The Latest at Goethe

The world is a village. What windows from Karl-Marx-Allee are doing at the Biennale in the Chinese harbour city and how the East German architect Richard Paulick got to the Far East. By Patrick Wildermann

It is the story of old windows that made their way from a rubbish container on Karl-Marx-Allee to China. The story of a bookshelf said to come from an underground library in Shanghai and today standing in a Berlin flat. And it is the story of a man who worked as an architect in the Far East and in East Germany, yet strangely remained invisible. It is a global story of its own kind, but let’s begin at the beginning.

Peter Anders chose the Café Kubrick in Beijing as a meeting place. It is across the street from the Chinese capital’s only repertory cinema, embedded in the futuristic complex of the Beijing MOMA: high-rise cubes near the urban motorway, linked by bridges – one of the few examples of ecologically sustainable building in China; green architecture in the midst of a country where something new is constantly being built overnight.

At Café Kubrick, named for the legendary film director, one finds English film literature and beverages at western prices. Anders, who heads the Goethe-Institut Beijing and designed the Berlin pavilion at the Shanghai Biennale, tells about the project that spans an arc from Berlin to China and back again. The art show in the harbour city, only five hours by high-speed train from Beijing, was based on a new concept in 2012. In addition to the main exhibition, there are a number of city pavilions in an empty office building: Ulan Bator beside Teheran beside Detroit. Anders says it is a new thing for China, “for such remote premises to be used in an official context.” The works there are withdrawn from direct control by the government.

An architect’s eventful life

The Goethe man asked the artist-architects from the Raumlabor group to design the pavilion. They soon came across the biography of a man who was more closely affiliated with them than they imagined: Richard Paulick. In Berlin he is best known as the architect of the state opera Unter den Linden, which was reconstructed in 1955. The demolition of the Paulick hall planned during the present restoration of the building was ditched following fierce protests.

The East German architect also designed the “Socialist” public housing projects in Hoyerswerda, Schwedt and Halle-Neustadt – where Raumlabor operated a temporary hotel – and two blocks on Stalinallee, today’s Karl-Marx-Allee. Here, the Berlin city planners’ office is in a Paulick building. “We didn’t know that,” says Raumlabor member Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius. The architect’s niece, the television actress Natascha Paulick, also lives in the same building. She just led a battle against the property management because the old windows were supposed to be exchanged for new insulated glass models. Most of Paulick’s windows were already lying in a rubbish container when the Raumlabor people saved them.

Foerster-Baldenius learned a great deal about the disputed architect from his niece. He discovered a bookshelf in her flat that he had already seen in a photograph in a book about Paulick. The communist, who fled to Shanghai from the Nazis in 1933, is said to have built it in China for insurgents who operated a secret Marxist-Leninist library. The piece of furniture contains no hidden compartments, holds no treasures; the heiress examined it. But, one can project all sorts of things into it, as into Paulick’s eventful life.

Structures only on the drawing board

It is an east-of-east biography full of question marks. For example, there are photographs showing Paulick in China in the circle around the Communist Richard Sorge, but what did the two have to do with one another? Many biographical moments remain unclear. What is certain is that Paulick chose Shanghai as his place of exile because, Rudolf Hamburger, a friend of his from university days lived there who became a Moscow agent and died in the Gulag. In addition, no visa was required for entry into the country. “I assume he didn’t think he’d be staying in China for 15 years,” says Foerster-Baldenius.

His stay there was not without successes. Among other things, Paulick founded an interior design firm, held a chair for interior design and urban planning from 1945 at Shanghai’s St. Johns University and rose to become the director of the urban planning office of the government under Chiang Kai-shek. Then, in 1949, along came Mao and Paulick decamped. He actually wanted to go to America – a plan that did not work out – he then toured through Europe for a while and ended up in Berlin with Hans Scharoun on the Reconstruction Commission. Was it a happy time for him in China, or a fight for survival? Most of his designs were never brought to fruition. Paulick built only one house in Shanghai, the Yao Residence, which is used today by the government as a guesthouse. His name is practically unknown in China.

Enthusiastic reactions

The architect possibly lost his signature style while in exile. Paulick came from the Bauhaus school, worked for Gropius and implemented rigorous modernistic architecture in the international style. Nothing more can be recognized of this in his later structures on Stalinallee. “He was not someone who embodied a new idea of the city,” according to Foerster-Baldenius. The installation at the Biennale is correspondingly ambivalently entitled The International Ghost – a hybrid of a number of Paulick buildings from the Steel House in Dessau, his first design, and the Yao Residence with its teahouse impression including goldfish (which sadly perished), songbirds and ten noisy crickets. Visitors are served tea in the Berlin pavilion, an excellently design brochure provides information about the project and Paulick’s work. “Everything that happened before 1949 is prehistoric for the Chinese,” explains Foerster-Baldenius.

Reactions to the pavilion are euphoric – whereby criticism is not common in China, as curator Peter Anders bears in mind. Yet the China–Berlin axis is truly quite pronounced. There is a lively exchange in the electronic music scene, and the appeal of the German capital city is also great for Chinese artists. For a few more days, one can peer towards Berlin through old windows in Shanghai. The windows from Karl-Marx-Allee flew 8,400 kilometres for this and give the Biennale pavilion an uncommon perspective: a view of Richard Paulick’s designs; at houses that were never built.

Published with the kind permission of the Berlin Tagesspiegel