Thilo Hilpert about the exhibition Thilo Hilpert, November 2001. Full version from the catalog. Preface When you write, the particularly difficult lines for the beginning are always left to tackle at the end. In this way, introductions are able to tie everything together. Presumably, if it hadn't been for an encounter with certain buildings and architects on a trip to Chicago in early 2000, I might never have even arrived at the idea of an exhibition. At that time, I was still engaged in thought in my work on Modernism in post-war Germany. In addition, this year's two major Mies van der Rohe shows in New York had already been announced. In the years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, many scholars doing research at the Bauhaus in Dessau have finally called for a formal examination of Mies's work at the place where he had been the last director. This demand had never been voiced in East Germany. But after a period of intensive inquiry, the fact emerged that his reception in the West was likewise incapable of sufficiently acknowledging Mies's work in the form of a representative exhibition. Since the exhibition in 1968 at the Akademie der Künste, on the occasion of the opening of the Nationalgalerie, all the major Mies van der Rohe exhibitions in Germany have been borrowed from New York or Chicago, including the shows at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum in 1987 and at the Altes Museum Berlin in 2001. But can there really be a cultural identity when the brutal turning point, the destruction of one's own progressive culture, is rather ignored before it is considered in terms of its consequences, especially with regard to an architect who can be called the most important figure of classical Modernism to come from Germany? While the process of working out Germany's own reception of Mies did not lend itself to the public forum afforded by an exhibition, this does not mean that we move unencumbered by an inherited historical burden. Instead, it means that we live with the interpretations of others. At the same time, it has become obvious that the commendable interpretation of Mies's work, disseminated by Philip Johnson right after the war, is now threatening to exhaust itself through the repetition of well-known perspectives and facts. Perhaps the difficulties involved in organizing an exhibition on Mies van der Rohe in the country of his birth also have to do with the events surrounding the National Theater project in 1953. No exhibition can be put together without a certain core of original works. But the lack of such basic material and the oft-lamented profiteering of the big museums with works related to Mies cannot alone explain such a deficit of exhibitions. There was certainly no lack of unexplored aspects, potential subjects or fitting occasions to hinder a closer look at Mies's work. We were truly anxious that the big shows this year in New York, with all their magnificent original pieces, might include the model and the plans for the Mannheim National Theater project in 1952-53. In the end they passed them by, for they did not really fit in with the main theme of either "Mies in Berlin" (Museum of Modern Art) or "Mies in America" (Whitney Museum). These shows identify the pivotal moment in Mies's career as his emigration in 1938. It remains hard to grasp, however, why the latter show is not also coming to Berlin The preparation for the exhibition turned into a research project. It could not be overlooked that the post-war theater in Mannheim still suggested Mies's influence, even in its reversal of form, and that his design for the theater was included in every publication on Mies's work. Despite the design's outstanding quality and significance in Mies's thought, it remains oddly out of reach. In March 2000, when we were finally ready to begin the phase of concrete preparation, it was impossible to predict to what extent the exhibition would become a presentation of the new results gleaned from our research. New and previously unknown documents and references kept coming to light, until it finally became clear that the National Theater project was the most important turning point in post-war Modernism in Germany. For this reason, the exhibition and book will also serve as a report on the contradictions and tensions from which the very foundations of Germany's architecture were formed. Mies van der Rohe's design reveals him to be an architect of the avant-garde who did not stop developing with the solutions of classical Modernism. The contributions here by internationally renowned scholars clarify the currents of experimental Modernism that were no longer able to take up a central position in the climate of post-war Germany. Thilo Hilpert, November 2001. Copyright © 2002, all rights reserved.