The Journal of Architecture

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Visualising the urban masses: modern architecture

and architectural photography in Weimar Berlin

Sabine Hake

To cite this article: Sabine Hake (2006) Visualising the urban masses: modern architecture and
architectural photography in Weimar Berlin, The Journal of Architecture, 11:5, 523-530, DOI:
10.1080/13602360601104543

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Published online: 08 Jan 2007.

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Visualising the urban masses:
modern architecture and
architectural photography in
Weimar Berlin
Sabine Hake
Bertolt Brecht once famously said ‘that the “simple
reproduction of reality” says less than ever about
that reality. A photograph of the Krupp works or
of the AEG yields almost nothing about these insti-
tutions. Reality as such has slipped into the domain
of the functional.’1 And in a critical review of New
Vision photography, Walter Benjamin asserted that
photography ‘can no longer record a tenement
block or a refuse heap without transfiguring it.
Needless to say, photography is unable to convey
anything about a power station or a cable factory
other than, “What a beautiful world!”’2 Having
identified the false claims on the real made in the
name of photography, Brecht and Benjamin prob-
ably would have said the same about any photo-
graph of Mossehaus, the headquarters of the
Mosse publishing company and one of Erich
Mendelsohn’s most famous buildings.
In the visual archives of Weimar Berlin, such indi-
vidual images—of famous buildings, streets, and
squares—have come to serve as conduits to an
urban culture romanticised in the myth of ‘the
golden twenties’, theorised in reflections on urban
subjectivity and Weimar flânerie, and scrutinised in
numerous studies on German mass culture and
modernity. But how can we move beyond the inde-
terminacy of the image, as diagnosed by Brecht, and
gain access to its meanings within a specific social
and cultural context? How can we avoid the aesthe-
ticising effects observed by Benjamin and consider
formal qualities as part of a broader cultural shift
towards vision and visuality? And in what ways
# 2006 The Journal of Architecture
523
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Department of Germanic Studies, University of Texas
at Austin, Austin, USA
must we link the profound changes in the organis-
ation of urban life and the structure of class
society to the new cult of surfaces associated with
modern entertainment and consumer culture and
the surrender to visual spectacle brought about by
new visual mass media like photography and film?
Addressing some of these issues, the following
case study of Mossehaus illustrates how the photo-
graphic representation of one particular building
can be used to gain access to the historical process
through which the meaning of photographs was
established and continuously revised. During the
1920s, the streamlined façade of Mossehaus
emerged as one of the most recognisable icons of
Weimar modernism, a symbol of the new spirit of
mobility, functionality and adaptability, and hence
a key site in the visual imaginary of an emerging
white-collar society.3 Photographed for tourist
guides and photograph-albums, discussed in
architectural surveys and cultural magazines, and
adopted as a trademark by the company’s advertis-
ing business, Mossehaus became the only building
chosen to represent the New Berlin in all three
popular books of photography about Weimar
Berlin: Mario von Bucovich’s Berlin (1928), Sasha
Stone’s Berlin in Bildern (1929), and Laszlo Willinger’s
100 x Berlin (1929).
But why did Mossehaus play such an over-
determined role in Weimar debates about architec-
ture and mass society? A first clue can be found in
the historical events that made the façade renova-
tion necessary in the first place. Located on the
1360–2365 DOI: 10.1080/13602360601104543
 524
Visualising the urban
masses: Weimar Berlin
Sabine Hake
corner of Jerusalemer Straße and Schützenstraße in
the famous newspaper district, Mossehaus was the
headquarters of the eponymous Berlin-based pub-
lishing company. The newspaper district had seen
plenty of street fighting during the revolutionary
uprisings in the first half of January, 1919, an indi-
cation also of the central role of media conglomer-
ates like Scherl, Ullstein, and Mosse in sustaining
the precarious balance between democratising ten-
dencies and imperial power structures during the
Wilhelmine empire. Spartacists had taken over the
editorial offices of the Berliner Tageblatt, the influen-
tial daily newspaper founded by Rudolf Mosse in
1871. In response, government troops had sur-
rounded the armed revolutionaries and, with the
help of considerable fire power, regained control
of this highly symbolic place in the city’s topography
of power. The price to be paid for this victory of law
and order: a heavily-damaged building that required
major repairs to an ornate neo-Renaissance sand-
stone façade, completed in 1903 by Cremer &
Wolffenstein.4
Soon after order was restored in the capital, Hans
Lachmann-Mosse, the son-in-law of the company’s
founder, approached the architect Erich Mendel-
sohn to produce a design that would express
Mosse’s identity as a liberal, progressive publishing
house more adequately than the old historicist
façade. Lachmann-Mosse, who had a personal inter-
est in modern art, chose the young Mendelsohn
after seeing a photograph of the Einstein Tower in
the Berliner Tageblatt. The Mosse commission
marked the beginning of a spectacular career that
made Mendelsohn one of the most respected new
architects working in the Berlin of the 1920s.
Mendelsohn and Mosse-Lachmann, both of whom
belonged to the city’s German-Jewish liberal bour-
geoisie, continued to collaborate on several other
architectural projects until the world economic
crisis and the rise of anti-Semitism and National
Socialism put an end to their endeavours and sent
them into exile.5
The transformation of Mossehaus’s damaged his-
toricist front into a modernist surface required
specific strategies of mediation and integration.
Here Mendelsohn came up with a highly original sol-
ution: he used a protruding entrance canopy and a
three-storey entrance bay of curving window
bands to create the distinct curved corner that
would soon become the distinguishing mark of his
department stores and office buildings. Three
additional floors ended in a roof line reminiscent of
an ocean liner, another characteristic feature of
Mendelsohn’s contribution to what is often referred
to as the functionalist style. Contemporaries hailed
the aerodynamic design as a perfect expression of
the modern cult of movement, dynamism, and func-
tionality. The black ceramic tiles of the cornice and
the shiny window bands only heightened this
effect. As did the clear simple lines that translated
the acceleration of urban life, symbolised by the
shift from pedestrians to motorists as the paradig-
matic urban subjects, into the building’s rhythmic
order of horizontals and verticals.
The evolution of Mossehaus into an icon of
Weimar modernity must be examined within two
equally important developments: the erasure of
the memories of war and revolution through the
cult of surface phenomena and the promotion of
white-collar diversions and mentalities by the
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powerful culture industry. During the first days of Figure 1. Street

the uprisings in January, 1919, images of the revolu- Fighting in the
Newspaper District,
tion featured on the cover pages of most daily news-
Weltspiegel, 2/3
papers and illustrated supplements. For obvious (1919), front page.
reasons, the street fighting in the newspaper district (Photograph by the
and, in later issues, the destruction of Mosse’s edi- author.)
torial offices were given particular attention. In all
cases, selecting the right image involved choosing
the right perspective. Thus on the cover of Weltspie-
gel, the illustrated supplement to the Berliner Tage-
blatt, the uprisings were depicted from the point of
view of the government troops, with the heading
‘Berlin under the sign of terror’ establishing the sol-
diers as the legitimate defenders of a terrified popu-
lace (Fig. 1).6
By contrast, there were a few independent photo-
graphers, like Willy Römer, who spent those fateful
January days on the side of the Spartacists and
took his photographs from inside Mossehaus, a
choice that clearly shows his solidarity with the insur-
gents.7 Interestingly, on the tenth anniversary of the
occupation of the newspaper district, several illus-
trated magazines reprinted these dramatic images
from 1919, presumably in order to highlight the
difference between the chaos of the immediate revolutionaries seeking cover behind rolls of news-
postwar years and the political and economic stab- paper. This was a clear indication that the political
ility achieved during the mid-1920s.8 However, the conflicts of the prewar period had not been
juxtaposition of past failures and present achieve- resolved.9
ments also brought back the spectre of revolution: Between these two pivotal moments in the photo-
this time through the images of a class-conscious graphic history of Weimar Berlin, the Mendelsohn
urban proletariat and radicalised Communist party building was established as an easily recognisable
marching on the streets of Berlin. In the same year, symbol for the Mosse business and the liberal,
Der rote Stern, the new illustrated supplement of cosmopolitan spirit of its signature publications.
the KPD newspaper Die Rote Fahne, reprinted the From 1923 on, a minimalist graphic rendition of
above-mentioned Römer photograph of armed the corner design served as a trademark for the
 526
Visualising the urban
masses: Weimar Berlin
Sabine Hake
company’s profitable advertising business. Some-
times Mosse also used a wide-angle shot that
emphasised the building’s similarities with an
ocean liner. The synergies between mass publishing
and modern architecture extended to the marketing
of Mendelsohn as house architect and house author.
Promoting the architect’s vision of modernity
became synonymous with providing new designs
for living for the typical Mosse readers — the new
technical and managerial elites and the large and
diverse group of white-collar workers. Not surpris-
ingly, Mosse published two of Mendelsohn’s
books, Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten
(1926) and Russland—Europa—Amerika (1929),
and produced the first survey of his career,
Gesamtschaffen des Architekten (1930). All these
books were advertised in illustrated supplements
like Weltspiegel.
Neues Bauen (New Building) would never have
attracted such public interest and acquired such
symbolic capital without its photographic reproduc-
tion on the pages of cultural journals, illustrated sup-
plements, and trade publications. Familiarity with
the newest architectural styles became an essential
part of modern consciousness and a distinguishing
trait of the educated city dweller. But the iconic
status of individual buildings also brought a
growing dependence on writing as a necessary
element in positioning Neues Bauen within the con-
temporary debates on modernity, urbanism and
mass society. Literalisation, the anchoring of photo-
graphic meaning through short captions or longer
texts, was considered the most effective way of con-
taining visual indeterminacy and ambiguity. Follow-
ing Benjamin’s call for ‘the literalisation of the
conditions of life’,10 Mendelsohn himself relied on
short texts for establishing the meaning of his build-
ings. In fact, Das Gesamtschaffen eines Architekten
features Mossehaus twice, first on a film strip-like
design placed alongside his most important essay
on function and dynamism in architecture, and
later in a narrow frame that showcases the distinct
corner design in profile. The text reads: ‘Just as the
overall expression visibly echoes the rapid tempo of
the street, the movement intensifying to an
extreme toward the corner, at the same time,
through the balance of its powers, it tames the ner-
vousness of the street and the passers-by. [. . .] By
dividing and channelling traffic, the building
stands, despite its tendency toward movement, as
an immovable pole in the agitation of the street’.11
Celebrating the modernist building as a work of
art required its clear separation from the historical
cityscape through framing, cropping or masking.
At the same time, such decontextualisation called
for extensive recontextualisation within the aes-
thetic projects of Neues Bauen. The visual presen-
tation of Mossehaus in the two most important
books on Neues Bauen published during the
Weimar years, Elisabeth M. Hajos’s and Leopold
Zahn’s Berliner Architektur 1919 bis 1929 (1929)
and Heinz Johannes’s Neues Bauen in Berlin
(1931), attests to these underlying dilemmas and
confirms their origins in the revolutionary days of
January, 1919. In Neues Bauen in Berlin, whose
Bauhaus cover design and sans serif typography
suggest uncompromising commitment to modern-
ism as a way of life, the Mendelsohn building is
photographed from the opposite street corner,
with the streamlined corner in the centre axis and
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the two symmetrical flight lines highlighted as its Figure 2. Mossehaus,

most significant features. The one-point perspective
and the converging diagonals integrate the building
into the perimeter block as a powerful symbol of
homogenisation and standardisation. Consequently,
it is left to the accompanying text to describe how
the building nonetheless asserts its power as a
work of art. In the words of Johannes: ‘Expansion
of the old publishing house and modernisation of
the corner, built during the revolutionary triumphs
of the early post-war years. A new spirit is searching
for expression. Forcefully the streaming masses of
the new addition envelop the ossified façade of an
exhausted eclecticism.’12
In the remainder of this article, I want to use the
representation of Mossehaus in the photographic
books of Stone, von Bucovich, and Willinger to
examine the positioning of Neues Bauen in the
larger narratives of Weimar Berlin. In the more tra-
ditional approaches, von Bucovich and Stone
present Mossehaus as an integral part of the peri-
meter block and its mixture of old and new build-
ings. Von Bucovich achieves this integrationist
approach by shooting the streamlined façade from
the perspective of Schützenstraße (Fig. 2).13 Like
von Bucovich, Stone avoids the high drama of the
corner diagonal by assuming a position on the
other side of Jerusalemer Straße (Fig. 3).14 But
whereas von Bucovich demonstrates the successful
integration of old and new by showing Mossehaus
next to an eighteenth-century building, Stone
places greater emphasis on the harmonious relation-
ship between building and street traffic. He stresses
the participation of this modernist icon in the daily
rituals of urban life. The reduction to the essential
in Mario von Bucovich,
Berlin 1928: Das
Gesicht der Stadt,
preface Alfred Döblin,
afterword Hans-Werner
Klünner (Berlin,
Nicolaische Verlag,
1992), p. 55.
(Reproduced with
permission from
Nicolaische
Verlagsbuchhandlung.)
elements of architecture and photography is most
pronounced in the approach taken by the young
Willinger (Fig. 4). Here the narrow frame and
skewed angles, so typical of Bauhaus photography,
turn the curved window bands into an almost
abstract reflection on surfaces and structures.15
Published in 1928/29, the high point and turning
point in Wagner’s ambitious programmes for the
New Berlin, the three books of photography resort
to the familiar oppositions of tradition and inno-
vation, continuity and change, and rely heavily on
frame composition to establish Mossehaus as an
iconic presence within these contradictory narra-
tives. But positioning the building in these contexts
required much more than frame composition and
other formal means; it also required close attention
to the conventions of the photography book.
 528

Visualising the urban

masses: Weimar Berlin
Sabine Hake

Figure 3. Mossehaus,
in Sasha Stone, Berlin in
Bildern, ed., Adolf
Behne, afterword
Michael Neumann
(Berlin, Gebr. Mann,
1998), p. 57.
(Reproduced with
permission from Gebr.
Mann Verlag.)

Figure 4. Mossehaus,
in Laszlo Willinger, 100
x Berlin, preface Karl
Vetter, afterword
Helmut Geisert (Berlin,
Gebr. Mann, 1997), p.3.
(Reproduced with
permission from Gebr.
Mann Verlag.)

Weimar publishers promoted photography books as

the perfect hybrid form that allowed readers to par-
ticipate in the visualisation of urban culture and the
proliferation of photographic consciousness, whilst
preserving bourgeois modes of art appreciation.16
In their layout and design, all three books under dis-
cussion combine formal allusions to the high-end art
book and the photographic album with the thematic
concerns of the popular illustrated travel guides and
picture books. They also take full advantage of
the reader’s familiarity with the city’s famous
monuments, streets, and squares, thus making the
inevitable moments of recognition an important
aspect of the photographic book’s popular appeal.
With its 254 plates, beautifully reproduced and
presented in an appealing quadrangular format,
von Bucovich’s Berlin appeared for Albertus-Verlag
as the first volume in a series on ‘The Face of the
Cities’; the only other volume, a portrait of Paris,
was published in the same year. Aiming at a cul-
tured, middle-class readership, the book included a
preface by Alfred Döblin, who had himself initiated

a radical reassessment of the conventions of realism
through the highly fragmented view of Alexander-
platz in his famous eponymous novel of 1927. Pub-
lished by the well-known art book publisher Epstein,
Stone’s Berlin in Bildern was to be part of a planned
series entitled Orbis Urbium: Schöne Städte in
schönen Bildern that apparently never materialised.
Edited by the architectural critic Adolf Behne, and
with a dedication to Martin Wagner, the book
sought to advance the programme of the New
Berlin within the continuities of Berlin history, as
symbolised by its imperial architecture. Inexpensively
produced by the Berlin-based Verlag der Reihe,
Willinger’s 100 x Berlin appeared as part of a
similar series on city portraits that saw only the
1929 publication of a second book, on 100 x Paris,
this time with photographs by Germaine Krull. The
accompanying German, French, and English texts
address a cosmopolitan readership fully conversant
with modernist styles.
Contributing to the extensive debates on text-
image relationships, the prefaces confirm the com-
plicated dynamics of the social, spatial, and visual
mentioned above. In the preface to von Bucovich’s
Berlin, Döblin addresses the politics of the visible
when he concludes that ‘Berlin is largely invisible.
A strange phenomenon. [...] Could it be that all
modern cities are invisible—and that the things
visible in them are only the remnants of the
past’?17 Less interested in questions of represen-
tation than in showcasing the New Berlin, Behne
in his introduction to Berlin in Bildern describes
how ‘the task of the modern city-builder is not to
place monumental buildings in favoured locations.
He is no longer a tactician but a strategist of building
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in the city’.18 Whereas Döblin uses von Bucovich to
reflect on the problem of representing the modern
metropolis, Behne relies on Stone to reframe the
very terms of urban thought, away from monumen-
tality and historicity and towards functionality and
rationality. Finally, in an openly political reading
that reflects its author’s left-wing sympathies, Karl
Vetter in his introduction to Willinger describes
Berlin as a city without tradition and, for that
reason, the perfect setting for initiating social
changes that advance ‘the tendency toward the col-
lective spirit and the common will’.19
As the case of Mossehaus has shown, the photo-
graphic representation of the physical structures
that constitute a big city can offer revealing insights
into the ways a society imagines itself: through its
definitions of public and private space; through its
organisation of housing, commerce, and industry;
and through its attitudes toward tradition, inno-
vation and change. But no photograph of the big
city exists in isolation. It is also part of an extended
dialogue carried out across different art forms,
media technologies, and interpretive registers,
which remains inaccessible to direct representation.
The underlying structure of that urban society in the
divided political landscape of Weimar Berlin invari-
ably means class society. As soon as we approach
the individual photograph through the conditions
of its emergence and expose it to the kind of semio-
tic analysis of cultural material described by Clifford
Gertz as ‘thick description’,20 we can retrace the
processes of inscription that are of particular
relevance for analysing architecture’s over-
determined function as a symbol of modern mass
society. If we as scholars of Weimar culture and
 530
Visualising the urban
masses: Weimar Berlin
Sabine Hake
modern architecture are to overcome the problems
of visibility addressed by Brecht and Benjamin at
the beginning, we are well advised to read photo-
graphs within the larger contexts in which they
were produced and consumed — and to take
seriously their active contribution to the making of
Weimar mass culture and modernity.
Notes and references
1. B. Brecht, ‘The Threepenny Lawsuit’, in M. Silberman,
ed., Bertolt Brecht on Film and Radio (London,
Methuen, 2000), p. 164. For overviews of Weimar
photography, see U. Eskildsen and J.-C. Horak, eds,
Film und Foto in den zwanziger Jahren (Stuttgart,
Gerd Hatje, 1979), and H. Molderings, Fotografie in
der Weimarer Republik (Berlin, Dirk Nishen, 1988).
2. W. Benjamin, ‘The Author as Producer’, Walter
Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 2, 1927–1934
(Cambridge MA., Harvard University Press, 2003),
p. 775. The reference is to A. Renger-Patzsch’s Die
Welt ist schön (Munich, Ein Horn, 1928).
3. For historical overviews of architecture and urban plan-
ning in Weimar Berlin, see K. H. Hüter, Architektur in
Berlin 1900–1933 (Stuttgart, Kohlhammer, 1988)
and J. Boberg, et al., eds, Die Metropole: Industriekul-
tur in Berlin im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich, C. H. Beck,
1986).
4. One website about the 1992 –93 renovation of Mosse
House by Peter Kolb, Bernd Kemper and Dieter Schnei-
der states that the original building was damaged
during World War One. See http://www.galinsky.
com/buildings/mossehaus/.
5. On Mendelsohn, see K. James, Erich Mendelsohn and
the Architecture of German Modernism (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 88 –102.
6. See the cover of Weltspiegel, 2/3 (1919).
7. See W. Römer, Bürgerkrieg in Berlin März 1919 (Berlin,
Dirk Nishen Verlag, 1984), p. 16.
8. See, for instance, the cover of Berliner Illustrirte
Zeitung, 38/2 (1929).
9. See Der rote Stern, 6/1 (1929), cover page.
10. W. Benjamin, ‘A Small History of Photography’,
Selected Writings, op. cit., p. 537. (Translation modi-
fied.)
11. E. Mendelsohn, ‘Die internationale Übereinstimmung
des Neues Baugedankens oder Dynamik und Funktion’
[1923], Das Gesamtschaffen des Architekten: Skizzen
Entwürfe Bauten (Berlin, Rudolf Mosse, 1930), p. 28.
Translation from, ed., R. Stephan, trs., M. Thorson
Hause, Eric Mendelsohn Architect 1887– 1953
(New York, The Monacelli Press, 1999).
12. H. Johannes, Neues Bauen in Berlin: Ein Führer mit 168
Bildern (Berlin, Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1931), p. 16.
13. M. von Bucovich, Berlin 1928: Das Gesicht der Stadt,
preface A. Döblin, afterword H. W. Klünner (Berlin,
Nicolaische Verlag, 1992), p. 55. The reprint contains
only 107 of the original 254 photographs included in
the 1928 edition published by Albertus-Verlag.
14. S. Stone, Berlin in Bildern, ed., A. Behne (Berlin, Gebr.
Mann, 1998), p. 57. Published originally in 1929 by the
Vienna-based Epstein Verlag.
15. L. Willinger, 100 x Berlin, preface K. Vetter, afterword
H. Geisert (Berlin, Gebr. Mann, 1997), p. 3. The book
was first published in 1929 by the (Berlin) Westend-
based Verlag der Reihe.
16. See L. Rittelmann, ‘Constructed Identities: The German
Photo Book from Weimar to the Third Reich’, PhD dis-
sertation, University of Pittsburgh, 2002.
17. Bucovich, op cit., p. 5.
18. Stone, op cit., p. 8.
19. Willinger, op cit., p. xxv.
20. See C. Geertz, ‘Thick Description: Toward an Interpret-
ative Theory of Culture’, The Interpretation of Cultures
(New York, Basic Books, 1973), pp. 3 – 32.