Volker M. Welter – författare

Ernst L. Freud (1892–1970) was a son of Sigmund Freud and the father of painter Lucian Freud and the late Sir Clement Freud, politician and broadcaster. After his studies in Munich and Vienna, where he and his friend Richard Neutra attended Adolf Loos’s private Bauschule, Freud practiced in Berlin and, after 1933, in London. Even though his work focused on domestic architecture and interiors, Freud was possibly the first architect to design psychoanalytical consulting rooms—including the customary couches—a subject dealt with here for the first time. By interweaving an account of Freud’s professional and personal life in Vienna, Berlin, and London with a critical discussion of selected examples of his domestic architecture, interior designs, and psychoanalytic consulting rooms, the author offers a rich tapestry of Ernst L. Freud’s world. His clients constituted a “Who’s Who” of the Jewish and non-Jewish bourgeoisie in 1920s Berlin and later in London, among them the S. Fischer publisher family, Melanie Klein, Ernest Jones, the Spenders, and Julian Huxley. While moving within a social class known for its cultural and avant-garde activities, Freud refrained from spatial, formal, or technological experiments. Instead, he focused on creating modern homes for his bourgeois clients.

The battle in architecture between the internationalist voices of modernism and the localized resistance, which favored traditional technologies and regional precedents, reflected in microcosm the violent and complex histories of twentieth-century Germany. The chapters in this book span the years from 1902 to 1991 and interrogate the ways in which architecture constructed and reconstructed these histories, with a primary focus on those voices that were opposed to the dogmas of modernism. All translated into English for the first time, the chapters reflect the changing eras and contours of the German nation. They were written in the German Empire (1871–1918); the Weimar Republic (1918–1933); the Third Reich (1933–1945); the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), which both existed from 1949 to 1990; and, finally, the reunified Germany that came into being in 1990 when the former GDR and the reunified Berlin joined the Federal Republic of Germany.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Art in Translation.

The battle in architecture between the internationalist voices of modernism and the localized resistance, which favored traditional technologies and regional precedents, reflected in microcosm the violent and complex histories of twentieth-century Germany. The chapters in this book span the years from 1902 to 1991 and interrogate the ways in which architecture constructed and reconstructed these histories, with a primary focus on those voices that were opposed to the dogmas of modernism. All translated into English for the first time, the chapters reflect the changing eras and contours of the German nation. They were written in the German Empire (1871–1918); the Weimar Republic (1918–1933); the Third Reich (1933–1945); the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic (GDR), which both existed from 1949 to 1990; and, finally, the reunified Germany that came into being in 1990 when the former GDR and the reunified Berlin joined the Federal Republic of Germany.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Art in Translation.