From: Paul Jaskot <pjaskotdepaul.edu>
Subject: CFP: Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1914-1945, Reconsidered

St. Paul, Minnesota, April 18 - 22, 2018
Deadline: Jun 15, 2017

Call for contributing a paper to our session at the 2018 Society of Architectural Historians Conference on the broad implications of themes raised in Barbara Miller Lane's important book, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1914-1945. In 1968, Lane published her book, the first systematic attempt to analyze the complexities of German architecture from the Weimar Republic through the Nazi period. This foundational work established key issues that have dominated the discussion of interwar German architecture ever since. It refused the apolitical assessment of Modernism, dared to link discussions of the Bauhaus with those of National Socialist politicians, and took seriously the political and aesthetic function of architecture in Nazi Germany, among other important contributions. To this day, the need to attend to a complex notion of politics for the analysis of this period of architecture is seen as essential.

This session takes up the 50th anniversary of Lane’s text to assess how debates concerning architecture and politics in interwar Germany have changed over time. It calls for papers that directly address Lane but also those that tackle the expanded field of debate since publication of her book. For example, architectural historians have especially extended the geographic purview of their analysis of German architecture in these years, pointing to a variety of diasporic architectural interventions as well as challenging the national paradigm of a coherent “German” architecture. Other kinds of aesthetic architectural traditions such as vernacular ones left out of Lane’s account have become important to the debate about politics just as a wider range of architects (including the long-overlooked role of women architects) has complicated this history. In addition, scholars who may be critical of the blending of architecture and politics are also encouraged to apply. Papers that focus on the relevance of the analytic paradigm in other periods of German architecture are also of interest.

Session Chairs: Kathleen James-Chakraborty, University College Dublin; Paul B. Jaskot, DePaul University