INFANTRY DOGS IN A BAUHAUS APARTMENT
In 1926 Bertolt Brecht tells a story of two male types who, having shared the narrow confines of the trenches during the war, meet again in the republic, in a Bauhaus apartment. There would be no story to tell were the apartment not the site of a catastrophe of ridiculousness, which, as we know, it is the aim of every code of conduct to avoid.
It has long since become an established fact that in November and December 1918 a very large number of men, whose manners had suffered somewhat, returned home with their habits and got on the nerves of the people they had fought for.[60]
Brecht begins the story with this sentence, deriving the appeal of the Bauhaus aesthetic from the experience of infantry dogs in the trenches. At the same time, however, it quickly becomes apparent that any such rational enclosure as a Bauhaus apartment also produces an “unfathomable desire” for chaos. An engineer by the name of Müller is of the sort whose manners got a bit wild. His counterpart is Kampert, another engineer, whose sole desire, having survived the mud and slime of Arras and Ypres, is to live exclusively in a tiled bathroom (see Figure 8). Ernst Bloch also remarks that functionalist dwellings had something of the “charm of a sanitary facility,” and the opening paragraph of the story explains—quasi psychoanalytically (which we would least expect from Brecht)—the longing of returning soldiers for hygienic rituals:
There's nothing you can say to these sorts that will entice them out of their tiled bathrooms, after they've had to spend a few years of their lives lying around in muddy trenches.
The drama begins when comrade Müller, along with the laconic narrator, yet another engineer from the trenches, is invited to Kampert's apartment. Its appointments follow all the rules of new objectivity design: black lacquered hooks in the wardrobe; American recliners in the simple white-walled living room; a Japanese straw mat hung like an awning in front of the oblique atelier window; a red mahogany cabinet for counterpoint; an iron spiral staircase leading up to the simple bedroom, with iron bedsteads and simple enamel sink; and, separated from it only by a chintz curtain, the spartan study with shelves and a pine table and a hard, low chaise longue.
Müller, having been conducted through the new objectivity quarters, mumbles guiltily: “Well, it's actually living just like a pig.” Where nothing is left to chance, an accident always occasions a minor catastrophe. The drama that now gets under way displays the return of the trench warriors to the scene of objectivity; or, vice versa, it reveals that the stylistic rigor of the apartment and its inhabitants represents a return of the heroic, which all three protagonists, in the mulch of Arras, had disdained. Kampert's retreat into the cool interior of Bauhaus design is a kind of civilian reassimilation of heroic armoring.
His sole desire is to live exclusively in a tiled bathroom (Soldiers killed in the trenches at the Western Front, 1917. Photo by Ernest Brook. With the permission of Imperial War Museum, London.)
The satirical element of the story can be more easily understood against the backdrop of Bruno Taut's defense of the new dwelling. Taut's book, Die neue Wohnung, went through five printings between 1924 and 192.8, reaching a circulation of 26,000 copies by that time. Readers learned from Taut to expect from the new interior the effect of a “refreshing bath.” Paintings hanging on the wall are outfitted, as they are in Kampert's apartment, with curtains: art works should not be witnesses to such banal necessities as eating and digestion. “Bodily hygiene must now be joined by mental hygiene,” Taut demanded. Contrarily, “there is no need to shut off conversation in a tidy environment,” justifying glass walls surrounding the dining room.[61]
Taut's leitmotif is the “elimination of atavisms,” which he suspects not only in the remnants of the “sumptuous Orient” of Griinderzeit apartments, but in all concavities and dysfunctional elements that upset the aim of being “indisputable master in one's own home.” Taut is building Plessner's fencing hall! Quite logically he also covers the chaise longue in his cool interior with polar bear fur, adding with satisfaction: “The fur is used as pure material, without any of the barbarism of gaping
“But I don't think,” Brecht's narrator continues the story, “Muller could have endured this deliberate harmony and reformist utility any longer.” In this ominous way the reader is prepared for the coming disaster. Muller develops a “battle plan,” and it is he who at the end reigns over the demolished furnishings.
The variants of warm-cool polarity play out in this story. At the warm pole camp the egalitarian “hordes,” with their anti-heroic tendencies, their spontaneity, and need for asymmetries. At the cool pole we find the disciplining of affects, the desire for transparency, the law of discretion and symmetry.
Reading the story as a satire of Bauhaus ideology admittedly simplifies it. Yet irritatingly, even an “inappropriate” piece of furniture has a delicately contrived place in the overall decorative scheme of the apartment; the visitors also dislike the way cool industrial functionalism is presented in the form of pieces wrought by individual artisans. The story takes place at a time in which industrial Bauhaus production was making its first inroads against the reform movement's commitment to the crafts. But, in all of Brecht's dramas, we can identify the Dionysian infantry dog who runs amok inside rational constructions. In the world he represents battles are being fought over the remnants of chaos, and these remnants contain the last of humanity. But chaotic natures in this same world are fond of setting traps. When Brecht announces that “man is the mistake,” he is breathing the same distressed sigh as the new construction architects when they see what has become of their new dwellings a few months after the people have moved in.
Brecht's 1926 story is also a disdainful postwar echo of the blending of aestheticism and the reform movement among the architects of the prewar period, who still entertained the illusion that architecture could be the means to educate the individual. The creed of modern architecture expected reform dwellings to enforce its salutary moral effects on character—representing a code of conduct in three dimensions. Brecht's story confronts architecture's claim with the rather unwieldy nature of foot soldiers and mongers of chaos.
His narrative recalls a painful episode experienced by one of the pioneers of the reform movement and modern architecture. Influenced by Ruskin and Morris, in 1894 Henri van de Velde had built a model complex, Bloemenwerf, in Belgium.[63] The reformer narrates in his memoirs —not without a hint of satisfaction—a delicate situation that arose in
So they did on one day in February 1896, when Toulouse-Lautrec was a guest at Bloemenwerf. Wearing a strawberry-colored gown, the blonde-haired Maria served the food: yellow eggs with red beans on plates that matched the violet and green dahlia design of the wallpaper in the vestibule. The excess of harmony activated a sarcastic streak in the guest from Paris. Mildly intoxicated, he leapt up onto the table and launched into a speech that, to the disgust of the host, threatened to degenerate into “obscenities.” “But,” writes van de Velde in his memoirs, “it did not go that far. The atmosphere of our house did not fail to have its effect, and Toulouse-Lautrec's remarks ended in words of gratitude. The singular nature of our house, normal and extraordinary at once, did not leave him untouched.”
Brecht's story lacks such a good ending. The moralism of the modernist credo remains powerful enough to trigger a small sense of guilt in engineer Müller but not to alter his behavior. Put in the form of a crude aphorism: modernism here lets down its postmodern hair, whereby the “post-” serves only to indicate the return of the repressed. The foot soldier's shame has become an object of comedy. Four years later Brecht will compose learning plays in which-under the enormous pressure of the last phase of the republic to declare one's commitments-no one gets to laugh at the same collisions between spontaneity and cool construction. Now he follows the rules of discipline to their fatal consequences. As a means of behavioral correction in the Communist Party school-house, engineer Müller, former infantry dog, is killed, his body tossed into the lime pit.
The avant-garde discovered in prebourgeois cultures a type characterized by affective discipline, constant alertness, and an ability to bracket considerations of morality. But in fact there was no need to go elsewhere in search of such a type, since a storehouse of images of the armored subject, acting without the benefit of an inner compass, lay ready to hand.[64] The military comprised a cool culture subsystem within contemporary Weimar society and, like out—of-the-way cultures in distant times, functioned mechanically like clockwork and froze historical change.[65] The
The army was for millions a site in which behavior was shaped under the pressure of mortal danger; in Brecht's Mann ist Mann, it is called “Mama” in the Fatzer fragment we are born “in the tank.”[66] In the army, the need for an internal regulation of the conscience falls away; the external voice of orders takes over. The cardinal virtues are the ability to discharge a duty and react quickly. The rapid change of persona, from affective control to blackout, from etiquette to aggressive frenzy, is the order of the day at the front.
The soldierly icon is hard to separate from the typology of the new objectivity. Neither the cool persona nor the radar type exists without a military shadow: in the “gray army” of white-collar employees (Theo-dor Geiger), sociology finds it in the midst of the consumer sphere. Even the creature (type 3) is often only the other side of the coin. Jünger's construction of the worker blends the persona type with the iron figure of the soldier. This amalgam was part of a tradition that regarded the industrial worker as a metallized body.
Even a writer as opposite to Jünger's sensibility as Joseph Roth, observing the worker against the iron landscape of the railway system, outfits him with soldierly qualities:
There a man in uniform saunters amid the bewildering systems of tracks, tiny; the individual in this context is important only as a mechanism. His significance is no greater than that of a lever; his effectiveness no more portentous than that of a switch. In this world all the potential of human expressiveness is reduced to the mechanical communication of an instrument. More important here than an arm is a lever, more than a wink, a signal. Here the eye is of no use, rather the lantern; not the cry, but the whistle of an open vent. Here it is not passion that rules, but regulations, the law.[67]
In the workers' literature of this decade, we rediscover the type of the cool persona in the person of the Communist cadre: Leninism is his Art of Worldly Wisdom. Existence from a distance defines his pathos, and morality comes to expression in the tactical rules of survival in the midst of a generalized threat. Coolness is the quality that marks him off from the warm zones of the tradition-minded Social Democratic communities.