The Drawing
Berlin, Germany
March 1933
It is half a degree too warm to snow. When the night clouds fill to capacity and the Berlin sky opens, what’s unleashed upon the city is a torrent of frigid rain.
It is the kind of weather that catches people out: pavement-pummeling rainfall that immediately surges along street curbs and roars darkly into storm drains. Across the 20 boroughs people scatter, their destinations becoming the nearest dry place. A pack of shrieking young women in Steglitz scurries toward the door of a pub on Albrechtstrasse, catching within itself a young man attempting to move in the opposite direction. For a long moment he is forced to press against this giggling tide—elbows and lips and fragrant hair. The women disappear inside the pub. The young man is free to resume his brisk stride. Like other Berliners caught in the deluge, he moves with purpose. Unlike them, he heads toward no particular place. Only away.
Two and a half blocks, then three, then three and a half. He walks with his hat pulled low, his hands jammed deep in his pockets. His name is Johannes Schröding. He is an architecture student at a school that only recently closed its doors in one city and reopened them in this one. This retreat he is making is the same as the night before, and many nights before that. By now it is practically routine; only the rain is different. Because of this there is no cause for Johannes to expect any variation in outcome; nor can he in any way anticipate the coming turn this particular 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). There is only the same singular prospect of 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. Pages of trite, timid lines that were quickly aborted. Or, pages that were painstakingly executed, meticulously exact, and still somehow wrong. Six months ago in the other city (Dessau) there was a classroom assignment: a simple, rectangular, single-bedroom house with three brick walls and a fourth in glass so the garden could be seen. Draft after draft, his drawings for this assignment had elicited from his professor only a frown and a vague and crushing critique. Try it again. The final version, shown in plan and exterior perspective, mysteriously found itself on display alongside his schoolmates’ efforts as part of a schoolwide exhibition for skeptical city officials. On the morning of this exhibition Johannes’s professor, absently clutching a burning cigar, stood in front of this drawing in the school hallway, still frowning.
Johannes had moved to stand at the man’s elbow. His professor, who was also the school’s director and an architect of some renown, was weighty in both stature and status. He was different from other modernist architects. They had their cold insistence on functionalism, materialism, technology. This man wielded slabs of marble and spans of colored glass and sent the light dancing; he set interior space in motion, he liberated roofs from walls to make them float overhead. He was the reason Johannes had given up everything to come to this school.
They stood there in silence, eyeing the drawing. “I’m aware, Herr Director,” Johannes muttered miserably. “There’s still something missing.”
The man had lifted his cigar to his mouth and taken several long, impassive puffs as if to say, If you cannot see what, I cannot help you. Then he pulled his cigar from his mouth and spoke.
“What’s missing, Schröding, is life.” A pungent plume of greenish smoke mingled with his words. “You’ve drawn bricks and glass, rooms and walls. You’ve drawn a pretty building, when life is what matters.”
Johannes’s professor said this and nothing more before turning and making his way down the hall, an acrid cloud of smoke wafting in his wake.
By then the panel of city councilmen had arrived, swastika pins gleaming on their lapels. They were shown the collection of Bauhaus works—hand-designed wallpaper, bright woven textiles, typography samples, photo collages, lustrous metallic lamps, tubular steel furniture, exuberant paintings and sculpture, architectural models and sketches—but all they saw was their foregone conclusion, which was bolshevism. After this, it was one-two-three: a vote (5 Yes, 20 No), a canceled city subsidy, and a shutdown. The Bauhaus, which seven years earlier had succumbed to political pressure in the city of Weimar, was forced once more to close its doors.
A few months later, Johannes’s professor had reopened the Bauhaus as a private art school in Berlin, a bigger city occupied (hopefully) by bigger things, a place to operate (hopefully) unnoticed and undisturbed. The move returned Johannes to his home town, though by then he was no longer welcome at home. He’d taken a job at a tiny dark Steglitz pub called Mischmasch. He rented the room that is now six rainy blocks behind him. He penciled Life is what matters on the peeling wallpaper above his desk.
The months unspooled and he learned firsthand the things that occupied Berlin: the Reichstag burning and sweeping arrests and Brownshirt street fights and emergency decrees and the granting of full legislative powers to the Reich government. He learned that writing words on a wall does nothing to demystify them. The blank page appeared on his desk and remained there.
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.
Now, out in the streets of Johannes’s neighborhood, it is weather bedlam: rain mercilessly hammering the crown of his hat, punishing his shoulders and back. He’s begun to take it personally. A stop light holds him up at the intersection of Albrecht and Schützenstrasse, where the tires of a turning car slice through a lake-sized puddle, sending a wave of cold water up over the curb and into his shoes. And so the arriving moment of change for which Johannes is wholly unprepared begins with a muttered curse, with him shaking one foot and then the other. But then the light goes green, and Johannes lifts his eyes.
Across the intersection a woman steps from the curb. She is apparently the only person in Steglitz with the foresight to carry an umbrella. Johannes doesn’t know her; after this moment he will never see her again. But as she steps into the street, illuminated by a wide angle of streetlamp light, he cannot help but watch her. It is this that arrests his attention: her languid progress across the cobblestones, the absolute tranquility of her movement despite such an atmosphere of frenzy. It is as if the rain isn’t pounding down all around her, as if its incessant hiss against the pavement has silenced entirely. But of course it has not; it is only that the woman is herself surrounded by dry space. Her umbrella, a most minimal of shelters, serves both to secure her from, and liberate her within, her environment. From the opposite curb Johannes watches her approach, carrying a space of freedom that displaces the chaos around her. The woman steps onto his curb. Her face so serene. She moves past him and disappears down the sidewalk.
Here is the moment of change. 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, drenched socks stuffed in their shoes by the door, he confronts the blank page. His pencil begins with a single, hesitant stroke. 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 of sanctuary. All the parts relating, connecting, holding each other in balance. As he draws, the words from his bedroom wall look down.
When Johannes takes the sketch into the school’s architectural studio the next day, his professor says not Try it again but instead, Go further! and the days that follow are taken up with revisions and fine-tuning until, on a Monday night in early April, the drawing is complete. Johannes slips it onto the professor’s drafting table for him to find in the morning. He goes back to his little rented room and climbs into bed believing that the next day will be the start of something. There is no way to sense that it instead will be the beginning of the end of everything. Awakening to a pleasant April Tuesday, Johannes shaves and dresses and makes his way back to the Bauhaus architectural studio, oblivious to the workings of forces outside his control, to the fact that things are about to turn once again.
That morning, state secret police trucks roll quietly into Steglitz. Reaching the red-brick building that until just recently was an abandoned telephone factory, that now bears a small, unassuming white sign with black letters—bauhaus—the trucks come to a stop. Uniformed men carrying rifles disembark. They have been told that anti-government propaganda is being printed inside the school. The men fan out, covering the first-floor windows, guarding 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 corrective steps like these. He lets a moment pass. There is the chitter-chatter of a house sparrow from a nearby rooftop, the distant rumble of a truck downshifting on a neighboring street. Then the officer gives the signal, and his shoulder meets the door.
For more information about FAÇADE, or to read the full manuscript, please click here.
christine beth reish 