Review: Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany, by Itohan Osayimwese

Abstract

Itohan Osayimwese Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017, 344 pp., 8 color and 74 b/w illus. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 9780822945086 For a work of historical scholarship, Itohan Osayimwese's Colonialism and Modern Architecture in Germany has a surprisingly compelling opening. In the first sentences, the author stages a meeting in Berlin during the summer of 1913, where, gathered around a massive oak table, are “some of the men now considered to be the doyens of modern architecture in Germany”: Henry van de Velde, Hermann Muthesius, Bruno Taut, Walter Gropius, Hans Poelzig, Paul Schultze-Naumburg, and Dominikus Bohm, as well as some “lesser-known colleagues and proteges,” including Carl Rehorst, Adolf von Oechelhauser, Konrad Wachsmann, and—the lone woman in the group—Margarete Knuppelholz-Roeser (3). On the agenda is a discussion of “the status of architecture in the German colonies,” which leads to a conversation about ideas and language that, as Osayimwese suggests, “are familiar to readers today,” on topics such as the excessively ornamented “style architecture” in the protectorate of Kiaochow, the lack of objectivity in the floor plan of “ ‘parvenu’ villas” in the city of Qingdao, and the certain success of developing standard housing types and prefabricated houses in Dar es Salaam. Perhaps, Osayimwese imagines the group murmuring, “there is something to be learned from Germany's costly colonial adventure after all” (3). The meeting did take place, but not as described above. As the author notes, her depiction of the event is “fictitious in its finer details” (4). Most of those mentioned were not even present. Through this mise-en-scene, Osayimwese in one elegant stroke introduces the main protagonists in her book as well as the central theme that pervades her narrative, namely, “how colonial encounters and imperial entanglements affected architectural developments within Germany itself” (5). Not coincidentally, the meeting is staged in Berlin and not in Dar es Salaam (Tanzania), Douala (Cameroon), Windhoek (Namibia), or Qingdao (China). The book then can be understood, …