A German kaleidoscope

by Daniel Jütte

Transparency is a mantra of our day. It is closely tied to the Western understanding of a liberal society, and it informs key areas of our lives: we expect transparency, for instance, from political institutions, corporations, and the media. But what exactly the term means is not always as transparent as the image of perfect clarity that it invokes. The vision of transparency espoused by politicians and bureaucrats, for example, can be quite incongruous with what ordinary citizens associate with the word. Similarly, the policies and products hailed by corporate leaders as “transparent” are often, in reality, rather arcane to investors and consumers. The line between liberal promise and neoliberal reality is, often enough, blurry.

Transparency is not only a powerful metaphor, it is also a material reality. As a large-scale, mass experience, transparency is first and foremost architectural, inextricably linked to one particular element in Western architecture: glass windows. Today, of course, windows are ubiquitous, and by virtue of their transparency usually meant to be unnoticed. Who, put on the spot, could say precisely how many windows he or she has at home? It is even harder to estimate the total number of windows in a particular region or country. In Germany, one recent calculation yielded an estimate of 580 million window units.

And yet this seemingly inconspicuous element of architecture opens, as it were, a unique window onto our recent cultural and political history. Postwar culture, especially, would be hard to imagine without architectural glass. Few other materials have risen to similar prominence since 1945. The case of Germany vividly illustrates how glass—that quintessentially “clean” and modern material—assumed a key role in the rebuilding of a world in ruins. After 1945, large glass surfaces became a characteristic feature of postwar German political architecture. In domestic architecture, too, the technical sophistication of German windows has fostered a sense of national pride. When, a few years ago, Angela Merkel was asked in a newspaper interview which qualities she associates with Germany, her answer was as terse as it was telling: “I think of tight windows! No other country is able to design windows as tight and beautiful.”

Transparency is a mantra of our day. It is closely tied to the Western understanding of a liberal society, and it informs key areas of our lives.

Merkel’s answer is, of course, somewhat exaggerated. Innovation in the mid- and late-twentieth-century glass industry was hardly limited to Germany. Firms in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France made similarly important contributions. In the Federal Republic of Germany, however, glass came to play a particularly symbolic role. The political elite—as well as the architects they commissioned—considered glass an ideal material to embody West Germany’s commitment to democracy. Vitreous transparency was employed to convey a political message.

In 1960, Adolf Arndt, an influential social-democratic member of parliament, declared in a lecture titled “Democracy as Architect” (Demokratie als Bauherr) that political architecture in a democratic state was duty-bound to render the invisible visible. Criticizing traditional façades and their “political purpose to conceal,” Arndt demanded a “link between the principle of a democratic public on the one hand, and the exterior and interior transparency [Durchsichtigkeit] and accessibility of a democracy’s public buildings on the other hand.” Arndt articulated a majority view: postwar Germans espoused the architectural mantra that “transparency equals democracy,” in the words of architectural historian Deborah Ascher Barnstone, who argues that political architecture in West Germany displayed an “obsession with transparency.”

Some of the most prominent public buildings in Bonn, the West German capital, featured extensive glass surfaces—including the Bundestag, the federal parliament. The first Bundestag (1949), designed by Hans Schwippert, received an all-glass façade that allowed the public to observe the proceedings in the assembly. The second Bundestag, constructed by Günter Behnisch in 1992 as a more spacious successor to Schwippert’s parliament building, evoked the same architectural idiom of transparency. So did the courthouse of the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, built by Paul Baumgarten between 1965 and 1969. Baumgarten’s courthouse is still in use, and the architectural design continues to inform the institution’s self-understanding. The high court’s website explains: “By [the building’s] open structure, [Baumgarten] intended to express democratic transparency and to distinguish the building from the nineteenth-century-style palaces of justice.”

This commitment to glass architecture remained strong after the 1989 German reunification—even during the government’s relocation from Bonn to Berlin over the next decade. As Lutz Koepnick has observed, glass “emerged as one of the Berlin Republic’s most privileged construction materials.” Probably the best-known example is the Reichstag, the current seat of the German parliament. After the 1990 decision to make Berlin the capital of reunited Germany, a competition was held to solicit proposals for a radical overhaul of the nineteenth-century Reichstag building. British architect Norman Foster won the competition with his proposal to cap the Reichstag’s central assembly hall with a glass cupola that would be accessible to visitors and allow them to observe the parliamentary sessions from above. As Foster noted, the idea of a glass cupola catered to the expectations of both the political establishment and the public: “For security reasons, not every part of the Reichstag can be open to the public, but we have ensured that where possible it is transparent and its activities are on view. It is a building without secrets.”

Foster’s Reichstag has become one of the most iconic symbols of the “Berlin Republic.” It epitomizes postwar Germany’s commitment to vitreous transparency as the privileged idiom of the architecture of power. Indeed, Berlin—like Bonn in the past—is home to many other political buildings characterized by expansive glass façades. As the American critic Jane Kramer, writing in the New Yorker in 1999, noted about the mentality of post-reunification Germans:

They live in a capital from which the worst of Germany’s history was decreed, and now that the government is moving back to that capital they have convinced themselves that the right buildings will somehow produce the right attitudes in the people inside them. They like the transparency of the Reichstag’s dome—it’s the most visited place in the city now—because they think it will somehow guarantee that openness and democracy thrive in the Reichstag.

But is there really a guarantee that architectural transparency will bring about institutional transparency? Are democratic values innate to large glass surfaces? A closer look at twentieth-century history shows that there is little evidence to justify such sweeping assumptions. In fact, glass architecture was far more widely used in Fascist architecture than is commonly assumed.

Consider the case of fascist Italy, where dictator Benito Mussolini supported the generous use of glass in architecture. In this context of fascist architecture, Walter Benjamin’s interwar characterization of glass as “the enemy of secrets” took on a dark, unintended dimension. Transparency came to symbolize the conflation of public and private, of individual life and collectivist mass culture. By Mussolini’s own definition, fascism was a “glass house into which everyone can gaze freely.” At the same time, glass architecture served as a source of nationalistic pride. In Italy, the fascist-minded Association of Glass Manufacturers praised window glass as a distinctly Italian contribution to civilization: after all, the ancient Romans, the celebrated models of Mussolini’s Italo-Fascism, had first used glass in architecture. Leading Italian avant-garde architects accepted these ideological premises. Some, in fact, helped to shape Mussolini’s vision of a distinctly fascist architecture. Among them was Giuseppe Terragni, a longtime champion of glass architecture.

Foster’s Reichstag has become one of the most iconic symbols of the “Berlin Republic.” It epitomizes postwar Germany’s commitment to vitreous transparency as the privileged idiom of the architecture of power.

In 1932, Terragni received the regime’s commission to build Como’s Casa del Fascio, a building that would serve both as the headquarters for the local Fascist Party and as a community center. Completed in 1936, the building emphasizes transparency and openness: more than fifty percent of the exterior is glazed, and the interior, too, features glass walls and floors. Terragni hoped that a generously glazed building such as the Casa del Fascio would allow for “instinctive verification” in the relation between the fascist state and its citizens. Citing the Duce, Terragni declared about the Casa: “Here is an embodiment of Mussolini’s idea that fascism is a glass house in which everyone can peek.” For Terragni, a “house of glass” ensured that there would be “no encumbrance, no barrier, no obstacle between the political hierarchies and the people.”

In fascist Germany, too, issues of fenestration and architectural glass received considerable attention. In the public architecture of the Third Reich, oversized windows underscored the regime’s will to architectural monumentality. Industrial architecture, in particular, was supposed to benefit from the generous use of glass. The mantra of rationalization, the use of uniform materials, the lack of ornament, and the idea of functional design—all of these key principles of interwar modernism proved compatible with Nazi architecture, if stripped of their original democratic impetus and put in the service of a collectivist ideology. As architectural historian Petra Eisele has observed, in the Third Reich “the agenda of the Bauhaus was rejected in terms of its philosophy, but continued on a formal level.” Leading Nazi officials, such as propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, explicitly defended interwar modernist architecture, commending its emphasis on clear forms and endorsing it as a legitimate source of inspiration for a new fascist architecture. Baldur von Schirach, the leader of the Hitler Youth, commissioned overtly sachlich architecture for his organization. In his opinion, a “youthful” German architecture was to avoid monumentalism and historicism, and instead draw on quintessentially modern materials like glass, steel, and concrete.

Albert Speer recalled that Hitler “could become enthusiastic over an industrial building in glass and steel.” Such ideas aligned with the mission of the Nazi Bureau for the Beauty of Labor (Reichsamt Schönheit der Arbeit). The Bureau’s name was, of course, a euphemism: the goal of Nazi economic policies was not to achieve “beautiful” working conditions but rather to prepare Germany for war. In an effort to improve the conditions of industrial production, the Bureau published brochures and pamphlets that encouraged companies to install large windows. What is more, one of the most iconic industrial glass buildings associated with modernism—Walter Gropius’s Fagus factory, outside Hannover—was officially declared an “exemplary national-socialist workplace.” Indeed, the continuities between interwar modernism and Nazi industrial architecture are manifold. As Speer admitted after the war, the Bureau freely copied Bauhaus ideas and designs.

There is another dimension of German history that complicates the idea of glass as an untainted embodiment of “democratic transparency.” After all, the history of postwar Germany cannot be reduced to the history of the Federal Republic. For four decades, there existed another German state, the German Democratic Republic (GDR), where glass architecture also served a political function—but under the auspices of communism.

The communist government of the GDR had its own reasons for encouraging the use of glass, at least in certain genres of architecture. Invoking an argument familiar from early-twentieth-century modernist discourses, the party line deemed glass and transparency beneficial to public health. In this vein, the GDR-published booklet The Function of the Window from the Romantic Period to the Present (1970) ended with the emphatic claim that “socialist public housing” had leveled the differences between ostentatious bourgeois architecture and the poorly lit lower-class dwellings of the past: “Both in generic and experimental buildings, all apartments receive sufficient light through large windows. And those sites of production, where work under bad light conditions was the rule in the past, are now almost forgotten thanks to the use of the newest building techniques.”

Creating better living and labor conditions for the working class was not the only objective, of course. As in the Federal Republic, glass carried symbolic meaning in the GDR—especially in Berlin, a city in which the Cold War played out also on an architectural level. Any major building project in the divided city was considered a political statement, even if the building did not have a political purpose. A case in point is the Europa-Center, a large shopping center and office building erected in the 1960s on the Kurfürstendamm, West Berlin’s central boulevard. The glass-faced complex was perceived as a temple of consumerism. In the words of historian Mary Nolan, it embodied “West Berlin’s effort to adopt American modernism and lifestyles.” In the eastern part of the city, communist leaders sought to counter such architectural symbolism. It is no coincidence that glass featured prominently in the political architecture of the GDR—a communist state that routinely fashioned itself as the “showcase of socialism” (Schaufenster des Sozialismus).

As in the West, but with a different ideological impetus, the GDR’s conspicuous use of glass in certain political buildings was meant to signal political transparency. Consider the Staatsratsgebäude, the seat of the State Council, built by an architectural collective under the leadership of Roland Korn and Hans Erich Bogatzky (1960-64). Located in the heart of East Berlin, the building featured a generously glazed main façade, while the central staircase boasted a monumental cycle of colored windows depicting the historical development of German communism. With similar intentions, the façade of the nearby Palace of the Republic, built by an architectural collective under the direction of Heinz Graffunder (1973–76), was lined with iridescent, bronze-colored windows, which, at least from a close distance, provided views into the interior. The Palace of the Republic served as the official seat of the GDR parliament, and its glass façade suggested that the inner workings of the (rather powerless) legislature were visible to everyone. In line with this appearance of openness, the Palace also housed publicly accessible concert halls, theaters, and cafés. The impression of abundant light in the interior was augmented by hundreds of ceiling lamps, which led citizens to quip about the Palace as “Erich’s lamp shop” (Erichs Lampenladen; referencing Erich Honecker, the GDR’s leader at the time).

The Palace of the Republic—like other amply glazed public buildings in the GDR—was supposed to give an appearance of democratic accountability and good governance. In practice, however, transparency only existed in a very different sense. As we now know in disturbing detail, the interior of the Palace was under permanent surveillance by the Stasi, the GDR’s feared state security service. In fact, the well-lit interior provided optimal conditions for the Stasi’s omnipresent surveillance cameras and informers. It was not the inner life of the GDR’s political institutions that was transparent, but rather the private life of the citizenry, which in this setting, and indeed in many others, lay exposed to the eyes of thousands of spies and informants.

Mass surveillance was a tactic that the Stasi had learned from its big brother, the Soviet secret service. It is no coincidence that the Stasi subscribed to the Soviet cult of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the founder and first director (1917–26) of the Cheka, the secret police that ultimately became the KGB. Interestingly, the invocation of vitreous imagery played an important role in this cult. For Dzerzhinsky, being true to the party line meant living a transparent life as a model Soviet citizen, without hiding any secrets from the state. Dzerzhinsky, for his part, was praised by the Soviet propaganda as a “crystally pure person.” This notion of crystal-clear commitment to the communist cause was not mere rhetoric. It had tangible effects in the Soviet Union: a crystal-glass factory was named after Dzerzhinsky, and a town specializing in industrial glass production bore his name. Needless to say, none of this vitreous rhetoric translated into institutional transparency in the political system. The Soviet regime remained notoriously secretive. There was no connection—neither historically nor etymologically—between glass and glasnost.

The Palace of the Republic—like other amply glazed public buildings in the GDR—was supposed to give an appearance of democratic accountability and good governance.

In sum, the history of German vitreous architecture in the twentieth century illustrates both the promise and pitfalls of building with glass. Projects such as the new Reichstag cupola were driven by motivations deeply rooted in political symbolism, but in practice the large-scale use of glass has come with its own challenges. (Incidentally, according to German news media, rain buckets are a familiar sight in some of the glass-roofed administrative buildings that form part of the Reichstag).

In Germany and elsewhere, the history of glass in modern times is, despite considerable technological innovation, not a story of linear progress. Modern glass architecture is widely considered a quintessentially “rational architecture” (as architectural historian Annette Fierro has shown in her book The Glass State). But there remains a dissonance between what we expect from glass and what it can do. No amount of architectural glass will guarantee a transparent social or institutional culture, and any belief to the contrary has more to do with supernatural thinking than with a realistic assessment of what architecture can accomplish. Where transparency is desired as a communal or institutional reality, it needs to be encouraged and enacted on a social basis. Everything else is mere architectural symbolism—and the benefits of such symbolism are not at all as clear as the vitreous façades that are meant to embody it.

Photo: Deutscher Bundestag, June 3, 2019, by Massimo Virgilio. Courtesy: Unsplash.

This article appears in the 2024-25 Berlin Journal (38). Adapted from Transparency: The Material History of an Idea, by Daniel Jütte, published by Yale University Press. Copyright © 2023 Yale University Press. Reprinted by permission of Yale University Press