MAIKEN UMBACH. German Cities and Bourgeois Modernism, 1890-1924. New York: Oxford University Press. 2009. Pp. xi, 253. $99.00

Abstract

If the capacity to make distinctions is a hallmark of intelligence, Maiken Umbach's study of fin-de-siècle German architecture and urbanism is a supremely intelligent book. Umbach seeks to identify a reformist political and cultural stance of “bourgeois modernism,” whose artifacts were immersed in place-appropriate references, but without indulging in the “historicism” of the second third of the nineteenth century, best known perhaps from the building program of the Vienna Ringstrasse. The author stresses the strategic importance of the “second cities” that gave Germany its distinctive urban richness; and she emphasizes that, rather than embodying any aspiration toward “feudal” values, her protagonists were staunch advocates of the national vocation as a producer of quality industrial products “made in Germany.” A major challenge they set themselves was how to draw on the energies of “place” without yielding to the primordial anti-urban agrarianism of the organized celebrants of Heimat. Umbach follows the work and theoretical writings of exemplary figures, pre-eminently Hermann Muthesius but also Karl Ernst Osthaus, Peter Behrens, Fritz Schumacher, and others. As important as the designers themselves is the sense of place that she develops. She focuses first on mercantile Hamburg, a site conservative in its institutions but oriented toward Britain and modernism by virtue of its vast merchant-marine commerce; then she examines the multicity industrial region of the Ruhr to understand the aspirations of Osthaus and glances, too, at the parks of Munich and the “garden city” of Dresden-Hellerau, in each case emphasizing the distinctiveness of styles and aspirations.