Sibylle Lewitscharoff

The house I was never allowed to enter. The famous Schmitthenner designed house in Löwen Strasse – for the first time I will see it from the inside. I grew up in Löwen Strasse too, but at the lower middle-class end of the street that leads into the old part of Degerloch. I effortlessly draw the house out of a dark chamber of my memory, admittedly only the top floor and the roof, the parts that rose higher than the high garden wall. A gate set in the wall. I can see Robert and Blechle disappear behind its jambs. All of the make-believe fortresses that I shot at as a child with my home-made catapults looked like Blechle’s house, rather than the castles in the Swabian hills.

Its architect was also the author of The German House, who early on became a whole-hearted supporter of Hitler and yet still did not get much of a look-in, because the harmonious conservatism of the Stuttgart School had little in common with Speer and Troost’s constructions. So the gentle ratios and felicitous proportions continued to benefit well-heeled private individuals, who had him build their houses. At the end of the twenties they also benefited Karl Richard Stahl. I, of course, knew nothing of all that. My parents did not talk about architecture, they were busy with their beverages shop. Blechle’s mother only started receiving deliveries from them in the seventies, by then I was already living in Munich.

To: Frau Gerlinde Stahl, Löwen Strasse 164, 70597 Stuttgart.

As the bulky envelope disappeared into the slit of the postbox, I started to worry whether I might have done something stupid. I expected a court injunction to be served, prohibiting the publication of my notes. Ten days later I heard her voice on the phone for the first time, a somewhat more common voice than I had imagined. She invited me to tea.