The Drawing
Berlin, Germany
March 1933
It’s the kind of weather that catches people out. Half a degree too warm to snow, the night sky unleashes a torrent of frigid rain that falls in heavy sheets, pummeling the pavement, surging along street curbs, roaring darkly into storm drains. On the sidewalks people scatter; they rush toward their destinations, which now become the nearest dry place. A young man walking along Albrechtstrasse in the borough of Steglitz is caught up in a pack of shrieking girls retreating toward the door of a pub, shielding themselves beneath newspapers held above their heads. Moving through them is like pressing against the tide; he alone hurries not toward something, but away.
His name is Johannes Schröding; he is an architecture student at a school that just recently opened its doors in Berlin. Hat pulled low, hands jammed deep in his pockets, Johannes stalks through the icy deluge: two and a half blocks, three, three and a half. By now this nightly retreat has become routine; only the rain is different. And so there is no cause for him to expect the turn that this evening will take in five minutes’ time, in this rain, at the corner where Albrecht meets Schützenstrasse. Right now there is only the same dark frustration as always, magnified by the weather—he cannot even smoke a cigarette in this wet—and no other prospect besides increasing the distance between himself and his tiny rented room—four blocks back, now four and a half, now five—where, abandoned on his desktop, a white piece of paper sits blank.
The empty page on his desk tells two stories. The first is about the pages that came before it: trite and timid and quickly aborted. Or, painstakingly executed, meticulously exact, and still somehow wrong. In a different city six months earlier, Johannes made an attempt at a classroom assignment: a simple, rectangular, single-bedroom house with three brick walls and a fourth in glass so the garden could be seen. His professor, the school’s director, had frowned, sliding the drawing back across the table.
“Try it again.” The words were gentle and vague and crushing, and with each subsequent draft Johannes endeavored for the man to say anything else, but every time it was the same. “Try it again.” His final, quasi-passable result, in plan and exterior perspective drawings, was later propped alongside others’ efforts on an easel in the school hallway as part of a special school exhibition for city officials threatening to pull funding. On the morning of the exhibition his professor, a burning cigar in his mouth, had stood in front of Johannes’s easel, still frowning.
He came to stand at the man’s elbow. “I know it, Herr Director. Something is missing.”
The man, weighty in both stature and status, was different from other modernist architects with their cold insistence on functionalism, materialism, technology. This man conducted slabs of marble and spans of colored glass and sent the light dancing; he set interior space in motion, he liberated roofs from walls and made them float overhead. In this dim hallway he puffed impassively as if to say, If you cannot see what is missing, I cannot help you. Then he pulled his cigar from his mouth and met Johannes’s eyes.
“You have the knowledge and the skill, Schröding, but do you know how to use them?” He tapped the page with his finger. A pungent, greenish plume of smoke mingled with his words. “It’s not about the parts, but the whole; the whole is the relationship of the parts. Above everything, you must remember that life is what matters.”
He said this and nothing more. The professor turned away to open the doors to the exhibition, the acrid aroma of his cigar lingering in his wake.
But nothing—not life, not the whole or any of its parts—mattered in that exhibition. The invited panel of city councilmen, swastika pins gleaming on their lapels, took in the array of artwork—hand-designed wallpaper, bright woven textiles, typography samples, photo collages, lustrous metallic lamps, tubular steel furniture, exuberant paintings and sculpture, architectural models and sketches—and saw only blatant modernism smacking of bolshevism, which they’d suspected all along. After this, it was one-two-three: they cast their votes, the city of Dessau ceased its subsidy, and the Bauhaus was forced to close for the second time in the school’s history.
Johannes, who’d given up everything to study here, and specifically to study under this professor, was left with nothing. Not a diploma, not even a decent drawing. When a few months later the director reopened the Bauhaus as a private school of art in Berlin—a bigger city hopefully occupied by bigger things, where the Bauhaus might quietly operate undisturbed—Johannes understood he’d been given a final chance. He returned to his home town, though he was no longer welcome home. He rented the room that is now six rainy blocks behind him. He penciled Life is what matters on the wall above his desk.
But Berlin, with its burning Reichstag and sweeping arrests and Brownshirt street fights and emergency decrees dissolving basic rights and granting full legislative powers to the Reich government, was anything but quiet, and the words on Johannes’s wall served only to mystify and frighten him. Uncertainty colored his assignments, colored everything. And the blank page on his desk became both nemesis and constant companion, days into weeks into months.
This is the second story the empty page tells: that of the present. And, probably, the future. Time to quit, the page says to him in the morning. Your father was right, it says at night.
Out in the streets of Johannes’s neighborhood, it is now weather bedlam: rain drumming mercilessly on the crown of his hat, punishing his back and shoulders. He’s begun to take the rain personally. When the traffic light at Albrecht and Schützstrasse holds him up, a passing car sends a wave of frigid puddle water over the curb and his feet. And so this moment begins with him cursing, shaking out one shoe and then the other.
But then the light goes green, and Johannes looks up. Across the intersection stands a woman: the only person in Steglitz with the foresight to bring an umbrella. He doesn’t know her; after this moment he will never see her again. But when she steps from the curb, illuminated by a wide angle of streetlamp light, the way she moves across the cobblestones—differently than every other frantic thing in this downpour—arrests his attention. Beneath her umbrella, she is surrounded by dry space; she is at once secured and liberated by the most minimal of shelters. Standing at the curb in the rain, Johannes watches how the woman carries a space of freedom that displaces the chaos around her; he watches her step up onto the curb and make her way past him and disappear down the sidewalk.
Inside his mind, points illuminate and connect. Then Johannes turns and runs six blocks back through the rain.
In his room, coat and hat dripping from their hooks, he confronts the blank page. A single, hesitant stroke with his pencil; then it flies. For once, the lines are sure. In the sweep of desk lamp light, something begins to emerge: exterior walls that give way to whole sections of glass so that the interior is at once a place of refuge and a point of connection to the world outside. A space of freedom and sanctuary. All the parts relating, connecting, holding each other in balance. The words from his bedroom wall look down. Life is what matters.
The following day Johannes takes the sketch into the architectural studio, and his professor says not Try it again but instead, Go further! andthe days that follow are taken up with revisions and fine-tuning until, on a Monday night in mid-April, the drawing is finished. Johannes slips it onto the professor’s drafting table for him to find in the morning. He leaves the school building and goes back to his little rented room and climbs into bed believing that the next day will be the start of something. It will instead be the beginning of the end of everything, but there is no way he could know this.
Drifting off easily, Johannes sleeps soundly, oblivious to the workings of forces outside his control, to the fact that things are about to turn once again.
The next day, a pleasant April Tuesday, state secret police trucks roll quietly into Steglitz in the mid-morning. A telephone tip-off from a Dessau public prosecutor has informed the Berlin Gestapo—falsely—that an art school in Steglitz has been printing anti-Nazi propaganda for distribution. The trucks roll to a stop outside of an expansive, red-brick building that until just recently was an abandoned telephone factory. Men in black uniforms, rifles in hand, disembark and move swiftly past the small, unassuming white sign with black letters reading simply, bauhaus. The men fan out, moving to cover the first-floor windows and to guard any doors that let out from the side or the back. In silence they glance and gesture at one another, moving to their positions in golden, mid-morning light.
Once in place, anticipation ripples among them. The element of surprise, the catching in the act: the lead officer’s pelvis shivers at its promise. The righting of the country begins with little corrective steps like these. He waits another moment, hearing the chitter-chatter of a house sparrow from a nearby rooftop and the distant rumble of a truck from a neighboring street. Then he gives the signal, and his shoulder meets the door.
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christine beth reish 