FAÇADE
The Drawing
On the night that everything turns for him, a cold rain pounds the Berlin streets. It is too wet even to smoke, and so he just walks, hands in his coat pockets and the brim of his hat pulled low. Five blocks back, on a desk under an arc of lamp light, a blank white page waits.
When he cannot draw, he walks. He has become well acquainted with this neighborhood’s night streets these past five months.
The empty page on his desk tells two stories. The first is about what came before: pages and pages of failures. Designs presented in plan and interior perspective, painstakingly executed, exact, and somehow wrong.
“Something is missing.” These words, long unsaid for fear of rendering them true, he’d uttered while standing before a drawing he’d prepared for exhibition in the previous city. It was a design for a one-bedroom courtyard house: simple, rectangular, a freestanding wall subtly dividing the main living space, all enclosed by three exterior walls of brick, the fourth in glass so the garden could be seen. “It is wrong and I cannot tell how it is wrong.”
Looking with him at the drawing, his professor had puffed on his cigar and shrugged as if to say I cannot give you eyes to see it. The man exhaled a pungent green plume of smoke and gestured generally at the design as if the solution were self-evident. “It is not the external that is important, you see?” the professor explained. “Life is what matters.”
He did not see.
In that city the panel of judges, swastika pins on their lapels, judged the exhibition to be overtly socialist. Subsidy for the art school was pulled, forcing it to open privately and humbly in a bigger city occupied by bigger things, where it could attempt to work quietly, unnoticed, and undisturbed. The student brought his professor’s words with him and wrote them on the wall of his newly rented room. Not the external. Life is what matters. He needed only to live up to these words. The blank page subsequently became his Berlin companion.
The other story the empty page tells is what will come, or, rather, what certainly will never come. Time to quit, the page says to him in the morning. Your father was right, it says at night.
Walking now in the deluge, he flips up his collar and puts another city block between himself and the page. He has begun to take the rain personally. Dropping from the black night sky, it pummels his shoulders and drums against the pavement and rushes with wicked glee into the gutters.
At the street corner his eyes catch movement incongruous with the frenzied weather: a slow-moving form on the other side of the street. The gait is female. Under the shelter of an umbrella, this woman does not rush but strolls, straight-backed. He watches her glide toward the corner, where she emerges illuminated in the wide angle of streetlamp light. Surrounded by dry space, she is at once secure within, and liberated by, this most minimally-defined of rooms. The traffic light changes and the woman with the umbrella steps from the curb, with each stride carrying a space of freedom that displaces the chaos of the universe around her.
Unmoving, he watches her. It is in this moment that everything turns.
Back in his room, his coat and hat dripping from their hooks, his pencil flies across the blank page. He need not check himself; the lines are sure. In the sweep of light, something begins to emerge: a minimal exterior, a structure of steel and concrete alleviated by whole walls of glass so that it is at once a place of refuge and a point of connection to the infinite. He glances at the wall: Life is what matters.
In the weeks that follow he makes revision upon revision. His professor murmurs an unprecedented approximation of approval and marks the rough drafts, suggesting further refinements. One evening the drawing is at last complete. In the architectural studio he slips it onto the professor’s drafting table for the man to see the following day. He imagines the way the morning light from the generous industrial windows will pour over the page, illuminating its lines. He goes home with this image in his mind, not expecting that things are about to turn again.
Bauhaus
11 April 1933
Outside, the men clothed in black move swiftly. Silent but for the clopping of boot soles on the paved street, they approach the building, rifles in hand. This building, expansive and brick-faced, was until recently an abandoned telephone factory. It now bears at the front door a small, unassuming black sign with white letters reading simply, “Bauhaus.” Fanning out, the men surround the building, moving to cover the first-floor windows and guard any doors that may let out from the side or the back. They hurry, glance, and gesture. It is 8 a.m. on a Tuesday, a school day. They move to their positions in ordinary morning light.
Once in place, anticipation swells. The element of surprise, the catching in the act. The lead soldier’s pelvis shivers with keenness. He waits, hearing the chirp of a house sparrow from a nearby rooftop and the distant rumble of a truck from a neighboring street. At the signal, his shoulder meets the door.
Johannes
Inside, from the hallway, he watches her. She stands in the architectural studio at the drafting table, looking at his drawing. Backlit by an industrial window filled with morning light, she stands not more than 15 feet away from him, an apparition he dare not believe. A wave of black hair sweeps forward, hiding her profile as she bends toward the page. Johannes steps into the studio.
Still wearing her coat and hat from wherever it is she has come, Britte clutches both her gloves in the palm of one hand, the bare fingers of the other reaching toward the drawing. He watches as her fingertips graze its lines, feeling their way along the weeks of the design’s development, touching with this line a decision, and that one, a breakthrough. Her touch sweeps through the building’s open interior to the exterior walls of glass, where containment meets infinity. He wants to kiss those fingers. Then her head turns, and she, no apparition, looks back at him.
“Johannes,” she says, as if they’d spoken yesterday. She pats the drawing emphatically, and, pushing the door closed behind him, he crosses the room to stand with her.
“I’m reminded of Schiller,” she says, her eyes back on the drawing. “What you’ve done here—balancing the material and the spatial, resolving extremes—it makes me think of what Schiller said, that art should be able ‘to mediate between freedom and restraint, reason and emotion, the individual and the group.’ Look what you have done here.”
He covers her hand with his, squeezing it and the soft gloves in its grip.
“You vanish for weeks,” he says, smiling gently, “and you want to speak to me of Schiller?”
Her glance drops to their hands. He can see the memory in her face.
“It was only a dance,” he says to her. “One dance. I don’t even remember her name.”
Britte straightens and withdraws her hand, lifting her eyes back to his. “Who you choose to dance with is none of my business.”
It is then that the studio door explodes open and a man in a black uniform raises his gun.
Mies
“Stop there,” the sentry guarding the entrance says.
“This is my building,” Mies answers. “Why do you have it surrounded?”
“You are Ludwig Mies van der Rohe?”
“Yes. The director of this school and the owner of this building. I have a right to go in.”
A glitter appears in the sentry’s eyes as he steps aside.
Mies hesitates at the open door of the Bauhaus, the hallway infested now with Gestapo. The sentry raises his brows at him, and Mies clears his throat and steps across the threshold.
“This is my office,” Mies tells the officer standing behind his desk. “I demand to know what is going on here.”
The officer straightens, his face impassive. “It is the Dessau Attorney General who demands it,” he says. “The mayor of Dessau is under investigation for suspicion of Communist activity. Your school and Mayor Hesse were closely aligned before the Bauhaus relocated from Dessau, isn’t that so, Herr Professor? We have been summoned to conduct a search.”
“A search? Of an art school?”
“Not just any art school.” The officer eyes him evenly, a twitch pulling the corner of his mouth.
“There is nothing to find here.”
“Then I suppose you won’t mind us having a look.”
Mies stands motionless for a moment, holding the officer’s eyes with his own. Then he steps into the hall, turning, his arms gesturing wide.
“Open everything for inspection,” Mies calls. “Open everything.”
Britte
It is an unreal moment. His hands raised, Johannes stands between her and the gunman. A second officer enters the studio, peering first at Johannes and then at her, and Britte’s own hands lift. The man’s eyes on hers are sharp but not penetrating; his stare is meant only to intimidate. He makes his way past them to Mies’s teaching desk in the corner of the room, where the officer rifles through a stack of papers on the desktop and then yanks open drawers, pawing through their contents before slamming them closed, one after the other. As the man digs, Britte steals a glance at Johannes. He shakes his head. Just stay still.
The officer does the same with the file cabinet, digging and yanking until the last drawer is slammed and sketches and syllabi lay scattered on the floor. The man glances at the officer with the gun. A ghost of uncertainty flits between them, and the gunman’s rifle lowers a centimeter. The officer’s eyes shift back to Britte and Johannes.
“Identification!” he barks. Snapping his fingers twice and gesturing at them, he approaches, thrusting out an expectant hand. Britte dips to the purse at her feet and pulls her papers from her wallet. She stands to see Johannes slap his pockets and come up empty.
The officer plucks the papers from her hand and makes a show of looking at them and then at her face before shoving the pages back at her.
“Nothing?” he says to Johannes, and then gestures at the man at the door, who fully lowers his gun and advances, seizing Johannes’s arm with such force a gasp escapes Britte’s throat. In the blackshirt’s grip, Johannes chances a look at her: a calm face, another nearly imperceptible shake of his head. This will amount to nothing. Don’t be afraid.
All at once he is led away through the door, the back of his blond head and lean familiar frame disappearing into the hall, and she is left thinking of everything she might have said, including that the dance, the girl, mean nothing. It is true enough.
Britte darts her eyes back to the other officer, finding him looking at Johannes's drawing. As she herself had done, he touches its lines. His finger sweeps over the volumes of space and up the walls that define them, up to draw laterally along the long, flat line of the building’s roof. Here the man’s expression darkens, and Britte can see that he is captivated not by beauty and simplicity, not by ingenuity, but only by the bald display of a modern style, which to this officer’s mind is not just un-German, but Communistic. The officer snatches his finger from the page.
His hard eyes meet hers, frighteningly aloof. This is only the beginning, they say. Then the man blinks and without a word crosses the studio and disappears into the hall. His retreating footsteps echo.
With trembling fingers Britte reaches for Johannes’s drawing. Folding it, she slips the drawing into her pocketbook.