In 1932 Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock transferred European modernism into the »International Style«. Their seminal MoMA exhibition in New York was a watershed in the history of social modernism. In contrast, the short films by Ella Bergmann-Michel – an artist who filmed »das neue frankfurt« (»the new frankfurt«) until the upsurge of Fascism – reveal what was lost with the end of »official« German modernism. A veil was drawn over how modernism reacted to 19th-century European mass poverty and the thorough-going success of its response via a mixture of welfare programmes, socio-cultural upheavals and large-scale housing construction schemes. This was seen most recently in the exhibition »Ganz Unten/Life at the bottom« in the Wien Museum, which referred in the show’s tagline to the »discovery of poverty«, and also narrated the history preceding welfare modernism.

[b]Dickens’ World[/b]
How can one recall early industrial mass poverty in an age in which living conditions are growing dramatically more precarious? Thanks to »High Speed One«, a high-speed rail link, you can now make your way to the newly opened »Dickens World« especially rapidly from London, Paris or Brussels on the Eurostar. In May 2007, not far from Ebbsfleet International Station, investors opened a leisure centre about London’s slums. The complex is framed by multiplex cinemas, outlet stores, free parking places and themed restaurants, and promises one of the longest boat trips you can enjoy in the dark anywhere: »the invigorating journey carries visitors from the gloomy depths of London’s sewers up to a magical flight over the rooftops.« To that end the water has been artificially dyed a nice shade of brown and dotted with debris. The idea is for visitors to plunge into the streets of the city with the sounds and smells of the 19th century. Back then it must have been literally breathtaking. A great deal of attention is paid to authenticity in replicating the era, the characters and the narration, so that visitors can experience how people lived in early 19th-century England. Whilst queuing for the boat tour, one passes Newgate Prison, where punishment methods from the period are on show. You could however also experience the dreaded discipline of Victorian classrooms.

The complex, which has been in the pipeline since 1970 and was originally planned for Kings Cross in London – in other words, right next to the current Eurostar terminal – was moved to the post-industrial outskirts instead for cost reasons. It is said that Charles Dickens’ father worked in the Royal Wharf within the area now covered by the complex in Chatham Maritime, which cost a tidy 100 million. After a while he ended up in the debtors’ prison, where the rest of the family moved to join him, whilst as a child Charles worked in a shoe polish factory. However he became acquainted with »real« poverty through engravings by William Hogarth and as a man-about-town strolling through the impoverished neighbourhoods. Convinced that only housing reform could put an end to the poverty, Dickens deployed his fame at charity events.¹ His novel »Oliver Twist« was published from 1837–39 in weekly or monthly episodes serialised in cheap newspapers, which meant that it reached out to a broad audience of all social classes, as well as giving the author an opportunity to respond in later instalments to feedback from earlier episodes.

[b]Dark continents[/b]
In Dickens’ day, the sub-proletarian districts of London were held to be a »dark continent«, mentioned in the same breath with the overseas territories of the British empire. The catalogue of the »Ganz Unten/Life at the bottom« exhibition talks of inner colonies in the heart of the European city parallel to the colonisation of other »dark« continents. Victorian pre-modernism encountered a planet of slums, running from its immediate vicinity right to the plantations. »A cosmopolitan space, populated with Germans, Jews, Lascars and Africans« is how historian Seth Koven evokes living circumstances on a par with those in Calcutta or the Caribbean. The British Empire was at its apogee in the 19th century in terms of industrialisation and world trade. Yet right next to the Bank of England was the notorious poor quarter of Whitechapel. Economic depression and mass unemployment in the docks stoked demonstrations and unrest.

With a population of around four million, London was the largest mega-city in the world in 1881. »Africa at home« was located in the East End and did not refer to an immigrant neighbourhood, but above all to native Britons with their sub-proletarian habits and customs unfamiliar to the bourgeoisie. For the ruling classes, English dockworkers were exotic figures, like slaves on the »Gold Coast«. In keeping with this, the churches pursued their mission at home and abroad with equal zeal.²

[b]Faits divers[/b]
The exhibition »Ganz Unten/Life at the bottom« invites visitors to »take a fresh look at those who discovered poverty – in order to heighten awareness of precarious living conditions nowadays «. The urban jungle around the corner called for the »social explorer«. When drawing up his descriptions of the English working-class’ situation in 1844, Friedrich Engels wandered for days through the »throngs of people«, encountering along the way »barbaric ruthlessness«, »egoistic harshness« and »nameless misery« beyond the »miracle of civilisation«. He complemented his studies with police files, articles and statistics. The unexplored blank expanses on town maps attracted explorers seeking to scout out knowledge and adventure. They were driven by curiosity, disgust and sensationalism as much as by humane concern, political enlightenment and revolutionary zeal.

The »discovery of poverty« can be traced back to a period between 1830 and1930, in other words, between the advent of the mass media (serialised novel, press, slide show with music, and also increasingly photography and film from the late 19th century on) and social housing schemes. »Faits divers«, the »news in brief« sections in the papers, divided up the experiences into distinct sensationalised incidents. They reported on individual poverty as if it were some kind of spectacular special effect, with observers settling down to view it as if they were the audience at some spectacle. During this period, visiting morgues was seen as a tourist attraction cutting across class divides.

[b]In the garb of poverty[/b]
When French artist Gustave Doré travelled through the Victorian slums around 1870 together with British author Blachard Jerrold, the figures in Dickens’ novels already vividly peopled imaginings of the face of poverty. Doré worked with contrasts of light and shade, using brown ink, white chalk and gouache on paper, thus giving his dramatically composed images an artistic touch. He and Jerrold wore the clothing of the poor in order to penetrate deep into the slums for their book »London – a pilgrimage«. If one becomes part of the »mass« oneself, one loses one’s fear of it. Scruffy clothes and blackened faces offered a suitable disguise. »›Empathy‹ with the life of others« or »class transvestism« are the terms used by urban ethnologist Rolf Lindner to describe this.

Shabbily clothed and armed with a camera and a magnesium flash, Emil Kläger and Hermann Drawe also moved closer to the objects of their attention in summer 1904 in Vienna’s sewers, in its tangled maze and brick furnaces, as well as in homes for men, shelters for the homeless and camps. During this trip Kläger met a particularly picturesque homeless man, who soon revealed himself to be an undercover journalist. »Through Vienna’s districts of poverty and crime « was the title of their enormously popular slide show that drew in audiences for years in Vienna’s Urania. Here the petit bourgeois, having escaped this dreadful fate, could indulge in a bout of collective horror. At the same time middle-class fears of social decline could be restrained. The coloured shots in the bright glare of the burning magnesium show startled figures reclining, crouching, leaning on brick walls. Both the police and the authorities in charge of the sewers had long known about the tunnel people and accepted their existence. Information about planned purging of the sewers and flood warnings were passed on to the subterranean city. Whilst the authorities had long been communicating with the sub-proletariat, the »discoverers« of poverty set themselves up as its interpreters for the middle-class world.

[b]Rear courtyard, cellar and attic[/b]
»An improvement in poor conditions can only come about if the existing shortcomings are revealed, if they are dragged into the light of day, so that it becomes clearly visible where efforts must be made to bring about a turn to the better.« (Housing Inquiry, 1906).
The editors of the catalogue for the exhibition in Vienna describe Albert Kohn’s long-term studies as »politicisation of the image of poverty«. As a Social Democrat he was on the black list: his wife sewed ribbons for wreaths, working from home.³ In early 1898 the former itinerant salesman stopped peddling goods for cobblers and became managing director of what was at the time the largest local health insurance fund in Germany (later AOK). From 1901 to 1922 he ordered inspection visits to the overcrowded residential areas, which were assessed statistically using data tables and photographed.

»What are living conditions like for our patients?« Kohn’s published his »Housing Inquiry« based on home visits by »Patient Inspectors«, which even today offers sensational glimpses into a »Gründerzeit« Berlin of new beginnings, a period that rarely proved to be a »Belle Époque« if one looked beyond the stuccoed facades. The aim was not to focus on symptoms but to root out and combat the causes. The inspectors found confined, stuffy living quarters, without heating, water, light or ventilation and riddled with fungi, full of debris, odours and vermin. Parallel to the photographic documentation, tables of urban overcrowding were compiled, recording the size of flats, plus the number of windows and the levels of dampness; people were also asked about their illnesses and sleeping arrangements. Three people to a bed, the chronically ill sleeping alongside the healthy, alcoholism and sexual assaults in the most confined spaces were fairly commonplace.

The comparably distanced camera seeks to glean an overall impression and therefore does not intrude too much on the individuals. If the inspectors’ visit was announced, people got dressed up and tidied up their homes. It was impossible to record the odours and lack of fresh air: »Neither the pen nor the brush of our greatest artists can depict it in its full horror … for observing it all five senses react with horror « (Albert Kohn, 1907).⁴ The hard shadows cast by the open flame of the magnesium produced dramatic theatrical effects in particularly gloomy rooms. That meant that the illumination from the flash or the wide-angle lens distorted reality and as a consequence Kohn found himself with a dearth of arguments.

Ten years previously, a precise street-by-street map of living and housing conditions in London had been produced in order to provide solid facts, a project initiated by Charles Booth, a British entrepreneur also active in the Brazilian shipping business.⁵ The work, »probably the most important city map of the 19th century«, to cite curator Alex Werner, was based on »poverty experts« from schools, the police force, the churches or hospitals. It transpired that around thirty per cent of the urban populace lived below the poverty line.⁶ As Booth put it, it is reforms based on knowledge, not charity, which change the world.

[b]Self help and welfare[/b]
The dismal state of housing was viewed primarily as a social threat to the bourgeoisie. The Prussian state had not developed any instruments of social policy other than police repression. It was not until 1911 that a district housing office was opened in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Informal self-help structures based on solidarity, such as educational and apprentice associations, confraternities and trade unions, as well as various aid funds, attempted to plug the holes in the system, but were to be smashed to smithereens once again by the 1878 »Socialist laws«. As a concession the social state was developed: in 1883 health insurance was introduced, in 1884 accident insurance, in 1889 old age and disability insurance, all of which culminated in 1911 in the Reich Insurance Act and helped to define the model of the European welfare state. The welfare state made provision for its citizens, hoping for calculability and standardisation; in addition the government wished to generate loyalty among its subjects in the process of an »inner foundation of the Reich«. 63 per cent of the populace was already covered by compulsory insurance in 1913. Social Democracy, which was combated in other realms, took refuge in the new health insurance funds and thus became part of the state apparatus: »However the price paid was that Social Democracy’s original policy on health, namely that illness could only really be overcome by removing the capitalist system, increasingly slipped out of sight«, as Christoph Sachße and Florian Tennstedt established in 1982.

The bourgeois had a profound sense of the threat of a revolt by the sub-proletarian milieu. In addition to activities organised by the churches, the middle classes, seeking to ease their consciences, also became involved. »Poverty is consciously exploited in ordered to ensure the do-gooders enjoy… having their curiosity satisfied, adventure, disguises, revelling in their own superiority, a shiver of nervousness and suchlike pleasures«, wrote Karl Marx in 1844/45 in »The Holy Family«. In addition, private charitable acts became a vehicle of emancipation for ladies. »Social maternalism« (Christoph Sachße) and engaging in useful charitable acts offered them an escape route from their boredom at home. In contrast, working-class women had scarcely any time to devote to their own families, so that half a million small children grew up almost entirely without a mother. When work was over for the day, the fathers were keen to escape from the cramped quarters at home to head for one of the numerous pubs or to become involved in the male public domain of party, association or trade union activities.

[b]»Milljöh« or studying the locals[/b]
Like Doré before her, Berlin graphic artist Käthe Kollwitz also drew on the style of illustration used in popular classics or Christian iconography, most likely also with a view to giving poverty a degree of added cultural value and making the lower classes legible to the bourgeois. In 1912 Kollwitz’ poster »For Greater Berlin« promoted the plans to associate Berlin and the surrounding area in a kind of marriage of convenience, to ensure that the taxes of the rich living in the villas on the outskirts could also be collected, and indeed that large-scale housing schemes could be constructed there too. This special-purpose association was a response to the city’s explosive growth, with population figures shooting up from 850,000 in 1885 to 2.7 million around 1910. After charges were brought by a member of the board of the Real Estate and Landowners’ Association, her poster was banned because of »incitement to class hatred«. In later years self-doubt gained the upper hand, as she pondered whether her posters would change anything and help to overcome poverty. However, she always found images from the world of the middle class rather dull.

The »Metropolis Documents« from Berlin, an early work of German urban ethnography, were adorned with »Milljöh« drawings by Heinrich Zille, their title spelling out their subject-matter in Berlin dialect. The 51-part brochure series by the itinerant, author and publisher Hans Ostwald aimed to offer directions through the labyrinth of the metropolis. He called on »professional manufacturers of morality« to take a look for themselves at everyday urban life rather than casually writing it off. His reportages on rural workers and people working from home gave a voice to those affected. The field study project, which extended to over 5,000 pages,⁷ concentrated on Berlin but also referred to Vienna in six editions, making direct comparisons. Doctors and lawyers, in addition to journalists, also contributed to the unusually polyphonic compendium on anarchists and pimps.

It was not until the advent of documentary sound films that those examined were afforded an opportunity to express themselves directly. That is also how the exhibition ends, with »Housing Problems« by Arthur Elton and Edgar Anstey. Commissioned by the British Commercial Gas Association and shot in 1935, the 15-minute film offers ample scope to the inhabitants’ freely formulated protest – a sensational approach back then. In the midst of their everyday lives at home, the people, introduced by name, talk about plagues of rats and other vermin. Ultimately the film changes direction and presents solutions dreamt up by the commissioning client: modern housing blocks are to remedy problems in the East End. The voices serve the interests of politics, the film »looks at the problem from the perspective of the solution« (Vrääth Öhner). The idea is to prove that here the local populace and the public administration are of one mind: »Not solutions to problems but victims for experts« is how media analyst John Hartley described this reversal of terms. In 1980, at the apex of public provision of housing in Britain, a third of the population lived in high-rise social-housing exemplars of modernism.

[b]The »new« and the »red«[/b]
In 1922 the housing campaign run by Berlin’s AOK drew to a close; the Weimar Republic had finally put provision of housing and health care on the agenda; large-scale construction of housing was now considered progressive. In the section covering the period up to 1930 the exhibition in Vienna thus portrays the phase running from the discovery of poverty to the political implementation of improvements in the interwar period. »Die neue Wohnung« (»The new home«), Hans Richter’s film completed in 1931, an excerpt of which was screened in the exhibition »100 years of the Deutscher Werkbund«, demonstrates the transition from historicism to modernism via cluttered middle-class flats from the Wilhelminian period, which gave way to suburban terraces with views of the Alps.⁸ »The avant-garde as a bourgeois, artistic movement had drawn to a close for lack of a social basis upon which to develop«, he wrote in 1951 in »Histoire de l’Avant-Garde Allemande, 1918–1930« in »L’Age du Cinema«. As early as 1930 he had noted at the »International Congress of Independent Film«, assembled in Brussels, that it is not technical innovations but rather social problems that take centre-stage in an economic crisis. Modernism thus takes shape as a social movement. Logically enough, towards the end of the »Ganz Unten/Life at the bottom« exhibition, an excerpt from the 1926 Social Democrat advertising clip, »A film of the new Vienna«, is screened, celebrating the achievements of Red Vienna.

It was not only »Red Vienna« that was »new«. The alliance »das neue frankfurt« (1925–33) was called into being as a grouping of town planners, architects and artists, which aimed to offer the general public improvements in the spheres of urban planning and culture, and was given programmatic direction by architect Ernst May, who was in charge of construction affairs on the town council. The entire local authority structure was undergoing a process of change in order to transport into the city Social Democracy’s modernism plus its services as manifested in architecture. Contemporary architecture was viewed as a social task in this context. An important, yet almost forgotten protagonist was the artist, photographer and filmmaker Ella Bergmann-Michel. The world premiere of her documentation »Where do old people live?« was in 1932, screened together with Richter’s film, »Die neue Wohnung«. The artist, inspired by revolutionary ideas, ran the »Film Working Group« in the »League for Independent Film« and in 1929 moved into a studio in Frankfurt’s night-club district. From her window she documented the bustling traffic in the neighbourhood or moved around in the thick of things. Working on a commission from the city she photographed the neon signs, cinema entrances and shop windows, as well as the housing projects in Praunheim and Römerstadt, where the first tenants had already moved in. She took an interest in the social aspects of modernity. Her lively photos show everyday urban life, with people planting broad beans in allotments. In her work you won’t find information about architecture »swept clean« of people, as was common practice in the architectural photography of the era.

[b]»Folklore Museum of Modern Art«[/b]
The »Schmelz« as a »Folklore Museum of Modern Art« became a meeting place for the avant-garde. Kurt Schwitters, László Moholy-Nagy or Adolf Meyer, typographer Jan Tschichold, director Joris Ivens and, on a number of occasions, Dziga Vertov popped in. In 1930, via Jewish photographer Ilse Bing, Ella Bergmann-Michel met architect Mart Stam, who asked her to film his award-winning Henry and Emma Budge Old People’s Home⁹ on the outskirts of Frankfurt. »Where do old people live?« asked Ella Bergmann-Michel and called for a better life. She superimposed the word »noise« when filming downtown streets, old buildings and individual people in high-angle shots, and then showed the centrally heated, sociable luxury of a new era: »Light and sun in plenty in large cheerful rooms in this very modern building, completed in 1929, a first for Frankfurt, fitted out with all the amenities for elderly people … The floor plan of the building and the option of altering some of the rooms was depicted in animated drawings.« (Ella Bergmann-Michel, »Meine Dokumentarfilme«, typescript, 1967). The one hundred individual rooms with balconies are grouped around common rooms with movable walls. Niches with seating surrounded by glass partitions appear throughout the scheme and the kitchen must have been high-tech back then.

[b]»Everyone!«[/b]
The excerpt »The unemployed cook for the unemployed – everyone has to lend a hand« shows a very different type of commissioned work. This film shows the other side of the new Frankfurt. Here 10,000 people with no fixed income are provided with a warm meal for thirty Pfennig a month. In an era of mass unemployment, queues of hungry people and inflation, the documentary film-maker turned her gaze on a self-help solidarity scheme, and to that end observed the work of 28 kitchens, as well as the administration. »No-one should go hungry«, as the slogan states, and »Everyone / must / help / Everyone!« The film, complete with contact address and account number at the end, was shown in the newsreels screened before the main feature in Frankfurt cinemas, as well as on a mobile screen in the town centre, where money could be donated on the spot. As a result the initiative not only achieved a higher public profile but also obtained 600 Reichsmark in donations, as well as donations in kind.

In the increasingly radical political climate, Ella Bergmann-Michel’s subsequent films could no longer be screened publicly. »Street traders« observes the informal economy of street hawkers, selling fruit and vegetables without a licence from their heavily laden wooden carts. Bergmann-Michel links this with shots of beggars and newspaper boys, saleswomen at the roadside wrapped up in thick layers of blankets, makeshift stalls selling goods or tricksters with card games. Her medium-distance shots remain accommodating; one sequence was re-enacted later together with the traders. »With a 35mm hand-held camera it was possible to film the tradespeople unobserved on squares and streets … as well as the others, who were keen to avoid police observation … The theme was rounded off with travelling traders performing at the fairground on the square by the market hall.« At the end, the fair is dismantled and the »travelling people« journey on with their »houses on wheels«.

»Catching fish in the Rhön«, which, for all its formal whimsy, appears to pre-empt the time of inner exile, was followed by »The last election«, an oppressive document on the excessive Reichstag electoral campaign shortly before the National Socialist seizure of power or »Machtübernahme«. The streets, dotted with swastikas, as well as hammers and sickles, were transformed into parade grounds: »The last film remained a fragment. It showed shots of campaign posters, of lively street discussions … Then I had to break off my filming for political reasons. It was January 1933.« Whilst filming a fight outside an NSDAP election office, the director was placed under temporary arrest by the police, her film ripped out of her camera in the process. The Social Democrat’s Realpolitik had become worn out by the friction between the various camps – at the end of the film we suddenly see »neuer frankfurt« posters for the last lectures by Alfred Döblin and Rudolf Arnheim.¹⁰

[b]Housing on the poverty line nowadays[/b]
As early as the 2nd CIAM (Congrès International d’Architecture Moderne) Conference in 1929 in Frankfurt am Main, the pioneers of urban modernism turned their attention towards »today’s housing for those on the poverty line«. Walter Gropius and Hannes Meyer presented prototypes for small flats in the inter-war style. The successors to the Bauhaus in Dessau have now picked up on the project once again: »Societies around the world are confronted in the social, ecological and cultural sphere with the problem of scarcity of housing… already around 50% of the world’s population live in cities, and roughly half of those urban dwellers live in poor neighbourhoods, slums or are homeless «, to cite the call for projects for the 5th Bauhaus Award 2008. This prize will »also explore the social standards of modernism.«. In western Europe too, more than one in ten people currently live in patently inadequate housing, with rent taking up a significant proportion of their overall income: »The homeless, tenants subletting, residents in homes, refuges and emergency accommodation; the long-term unemployed and unqualified young people; ethnic Germans moving back to Germany, immigrants and people without official papers; students, low-wage groups and pensioners; single parents and large families have difficulty in finding accommodation in town.« This list comprises city-dwellers that simply do not exist in the classical images of the real-estate world.

[b]Balalaika social policy[/b]
It is virtually impossible nowadays to overlook the signs of great poverty afflicting some, in contrast with the ever-growing gap between the wealth enjoyed by others, which exists in parallel. Collecting bottles to recover the deposit on them, an activity pursued with ever greater boldness, is one of a series of poverty-driven practices accorded cynical recognition by the government. In March last year the »FAZ« recorded on the front page a statement by Germany’s Minister of Social Affairs, Franz Müntefering, asserting that people would have to adjust to the idea of wide-spread poverty in old age: »You can have a go at various things: playing the balalaika or playing the pools, having a (government-subsidised) Riester pension or a company pension, and then you have to see whether you can scrape some money together like that.« The »activating state« encouraging its citizens to busk in the underground is speculating about a life that is now part of everyday experience in crumbling areas in the east of the EU.

A Berlin doctor from the Urban Hospital, which has adapted to meet the needs of the social structure in Kreuzberg, talks about contemporary poverty, hidden behind the facades. As a GP who also works in Accident and Emergency, he could be a »housing inspector« reporting on current crises in the AOK tradition if there were to be a demand for this kind of documentation. A lack of proper housing is part of a broader social crisis. This was reflected too in protests from Paris to Nice last winter, which let off pressure that had long been building up, and generated fascinating forms of activism ranging from accommodation-viewing parties to demonstrative permanent camps. In France there is a shortfall of one million flats; around 100,000 people live on the streets, the rest stay in caravans, tents or homes for the homeless. Now even the upwardly mobile middle classes can no longer manage to pay for a flat in the centre of the capital, where prices have spiralled to absurd levels, and in their mind’s eye already see themselves moving to the stigmatised suburbs.

Bibliography & exhibitions:
Gesine Asmus (ed.), »Hinterhof, Keller und Mansarde. Einblicke in Berliner Wohnungselend 1901–1920«, Reinbek 1982
Ella Bergmann-Michel, »Dokumentarische Filme 1931–1933«, DVD, Edition Deutsches Filmmuseum Frankfurt am Main
Ute Eskildsen (ed.): »Ella Bergmann-Michel, Fotografien und Filme 1927–1935«, Göttingen 2005
Andreas Janser/Arthur Rüegg, »Hans Richter – Die neue Wohnung«, Baden 2001
Werner Michael Schwarz/Margarethe Szeless/Lisa Wögenstein (ed.), »Ganz Unten. Die Entdeckung des Elends«, Vienna 2007
»100 Jahre Deutscher Werkbund 1907|2007«, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich 19th April to 26th August 2007, Akademie der Künste Berlin, 16th September to 18th November 2007
»Berliner Siedlungen der 1920er Jahre. Kandidaten für das UNESCO Welterbe«, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 25th July to 8th October 2007
Dickens World, Chatham Maritime, Kent, http://www.dickensworld.co.uk
»Heinrich Zille, Kinder der Straße. Zeichnung, Grafik, Fotografie«, Akademie der Künste Berlin, 11th January to 24th March 2008; Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin, Ephraim-Palais, 11th January to 2nd March 2008

 

Translated by Helen Ferguson

 

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