Vol. 19 · No. 4 · Issue 61 · Winter 2001 · pp. 1-42 (42)

William Rollins

Download full article (228 KB) [subscribers only]

Abstract

"White, everything white." White was the color of the Weimar Republic, or at least so it seemed to cultural critic J.E.Hammann writing in the journal Die Form in 1930. In his article Hammann did not just note the trend toward white in interior design, but rather he was determined to understand the greater significance in his fellow Germans' overwhelming color preference. White, Hammann surmised, was a "characteristic mark of the way in which we grasp our age," a "chief indicator of the times," and a powerful evocation of the "new spirit" behind Weimar's "modern weltanschauung". The following essay proceeds from the assumption that Hammann was right: the turn to white, especially in the built environment, does indeed provide a significant avenue for interpreting the self-consciously modern culture of 1920s Germany. This investigation will show that Hammann's own interpretation was one-sided and probably too optimistic. Streamlined white buildings and simplified interiors may have offered an attractive feeling of "freedom, air, [and] light," but at the same time this was an aesthetic whose origins lay in the crassly utilitarian creed of the bourgeois hygienic reform movement. These unreflected origins tragically undercut the political effectiveness of avant-garde architecture, which was used to great effect in egalitarian Social Democratic housing schemes and which was clearly intended to be liberating and empowering. The very form of the modernist environment resisted any such utopian inscription, however, as its whiteness in particular reinforced ingrained, bourgeois-functional values of individual work, health, efficiency, and performance. Modernists thus unwittingly undermined their own best efforts to construct a "new man" and a new society, and may well have exacerbated the crisis of employment that led to the demise of the Weimar Republic.