This rare postcard – titled Araberdorf (or Arab Village) – depicts the Weissenhof estate through the eyes of the Nazis.
The Stuttgart suburb of prototype modernist housing had come into being as the result of a major international housing exhibition, held in 1927. Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Peter Behrens, Bruno Taut, Mart Stam and J.J.P Oud were among the participating architects brought together by the Deutscher Werkbund.
Project director Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe oversaw the layout of the estate and delivered its largest building; the block of flats seen at the top right of the postcard. Superimposing racial caricatures into the scene was meant to satirize the progressive intent behind modern architecture. In line with their thinking on progressive art, the Nazis believed that the functionalist buildings of the estate were degenerate. To them disposing with the architectural language of the past betrayed unpatriotic thinking.
The ugly piece of propaganda is referenced in the shortlived British modernist journal Focus, in 1939. Its editoral – written in the Spring of that year – suggested that the Nazis were about to pull down the entire suburb and wipe it from the map. But fortunately, despite significant damage during the bombing raids of World War Two and subsequent unsympathetic urban regeneration, many of the buildings survive to this day and have been restored. Now two Le Corbusier-designed buildings have been listed for UNESCO international heritage status, confirming the estate’s significance as a key moment in the emergence of the Modern Movement.
Design is fine. History is mine. 