Werner Hegemann

Hegemann was the son of Ottmar Hegemann (1839-1900), a manufacturer in Mannheim, and Elise Caroline Friedrich Vorster (1846-1911), daughter of Julius Vorster, a founder of Chemische Fabrik Kalk in Cologne. After graduating from Gymnasium Schloss Plön in 1901, he began college studies in Berlin; studied art history and economics in Paris; economics at the University of Pennsylvania (1904-05) and in Strasbourg, and in 1908 completed his doctorate in economics at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.[1] In 1905 he married Alice Hesse (1882-1976) in Berlin. The couple had one child, Ellis, in 1906. After obtaining his Ph.D in 1908, Hegemann returned to the United States (with his wife and child) and worked as a Philadelphia housing inspector. In 1909 he was in Boston, working with the Boston-1915 Movement, a five-year plan to develop and improve the Boston area.

Back in Berlin in 1910 Hegemann was General Secretary of the Universal City Planning Exhibition held in Berlin in May and June of that year.[2] The exhibition aroused great interest and was reprised in refocused form in Düsseldorf; Hegemann wrote an article about it for a general audience and a two-volume official book.[3] These city planning exhibitions were the first of their kind: Hegemann was in the right place at the right time to play a formative role in the early development of city planning as a profession.

In 1912 Hegemann accepted an invitation from Frederic C. Howe, Director of the People's Institute in New York, to give lectures on city planning in over 20 American cities.[4][5] He impressed his American hosts by providing commentary tailored to each city visited, and emphasizing infrastructure and function over appearance. He urged American planners not to use great European cities like Paris and Berlin as models, because they were built around over-crowded residential centers without regard for transportation. In Hegemann's view, European cities were dazzling but congested; he stressed the need for healthful, enjoyable residences and efficient transportation routes. When the tour ended in California, Hegemann bought a motorcar, learned to drive, and toured the west coast up to Seattle. The municipalities of Oakland and Berkeley then engaged him to prepare a comprehensive planning report, published in 1915 as the Report on a City Plan for the Municipalities of Oakland & Berkeley. Hegemann's report developed a hierarchy of planning areas and called for the cooperation of urban groups to steer urban development, encouraging the turn from inner-city embellishment to optimizing urban functions. In early 1914 Hegemann embarked by ship on a return voyage to Germany via the Pacific, in order to visit the Far East and Australia. In Australia that July he boarded a German flagged ship for the final leg of the journey home. World War I broke out when the ship was near the entrance to the Red Sea on the East coast of Africa, and it dodged English warships for several weeks before being sequestered for months off the coast of Mozambique. In April 1915 Hegemann stowed-away on a Norwegian vessel bound for the United States, where he spent the duration of the war. In 1916, while in the U.S., he was divorced from Alice Hesse.

Hegemann remained in the United States throughout World War I, and as the War ended was deeply involved in work and writing another book. Based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin he established "Hegemann & Peets," a firm specializing in city and suburban planning, with landscape architect Elbert Peets.[6] The firm designed the Washington Highlands Historic District, and Wyomissing Park, a "Modern Garden Suburb" in Reading, Pennsylvania. In 1918, visiting his friend Fiske Kimball at the University of Michigan, Hegemann met Ida Belle Guthe, daughter of Karl Eugen Guthe. In 1920 the couple married at the bride's home in Ann Arbor, Michigan. In 1921 Hegemann completed work on The American Vitruvius: An Architects' Handbook of Civic Art with Elbert Peets, a "thesaurus" of civic art for architects, commenting on about 1200 examples of the discipline (published in 1922).

Despite nearly a decade of professional work followed by marriage in the United States, Hegemann had no plans to remain there: he wished to make his home in Germany. In October 1921 Hegemann and his new bride left New York City on a steamer for Italy. After eight months in Italy, in 1922 the couple settled in Germany. Hegemann designed and built a home in Nikolassee, outside of Berlin. He became editor of Wasmuths Monatshefte für Baukunst, published by Ernst Wasmuth Verlag, known for its international coverage of architecture and Hegemann's incisive critiques. With a literary-polemical style of criticism that stood out sharply from the manifesto style of the moderns, Hegemann opposed formal modernism and academic traditions and favored a moderate modernity. He encouraged people with different views to write to the journal, and facilitated debates among schools of architectural thought.

During the late 1920s Hegemann published two historical books debunking German heroes: Fredericus (published in Germany in 1926 with an English translation in 1929), and Napoleon, or Prostration Before the Hero (published in Germany in 1927 with an English translation in 1931). Both books challenged the popular German perception at the time of Frederick the Great and Napoleon as great leaders, romanticized and celebrated for their military successes and nation building. In his Forward to the English Fredericus, Hegemann denounced Frederick the Great as a "most obnoxious figure," and wrote that "The present book opposes the overpowering and continuously increasing mass of literature in praise of the 'Great King.'" In Napoleon the emperor is described as a "butcher" whose Napoleonic Wars produced "rivers of blood," "untold human sacrifice," and four million deaths. These volumes and other writings clearly set-forth Hegemann's prescient concern about German lauding of strong national leaders. In 1930 he published the work for which he may be best remembered: Das steinerne Berlin: Geschichte der Grössten Mietkasernenstadt der Welt (Stony Berlin: History of the Largest Tenement City in the World), combining political and architectural criticism in a review of Berlin's architectural history. In the introduction he wrote, "It is a German illusion to believe in the possibility of creating an intellectual capital as long as the so-called educated people are almost proud of their inadequate understanding of urban planning."[7] In 1931 he made a lecture tour through South America, visiting Argentina, where he attended a local convention on urban planning at Mar del Plata. Hegemann gave a lecture criticising European aesthetics, patterns and planning of this resort city.[8] Back to Germany, he devoted himself increasingly to warnings against the National Socialists in a series of political articles.

In February 1933, a few weeks after Hitler took power and contemporaneously with the Reichstag Fire, Hegemann published Entlarvte Geschichte ("Unmasked History"), a book critically and sarcastically questioning the origins of and role models for the Nazi Party. He left Germany on the evening before publication. Hegemann exercised irony in dedicating the book to Adolf Hitler, causing Nazi bookstores to promote it for three weeks before discovering the ruse (and banning the book). In the May, 1933 Nazi book burnings he was denounced as an "Historical Forger," with his books burned as the Nazis proclaimed, "Against the falsification of our history and disparagement of its great figures! For reverence for our past!" [9] After several months in Geneva and France, Hegemann was invited by Alvin Johnson to teach urban planning at The New School for Social Research in New York City beginning in November 1933.[10] That October Hegemann left Europe for the United States with his wife and four young children. He was one of many intellectuals essentially exiled from Germany due to Nazi hostility and persecution. Upon arriving in New York City on November 4, 1933 Hegemann opined that the German people would not tolerate Hitler for more than two more years. He began lecturing at the New School and organizing assistance for intellectuals and scholars detained by the Nazis in Germany, such as Carl von Ossietzky, another German critic of Hitler, who was arrested and imprisoned by the Nazi's in the same month that Hegemann left Germany. He also wrote in support of Roosevelt's New Deal. In 1935 Hegemann began teaching at Columbia University.[11] In 1934 the Nazis seized Hegemann's house in Nikolassee, and in 1938 revoked his doctorate.

Hegemann saw the rise of Hitler in Germany as emerging from a historical context of Germans idealizing strong, militaristic nationalists -- a phenomenon that he had written about repeatedly during the years in which Hitler rose to power. Characteristically overstating the point, he criticized a century or more of "craving for submission" by German professors, bureaucrats and professionals, and observed that if Hitler ever decided to stop enslaving the nation, he would be "overwhelmed by an irresistible rush into ever deeper submission" by those with "collusive attitudes toward war-hungry German nationalism." Similarly, in 1934 Hegemann viewed the persecution of Jews in Germany as "in conformity with Old Prussian tradition" of antisemitism, and as consistent with the German aristocracy's disregard for "intellect and higher culture." Writing from the perspective of 1934, Hegemann recognized in Hitler a fanatic, but did not believe he could be taken seriously for long. Hegemann never imagined that five years later Hitler would seize total control of Germany and begin a world war resulting in the deaths of over 35 million people.

Hegemann's early years in the United States, along with his strong education and broad interests, made him an intermediary between city planners and architects throughout Europe and on both sides of the Atlantic. In particular, his The American Vitruvius refers extensively to European design, taking many examples from his book on the Berlin 1910 exhibition, while in Amerikanische Architektur und Stadtbaukunst he informs German architects of American solutions.[12] However, his emphasis on urban planning rather than purely formal considerations and possibly his having not been present during the development in Europe of the Modern Movement in architecture put him at odds with modernists. For example, in 1929 he was forced to retract an accusation that Martin Wagner's primary activity as chief of city planning for Berlin was funneling architectural commissions to extremist friends,[13] and he labeled Le Corbusier's Ville Contemporaine project for transforming Paris "only vieux jeu" (old hat), sarcastically predicting that it was likely to be realized,

[not] because [the skyscrapers] are desirable, healthy, beautiful, and reasonable from the perspective of urban planning but because they are theatrical, romantic, unreasonable, and generally harmful, and because it is part of the money-making activities of a metropolis, in what is literally the world's most international city, Paris, to serve the need for sensation and the vices of native and imported fools.[14]

In New York in early 1936, Hegemann became ill, first diagnosed with Sciatica and then hospitalized with apparent pneumonia.[15] His illness developed during a time of great stress, as he worked to support his family after having to leave all his assets behind in Germany. While bed-ridden at Doctors Hospital (Manhattan) he worked on his last book, the three-volume City Planning, Housing, intended to supplement and update The American Vitruvius. Eventually completed by two co-editors, the last volume appeared in 1938.[16][17] Hegemann died on April 12 1936, at age 55. The treating doctor opined that the cause of death was tuberculous meningitis.

• Der Städtebau nach den Ergebnissen der Allgemeinen Städtebau-Ausstellung in Berlin, nebst einem anhang: Die Internationale Städtebau-Ausstellung in Düsseldorf; 600 wiedergaben des Bilder- und Planmaterials der beiden Ausstellungen, mit Förderung durch die königlichen preussischen Ministerien des Inneren, des Handels und der öffentlichen Arbeiten, sowie durch die Städte Berlin, Charlottenburg, Rixdorf, Schöneberg, Wilmersdorf, Potsdam, Spandau, Lichtenberg und Düsseldorf. Herausgegeben im Auftrage der Arbeitsausschüsse von Dr. Werner Hegemann, Generalsekretär der Städtebau-Ausstellungen in Berlin und Düsseldorf. 2 vols. Berlin: Wasmuth, 1911, 1913. (in German)
• The American Vitruvius: An Architects' Handbook of Civic Art, with Elbert Peets, New York: Architectural Book Publishing, 1922.
• Fridericus; oder Das Königsopfer, J. Hegner, Germany 1924
• Napoleon: oder Kniefall vor dem Heros, J. Hegner, Germany 1927
• Amerikanische Architektur und Stadtbaukunst: ein Überblick über den heutigen Stand der amerikanischen Baukunst in ihrer Beziehung zum Städtebau. Berlin: Wasmuth, 1925. (in German)
• Das Steinerne Berlin: Geschichte der grössten Mietkasernenstadt der Welt. Berlin: Kiepenhauer, 1930. (in German)
• Der Gerettete Christus, 1928 (Translated from the German by Gerald Griffin as Christ Rescued, 1933).
• Mar del Plata: El Balneario y El Urbanismo Moderno. Mar del Plata, 1931. (in Spanish)[8]
• Entlarvte Geschichte. Aus Nacht zum Licht. Von Arminius bis Hitler. Leipzig: Hegner, 1933. (in German)
• City planning, Housing. 3 vols. Vols. 2 and 3 with William W. Forster and Robert C. Weinberg. New York: Architectural Book Publishing, 1936–38. OCLC 837328

• Caroline Flick, Werner Hegemann (1881–1936): Stadtplanung, Architektur, Politik: ein Arbeitsleben in Europa und den USA. Munich: Saur, 2005 (in German)
• Christiane Crasemann Collins, Werner Hegemann and the Search for Universal Urbanism, New York: Norton, 2005.

• Works by or about Werner Hegemann at Internet Archive