Social Utopias of the Twenties: Bauhaus, Kibbutz and the Dream of the New Man.

This volume represents the results of two 1994 conferences, one in Dessau, Germany, and the other in Belt Berl, Israel, in honor of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the foundation of the Bauhaus and the transmission of part of its heritage to Israel. As the title indicates, the broad topic of the conferences was the utopian visions of the 1920s, when the Bauhaus was developing its reputation for pedagogical and aesthetic innovation and Jewish emigrants to Palestine were seeking a cultural and social revolution in the form of the kibbutz.

The topic is intriguing, but the results are disappointing. Regrettably, there is no editor's introduction, perhaps because the task was simply too daunting. As the various contributions make clear, there were indisputable links (biographical, technological, and theoretical) between the Bauhau's vision of a collectivistic industrial utopia and Jewish settlers' dream of a collectivistic agrarian utopia. But the overlaps and contrasts between these two very different (though related) visions is only obliquely examined. Obviously, the editor's introduction would have been the appropriate place to elucidate the relationship between these utopian visions.

In lieu of an introduction there is a forward in which conference organizers Rolf Kuhn and Anke Martiny explain the background to the conference. Although not all contributors submitted papers and the ensuing conference discussions are not represented in the book, Kuhn and Martiny hope it will contribute to a better understanding of the Bauhaus and, further, that the "new" Dessau Bauhaus will be able to show a way into the future. This rather unfocused beginning accurately foretells the equally unfocused examination of the "New Man."

Just what the "new" Bauhaus is about is the subject of John David Morley's contribution (a breezy, superficial piece reprinted from a magazine article). After describing the region's economic importance to German industry during the Weimar period, he glowingly describes the goals of current Bauhaus Dessau director Kuhn. Kuhn, somewhat ironically, is attempting to make over the Dessau Bauhaus in the image of the original craft-oriented Weimar Bauhaus. Whether that is going to include a "Back to Handicraft!" call to arms is not mentioned. Kuhn is an ecologically-minded architect and town planner who is trying to aid in the economic reconstruction of Sachsen-Anhalt.

Other ironies, equally unremarked, are embedded in the respective utopian visions of the Bauhaus and the kibbutz. The same forces of modernization that were a prerequisite for the Dessau Bauhaus' New Man (sport, industry, mass society, urban media and tempo) seemed to spell the downfall of the kibbutz's New Man (rural, agrarian, craft-oriented). Another irony is that the collectivistic society assumed by Gropius and other modernists to be Europe's dawning postcapitalist future came closest to realization in Palestine, albeit under substantially different circumstances.

As Heinze-Greenburg points out, "Palestine . . . was an early experimental laboratory for European utopias and collective housing projects." The utopian element was prominent, with plans for family reorganization that resembled what at least some modernists foresaw in future European societies. The communal dining, child daycare, recreation, social-cooperative consciousness that marked kibbutz design were all goals of many German modernists. The trend in the kibbutzim during the seventies, with the introduction of certain urban-style entertainment and consumerism, made the kibbutzim even more like the type of communities envisioned by Gropius in the late 1920s. Neither irony is emphasized or analyzed by the book's contributors. Here, again, an editor's introduction would have made the volume more useful.

Another issue that deserved more explicit analysis but failed to receive it was the contrasts between the Weimar Bauhaus' New Man and the Dessau Bauhaus' New Man. Though Wolfgang Pehnt traces the development of the concept of the New Man back to the nineteenth century, his essay (unfootnoted) and Jeannine Fiedler's chapter emphasize the Neue Sachlichkeit New Man of the second half of the 1920s; yet the earlier rendition of the Bauhaus' utopian vision was actually closer to that of the kibbutz. This is illustrated by Michael Siebenbrodt's short chapter, "Toward a New Working and Living Community," which looks at a Bauhaus-planned housing project in Weimar. These unrealized plans emphasized economic autarchy, collective facilities, and a quasi-religious sense of community stressed architecturally by a radial or crystalline plan with a prominent collective building in the center, i.e. the essential kibbutz design.

A number of contributions suffer from vague phrasing, and much of the book is awkwardly and at times inaccurately translated. The entire book is littered with misspellings, including authors' names in footnotes. Chapters dealing with the Kibbutz's New Man contain many untranslated and undefined Hebrew words, forcing the reader unfamiliar with Zionist history to depend on context. A cartoon illustration originally published in Uhu is attributed to der Querschnitt.

The production of the book is lavish, the quality of the contributions ranging from provocative to mediocre. One can not help but think the publication of the book (financed by the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and the Friedrich-Ebert Foundation of Tel Aviv) was intended to serve purposes other than scholarship.

Mark Peach Southern College