The relationship between building and user is not an easy one. People and architecture do not always fit together. So the question is: what does the perfect occupant of a building look like? My thesis: Like Helmut Schmidt. Whether it was the Chancellor’s bungalow or a terraced house in Hamburg, Schmidt succeeded in lending dignity to very different buildings through his own aura.
The personality of the recently deceased former chancellor has been illuminated in all its facets in recent days. However, precisely this aspect, Helmut Schmidt’s relationship with architecture, has been left out. Yet, unsurprisingly, he also had something to say on this subject – and it was quite determined. In a round table discussion with Louisa Hutton, for example, he spoke out against the construction of the new Berlin City Palace. The Elbphilharmonie does not come off well with Schmidt either. He finds the music building “rather nouveau riche”.
Schmidt’s attitudes seem a little conservative in places – but understandable throughout. He was not a man of baroque gestures. He was someone for whom function was important. But the interesting thing about Schmidt as a public person is that, unlike many social democrats, his demonstrative sobriety does not come across as quiet, but on the contrary, always skillful. Helmut Schmidt was definitely a man of style. And not just because he was simply good-looking. No, the entire Schmidt composition had something discreetly elegant and at the same time confident about it. Of course, the pipe placed in the picture and later the public cigarette was always an act of self-dramatization. The suits fit, the hair was neatly combed, but not anxiously hyper-short. And, of course, the Elbsegler was ultimately also a style statement – one that, together with Schmidt’s political wisdom and intellectual cosmopolitanism, created a coherent whole.
And this coherent whole also had an effect on the architecture in which Schmidt lived. Hardly any other German chancellor has lived in Sep Ruf’s Bonn Chancellor’s Bungalow as appropriately as Schmidt. In his eight years there, he created a much more rounded image in this perhaps most beautiful of all post-war German political buildings than, for example, Helmut Kohl. The latter is quoted as saying that Ruf’s house was an “absurd building – in the sense of a Federal Chancellor’s apartment”. It was probably too minimalist for him. Helmut Schmidt, who incidentally would have liked to have been an architect himself, would never have said anything like that.
But the interesting thing is that the public figure of Schmidt not only lends an iconic building like Ruf’s pavilion a sense of design and cultural significance. But also an unadorned semi-detached house in Hamburg-Langenhorn. Schmidt had lived there with Loki since 1961, when the house had just been completed. Nothing about this brick building is impressive, and the garage placed in front of the rather flat building would have to be described as a failure in terms of architectural criticism. But that is not the point. Schmidt’s presence in this house says: this is not about representation. People live here in an unagitated way – and do a lot of work. Schmidt regularly received state guests there. What might Schmidt’s friend Valéry Giscard d’Estaing have thought when he arrived directly from the Elysée Palace in Paris?
One can assume, however: Giscard d’Estaing will have understood that Schmidt deliberately did not swap his residence for a more opulent building on the Elbchaussee, for example. This was also the new Germany of the time – a country that viewed the pompous gesture with skepticism. Gerhard Schröder later followed this philosophy of architectural anti-symbolism with his terraced house in Hanover. And, as is well known, he fared better with it than Christian Wulff, whose longing for a little architectural grandeur was ultimately his undoing. Something like that would never have happened to Schmidt. And this despite the fact that he certainly made a lot of money from his public appearances after his chancellorship at the latest.
So now the Langenhorn duplex is empty. But not for long. Schmidt decided that a museum should be set up there, on Neubergerweg, after his death. Personally, I am looking forward to breathing the aura of the world politician in this normal Hamburg location.