of World War I that led to the establishment of a democratic state in Germany, the Weimar Republic.

Germany was defeated, strained, and deeply divided. Likely anything could have set off revolt from any side. As it happened the revolution began with a naval order. The Naval Imperial Command planned, on their own, an attack on the British fleet late October, 1918, even though they were greatly outnumbered, even though the Supreme Army Command had conceded the month before that Germany’s situation was hopeless, even though it would have compromised Germany’s position in negotiations. The army leveraged for a democratic government, one of Woodrow Wilson’s terms for peace, their motive being to preserve their power after the war. It also gave them a scapegoat. Later they could lay blame for defeat and capitulation on the new government, which they did. For the admirals the futile attack was a matter of honor, which gives us a sense of the tenor of the times. The sailors mutinied, the attack was called off, the sailors were incarcerated, protests against which spread to workers, to general strikes across Germany. Within weeks a provisional republic was established. Abdication of Emperor Wilhelm II and other ruling monarchs soon followed.

The provisional government, led by Friedrich Ebert of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), was unstable and had to contend with opposition left and right, the latter having far greater sway. The SPD did propose reform, including the eight-hour work day, the right to collective bargaining, social benefits, and universal suffrage for women, but the old regime, the imperial officers corps retained their voice and power, which Evert thought he needed to maintain order. On the left there were several factions, including the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), Spartacists Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg among its leaders, who wanted nationalization of key industries and a system of representation based on the newly created Soviet model. Early December a likely coup from the right was attempted but dissipated, though it announced intent and showed the possibility another might occur, much in the minds of protestors in a later demonstration that led to death and violence late December, then another early January that drew half a million protestors to Berlin.

Encouraged by the numbers, the KPD attempted overthrow of the government, the Sparticist uprising, hastily planned. The masses did not rally to their cause, however, and their revolt was quickly put down by the government supported troops of the Freikorps, paramilitary volunteers. Days later Freikorps officer Waldemar Pabst arrested Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg and had them taken to a hotel room where they were interrogated and tortured, then, later, elsewhere, shot. Pabst alleged authority for the executions came from higher ups in the government. Other leftist attempts at revolt the following months were quickly and violently suppressed. In August 1919 the Weimar Constitution was adopted, marking for historians the end of the November Revolution, though division and tension remained in the years that followed.

It is all much more complicated than that. Beyond what I have left out, add the possibility of what else might have occurred, given the factions, the numbers, the tensions. The Wikipedia article, which I have consulted, looks thorough and balanced, with multiple points of view. From it I take its conclusion:

With all the differences concerning details, historical researchers agree that in the German revolution, the chances to put the republic on a firm footing were considerably better than the dangers coming from the radical left. Instead, the alliance of the SPD with the old elites constituted a considerable structural problem for the Weimar Republic.

Which raises the questions as to what defines order and upon what it should be based. As Germany discovered not many years later, the structural problem erupted. The right wing, the old elite, fervent nationalists, industrialists, and Junker landowners tolerated and enabled Hitler because they thought they might make use of and could control him. Many, soon most believed in him and followed his program.

We once looked back with disbelief, even abhorrence at revolt, at such violence. But we have our own Freikorps, who were told by our previous and current president to stand back and stand by.

At the opposite end of the political spectrum, this insurrection was tolerated, even praised, though will soon be forgotten, passing into American complacency, our collective oblivion.

We have also maintained a long standing fear and distaste of communism, though most do not know the meaning of the word or what it was meant to represent or what it once promised. For German workers, fodder for the trenches, who saw the results of nationalist ambitions and the unstable alliances that led to the war that killed of millions, some alternative, a transcendent solution, was worth some thought.

But the Monument to the November Revolution, dedicated to the fallen communists, also known as the Memorial to Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, is not the place for ideological war, not now, a century later, rather should be a construction that perpetuates remembrance of the dead, which should always stay our hand, give pause, and stir sober reflection on history itself, its conflicts, its turmoil, but also its possibilities for life, for our lives together.

I was, I am, I will be

The monument has received scant attention at best in the standard texts, if it is mentioned. It doesn’t fit in with the received understanding of Mies’s development or that of modern architecture, of western culture itself, and some critics may have found the political implications sensitive, if not awkward, at any rate out of place. But it is an unusual structure that doesn’t admit critical clarity. And esthetics in political matters always puts us in an uneasy position. Also there are gaps in our understanding. No pictures of the other side have survived, and we only have a few of Mies’s rough drawings, a few words. Here, as elsewhere, he largely kept his silence.

The KPD discussed the project in early 1925. William Pieck, the KPD party secretary, refers to purpose and an early plan:

The drawings and a sculpture on display here illustrate the project for a monument to the fallen heroes of the proletarian revolution. It has to be placed in Friedrichsfelde, where the victims of the SPD-led counterrevolution already lie. Among them you can find the ones who were killed by treason like Liebknecht, Luxemburg, Jogisches [and] such as the ones who were killed during the fightings of January and March 1919 or during the factory protests of 1920. Thanks to the effort of a friend of us—an artist—we could obtain a work of art: It was shaped by the French sculptor Rodin and it is called “indignation.” This sculpture will stand in front of the central nucleus of the monument: a wall. This wall should [recall] the wall of the “federates” in Paris, in front of which the victims of the bourgeoise repression against the Commune´s insurrection of 1871 were buried. This idea of the wall must be put in relationship also with the Kremlin wall in Moscow, where the heroes of the Russian revolution lie beside Lenin. In this way the central monument dedicated to all fallen revolutionaries will be erected in Berlin thanks to the effort of the whole German proletariat.

The Friedrichsfelde Cemetery, built in the 19th century, was intended to be an open burial place for the working class, for all. In the early 20th century, with burial of their members and leaders, it became associated with various socialist movements, leftist causes. The monument Pieck describes was not built and we do not have the drawings. Later that year Eduard Fuchs, who advised the KPD on esthetic issues, approached Mies, whom he had hired to make an addition to his house, which Mies had built, proposed the design that was.

As most of these people were shot in front of a brick wall, a brick wall would be what I would build as a monument.

Mies

He must have been aware of the earlier plan, or at least the intent, as the monument was made of brick and did resemble a wall. Perhaps his memory slipped—Communards in France were shot against a wall, not Liebknecht and Luxemburg.

The monument had a podium where an assembly could be addressed, along with a flagpole and the Soviet star. In the early 1930s the place of ceremony, remembrance, ideological alignment, and demonstration also became a site of desecration and violence. In one protest rally against the Nazis three members were killed by the rising tide.

I’m not clear which flag was raised or what significance the star carried for them. It certainly showed sympathy and identification with the Soviet movement and support for workers worldwide in what was seen as an international movement. But the KPD in the 1920s, like the Soviets, was in the process of defining itself, this in turbulent, uncertain times, and ideology and practice were still in flux, unresolved. The oppressive clarifications of Stalin, to their full extent, came later.

Nor is it known what the KPD might have become had Liebknecht and Luxemburg survived. Both were pacifists. In 1916 they, with others, formed the Spartacus League, the name coming from the Spartacus-led slave revolt in Roman times, to voice their opposition to the war, which the SPD supported. Luxemburg, by one account a reluctant participant in the Sparticist uprising, who believed in freedom of speech and the need for support from the people, was critical of the authoritarian shift in the Soviet Union.

The public life of countries with limited freedom is so poverty-stricken, so miserable, so rigid, so unfruitful, precisely because, through the exclusion of democracy, it cuts off the living sources of all spiritual riches and progress.

Words worth reflection now.

Ich war, ich bin, ich werde sein

The words appear on Mies’s plan and may have made temporary appearance on the monument. They are the last known written words of Rosa Luxemburg, composed just after the uprising, the night of her arrest, which appeared in her article in Die Rote Fahne—The Red Flag— “Order Prevails in Berlin.”

The contradiction between the powerful, decisive, aggressive offensive of the Berlin masses on the one hand and the indecisive, half-hearted vacillation of the Berlin leadership on the other is the mark of this latest episode. The leadership failed. But a new leadership can and must be created by the masses and from the masses. The masses are the crucial factor. They are the rock on which the ultimate victory of the revolution will be built. The masses were up to the challenge, and out of this “defeat” they have forged a link in the chain of historic defeats, which is the pride and strength of international socialism. That is why future victories will spring from this “defeat.” “Order prevails in Berlin!” You foolish lackeys! Your “order” is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will “rise up again, clashing its weapons,” and to your horror it will proclaim with trumpets blazing: I was, I am, I shall be!

those words taken from the poem “Revolution” by Ferdinand Freiligrath, in exile, on the failed revolt for reform in Germany, 1848:

Oh, no! the song those waters hear is not of sorrow, nor dismay.
‘Tis triumph-song–victorious song–the pean of the future’s day
The future–distant now no more–her prophet voice is sounding free,
As well as once your Godhead spake: I was, I am, and I will be!

The voice of Godhead—consider:

God said unto Moses, “I AM THAT I AM.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me unto you.”

Exodus 4:14

“I am the Alpha and the Omega,” says the Lord God, “who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty.”

Revelation 1:8

The appeal is to the eternal.

After Luxemburg was shot her body was dumped in a canal, not discovered until months later.

Nazis leveled the monument and removed graves in 1935.

I was, I am, I will be

A monument is a structural mass that rises above the plane of our horizon, that interrupts the day-to-day grid of our existence. We cannot live or work in monuments, only walk around them, in some cases enter, rest a while, then leave. We are only encouraged to pause, remember, and reflect. They mark some event, the people involved, the intersection of our lives and history. If those people are dead, their names are usually identified, their deaths put in context, that context moved to some larger understanding.

We can pass through the Menin Gate, and it serves as one entrance to the town, Ypres, Belgium. Designed by Sir Reginald Blomfield, revealed in 1927, it commemorates the tens of thousands missing British and Commonwealth soldiers who died on nearby battlefields during World War I, whose graves were never found. Names are listed and subsumed under the exhortations of inscriptions above, Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, Pro Patria and Pro Rege—to the greater glory of God, for country, for king. Symmetrical, stable, and solid, the Gate evokes confidence and security, a notion of closure. The horrors of the past have been bridged over, we can move on, pass into the city. Though built just after Mies’s monument, stylistically it looks to the past. We are anchored back in time with its iteration of the Roman triumphal arch, which promotes historical continuity, the enduring Empire. Lying on top, at the apex of an implied triangle that caps, controls the structure and points to the sky, a lion, emblem of Britain, also Flanders.

An explicit triangular shape points to the sky in Walter Gropius’s Monument to the March Dead, 1922, Weimar Central Cemetery. Complex, off-center, skewed, rising from a splayed, asymmetrical arrangement of other triangular shapes, it abstractly resembles a thunderbolt, though it cannot be determined if the bolt comes from the sky or rises from the disturbance beneath. The monument commemorates the workers killed in the Kapp Putsch, 1920, a failed right-wing attempt to overthrow the newly formed republic and replace it with an authoritarian state. Tensions from the November Revolution were far from resolved. The Nazis destroyed it in 1936.

Peter Eisenman’s memorial in Berlin, 2005, restores a measure of symmetry with its field of some 3000 stelae arranged in a grid, and we can walk among them. But the ground on which they rest undulates slightly, as do the sizes of the blocks, which in sections tower over us. It doesn’t matter what path we take because there is no set path, no resolution to the variations. We might get lost. The blocks, opaquely, emphatically non-symbolic, represent nothing. We are more aware of the grid that contains them, whatever a grid might represent, how it has been slightly, gently shifted, moving us to slight imbalance. Against the subtlety, the slightness, overwhelmingly ironic is the magnitude of what the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe commemorates, the Holocaust, the millions dead.

The central hall of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, MASS Design, Montgomery, Alabama, 2018, contains rectangular volumes arranged in a grid, covered with a roof. Symmetry, regularity reappear with a vengeance. Outside, the low, long structure with its repetitive narrow posts stretches our vision, strains our desire for order, for balance, and supports no structural conclusion, no relationship with the sky, with anything beyond or above it.

Inside suspended, again in perfect order, some 800 steel slabs. Hanging is the appropriate suggestion, as each represents the 800 counties where racial lynchings occurred, each engraved with the names of the victims. We can walk beneath them, hanging above us horrifically, but, as with the Eisenman, find no set path or resolution. We are stunned with the numbing regularity and repetition. The rust on the slabs grates the senses, fixes them in memory, reminds us of time and take us to the past, the corrosion of civil society.

Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, 1982, is nothing more than a black, triangular cut into a gentle mound of ground, two walls that contain the names of service members lost in that war, some 60,000. We can walk by and read the names, as millions have. The memorial doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is, but what it suggests is an open wound in the fabric of our country, a black memory.

What all these monuments after Menin have in common is their disturbance, in varying degrees, in different ways. Instead of providing closure and continuity, they resurrect conflicts in the past and make them present, will not let us forget them. Stylistically they are modern, taking us out of the course of our cultural past, asking us to question where we are today.

[I gave it] a square shape. Clarity and truth were to join forces against the fog that had descended and was killing all hopes—the hopes, as we rightly perceived at the time, of a lasting German republic.

Mies on the monument. It is decidedly modern as well in its abstraction, its play of forms, but it does not unsettle or displace us like the others, rather does the opposite. It more closely resembles a traditional monument, is more a monument than a wall in its mass, form, and poise, and in this respect is closer to the Menin Gate. Just as the triumphal arch is structured by piers flanking an arch, Mies’s work suggests, with the indentation at the top, in the middle, with stacks rising on either side, a similar three-part expression. But only approximately, indefinitely.

The podium, however, the essential programmatic element, is not centered like the Menin arch but placed at the far right. Combine it with the star and flagpole, and a right triangle is suggested that anchors that side as well as provides a vertical lift that counters the horizontal progression of slabs, of the rows of bricks. Diagonals are suggested by the slabs—I mark two in blue—which provide countering tensions that balance the rightward shift and encourage rough focus on the middle. I could add many more such lines and would only find a web of lines that has no rational intersection, no clear resolution, yet collectively maintain the overall composure.

The markers for the graves, however, are arranged in a regular rows before the structure, whose regular grid contrasts with the irregular masses and complements, in a different way, the order of the star, radiating outward, without dominating or restricting the overall effect. The monument itself is enclosed within a regular plot, a formal square with a walk around, whose definite order sets a base from which the main structure departs. In some photographs vegetation between the markers has not been trimmed, rather allowed unfettered growth. Outside the borders more growth rises, surrounds.

Again, there are no surviving photographs of the other side. Likely the volumes on the front were continued horizontally on this side, but also they would have had different locations and lengths. Perhaps a few more might have been added. Full repetition of the front would have contradicted the monument’s dominant character, its variety and unpredictability.

And likely the rough suggestion of three parts, with the indentation in the middle, would have been continued. I assume there would not have been a podium or star or any other contrasting element. But this is a rough model and I’m just guessing. What I realized, however, looking at this side, is how much the flagpole and star contribute to the overall dynamics of the front. Without them, the collected slabs look irresolute, merely inconclusive. We are told what matters most, what is front and what is back.

What all the rectangles, implied and actual, reinforce separately and together is the horizontal character of Mies’s structure that, unlike a traditional monument, is directly set into the ground and lies low beneath the sky, without a formal base, without a concluding cap.

And in place of the smooth, unified assertion we expect of a monument we have the texture of rough, recycled bricks, whose separate identities are delineated by dark grout, whose overall accumulation is rough and uneven. The stretcher courses, running, have headers laid on end at the bottom and horizontally at the top to separate and distinguish the volumes visually, though this pattern is not consistent throughout, adding another note of chance, of accident.

The appearance of stacked masses of bricks, of course, is an illusion. Likely all the exterior is built around a reinforced concrete core. But it is a compelling illusion, complexly expressive. Engage it, experience it in all its parts, in their assemblage, and you realize how much it is a complete and convincing creation.

All of the monuments are complete and convincing in their own way. They provide esthetic expression that helps us conceive and bear the conflicts, the losses they bring to memory. The cut in the Vietnam memorial can also be seen as a surgical cut, preparatory to operation on a lingering wound that has not healed. The other modern monuments point to the need for restoration of what has been lost, has been corrupted, what has yet to be discovered. Recognition, remembrance is the first step. What they do not offer is a set of symbols or received notions to guide us. Mies’s monument, however, like the Menin Gate, not only brings a measure of composure, stability even, but also presents a figure, a symbol. In place of the lion of state and empire there is the Soviet star, which sets the monument in time and locates it in a set of propositions, of ideas, an ideology, with which we need to come to terms.

In the early decades of the 20th century Mies, grounded in neoclassical Schinkel, from his his formative years in Berlin, his time spent in Peter Behren’s office, in the art galleries, was exposed to, if not directly engaged in a dense, rich, cluster of styles that challenged received notions—Suprematism, Expressionism, De Stijl, Constructivism, Futurism, Cubism—movements, ideas on art and architecture and society and the world where it is difficult to locate him or his work with certainty or precision. The temptation, which I’ll forgo, is to invoke Heisenberg: what we discover depends on the angle of our approach. Quantum physics will not help us understand Mies, and the useful meaning of his monument may lie in our inability to pin it down.

Dietrich Neumann suggests the influence of Richard Herre’s poster for the Werkbund exhibition, Die Form, 1924. The similarities are striking, and Mies, from his involvement in the organization, certainly would have seen it. If an influence, it provided a base for his substantial reconfiguration. The Werkbund was formed to recast architectural types and put a new face on German industry and bring global recognition, improve competition, reflect a rapidly changing world. The poster does as much for the notion of form. It is monumental itself, simple, direct, and dynamic, launching FORM with emphatic projection.

Especially after WWI, with the German defeat and the collapse of the imperial state, artists were moved to rethink the old order and reimagine possibilities for a new. Mies aligned himself with the burgeoning avant-garde. He joined the Novembergruppe, an association started by Expressionists that then branched out to other movements, which was committed to social change, that took its name and inspiration from the November Revolution. He also was involved with the avant-garde, politically progressive journal with a Constructivist slant G—G standing for Gestaltung, form-giving—where, in 1923, he made this pronouncement:

we reject

then braces:

Any aesthetic speculation
any doctrine
any formalism

and continues:

Building art is the spatially apprehended will of the epoch.
Alive. Changing. New.
Not the yesterday, not the tomorrow, only the today, is formable.
Only this building creates.
Create form out of the nature of the task with the means of our time.
That is our work.

Beside his words, in the margin of the page, vertically on end, appeared:

Art should change life, not interpret it.

K Marx

If Mies did not place the Marx quotation there, I assume didn’t disapprove. There is much to unpack here, much abstraction that needs to land, but the thrust of their ideas is clear: both are coming to terms with historical shifts, both express the need to rethink past assumptions, rebuild society. Communism is placed within Mies’s orbit, and the star on his monument leads the way.

In the Vredeman de Vries engraving, above, the two lions rest on plinths at the middle, on center, dividing the space evenly, in their recession directing us to the vanishing point, theoretically lying an infinite distance away. They control all space within and without the arched structure and point to a system of perspective that sets the sizes and proportions of all the parts. It is a picture of absolute order. The recumbent lion on the Menin Gate rests on top of the monument, above the names of the dead, and not only controls the symmetrical construction of the arch but also the space beyond, well within the city, seen through the arch. Literally it is a creature of reposing strength, poised, prepared to spring. Figuratively it is a representation of enduring empire, reinforced historically by the classical reference of the arch, its language. Like the Vredeman lions, it is a symbol of hierarchy and control of space.

The Soviet star is taken as a symbol of communism in general as well as an emblem of the actual Soviet state. The crossed hammer and sickle represent the joining of agricultural and industrial workers who should comprise the society and, theoretically, collectively govern it. Significantly, appropriately, it does not rise above the monument in domination, rather sits within the sliding masses, just above the regular rows of graves, and its placement to the right sets all the parts in motion to uncharted space. The monument is frontal, and, without other reference or specific language, places us firmly in the present, the here and now, and stirs us to thought, to action.

Formally there is active visual communication among the grave markers, the star, and the brick masses, a complex array of tensions that encourages a dialog among the living who have come to remember their departed comrades and reaffirm their identity, their beliefs. But conceptually what should we understand? An attractive and wholly superficial reading might be that the star asserts and secures the ideology that redeems the fallen, laid in regular rows, their deaths given rational cause and purpose in a grid amidst the dissolution of a fallen state, presented in the disturbance of the masses of sliding bricks, whose turmoil will be transcended, say from dialectic. But Michael Chapman, citing Buchloch, says similar:

For Buchloh, the monument distinguishes Mies from other architects operating within the landscape of Berlin in the 1920s by directly challenging the ideological power structures that the architect is forced to operate within. For Buchloh, “Through the [act] of aesthetic commemoration, [Mies resists] the constantly renewed collective prosecution of those victims in the form of their eradication from current memory, thereby dignifying the victims of a state whose opponents they had become because of their public challenge.” That Buchloh observes an inherent “dissidence” in this monument is clear, concluding that the work is not only a critique of the political ideologies operating in Berlin in the 1920s, but the values and economy of architecture, which was inevitably entwined within these and dependent upon them.

Buchloh gives priority to what most matters, most gives the monument meaning, the victims and those who came to remember them, whose own existence was in peril. The monument responds to extinction with energy in the active design, not the overarching calmness of the Menin Gate. The dead, their survivors were given a special place, unlike any other seen before, that could not be easily forgotten, quickly dismissed. According to Die Rote Fahne, 1926, the monument was well received.

The first impression of the monument is surprising. It stands almost too massive in front of the 43 graves in front. But once that first impression is overcome, one realizes that this form is truly the correct expression for such a monument to the revolution. As critical as it was seen at first by the participants [at the beginning] because of its unusual form, there was unanimous enthusiasm for this tremendous work at the end.

The living were given a space that gave them power not only to assert themselves but also question the history, the forces, the state that brought them to the site, that encouraged them to protest, to assemble, to move towards change. But the relationship of the star to the brick masses remains undefined, and any suggestion of representation of critique of state in their irregular and shifting assembly is tenuous at best. Most, the notion of dissonance does not fit with our overall experience of the monument, the brick in its collective composure. We could consider instead that the slabs represent an assembly of individual parts given separate identity and brought together into a new state, with the star ensuring their collective identity. Instead of a dissolving political structure, we see the one that will take its is place. Schnapp describes it as

a complex of massive blocks, themselves composed of irregular stone bricks, [that] shuttle freely in and out of [the] supporting wall, as if seeking their definitive place within a perpetual work in progress (the building of a just world). The paradox of solidity animated by movement was reinforced by the monument’s use as a podium and stage for political rallies from the time of its construction to the era of Nazism.

This interpretation is attractive as well and just as suspect. Again it’s hard to find explicit reference in the different sizes or varied placement of the slabs. And it is vague. Also it is an exact opposite reading. We feel like Polonius discussing clouds with Hamlet. Both interpretations have only marginal connections to the formal events of the design, their complexity.

For Chapman, however, critical reception is a matter of setting priorities:

By positioning Mies’s monument within a culture of avant-gardism, and, like Buchloh, privileging the ideological content over the purely formal language, it is possible to develop an expanded framework for architecture and politics where function and form are secondary to action. Through the radicalization of time and the mobilization of participation, architecture can arrive at a relationship to dissidence that is irrespective of its physical form or immediate purpose: activated as it is by memory and ideology as a unifying principle of political life.

He recalls Constructivist theory:

For us, however, form is a result of organisation and functional relations of working and constructive moments. It is necessary to look at it and critique it not as form, but as an approach to cultural organisation.

Ivan Leonidov

What most matters is what a building does, and what a building does is one part of a larger reality, the social order. Without significant activity, without engagement, regardless of design, a structure has no substantial meaning in any larger scheme. Form should be direct and clear, and facilitate, promote action and belief in a way that is unambiguous. In this case, the monument serves as a locus of ritual remembrance, of assertion. Imagine the degree of members’ engagement when they gathered in there in the 1930s, during Hitler’s rise, what they saw in the monument, what they felt, what they were moved to think, to do. Imagine how it might stand today, how it might serve, what it might mean to present-day German Communists if it were rebuilt, as has been proposed the last decades. Yet imagine how it might have appeared, what discussion, what action it might have inspired years later if it had survived—somehow—and the KPD could have continued to meet, those who survived, weren’t rounded up—at the time of the Stalin purges, the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact.

But the monument is complex and ambiguous, and it does not make explicit statement about ideology or provide a clear path to action unless we project one on it that may be at odds with its formal design and its expressive power. Nor do any of the critical approaches fit with what we know about Mies and his other work or the way he describes it:

Clarity and truth were to join forces against the fog that had descended and was killing all hopes—the hopes, as we rightly perceived at the time, of a lasting German republic.

His words speak not to dissonance but resolution, not to revolution but restoration, not to a classless state but to a republic. An aside, to which I will return—

They also describe how his Barcelona Pavilion, built a few years later, was perceived and is still seen today. The pavilion put a new face on Germany to meet the world, a progressive representation of the evolving Weimar government in a structure that was open, transparent, and composed, that looked forward, past the ravages of a war, past the megalomania of monarchy, of the empire that started it.

They aren’t dissimilar from those made at its opening by Georg von Schnitzler, an industrialist without whose political influence and financial resources it would not have been built:

In a country less favored by the sun than yours, where the winters are long and dark, and there are many rainy days, a new spirit of the age has emerged, which aims to collect and radiate as much light and clarity as the natural conditions permit. We reject anything that is labyrinthine, obscure, overwrought, and complicated, we want to see clearly, and we want to surround ourselves with things that are clear, straight, and pure. Utmost simplicity has to be accompanied by the deepest profundity.

There is winding and a subtle complexity in the pavilion’s design, but it is not overwrought and von Schnitzler echoes the same appeal for clarity as Mies, a reach for higher understanding, some larger truth.

Georg’s wife, Lilly, also influential, wrote an article about the pavilion in a similar vein, though ethereally, perhaps overreaching. Mies “cast our spiritual existence into form”:

. . . as if from a fairytale, not from the Arabian Nights, but from an almost supernaturally inspired music of eternal space, not as a house, but as a drawing of lines in such a space by a hand that defines the human reach toward infinity.

Another appeal to the eternal, again the same plea for clarity, for extension, for aspiration. Compare to Mies’s own words at the time:

It must be possible to heighten consciousness and yet keep it separate from the purely intellectual. It must be possible to let go of illusions, see our existence sharply defined, and yet gain a new infinity, an infinity that springs from the spirit.

Lilly’s reach for infinity, at the end of her article, takes her precisely here:

Spain seems to be Europe’s last haven for conviction, attitude, character, metaphysics—the sole values through which Europe can recover. . . . Spain’s experiment win Barcelona, which is symptomatic for all of Spain to drive out the devil with the help of Lucifer, is for all of us a most enthralling adventure, whose result can become authoritative for us as well.

Lilly von Schnitzler

The experiment was the coup led by General Miguel Primo de Rivera in Barcelona to assume dictatorial control in 1923. The adventure in Germany was not many years off. Change a few terms but keep the thrust, the spirit of her words—we’re hearing similar in Germany and Russia now, in Hungary, the rest of Europe, elsewhere—and here. Georg, pro-monarchy and anti-Weimar, joined the SA and Nazi Party and was convicted of war crimes in the Nuremberg trials.

Most of us would quickly reject the pairing of fascism with the Barcelona Pavilion, but on what terms? Certainly for reasons of humanity, hopefully of ideology. Historically, given the von Schnitzlers’ involvement, however, we are on less certain ground. Its innovation, its asymmetrical layout, its subtle, complex design, its quiet ambiguity would seem to contradict the aims of a totalitarian state, but imagine if it had been rebuilt in Germany—not unthinkable, given attention to it worldwide in cultural circles—and then took on this symbolic marker under the Third Reich. It is not hard to imagine how the building might have been used, what assemblies would have taken place there, how it would have been promoted, and the von Schnitzlers paved the way. Had that happened, critical understanding would have been impacted in the decades since, and our favorable reception now, nearly universal, would have been stained.

Of course the Nazis dismissed modernism as decadent and instead opted for a stripped, distended classicism, less subtle, more direct, more imposing—as did the Soviets under Stalin, who built similar.

But modernism was not seen in contradiction to political ideology in Italy, Terragni’s Casa del Fascio, for example.

Mies, in fact, refused the Weimar government’s request to put their eagle on the onyx wall and was reluctant to put any figure or adornment on the pavilion with the exception of the demure figure Dawn, which he selected. He did, however go to great lengths to secure the star—Krupp Steelworks refused to fabricate it, so he asked them for five separate plates that he could assemble on site—and it is essential to its formal composition as well as our critical understanding. Mies obviously had familiarity with what the star represented and some affinity. In 1926 he, along with other avant-garde architects and artists, joined the Society of the Friends of New Russia. But he was not a member of the party. He read Marx, or at least about him, and referred to him favorably in his notes, but he also read St. Aquinas, and he was no more a Marxist than he was a Thomist. Nor did he leave us any extended discussion of Marxist theory or application—or any politically motivated esthetic theory.

Mies rejected formalism for formalism’s sake. There had to be a finger on the pulse of the present moment along with a purpose, larger understanding. Like Marx, Mies recognized shifts in economic and technical developments. Like Marx he realized their limitations and the problems they posed, Like Marx he saw the need for change, for a different, a better society. But we can go no further. Where Marx sounded dialectical materialism, Mies invoked the spirit:

Building art is not the realization of specific formal problems, no matter how much they may be contained therein. But it is always, I repeat, the spatial execution of spiritual decisions.

and creativity:

The battle cry “rationalization and typification,” along with the call for the economizing of the housing industry, represent only parts of the problem, for, although important, they have significance only if seen in right proportions. Next to them, or rather above them, stands the spatial problem that can only be solved by creativity rather than by calculation or organization.

and nature:

We should attempt to bring nature, houses, and human beings together in a higher unity.

And we don’t know what he is talking about. We only get a general philosophical thrust, without specific terms or explicit theory or projected solution. There is virtue in that. Where the von Schnitzlers point with absolute, poisoned certainty, Mies gives no terminus, no final solution. His notion of spirit, of infinity is not grounded, is not so narrow, not so constrained, not so mean, and he claims no certainty. Formally and conceptually, we cannot take the Barcelona Pavilion as a representation of a fascist state unless the interpretation is forced on it. It is too open, too abstract, too subtle—too graceful.

Similarly, it is hard to conceive any literal representation in the masses of the brick slabs, their substantial variation in size and placement, or plot any ideological relationship to the symbolic shape that might stick. But formally, conceptually, we can’t understand the monument without factoring in the star. In the absence of help from Mies, I’ll propose a theory which brings form and ideas together that might be useful and fit what we see. Mies was not adverse to the star, what it represented in 1926, when Communists and his society as a whole were in the process of rethinking, reshaping the world, but his attraction was only general. The star represents one example of an alternative, incipient, evolving at a time when his own ideas were in flux, evolving, and might stand for other such efforts, worth entertaining, continuing, preserving. As such, it had to be presented provisionally, conditionally.

Formally the star provides a focal point from which rays, regular, predictable, radiate resolutely outward, above, among the other forms, their complex arrangement, their quiet tensions.

It functions like the statue of Dawn in the Barcelona Pavilion, which provides a dynamic focus to the staggered walls without dominating them, without precluding, without resolving their openness, their subtle questions. Similarly the rays of the star contrast with the horizontal character of the slabs and provide a point of focus—the center of the star—counterpointing the complexities of the slabs, activating their variety and at the same time validating their overall composure. In both buildings the focal point is offset, to the right, giving the sense of motion from left to right, the direction of reading, of understanding, of progress. 

What we are given is a formal presentation of a dialogue of alternatives, of active possibilities stated without dominance, without full resolution. Options are kept alive. Conceptually we don’t get a plan or an outline, rather a general idea, necessarily ambiguous, open-ended. A durable state needs complexity and vitality, not fixity and absolute enclosure. To be vital, the state needs vital, free individuals, and vital individuals need a vital state in which to thrive. The star could be seen as representing a system that guides the masses physically, figuratively, yet at the same time the mass of individual slabs set the conditions under which the star should exist, has life. Even that, however, may be too literal an interpretation, and the strength of the monument is how much it avoids the obvious, the literal, the confines of specific ideology that can constrain, choke, close off choice, shut us out. What we get from Mies is a general thrust, left open. He has taken a tradition of thought, of perspective and symmetry and control, and shifted it into a representation that is active and flexible, He reshapes the way we think about space, about ourselves, individually, together. We need freedom, we need balance, we need composure.

What holds the monument together and gives it substance, what allows the star to rise, what checks its ascent, are the facts of our individual existence, of humanity, of time and wear and mortality. I am reminded in their rough texture of the rust on the slabs of the lynching memorial, though here collection is maintained with a measure of understanding instead of horror, of assertion instead of despair.

Ich war, ich bin, ich werde sein

The monument is based on and owes its existence to the sacrifices of the dead KPD members, to the aspirations, the trials of the survivors. Without that recognition, the monument becomes an idle abstraction, a facile exercise. Similarly, whatever Mies intended, whatever he understood, it could not have existed without the specific ideology they pursued, and the ideas charge its significance. The monument does not preclude, rather invites ideological critique as much as it deflects it, and we need more. When we look at the monument now, we need to remember how it was once used, how it might yet be used again, if only in our imagination. We need to be become revolutionists and stand before the podium, if only for moment, and conceptualize the transformation of the world. But to value the monument and understand it, we need to experience it, follow its shapes and formal composition and see where those take us, our thought.

Significance in a work of art is a complex matter without set resolution. It changes with time, our changing perspectives, and is as much determined by shifting trends and ideas as by the creator’s original theory, itself variable and uncertain. Most, it depends upon existence in the world, the historical forces that lead to creation, to ideological debates, to social tensions and conflicts, in this case a failed revolution. Mies became involved when he took on the project. His monument doesn’t exist outside of history, it is part of it. But to insist on ideological interpretation is to deny expression and extension and ignore the monument’s universal appeal, what those of us outside the theory might take away. If we look at the monument today, when communism is not active on the world stage in any recognizable from, certainly not in Russia, though Putin has resurrected Stalin and his ambition, the old borders. The historical forces, however, that caused the death of the protestors, the destruction of the monument persist.

The fascism of the 1920s and 1930s. . . had three core features: it celebrated will and violence over reason and law; it proposed a leader with a mystical connection to his people; and it characterized globalization as a conspiracy rather than as a set of problems. Revived today in conditions of inequality as a politics of eternity, fascism serves oligarchs as a catalyst for transitions away from public discussion and towards political fiction; away from meaningful voting and towards fake democracy; away from the rule of law and towards personalist regimes.

Timothy Snyder/The Road to Unfreedom

If we remember our past, too recent but in the process of being forgotten, look at our world today, at what lies obvious before us once we focus our sight, we see those forces persist and are pervasive. Comparisons with Nazi Germany have come too often since that war, especially, of course, the last years, too quickly, too grossly, glibly appropriating the magnitude of the destruction. Our present condition has roots in an ongoing malaise that has a uniquely American character. However to say we haven’t experienced the same degree or type of horror provides little consolation. Small corrupt behaviors, repeated over time, can erode our resolve, cause us to lose our bearings as they pile up and fester or seep into the ground water of our culture and slowly poison us, drop by drop.

Our current president, in a campaign speech, told far-right Christians he was going to fix things so that they wouldn’t have to vote anymore. We have no idea what he meant, but we know how that was done in the past and why and where it led. Perhaps all his talk is just rhetorical bluster, not to be taken seriously, at face value, but that only shows how much the art of persuasion has been degraded. Regardless, the language of abuse has been prolific and has dominated public discourse, defining the terms we live by, shaping the ways we think, what we feel. It sets the ground for future action, and without vital language we won’t have the means to counter, even understand what we are doing.

But we have every reason to believe he is serious, that the potential consequences will be large.

Snyder defines two mindsets that determine current political behavior, the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity. The politics of inevitability in the US promotes the notion that the market has triumphed, that it has brought democracy, freedom, happiness, and progress. It is inevitable, it is unassailable, there are no better alternatives, and we question it at our expense. The politics of eternity places us within a vanishing perspective of imagined crisis and salvation. In Russia Putin promotes absolute authority based on confrontation against fabricated enemies, us, the free world, anything outside; a projection of cultural myth, Russkiy Mir; and a spurious spirituality over which he presides, unapproachable, unassailable. In such a perspective we are diminished to insignificance, our votes are meaningless, and our only choice is to feel the passion, align ourselves with the ruler, and take part in phantom battles. The war in Ukraine, however, has become too real. Both mindsets take us from history, from thought, from decision, from truth. And one leads to the other.

Eternity arises from inevitability like a ghost from a corpse. The capitalist version of the politics of inevitability, the market as a substitute for policy, generates economic inequality that undermines belief in progress. As social mobility halts, inevitability gives way to eternity, and democracy gives way to oligarchy. An oligarch spinning a tale of an innocent past, perhaps with the help of fascist ideas, offers fake protection to people with real pain. Faith that technology serves freedom opens the way to his spectacle. As distraction replaces concentration, the future dissolves in the frustrations of the present, and eternity becomes daily life. The oligarch crosses into real politics from a world of fiction, and governs by invoking myth and manufacturing crisis. In the 2010s, one such person, Vladimir Putin, escorted another, Donald Trump, from fiction to power.

For a decade the press that hasn’t become corrupted has been assailed. In the judicial system, a mythical version of our past—”originalism”—has been used to justify state control and amplify the power of executive authority. Spiritual leaders, in a literal and selective reading of the Bible, have fused their beliefs with the state and made our current president, unquestioned, its figurehead. We have been lied to, lied to, lied to, lied to about our electoral process and its results, about facts and theories about our society, about our past, about our identities, about our culture, about our health and the health of the climate. Crimes committed have been glossed over with lies, repeatedly, repeatedly, imaginary crimes have been fabricated against opponents and repeated and repeated. We have been smothered with lies, strain to catch our breath.

Totalitarianism is its own true enemy, and that is the secret it keeps from itself by attacking others.

Our president thrives on defining enemies, getting even, getting back. This is what sustains him, brings him attention, attracts followers, gives him power. Countless enemies have been identified and vilified in the grossest terms, many threatened with exclusion, with incarceration—insiders, outsiders, an entire party in opposition, individuals, groups, whole cities, half the nation, whole nations. For years we have been forced to trudge in excrement, and however much the best of us can deflect the accusations the excess dulls our senses, the smell lingers, drags us down in the mire.

If there is no truth, there can be no trust, and nothing new appears in a human vacuum. . . . In conditions of distrust and isolation, creativity and energy veer towards paranoia and conspiracy, a feverish repetition of the oldest mistakes.

We live in a world that has turned ahistorical, meaningless, and perverse. While I’ve been writing this essay there has been an inauguration, where the richest men in the world sat in attendance, where instead of hearing about climate, economic strain, social well-being, housing, inequality, common purpose, world understanding and cooperation, we were given talk about deportation, exclusion, loosened restraint of corporations, increased restraint on individuals, about global expansion, Bitcoin and artificial intelligence, a trip to Mars. The military has been purged, a shift of purpose proposed. Appointments to key positions are now being reviewed, executive orders flow in a torrent. Insurrectionists have been freed, I assume are standing by.

I have only scratched the surface.

He is just getting started.

Beyond what has been planned from within the White House, add what stirs the current president’s heart, has been turned loose in hearts across the land, where it leads. Revenge, unleashed, knows no bounds.

The other party has willed the government into dysfunction. There are no effective checks now in the legislative or judicial systems. The press is conceding, toning down. The best we might have to hope for is implosion from corruption and virtual madness.

How fresh, how active, how challenging the monument looks today, a hundred years later, at least in the pictures, in my rough model. How much it absorbed me the week I spent building it, how much it has engaged me the weeks since as I have contemplated it on my table, walked around, viewed it from all angles. Much made construction difficult. Large parts are unknown, and the pictures we have are rough and difficult to read. There is no surviving graphic representation of structure, no elevations or detailed plans. Also at this scale I had to use large units, oversized blocks that couldn’t capture subtle overhangs, accurate proportions, the rough texture. Building the model was an extended process of balancing compromises and uncertainty that tested my patience and resolve. I could have done better.

There’s a point in that, however, a metaphor. Coming to terms with the past, the present is always a matter of handling uncertainty and unknowns, of avoiding forced simplicity and symmetry without giving in to total confusion, without losing spirit, without losing sight of what matters.

[I gave it] a square shape. Clarity and truth were to join forces against the fog that had descended and was killing all hopes—the hopes, as we rightly perceived at the time, of a lasting German republic.

Mies made this comment in an interview in 1969, some forty years later. There is no reference to revolution, to repression, to an ideology, a party, to lives taken, all of these lost a fog. Clarity and truth—the abstract and open words sound conciliatory, concessionary, palliative, like a glossing over. Yet they may well best express what Mies intended at the time of construction, best describe how the monument works formally, how it might move us now, and they touch on something that sustained me throughout a difficult construction, a difficult time, and allowed me to look at the world around me without repulsion, to look up.

The monument is not square. The dimensions of the controlling rectangle itself are not certain, only suggested, with alternative possibilities, and the various rectangular volumes within, of varying sizes and placement, complement and pull away from its overall suggested size and symmetry, as well as pull away from and complement each other, doing so with energy and composure, with a sense of proportion that cannot be measured. The design is not rigidly symmetrical but not chaotic, rather asserts its own free sense of order, flexible and open. What might have been a stolid mass of brick has come alive.

The lynching memorial is located in Montgomery, Alabama, where Rosa Parks refused to sit at the back of a bus. The Vietnam memorial is cut into a grassy space next to the National Mall, Washington, within the grid of a government that once sent soldiers overseas. The grid of the holocaust memorial lies in the grid of streets of Berlin, close to the Reichstag building and the Brandenburg Gate, once the seat of the Third Reich, at a location where the Berlin Wall once stood. Friedrichsfelde Cemetery, however, where the Monument to the November Revolution was built, was located then at the outskirts of Berlin, away from populated areas, and while not bucolic the land was lush and vibrant with growth throughout and peaceful. Mies speaks to a larger context.

Nature is an abstract concept for Mies, undefined, but in his work we get a plan, a schema, an expression that asserts its presence and establishes relationships in which we can move around, look beyond. In the memorial, as in the Brick Country House, the Krefeld Villas, and the Barcelona Pavilion, a low-lying yet active horizontal construction is placed within space, within the presence of nature that does not intrude or try to contain or dominate or regulate but rather maintain an active interrelationship between open, variable forms and open space. The spirit within talks to the spirit without.

We always need to remember the living and the dead, always look back, review past attempts to bring order and see how well they fit our lives, individually, together, always reconsider present efforts, allow for new, always avoid the traps of certainty, always look beyond ourselves, always look up.

The world is alive.

I am alive.

I was, I am, I will be

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A non-biographical note about Mies

The Monument to the November Revolution had to have been a serious effort for Mies and he had to have been aware of its ideological implications in a sensitive and conflicted time. His reputation up to that point was based largely on a handful of virtual projects, on drawings. Here he could show concrete representation of his ideas that might last in the actual world. I’m not clear how it was received by the avant-garde, however—or how much it was condemned by the cultural forces on the right, for obvious reasons, how it affected his reputation among them. He was also starting to get commissions for his new work, from the upper class, from the government, which I assume led to the need to negotiate political realities in Weimar Germany, the powers with the resources to fund his constructions.

Soon after the monument’s completion he made concessions—or was he making the best of a bad situation that was only getting worse? Germany was hit hard by the worldwide depression and the political scene shifted dramatically, soon overwhelmingly in only a few years. While director of the Bauhaus he had left-wing students expelled to depoliticize and save it—its political activities had drawn attention. He approached Alfred Rosenberg to try to save the school, in vain. He maintained his relationship with the von Schnitzlers, and it was Lilly who spoke on his behalf to Goebbels, also in vain. He signed a letter, Goebbels inspired, pledging allegiance to Hitler, presumably to help his projects, for which he apologized to his friends, which later came back to haunt him. And he submitted two designs to Third Reich competitions, one for the Reichsbank, 1933, the other for the Brussels Pavilion, 1934, above, where a small eagle does appear, placed by Mies’s hand, before a courtyard with timorous Nazi flags wavering in the wind. Both were rejected by the Reich, with vehemence by one account.

I have to confess I find both projects starkly simple and massively intimidating, as if expressions of state power, but the designs meet their programs and I don’t know how I’d view them if built another time, in another political environment. Similarities exist with his later work, in the US. I also withhold hold judgment of Mies’s behavior at a time when he was treading on treacherous ground, when it was impossible to be apolitical, to rise above politics, to maintain the integrity of his vision, when the creative act itself was imperiled. If he went through a change of conviction or a revision of his view of society, he doesn’t tell us. Doing so, then and later, even now, would only have exposed him to conflicting and unforgiving criticism from all fronts. I suppose we have to factor in ego, though nothing gets done without one. I have to give Mies the benefit of a doubt. The only two things I’m certain about him are that he was an architect, one who had ambition, who wanted to reach, to make his mark, and that he was German. I hazard the guess that he would have preferred to have worked in a Germany where the fog had lifted, the republic had survived.

I avoid biographies. They only give scattered details about the exigencies and accidents of our lives, brought together into interpretative coherence where neither a life nor a creation fits well. What matters is a creator’s work, where careful attention to details, to conversations with forms come together to provide a complete conception, if only provisionally, however ambiguously, one that lasts, that survives us, our biases, our suspicions. Our concerted efforts transcend our momentary imperfections, our lapses, the noise of the world, of our convictions.

I am curious, however. Mies’s father was a stonemason, and much of his work was in gravestones. Also his workshop was close to a cemetery. I wonder what childhood memories might have filtered up into the monument. I’m also curious how his own experience with brick influenced him. At fifteen, he apprenticed at construction sites and much later in life recounts this experience:

Once you were there, on the wall, it was good. You learned to work slowly, not like some wild animal that gets tired after fifteen minutes, but quietly, for hours and hours. If you were really experienced, you learned how to do corners, which was very complicated. Mostly we laid the bricks in cross bond, and now and then we’d make mistakes. The foreman would often just let us make them and carry on. Then we’d get a wall up a way and he would say, “O.K., that’s wrong. Take the whole thing down.” Finally, when we were finished, the carpenters would show up and we were shifted to the vital assignment of getting the water for the workmen’s coffee.

which must have been in mind as he oversaw construction of the monument. From Schulze..

As a side note, Mies was suspected in the US of being a Nazi spy and a communist because of the monument. He was brought before McCarthy’s HUAC hearings. From Neumann. No wonder he kept his silence.

Notes/Credits

Andrea Contursi has made drawings of the monument, which I consulted while making my model. This image from Wikipedia, where I also found the Pieck quotation. The translation may be off.

Timothy Snyder, “A fascist is unconcerned. . .” The New Yorker, “What Does It Mean That Donald Trump Is a Fascist?” Excerpt:

When the Soviets called their enemies “fascists,” they turned the word into a meaningless insult. Putinist Russia has preserved the habit: a “fascist” is anyone who opposes the wishes of a Russian dictator. So Ukrainians defending their country from Russian invaders are “fascists.” This is a trick that Trump has copied. He, like Vladimir Putin, refers to his enemies as “fascists,” with no ideological significance at all. It is simply a term of opprobrium.

Putin and Trump are both, in fact, fascists. And their use of the word, though meant to confuse, reminds us of one of fascism’s essential characteristics. A fascist is unconcerned with the connection between words and meanings. He does not serve the language; the language serves him.

Compare with our current president’s accusation against Kamala Harris during the campaign, from The Hill:

She’s a Marxist communist, fascist, socialist.

Mies, “As most of these people were shot. . .” cited in Franz Schulze, Mies Van der Rohe: A Critical Biography.

Rosa Luxemburg, “Order Prevails in Berlin” and “The public life of countries with limited freedom” from Wikipedia.

Ferdinand Freiligrath, “Revolution” from Revolution’s Newsstand, translation by Ernest Jones.

Mies, “[I gave it a square shape]. . .” from interview by Lisa Dechêne, Deutsche Volkszeitung, 5 September 1969, cited in Jean-Louis Cohen, Mies van der Rohe.

Mies, “we reject” cited in Fritz Neumeyer, The Artless Word. Neumeyer provides an image of the page where his words appeared in G, along with the Marx quotation in the margin.

Michael Chapman, “Against the Wall: Ideology and Form in Mies van der Rohe’s Monument to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht,” where he cites Buchloh and Schnapp. B. H. D. Buchloch, “A note on Gerhard Richter’s ‘October 18, 1977,'” Spring, October 48; J. T.Schnapp, “The monument without style,” Grey Room, Winter 2004.

Ivan Leonidov, “The first impression” cited in Anna Bokov, “Soviet workers’ clubs: lessons from the social condensers.” Leonidov was a theorist and member of the Constructivist OSA.

Georg and Lilly von Schnitzler quotations from Dietrich Neumann, Mies van der Rohe: An Architect in His Time. “The first impression of the monument is surprising” also found here. His book An Accidental Masterpiece: Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion provides more background of a complicated picture. As it was, the Weimar government wasn’t interested in the pavilion and couldn’t justify the cost.

Mies, “It must be possible to heighten consciousness,” from “The Preconditions of Architectural Work,” lecture February 1928, found in Neumeyer.

Mies referred to Marx favorably in his notes—see Neumeyer, his comment:

Mies refers here to a paragraph in which Ziegler, in his search for an “organic economic form,” discusses Marxist economics. The passage of which Mies writes “saying of Marx, very good,” indicated as “64 on top,” reads: “Just as the savage must wrestle with nature to satisfy his needs, to maintain his life and to reproduce, so must the civilized man, and he must do that under all forms of social organization and under all pos­sible modes of production. . . . Freedom in this area can only exist so far as societal man, the associated producers, regu­late their material exchange with nature rationally, bring It under their societal control, in order not to be ruled by its blind power. . . . But there always remains a realm of necessity. Only beyond that begins. . . the true realm of freedom, which, however, only blooms forth if it is erected with the realm of necessity as its basis.” Mies shows a comparable idea of freedom as an understanding of necessty in his concept of the building art, the technical necessities of which must be mastered so that “the world of our creations will blossom from within. We want no more; we can do no more.”

Compare with Mies’s manifesto above. We only get a shift in orientation towards the world, towards a kind of materialism not a system to govern it. Mies, however, in his other comments cannot let go of an unspecified idealism.

Mies:

“Building art is not the realization,” lecture 1926, found in Cohen.

“The battle cry of ‘rationalization,'” from introductory remarks to the special issue “Werkbundausstellung: Die Wohnung,” Die Form, 2, no. 9, 1927, found in Neumeyer.

“We should attempt to bring nature,” quoted in Christian Norberg-Schutz, “Ein Gespr!ich mit Mies van dor Rohe,” Baukunst und Workform, 11 (1958), found in Neumeyer.

Mies made similar remarks at this time and later. His direction is always towards aphorism, not a precise set of terms and ideas.

Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom. He provides detailed and extensive support for his claims.

“Our current president, in a campaign speech, told Christians he was going to fix things so that they wouldn’t have to vote anymore”—see Reuters:

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump told Christians on Friday that if they vote for him this November, “in four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”

Also consulted, Élise Julien and Elsa Vonau, “The Friedrichsfelde Cemetery: the Construction of a Socialist Space.”

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Images

All photographs of the monument via The Charnel-House/Bundes-archiv.

Mass protest via Gary Stockbridge, 1918 In Berlin.

Sparticist uprising photograph via WikiMedia Commons.

Armed protestors photograph, edited, via Al Jazeera, Bryan Woolston/Reuters.

Menin Gate via Wikimeda Commons.

Walter Gropius, Monument to the March Dead, via Wikimedia Commons. Also see The Charnel-House for another brief review and the history behind it. The design is too literal and it’s the least successful among the others.

Peter Eisenman, Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe via Wikimedia Commons.

MASS Design, National Memorial for Peace and Justice, via Wikimedia Commons.

Maya Lin, Vietnam Veterans Memorial, via Wikimedia Commons.

Richard Herre poster via Pinterest. Neumann suggests its influence in Mies van der Rohe.

Barcelona Pavilion black and white photograph by Alexander Hüls via Wikimedia Commons.

Drawing of Brick Country House via Wolf Tegethoff, Mies van der Rohe: The Villas and Country Houses.

The image of the Friedrichsfelde Cemetery is a recent photograph, via On the Grid.