On the Ambiguity of Rationalization: New Building and Psychoanalysis in the Weimar Republic

This cluster examines how new worlds are built in the course of revolutions, a set of actions that inevitably involves deep conflicts. For my purposes, two of these conflicts are most significant. First, those who form the “avant-garde” of either political and artistic movements may be recognized by many in intellectual circles, but certainly not by all. Second, the more radical the revolution, the wider the gap between the revolutionaries and those who cannot or will not break away from the old worlds. The introduction to the cluster points out how fraught this process of revolution is, how much hangs in the balance, how difficult it is to anticipate the moment that decides whether the new path is followed or retreat sets in, and what an important role art plays in all aspects of this. It is at least an advance in civilization when battles are fought not with weapons, but as battles of art or words with new arguments.

Such a complex discourse emerged in the aftermath of the 1918 November Revolution in Germany. The political upheaval set in motion complex changes in which artists and architects were involved from the very beginning, for they had a great interest in giving expression to the new political system of democracy and the new social reality also through new forms of creating and living. However, they envisioned this new world of living not only—or even primarily—for themselves, but mainly for the imagined inhabitants of the new democratic society. This is precisely where the conflict arises: in the incongruity between the idealized inhabitant and the real-life potential inhabitant who visits the new dwellings and assesses their persuasiveness in comparison to previous abodes. The essay will explore the contradiction between radical and conventional ideas of living through the concept of “rationalization.”

Directly linked to the political revolution and the founding of the democratic state, rationalization first became a buzzword in Germany in the early 1920s. It was during this period that the German state launched what it called the Rationalization Movement to help the moribund economy achieve new prosperity. Efforts to rationalize spread to all areas of economic life,[1] but in no area of public life was this movement more visible than in the construction of houses and housing estates, in an architectural movement today called New Building (Neues Bauen), later also known as International Style.[2] Well-known proponents of modern architecture, such as Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, were involved. The flat roof and cubic building forms, large glass surfaces, and white plaster came to be seen as the aesthetic expressions of modern architecture par excellence, and the effects of this pared-down approach extended to interior design. In fact, in the period following the German revolution, entirely new worlds were created in physical architecture, and the stated logic of their existence was their supposed rationality.

The reality of these architectural phenomena actually is evident in the fierce resistance to the New Building that came from many quarters. Modern architecture put traditional forms of building and old living habits to the test and therefore led to widespread arguments that ranged from detailed factual analyses to polemical statements and pointed caricatures in the media. In this essay, I shed light on this new polyphonic discourse expressed in text and image, which I approach methodologically as historical discourse analysis; an approach that captures the efflorescence of new speech and representation enabled by the Republic’s new constitution, which guaranteed freedom of expression in Germany for the first time.[3] My focus is on the public reception of this architecture in the language of architectural critics and writers who measured representations of this new architecture in the media by their own standards.

More precisely, I will focus on the strategic use of “rationalization” and its variants as a catchword. Specifically, authors pointed to the fact that the term was used not only in the field of architecture, but also in psychoanalysis.[4] This was possible because the term rationalization already had an established usage as a technical term in this completely different field of modernity, where it denoted a pseudo-rational subsequent justification of unconscious drives and desires, a so-called defense mechanism. This brings into play an entirely contradictory definition of the term’s use in the New Building context because psychoanalysis tended to locate rationalization in the sphere of the irrational. Thus, during this crucial time in Germany, in the wake of dramatic political change, three different revolutionary developments in the economy, architecture, and psychoanalysis became part of the same intertwined and conflictual history.

The “Rationalization Movement” in the Weimar Republic

Early in 1919, shortly after the revolution, the young Weimar Republic faced a number of heavy post-war burdens: housing shortages, thousands of displaced refugees, food shortages, and reparations payments chief among them. It was at this moment that the concept of rationalization established itself as a remedy for seemingly all economic and social problems; it also became the standard term for optimizing operational processes, a usage that continues to the present. The initiative to rationalize came from the German state itself; on June 10, 1921, the Reich Ministry of Economics and the Federation of Technical and Scientific Associations launched what they called the “Rationalization Movement.” A newly founded the National Board for Economy and Efficiency (Reichskuratorium für Wirtschaftlichkeit) acted as the umbrella organization for semi-public sub-organizations covering all areas of industry (heavy as well as light), production, operations management, and even the organization of supply chains. By the early 1930s, there were more than 150 committees and subcommittees with over 4,000 contributors.[5]

The new movement fostered tremendous activity in all areas of economic life because the state provided funding for which public stakeholders or companies could apply. The National Board supported research that comprised time studies and subsequent optimization of work processes, use of machines, assembly line production, specialization of tasks, differentiated wage systems and standardization of dimensions, products, and equipment. One of the main impulses behind the movement was to bundle all initiatives, make the results public, and build on successes.[6] The long-term goal was to increase the general welfare of the population by making goods cheaper, better, and more plentiful.[7]

The initiative was also driven by competition with the United States, as the author of the official brochure accompanying the Rationalization Movement summarized:

When the German economy surveyed the consequences of war and inflation, it was confronted with a disturbing picture: a powerful rise and noticeable expansionism in businesses in the United States, vs. a lack of capital, unemployment, crushing burdens, and weakened enterprises at home. The forces had shifted greatly. It was necessary to catch up with the lead of other countries. (Hinnenthal, Rationalisierungsbewegung, 19)

Thus, German businesses eagerly adopted the successful methods introduced by Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry S. Ford in the US. While in the US the term “scientific management” was common for this kind of approach, in Germany “rationalization” became the all-dominant term.[8] Since the advent of the movement was actually followed by a period of soaring prosperity between 1924–1929, the word spilled back from Germany into the country where Taylor and Ford had made their pioneering experiments. Significantly, the first dissertation on the Rationalization Movement in Germany was written in the US in 1933.[9]

One of the many governmental committees in Germany that were set up to institute rationalization was the State Research Society for Economic Efficiency in Construction and Housing (Reichsforschungsgesellschaft für Wirtschaftlichkeit im Bau- und Wohnungswesen). The architects who served on the committee as designers were particularly interested in introducing rationalization into the building industry, and they sought to promote mass housing construction through standardization and the use of new materials.[10] The housing shortage was likewise addressed through the development of prefabricated components and optimized construction-site management, both of which enabled cuts to project costs and completion times (Fleckner, “Reichsforschungsgesellschaft,” 159–168).

One of the first, most sensational presentations of the State Research Society’s work was the Weißenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart in 1927. The project’s director, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, had gathered seventeen modern architects from five countries, including Le Corbusier (Switzerland/France), Walter Gropius (Germany), Mart Stam (Netherlands), and others in order to design a range of model houses for future mass building (fig. 1–2).[11] The architects designed not only the buildings but their interiors, with built-in kitchens and closets, modern bathroom and lighting fixtures, and lightweight furniture. The interior of Gropius’s house for the Weißenhof exhibition was, for example, planned and fitted with tubular steel stairs, closets, and new lamps by Marcel Breuer, head of the carpentry workshop at the Bauhaus in Dessau, where Gropius was still serving as the school’s founding director (fig. 3).[12]

The Weißenhofsiedlung was only one example of architecture motivated by the Rationalization Movement that received financial support from the Weimar government. Other important experimental settlements that were funded by the State Research Society, also dating around 1928–1929, were located in Dessau, Frankfurt and Munich.[13]

New Building and the “Newness” of Living

Thus, nine years after the revolution and the establishment of a new political system, the Rationalization Movement had a visible expression in architecture and interior design.[14] Against this backdrop, far-reaching discussions arose in building magazines on topics as sweeping as tradition and modernity, and as specific as pitched roofs versus flat roofs. Both of these quickly became politicized between left and right, with hard lines on both sides and frequent polemical tones.[15]

A contemporaneous caricature helps us to understand these conflicts as a profound revolution of the conventional conception of living (fig. 4).[16] Published in the literary magazine Uhu in August 1931, it shows a section through a residential building with a pitched roof. The viewer is presented with two bedrooms, a living room, and a study. A stylized drawn staircase leads to the attic. The four main rooms are rationally furnished, sparsely equipped with the most modern furniture; tubular steel beds and chairs and functional lamps are the only elements in the rooms. Everything unnecessary has been banished. The impression is light, hygienic, and spacious.

The caricature’s author, Walter Trier, took his cue for these rooms from the well-known apartment furnishings of Erwin Piscator, who in 1928 commissioned Marcel Breuer to furnish his apartment (fig. 5–7).[17] While some of the details are moved and recombined, clearly identifiable are the desk with its adjustable lamp, the tubular steel armchairs and set tables, and the built-in bed. The punching ball from the gym is in the living room; a single cactus from the collection on a wall-mounted shelf has moved to the windowsill. Unlike the apartment photos, curtains are missing from the cartoon’s factory-type windows. Both the drawing and the photographs show their modern rooms devoid of human occupants. But the building in the caricature is not in fact completely without a human presence: in fact, if we follow the curved stairway to the top, we encounter a lively crowd of nine residents and two dogs crammed into the cramped, old-fashioned attic, arguably the building’s least attractive room. The interior is furnished with overstuffed furniture, knickknacks, and flowers; its orange coloring—a stark contrast to the black and white of the rest of the house—further enlivens the room’s floors, furniture, and paintings. The joke is that, while they may not be “fashionable,” these outmoded furnishings create the most comfortable—even the most gemütlich—room in the house. This portion of the caricature also draws on a clear model from the time: the Milleu depictions of the draftsman Heinrich Zille (1858–1929) (fig. 8). Zille found the motifs for his popular pictures in the petty-bourgeois and proletarian quarters of Berlin. They are so outdated as to appear to belong to the previous century.

The caricature aptly depicts how modern architects developed a completely new type of rational home furnishing in the Weimar Republic and how it collided with traditional ideas of living. Such modern interiors symbolized the new everyday, but they also created a rift between the buildings’ designing architects and their residents, the latter of whom felt pressured into a way of life in which they did not feel at home. Such sentiments are also expressed in the poem that was published alongside the caricature, “The only cozy (gemütlich) room in the house,” which ends with the observation that, although one must now hide one’s old things, one still secretly loves them.[18] The depicted lived experience of the residents shows them behaving irrationally within the reason-based interiors designed by the architects of the New Building. And this is where the discussion that I mentioned at the outset comes into play, which links the New Building to psychoanalysis and poses precisely the question of irrationality within the realm of supposedly rational architecture.

“Rationalization – A Double Meaning!”

As the caricature suggests with such humor, magazines and journals were key arenas for debates about architecture, in which the most diverse opinions and attitudes were expressed. Bauwelt was one of the leading building magazines of the time with one of the highest circulations. An anonymous letter to the editor was printed in the magazine in 1928 under the heading “Rationalization – A Double Meaning!” (“Rationalisierung – zweideutig”)![19] Thus begins the short text:

With the term “rationalization,” we are used to understanding the improved design of our work through all reasonable means. Psychologists, however, introduced the same term much earlier for a completely different concept that is only distantly related to it: they use it to describe our endeavor to give clear, sensible reasons for everything we do, even when it is done purely out of instinct or inner drive, and when deliberation only sets in afterwards. […]

Only for the architect none of this applies. He is never guided by anything other than clearly conscious and praiseworthy reasons. His solutions always arise from the task at hand, never from an older intention to try out certain designs. He always chooses his forms because the matter demands it; never because he wants to do it differently from the others; it is because he wants to struggle for something new, to stand out. How is it then that lay people in particular so often suspicious of “rationalizations” in the Weissenhof exhibition, and—let us state it plainly—doubt their honesty?

After establishing the two very distinct meanings of “rationalization” in contemporary culture, in sentences dripping with irony, the author describes the architect’s belief that he has only economic rationalization as his sole motivator in his designs. While the author does not give concrete examples, it is clear from the context that he considers some design ideas of the Weissenhofsiedlung to be entirely lacking in rationality and rather to belong to the realm of architectural experimentation. His text thus begs the question of whether the psychoanalytical definition might in fact apply better as a diagnosis of the architect’s true motivation for his peculiar design ideas since, in fact, his true motivation is indeed to attract attention, rather than to create rational designs.

The letter to the editor goes on to refer to an article on “Rationalization in Everyday Life” by Sigmund Freud’s student Ernest Jones, published in 1908.[20] Jones’s essay builds on a fundamental work that Freud published already in 1901, Psychopathology of Everyday Life.[21] “Rationalization” denotes pseudo-rational, retrospective justification of an action motivated by unconscious drives and desires. Even though the exact classification of rationalization within psychoanalytic theories of defense mechanisms is controversial, the concept is still considered valid in contemporary psychoanalysis and serves as a helpful structural tool for describing non-conscious motives for action.[22]

We thus discover here the interesting argumentative strategy of bringing into play the double of the architectural term rationalization, one that also comes from a scholarly field that was still new at the time. While architects justify their inventions as rational, in his letter to the editor, the author diagnoses a different “rationalization.” His argument is a psychoanalytic interpretation of the architectural profession with one goal in mind: to question the justification of New Building and to assume a completely different motive behind it, namely attention seeking self-expression. The architect, according to the writer’s diagnosis, denies that his motivation is anything but purely rational, even though his designs go far beyond the needs of the residents.

This letter to the editor reveals a disharmony in the relationships among modern architects, their architecture, and public opinion voiced by potential residents. Even if one did not share the rejection of modern architecture, bringing together the two concepts in architecture and psychoanalysis together makes rationalization an enigmatic and highly ambivalent term. The Rationalization Movement had been introduced into the debate after the political revolution in a hopeful and positive way to solve the far-reaching problems of the young state. By the time it presented its first results, it no longer had uniquely positive connotations, but was being criticized via a wide variety of strategies. As the caricature also suggests, the discourse shows that the contradictions of a rationalized architecture are an inevitable consequence and that, further, irrational aspects of living cannot simply be erased by building new worlds.[23]

Building New Worlds and the Rational

Early in the Weimar Republic, the economic crisis and the ongoing need for new housing put pressure on the state to release funds in order to find new solutions; these would come largely through rationalization. In response, architects and designers developed a new approach to housing design that, from that moment on, shaped the built environment. Therefore, this new political system of democracy was the starting point for new means of cultural production. But building new worlds did not proceed without conflicts, especially for its audience, and the specific newness was followed by alienation. Germany’s state-sponsored rationalization represents a strategy against whose background the debate in the building journals and the struggle for interpretive sovereignty of the definition of the new term could unfold. The discussion simultaneously raised questions about the rational nature of the design process and the architect’s relationship to the target group, the residents.

The joke at the heart of the caricature lies in its depiction of the fact that irrational needs are not simply made redundant by rational design, and that the requirements of a home are far too diverse to be solved by one single rational solution. The comparison of the definition in architecture and psychoanalysis again yields a complex argument that stands out from previous discussion about the New Building. As contemporaneous texts show, viewers were alive to the ambiguity of the term rationalization; their questioning of it was neither an uncritical, purely aesthetic approach, nor is it a dull condemnation of the unloved modern. Instead, in this decisive moment viewers and critics were calling into question the positivist thrust of the term rationalization. The conflicts between the two definitions are ambiguous, involvingthe rational and the irrational and the conscious and the unconscious. The defense mechanism is not only effective in the architect, but also affects the audience when the inventions become too foreign. The discussion made clear even then that rationalization also has irrational sides that must be taken into account.[24]

Both the Rationalization Movement and psychoanalysis were, each in its own way, revolutionary developments that had just arrived in society in this form. They clashed at this point in history and rubbed up against each other in modern architecture and interior design.

Uncovering these debates about the nature and logic of rationalized building also opens up new research questions. These include what the main protagonists of the New Building themselves had to say about the topic of rationalization. Rationality and rationalization in architecture endured as significant questions throughout the twentieth century, and some architects later deliberately invoked rationality in their work.[25] Moreover, the relationship between architect and resident continues to be a fraught process of negotiation even now. Both the economic and psychoanalytic meanings of the word have lost none of their applicability. Just as the word rationalization endures to this day, so too does ambiguity.

But history teaches us that the radical experiments of the period following the First World War would not endure. It has often been pointed out that the Weimar Republic failed because of its internal contradictions and the fractured nature of its politics. The weakening of Germany’s democracy and its failure to attain broad public acceptance allowed others to claim political leadership. After 1933, the National Socialist rulers explicitly focused their art policy on fighting against the modern art and architecture of the Weimar Republic. They could only do this because their policies were in line with the general opinion of a predominantly conservative public.[26] The time for free discussions about newness and living preferences may have been over, but the concept of rationalization was not. Whole new worlds were being built, the horrors of which were not remotely foreseeable even as the young democracy faltered and failed in 1933.[27]