Wow, Kulturdeutschland is discussing architecture and politics. About retro architecture and the new nationalism, to be precise. In Frankfurt, the new old town, the so-called Dom-Römer project consisting of 35 reconstructed or, as the initiators call it, “creatively rebuilt” houses, is opening. And the social media are abuzz with excitement among architecture enthusiasts.
It started with a text by Stephan Trüby, who I hold in high esteem and who also writes in Baumeister. He took aim at the political views of two initiators of the Frankfurt Reconstruction Festival. In a text for the FAZ, he proved that they felt they belonged to a right-wing intellectual scene. On Facebook and the like, this was quickly reduced to the accusation that the new Old Town was a neo-fascist project. This was followed by the expected uproar among Altstadt sympathizers and a not particularly surprising social media wave of statements of sympathy from the viewer scene, including a petition on Change.org. Dankwart Guratzsch, architecture critic for the newspaper “Die Welt”, is the chief defender of the Frankfurt retro project. He was supported by editor-in-chief Ulf Poschardt.
There is no shortage of rhetorical vehemence on either side; the excitement is great. And there is a reason for this. Basically, both sides are trying to maintain self-defining positions that have long been obsolete.
On the one hand, there is the attempt to defend an image of unbroken conservative bourgeois values. This is what drives the initiators of the Frankfurt Building Block Game. They would like to believe that there is a centuries-long line of bourgeois cultural continuity. This is what the Dom Römer project is supposed to stand for. They imagine a bourgeois educated class that has always cultivated cultural discourse in half-timbered houses in our cities and read Goethe – or the newspaper “Die Welt”. But this is no longer the case. The “bourgeoisie” as a sociological category of analysis seems rather outdated. And of course, the crisis of the bourgeoisie did not just begin these days, but already with (essentially anti-bourgeois) National Socialism. This represented a radical turning point for German society.
Today, Frankfurt’s city center belongs to bankers and start-up financiers from all over the world, regionally uprooted hipsters with money, so to speak. They have zero interest in any idea of the German educated middle classes. Nor are they interested in the new old town. The reconstructed old town provides backward-looking historical architecture for an imagined bourgeois-conservative urban elite. But this elite no longer exists.
The concept of the elite brings me to the other side, to the critics of the old town in the German cultural scene. If there is an elite, or more precisely a discourse elite, then they represent it. There is a consensus here in terms of skepticism towards the Frankfurt project.
But what’s interesting is that they are virtually an elite against their will. Many social media statements about the texts in Die Welt were dredged up again by learned anti-Springer ruminations and saw the articles as an expression of a German reactionary establishment. Oh how good it feels to imagine the cozy old fronts once again: There the evil right-wing bourgeoisie, the “power”, here us, the revolutionaries, the cheeky lateral thinkers. It almost seems as if some of the panelists are wishing for the same fronts back as the Frankfurt old town fans. But they too should be told: the fronts no longer exist – and the cultural establishment is yourselves. Stephan Trüby also represents this establishment. He holds – deservedly – a prestigious chair in Stuttgart. His text did not appear in the Stuttgarter Nachrichten or in a blog, but in the FAZ.
The initiators of the new old town that he criticized, on the other hand, appear to be socially and economically marginal figures. They certainly don’t have prestigious professorships, nor do they play a role in the major publishing houses or broadcasting companies. Others sit at the discursive center of the country. The architectural discourse in particular is in the hands of left-wing progressives – and they are remarkably united on the Old Town issue as well as other debates (an opinion that I often share).
Today, the underdogs are on the right. This is where the momentum of forces like the AfD comes from, despite their obvious lack of political ideas. What these forces do have, despite a general lack of political vision, is an architectural agenda. Stephan Trüby deals with this in many of his works.
Of course, this agenda rejects international modernism. But the struggle for cultural or architectural forms of expression of bourgeois life is, in my impression, just as alien to it. It is less concerned with neo-bourgeois old towns than with abstruse knights’ castles or ridiculous pseudo-Germanic villages. The bourgeoisie project does not play a decisive role for the new right – partly because they are deeply uncomfortable with the (bourgeois) attitude of tolerant cosmopolitanism, as demonstrated in the reaction to the wave of refugees, for example. The new right-wingers are not bourgeois, but culturally decoupled. Most of them are probably quite indifferent to the Frankfurt pseudo-bourgeoisie doll’s house.