Transnational Dimensions of German Anti-Modern Modernism: Ernst May in Breslau

Abstract

The internationally acclaimed architect and urban designer Ernst May (1886–1970) is generally considered an exemplary modernist, yet from 1919 to 1925 he practiced an anti-modern modernism in Silesia that calls into question conventional classifications of early modern architecture and has local, national, and transnational implications.1 Documented in numerous articles May wrote for Schlesisches Heim, May developed a pragmatic mix of modern and traditional architecture and urban planning idioms that was neither fully modern nor fully traditional. His approach was common among a certain group of European design professionals who matured between 1870 and 1910, during the rapid industrialization of the latter part of the nineteenth century when the benefits of new technology and modernization were called into question by a growing awareness of industrialization’s ill effects. On the one hand, industrial progress and new technologies improved the general standard of living by creating new, better-paying jobs and by making inexpensive mass-produced products readily available. On the other hand, industrialization and concomitant urbanization caused air pollution, overcrowding and urban blight, threatened traditional local, regional, and national ways of life, arts and crafts, and centuries-old social structures. Pressures often seemed mutually exclusive in nature, making it difficult to negotiate a middle way: machine-made against handicraft, standardization against unique design, steel and glass against wood and stucco, flat roofs against pitched ones (which erupted in the [in]famous War of the Roofs during the 1920s), Taylorism against Spenglerism.