Cities in Resistance: Psychogeography and Mnemonic Practice between Istanbul and Vienna, 1938-1941
We live in uncertain times, and who is to say what the younger generation will have to endure, even in Europe. This is precisely the reason why I gave such a detailed account of my dealings with the police, of their interrogation methods, and of my trials: should any of my readers find themselves in a similar situation, I hope that my testimony will allow them to react to it in a better and more informed fashion.
Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, Memories of the Resistance, 1995.
On the morning of January 22, 1940, Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (1897-2000) left her sister’s house at Hamburgerstrasse 14 in Vienna. She acquired a train ticket to return to Turkey the next day and then crisscrossed the center of the city. Before noon she met a man, known to her only by his pseudonym, “Gerber,” at the Café Viktoria. A few minutes into their quiet conversation, the Gestapo arrested them. With this seizure the meager Austrian resistance to the Nazi regime suffered a grave setback, the worst in World War II. More than four hundred suspected co-conspirators were detained in subsequent weeks, and Schütte-Lihotzky endured months of interrogations and assaults, a sham trial, four years of internment, and intense emotional and physical suffering.
Today, Schütte-Lihotzky is renowned for her social commitment in architecture, but her political work has been largely ignored.[1] No single essay in English examines her dissident work or the small circle of architects, workers, artists, politicians, and journalists with whom she labored while exiled in Istanbul and engaged in the active resistance in Vienna. These historiographical gaps, the result of disciplinary inclinations in architectural history, raise uncomfortable methodological and philosophical questions. Why is the socially inclined architecture of Schütte-Lihotzky and her colleagues, comprising kitchens, schools, and housing in the 1920s known while the spatial histories of their anti-fascist resistance remain unacknowledged?
“…these forms of dissidence cannot be attributed solely to individual architects: they involved the collective labor of people who used their bodies and urban surroundings in dangerous political work.”
In fact, in her 1984 memoir, Erinnerungen aus dem Widerstand, 1938-1945 (Memories of the Resistance), Schütte-Lihotzky described her arrest as the defining moment of her life.[2] This article is dedicated to Memories of the Resistance and theorizes the spatial histories that it illuminates. It foregrounds resistance fighters, who mobilized intimate knowledge of cities, and their oppositional labor, which historically relied on urban morphology, mnemonic practices, and the performativity of the body and the metropolis. Studying these counter-tactics, I demonstrate that these forms of dissidence cannot be attributed solely to individual architects: they involved the collective labor of people who used their bodies and urban surroundings in dangerous political work. As Schütte-Lihotzky hoped, and as I too imagine, their tactics are valuable for the contemporary reader beyond mere academic study.
Practicing Resistance: Istanbul, 1938-1940
Schütte-Lihotzky joined the active resistance in the fall of 1938, when she and her husband arrived in Istanbul. With the help of Bruno Taut (1880-1938) they secured “respectable contracts” at the Académie des Beaux Arts, where Schütte-Lihotzky designed rural schools.[3] A few days after the couple arrived, another Austrian architect, Herbert Eichholzer (1903–1943), visited Schütte-Lihotzky at the Académie.[4] Eichholzer, who shared Schütte-Lihotzky’s passion for the design of housing and educational facilities, had been sent from Paris to form a clandestine resistance cell in Istanbul on behalf of the Communist Party of Austria. Schütte-Lihotzky, who was one of the first people he approached, had signaled her willingness to join the Communist opposition while exiled in Paris earlier that year.
Although Turkey proved to be a peripheral site of resistance activity during World War II, its strategic position between Europe, the Soviet Union, and British Mandate Palestine prompted the Communist Party of Austria to attempt to organize a reliable resistance network in Istanbul.[5] Another partner in this endeavor was Victoria Maier Mayer (1914-2004), a Chilean architect who settled in Istanbul after graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.[6] Between 1939 and 1940, the architects shared a theoretical life and stayed up long into the night discussing anti-fascist literature and rehearsing dissident tactics with a few other people. First a guesthouse and then Schütte-Lihotzky’s permanent residence in Istanbul became the locale for secret gatherings and a basis of social and political life in exile (figure 1).[7] It was not purely architecture that captured the circle’s shared imagination, but the joint deliberations about political work and historical-theoretical reflections on Marxism, which they believed would be the framework for a more democratic architecture.[8] Thanks to the friendships she formed during her two years in Turkey, Schütte-Lihotzky’s practice shifted, from fashioning an architecture for the poor on behalf of municipalities to engaging in radical political work against the state.
Figure 1. Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and Wilhelm Schütte in their home, Istanbul, 1939. Courtesy of the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Collection and Archive, Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky Papers, F-151.
At times, these private gatherings in Istanbul were venues for tactical training as well. When important officials crossed from Europe into the Soviet Union (the Communist Party of Austria operated from Moscow after 1939), Eichholzer called his superiors for instructions and conversations. In these meetings, the architects learned how to navigate through a city clandestinely and how to maneuver if there was any suspicion of being tailed. They received instruction on how to approach others, often total strangers, in work that warranted trust. Gatherings were usually limited to a handful of people to curtail denunciations.[9] During the late 1930s, the resistance fighters in the Istanbul group also adopted pseudonyms, referring to them as “illegal” names. Eichholzer was called “Karl”; Maier Mayer, “Wera,” and Schütte-Lihotzky, “Paula.” These pseudonyms set the fundamental bodily and psychological condition for dissident work to begin.
“…resistance labor thus relied on the invention of fictitious names, a fabricated relationality, and a shared and imagined psychogeography of the city.”
It was crucial to establish protective rules and protocols for dissident activity in Austria and Germany. Any form of active resistance typically started with the “‘illegal’ minute.”[10] At face value, the “‘illegal’ minute” was part of the Party’s directive to obscure resistance fighters’ identity and to use the fabric of the city to carry out clandestine work. Dissidents exchanged pseudonyms at prearranged meeting points and established a false origin for their acquaintance. Within a few moments, they determined the qualitative characteristics of their relationship, friends, colleagues, or lovers, and maintained them throughout multiple meetings. They agreed upon a credible but fabricated place where they had come from that day and a false point of destination. In making elaborate but false connections, the seemingly simple Communist directive to conceal one’s true identity prompted the reinvention of selfhood within the context of one’s dangerous dissident work and one’s connection to others. This resistance labor thus relied on the invention of fictitious names, a fabricated relationality, and a shared and imagined psychogeography of the city. It was more than just a guideline; it was a tactic, a heuristic, a bond, and a shelter; a way of detaching oneself from one’s own “legal” identity and creating an imagined friendship with another.
Embodying Resistance: Vienna, 1940-1941
Eichholzer was called to Austria in the spring of 1940, Maier Mayer left on a separate mission, and Schütte-Lihotzky departed from Istanbul in December of the same year. During their trips, Schütte-Lihotzky and Maier Mayer employed bodily and mnemonic practices in creating a repository to transport information. When Maier Mayer arrived in Agram, Yugoslavia, Julius Kornweitz (1911–1944) taught her to decrypt secret messages through a sequence of fractions. Kornweitz, called “Bobby,” was an architect by training as well.[11] The system of encryption he imparted utilized numerators and denominators to indicate lines and letters on the page of a book and served as a prearranged key for clandestine messaging. Schütte-Lihotzky, instructed in Kornweitz’s “mathematical” system, was given an encoded message with Viennese contacts and addresses.[12] Hiding the small piece of crumpled paper in her ear canal, she carried this vital information across borders and arrived in Vienna on December 30, 1940.[13]
“The park’s monumentality and its imperial architecture of surveillance were thus turned against the totalitarian state.”
During her twenty-five days of active resistance work in Austria, Schütte-Lihotzky embarked on her primary mission: to locate the head of the Communist Resistance, Erwin Puschman (1905–1943), and persuade him, “Gerber,” to leave the country. It was feared that the central organization had been compromised. Schütte-Lihotzky was also tasked to take notes about anti-fascist literature for reproduction and dissemination abroad. In a small house, inhabited by a typesetter and his wife in the working-class district of Favoriten, she read leaflets and agitprop.[14] Using only her mind to store information, the goal was to memorize those pamphlets as carefully as possible so they might later be recited verbatim and transcribed in Istanbul.
Everyone working in the resistance to the Nazi regime was in extreme danger. Careful to follow instructions practiced in Turkey, in Vienna Schütte-Lihotzky stayed at her sister’s house and arrived at meetings only after taking long, meandering walks through the city. During these walks the dissident urban psychogeography established by the “‘illegal’ minute,” was bolstered by the actual performativity of the city. As Schütte-Lihotzky traversed parks and avenues, she ensured she was not being followed. Particularly in the imperial grounds of the Habsburgs’ former summer residence at Schönbrunn, the axiality of the Baroque landscape ensured that she had not been detected.[15] The park’s monumentality and its imperial architecture of surveillance were thus turned against the totalitarian state (figure 2).
Figure 2. View towards Schönbrunn grounds, Vienna, 1935. Courtesy of the Austrian National Library, Image Archives, Sp 202.
One day before Schütte-Lihotzky was scheduled return to Istanbul, Maier Mayer arranged to meet her at Hamburgerstrasse, likely to hand off more contacts and addresses. Before this meeting, Schütte-Lihotzky met Puschmann one last time to prepare his departure from Austria. During this encounter the Gestapo captured Schütte-Lihotzky and Puschmann. When Maier Mayer arrived at the Hamburgerstrasse residence in the afternoon, she was seized by the Gestapo, too. The interrogations began immediately after seizure, and both women found strength in the knowledge they had gained from resistance tactics, having rehearsed how to stay calm and obfuscate information. “False reporting during interrogations was a continuation of the struggle in other conditions,” Schütte-Lihotzky recalled.[16]
Extreme physical, psychological, and emotional violence marked these “conditions” of interrogation: all resistance fighters lived in constant fear of their own death and that of their friends and partners. Schütte-Lihotzky’s deep intimacy with cities and space and knowing her own body as site and repository for dissident work gave her solace in these darkest moments. She dreamt about places that she had lived or imagined and other oneiric landscapes to escape confinement. Studying such histories of the body calls into question the disciplinary and discursive biases that value reform won through architectural design over more radical political strategies and solidarity tactics. The second part of this essay will continue this inquiry, countering an architectural history that has for too long insisted on stories of professional “expertise” over lived experience, individuals over collectives, and urban space developed on behalf of municipalities over oppositional spatial imaginations against the state.
Author’s note: The author would like to thank Antonio Rinaldi and Lee Onbargi for assistance with editing, and the Graham Foundation for a project development grant that made this research possible.
NOTES
[1] For literature on the Frankfurt Kitchen see, Susan Henderson, Building Culture: Ernst May and the New Frankfurt Initiative, 1926-1931 (New York, NY: Peter Lang Publishing, 2013); Esra Akcan, “Civilizing Housewives versus Participatory Users: Margarete Schütte Lihotzky in the Employ of the Turkish Nation State,” in Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users, ed., Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachman (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 185-207.
[2] Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky first published her memoir, Erinnerungen aus dem Widerstand, 1938–1945: Mit einem Gespräch zwischen Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky und Chup Friemert, in 1984 (Hamburg: Konkret Literatur Verlag), used here for pagination; other versions were issued in 1985, 1995, and 2015. For a review of this literature, see Sophie Hochhäusl, “Spatial Histories of Dissidence: Imagination, Memory, and Resistance in Istanbul, Vienna, and Santiago de Chile, 1938-1945,” Ediciones ARQ, no. 105 (2020). Also see Deutsches Bundesarchiv, R/3017/17434 and R/3017/24835; Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischen Widerstandes (DÖW), Wien, File 10724 and 20100/10724.
[3] Schütte-Lihotzky stated in her the interview for her 1984 memoir that she and Wilhelm Schütte received favorable contracts; other sources suggest that only Schütte was initially employed. Schütte-Lihotzky, Erinnerungen, 37.
[4] For Eichholzer’s political activities, see Antje Senarclens de Grancy and Haimo Halbrainer, Totes Leben Gibt Es Nicht: Herbert Eichholzer 1903–1943, Architektur, Kunst, Politik (Vienna and New York: Springer, 2004).
[5] Bernd Nicolai, Moderne und Exil: deutschsprachige Architekten in der Türkei, 1925-1955 (Berlin: Verlag für Bauwesen, 1998), 100.
[6] Author interview with Carla González Maier, May, 2019. Primary documents from the Bundesarchiv in Berlin confirm this information, see Deutsches Bundesarchiv, R/3017/17434; R/3017/17445 and R/3017/37930.
[7] Dietmar Ecker, “Gedächtnisprotokoll eines Gesprächs zwischen Dietrich Ecker und Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky,” May/June (1985), 2; held in the Archives of the Technical University Graz, Dietrich Ecker Papers, Herbert Eichholzer, Box 3, Folder 5, 2.
[8] All three had been committed to this mission in architecture, having worked on domestic spaces, social housing, and children’s institutions: Schütte-Lihotzky was widely recognized for her kitchen designs; Eichholzer devised ideas on collective housing; Maier Mayer dedicated her thesis to orphanages.
[9] Schütte-Lihotzky, Erinnerungen, 55.
[10] Schütte-Lihotzky, Erinnerungen, 59-60.
[11] For information on Julius Kornweitz, see Hans Schafranek, “Julius Kornweitz und Leo Gabler – Auslandsemissäre der KPÖ im Visier der Gestapo,“ Jahrbuch 2011, Schwerpunkt: Politische Verfolgung im Lichte von Biographien, Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischen Widerstand (Vienna: Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischen Widerstands, 2001), 185-208
[12] For information on Öhler, see the victim database at the Documentation Center of Austrian Resistance and “Persönlichkeiten,” Jüdische Gemeinde Graz.
[13] Schütte-Lihotzky, Erinnerungen, 60-61.
[14] For information on Anton Konopitzky and Theresia Konopitzky, see Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischen Widerstandes (DÖW), Wien, File 20100/6025.
[15] Schütte-Lihotzky, Erinnerungen, 64.
[16] Schütte-Lihotzky, Erinnerungen, 80; for translations of the original German, please see Raphael Koenig’s and Christianna Bonin’s work in the forthcoming Memories of the Resistance: Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and the Architecture of Collective Dissidence, 1918–1989.
