(1) The emergence of theories of architectural nationalism in Germany during the early nineteenth century was contingent upon the rise of historical consciousness. During the preceding decades of the late Enlightenment, a shift of the discourse on reason to the arena of history gradually removed the air of authority and transcendence long accorded to Roman antiquity. It allowed previously ordinary or forgotten moments of the past (such as the Middle Ages or classical Greece) to contest for the patina of legitimacy as foundations of architectural knowledge. Historical thinking also reoriented the idea of recovery and rebirth -- long integral to Western architectural thought -- from universal and timeless notions to the terms of national progress and particulars. There can also be no doubt that the Napoleonic domination of Germany energized a profound desire for liberation from French political as well as cultural rule, focussing German attention on their self-formation (Bildung) as a nation. Yet, since historicism, as was the case with Enlightenment classicism, was a form of reflection on foundations and origins, its re- reading as nationalism inclined eventually toward absolute particularity. If originally produced as resistance to Enlightenment uniformity, nationalism later mimicked exclusionary practices.

(2) The ideological roots of German architectural nationalism extend back to Goethe's On German Architecture (1770), but its articulation by architectural theorists first forcefully emerged in the 1820s debate between Heinrich Huebsch and Alois Hirt ^Ref.1. Huebsch's book On Greek Architecture (1822) provided a theoretical basis for architectural nationalism by systematically criticizing Hirt's treatise Architecture According to the Principles of the Ancients (1809). Here Huebsch opposed Hirt's reorientation of the post-Roman treatise tradition to the recently discovered monuments of Greece. Although Hirt was moved by historical and archaeological investigations to recover architectural truth in a different set of origins than had customarily been the case, Huebsch urged that German architecture do away altogether with the idea of return to any external set of foundations. He rejected the continued construction of architectural authority upon a set of deductive movements from an exterior and imagined center, and proposed instead an inductive maneuver from the particular realities of contemporary existence in the native land. In contrast to Hirtian classicism, Huebsch's nationalism was distinguished not only by its conflict-laden demarcation of the historical parameters of architectural knowledge, but more fundamentally, in its strategy of resistance to universals. It sought its reason, by contrast, in an ideal of interiorization which moves from particular to particular.

(3) The debate between Huebsch and Hirt set the stage for a nineteenth century discourse on the question of architectural nationalism around a series of bipolar opposites: local v. international, materialism versus canonic rules, vernacular versus high, crafts versus art, practical versus intellectual ^Ref.2. Hirt's international stance viewed Greek architecture as the epitome of universal truth. His influential treatise brought together rationalist and empiricist approaches of the eighteenth century in an effort to derive an architecture that is wholly griechisch-roemisch: that is to say, an architecture that follows a set of rules which themselves express the true principles and sources of Mediterranean classicism. Like his predecessors, Hirt's notion of beauty in architecture revolved around unchanging regulative rules: proportions; symmetry; eurhythmy; simplicity of form; materials and mass; decoration. His advance from the classical treatise tradition consisted solely in his intention to clarify these rules by expanded empirical means: the study of an Erkenntnisquelle (set of sources of knowledge) constituting ancient architecture that utilized (and corrected) Vitruvius, the up-to-date corpus of Roman monuments, and most importantly, the now-dominant Greek monuments themselves. Arguing an early form of universal historicism, Hirt propounded to abstract the essence - and not the superfluous and merely particular - from the historical mass of antiquity. As he wrote, chaos arises when design does not proceed from such a "permanent foundation" (feste Begründung) ^Ref.3. What Hirt clearly meant by this foundation, however, was a set of sources which strictly excluded the growing popularity of the Middle Ages among German intellectuals.

(4) Quite to the contrary, Huebsch promoted national or differential historicism. He saw the Greeks foremost as national designers, if by nationalism is understood an adherence to immediate and concrete conditions and not theoretically- fabricated connections. It is no wonder, then, that Huebsch's subsequent medieval nationalism arose first from the powerful tradition of understanding Greece for German purposes. As was the experience with the Greek Revival of Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Gilly, J.J. Winckelmann and Friedrich Weinbrenner, the awareness of Germanic nationalism emerged from an imitation of a universal, an empirical study of Greeks as the basis for the specific realization of German national strengths, allowing ironically Greeks to become a universal example of particularized nationalism. Deploring Hirt's reliance upon custom for custom's sake (his reliance on erlernten Regeln and allgemeinen Pruefungsatz), Hübsch therefore rejected design theorizing from a priori classical rules. Rather, design logic must proceed inductively from individual observations of, and actions toward, Germanic culture and nature.

(5) Over the past two centuries, the conception of Germanness -- leading to German nationalism -- has been conditioned by Germany's unique historical situation in Europe. Germany was the birthplace of the Reformation, where Martin Luther taught that man is a passive receptacle of God's Grace. All knowledge, for Luther, is given to man in his state of despair and awareness of his own impotence. At least in his early years, Luther rejected the heritage of Aristotelian reason and scholasticism as irrelevant to true knowledge ^Ref.4. What this means is that the new German form of Christianity embodied an aversion to both the Catholicism of France and Italy as well as to the empirical traditions of England. As a consequence of this hostility, in the following centuries Germany was especially susceptible to the idea that it possessed a uniquely non-rational spirituality. This attitude led to later appeals on the part of German nationalists to primitive Christianity and even primitive Germany before it was Christianized and Romanized.

(6) During the latter third of the eighteenth century, the Sturm und Drang writer, Johann Gottfried Herder, approached Germanness as a state of existence in opposition to French reason. Herder's writings on language and philosophy undertook to reverse Wolffian metaphysics and its embodiment of the Cartesian split between thought and matter. Stressing knowledge as the unmediated perception of active organic forces, it became of overriding importance for Herder to unite spirit (and thought) with matter (and craft). Given the consequent need for Germans to know themselves better and not foreign concepts of reason, Herder became intoxicated by a belief in the unity provided by German religion, language, folk customs, agriculture, and climate. Towards 1800, Herder's indiscriminate syntheses were continued by the writings of romantic writers on medieval towns and the countryside of the Rhineland. Among the romantics, Herder's insistence on creative power was further wedded to the national landscape and its so-called imaginative expressions. As Friedrich Schlegel wrote in "Principles of Gothic Architecture" (1804-05), all great artistic cultures continue their art within the well-defined limits of their national spirit: Greek architecture in Germany is a soulless imitation ^Ref.5.

(7) Like Herder and the romantics, Huebsch sought a national foundation for architecture in the commonplace and immediate relationships that take place between a people and its land. In this early phase of German nationalism, under the influence of Enlightenment historicism, nationalities were considered living forces, always changing and never rigid. Like Herder and the playwright C. M. Wieland, Huebsch's conception of the material and spiritual elements of Germany was progressively nationalist, allowing for transformation toward a rational and cosmopolitan future. In On Greek Architecture ^Ref.6, and Defense of Greek Architecture against A. Hirt (1824), Huebsch established this progressive theory of architectural particularity in a manner that recalls the late eighteenth-century writer Justus Moeser. Earlier, Moeser had "reformed German historiography by changing the emphasis from kings and heroes and battles to people, institutions, and the influence of the law upon the daily life" ^Ref.7. Now, Huebsch challenged Hirt's theory of Greek heroism as irrelevant to contemporary and ordinary German building traditions.

(8) Central to Huebsch's critique was his contention that Vitruvius and the long tradition of interpretations which followed De Architectura were incorrect. Operating in the wake of nineteenth century scientific materialism, Huebsch regarded the Vitruvian text as antiquated as Aristotelianism, characterized by errors in both its descriptions of architectural statics and observations on the principles of artistic ornament. He portrayed Hirt as a latter-day Vitruvius, an antiquarian scholar concerned with outmoded static rules and ornamental elements to the utter neglect of contemporary building realities. Whereas Hirt sought to accommodate the treatise tradition to modern notions of history, Huebsch sought its complete rejection.

(9) In its place Huebsch envisioned a new science of building based on perception and work, on reflective and active responses to local (i.e., national) conditions. To this end, he insisted that architecture renounce closed systems based on external references for open systems which related to internal national conditions. All elements of architecture, such as much-debated column order, would take on meaning exclusively through social needs and natural tectonic potentialities. Thus, if Huebsch admitted that columns were a universal condition of trabeated structural systems, he also stated that they should not be granted pervasive formal qualities or usage. Crucial to Hirt's treatise had been the contention that the Greek columnar orders constituted a pervasive and necessary formal essence. Hirt's theory of Hellenic classicism was built upon the notion that all architectural evolution proceeds in a unilinear movement from wooden to stone construction. What is more, Hirt claimed that all decoration in the perfected Greek stone Temple of the Fifth Century B.C., from basic forms to the most precise details, was an exact imitation of earlier wooden constructive details, and, even further, morphologies of the forest. Accordingly, the ornamental vocabulary of classicism possessed eternal meaning, constituting the great artistic commentary on the equally noble historical advance of architectural construction.

(10) Huebsch countered Hirt's theory with his own claim that architecture always follows action and thought in science and religion: not aesthetic rule and linear historical evolution. For these reasons, Huebsch believed that the specific morphology and ornament of Greek columns relate only to their own culture, ideology, and natural environment; and do so only in their own historical time. Integral to Huebsch's resistant nationalism was his understanding that history was both differential and progressive. This attitude led him to contradict Hirt's dictum that two exclusive traditions dominate all architecture: stone and wood, resistance and plasticity. To Huebsch, architectural history possessed no central action which moves between countries as new peoples imitate older ones, or as stone traditions replace earlier wooden habits. Rather, architecture develops individually in different lands according to the active demands of local climate, religion, materials, and needs. Building in wood and stone, therefore, may develop together and are by no means necessarily exclusive or successive. For instance, in lands possessing adequate quantities of both wood and stone (i.e., the presence of wooden roof construction in the stone temples of Greece) Huebsch found mixed building methods (Bauart). Likewise, how could Hirt account for the evolution of the round Egyptian column (like that of the Greeks) in a country utterly lacking in forests and presumably built ancestors in wood?

(11) Huebsch's attack on the Vitruvian and Hirtian theory of imitation from wood encouraged looking in an extreme other direction for the sources of ornament: toward tectonic relationships. As he wrote, the dominant Greek artistic forms of the stone temple do not imitate their previous wooden character: but rather that which is technical -- "das Technische zu schmücken" ^Ref.8. In substituting a new principle for static imitation, Hübsch proposed the active realization of economic purpose and the fulfillment of Festigkeit (solidity):

"economic purpose is the fundamental purpose of the existence of every building. Solidity gives it the possibility of such existence and requires the correct construction. Construction, finally, is the creation and connection of the elements of building according to the laws of statics and the properties of materials"^Ref.9.

(12) Unlike Hirt, whose theory implied a theory of imitation for ornament as well as a slavish copying of structure from a universal center, Huebsch argued that forms must emerge from "the closest purpose" (dem naechsten Zweck) in contemporary society ^Ref.10. Not from the Roman tradition of imitation, Vitruvian concepts of beauty, regularity, and symmetry is architecture is made into decoration. Rather, forms of architectural members, such as the column, result from static relations and the close adherence of architects to the needs of national peoples.

(13) In his response to Huebsch's criticism -- Heinrich Huebsch, On Greek Architecture (1823) -- Hirt pointed out that Huebsch's theory implied a level of practicality which would end up destroying architecture's elevated status as an intellectual discipline. Huebsch, wrote Hirt, was a base and common architect who lacked a system and relied instead upon particular observations ^Ref.11. Drawing completely different conclusions from historicism than Huebsch, Hirt grasped that historical depth now mandated that architectural theorists study the emergence of a style over the long duration, the process by which buildings are gradually refined, ennobled, and brought to a state of perfection ^Ref.12. Accordingly, by consulting "a series of excellent and educated talents," located through the strata of classical antiquity, one learns a system from history ^Ref.13. But, we must ask at this point whether Huebsch opposed norms and rules altogether. After all, what constituted Zweck and pure utility for him if not a new system of norms? Hirt attempted to refine notions of veracity through historical reference to an ever-expanding corpus of classical particulars. Huebsch explicated nationalism in terms of a set of historical particulars. What differed was not the urge toward a set of origins and foundations for architecture, but rather, the different geographical and temporal space from which these would be drawn.

(14) In the short span between his book on Greek architecture and his most famous text, In Which Style Should We Build? (1828), Huebsch moved from early nationalism and its immersion in particulars to mature nationalism and its reabsorption of the particularized individual act into the centrism of the nation state. Here, although his architectural theory conceived building as a series of rational actions toward a functional set of programmatic aims, Huebsch sought a new centering of architecture in the Romanesque style (Rundbogenstil). As Hirt had made the column the embodiment of Greek universal design, Huebsch adopted the round arch as the essence of Germanic building. A historicist at heart, he surmised that if the Greek style is not appropriate for Germany then another style must be found which is appropriate to the northern latitudes and its practical building traditions and understandable by the common people ^Ref.14. Seeking to focus architectural consciousness in the German landscape, Huebsch's nationalism was conceived foremost as an act of cultural rehabilitation. This desire to re-center German architecture from the Latin world to the German national landscape was dramatized by many of his nationalist successors in the 1830s and 1840s (e.g., Rudolf Wiegmann, Carl Albert Rosenthal, August Reichensperger) who saw in the German state a massive individual spirit with its own life-principles ^Ref.15. In the development of conservative German nationalism during the second half of the century and its search for the germ of a German spirit, religious values and traditional customs increasingly replaced tectonic notions.

(15) As was even the case with Huebsch's criticism of international classicism, the oppressiveness of origins toward difference increased with the fuller knowledge of those origins. The more deeply German nationalists probed into the particulars of Germanic essence, the more they obscured Hübsch's original idea of Zweck, and, in an equally important sense, the acceptance of cosmopolitan architecture. Over time, the new architectural nationalism of the nineteenth century developed an ethnocentrism in which the primacy of the people (Volk) had much in common with the centering metaphysics of classicism. We saw that at first Huebsch was a proto-nationalist, since he built his particulars without a clear idea of what the rational universal will be. Later, his idea of origins in the Rundbogenstil, the flight from subjugation to freedom, sprang from a narrower view of national essence to which it was committed by virtue of its foundational outlook.

(16) Given its striving for an absolute grounding in particulars, nationalism (as a form of historicism) demonstrates an extraordinary ability to appear on different ideological fronts. Both a means of resistance and repression, nationalism re-creates for the modern consciousness both the ideals of individual and communal freedom and an oppressive regime as dictated by its imagined return to origins.

REFERENCES

Ref.1: See Barry Bergdoll, "Archaeology versus History: Heinrich Huebsch's Critique of Neoclassicism and the Beginnings of Historicism in German Architectural Theory," The Oxford Art Journal 5, no. 2 (1983), pp. 3-12.

Ref.2: Heinrich Huebsch, Vertheidigung der griechischen Architektur gegen A. Hirt (Heidelberg: Mohr, 1824), p. 25.

Ref.3: Alois Hirt, Die Baukunst nach den Grundsaetzen der Alten (Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1809), p. iv.

Ref.4: Lewis White Beck, Early German Philosophy: Kant and his Predecessors (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 93-99.

Ref.5: Friedrich Schlegel, The Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works, trans. E. J. Millington (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1849), p. 156.

Ref.6: Heinrich Huebsch, Ueber griechische Architektur, 2nd ed. (Heidelberg: Akademische Buchhandlung von J. C. B. Mohr, 1824).

Ref.7: Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in its Origins and Background (New York: Macmillan, 1961), p. 423.

Ref.8: Huebsch, Ueber griechische Architektur, p. 77.

Ref.9: Ibid., p. 17.

Ref.10: Ibid., p. 34.

Ref.11: Alois Hirt, Heinrich Huebsch, Ueber griechische Baukunst (Berlin: Ferdinand Duemmler, 1823), p. 3.

Ref.12: Hirt, Heinrich Huebsch, Ueber griechische Baukunst, p. 24.

Ref.13: Ibid., p. 6.

Ref.14: Heinrich Huebsch, In Welchem Style sollen wir bauen? (Karlsruhe: Fr. Mueller'schen, 1828), p. 52.

Ref.15: See Friedrich Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State, trans. Robert B. Kimber (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 109-111.

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This article was adapted from a paper read in April 1993 before the Annual Meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians, Charleston, South Carolina.