GERMAN PAVILION 1909, 1938–39 (DANIELE DONGHI, ERNST HAIGER)
The Kingdom of Belgium built the first national pavilion in the Giardini in 1907. By the First World War, six other European states followed suit, including the national pavilions of the superpowers of the era: the United Kingdom (1909), France (1912), and Russia (1914), among which the Padiglione dell’arte bavarese, built in 1909, which would evolve into the German Pavilion, can also be counted. Removed from the central exhibition palace that would later become the Italian Pavilion, but along the axis of the pedestrian path leading through the public park, the group of buildings for the European superpowers reflected, as it were, the political constellation on the eve of the First World War: the British Pavilion is located as a point de vue on a slight elevation resulting from the debris of the Campanile of Saint Mark’s Basilica, which collapsed in 1903 and was rebuilt by 1912; juxtaposed with it, and to the left and right sides of the French Pavilion were the Bavarian-German Pavilion and immediately adjacent to it, at the foot of the hill formed by the rubble, the pavilion of the empire of the Russian czar. Along with the Hungarian and British Pavilion, the Padiglione Bavarese opened for the Eighth Biennale in 1909; it was a symmetrical, neo-Renaissance building with a portico with Ionic columns and a pediment in the center, leading into a tall exhibition hall with three side rooms on either side. It had been designed by the Venetian architect Daniele Donghi. Just a few years later, when the Munich Secession began to part ways with the Biennale, the building was rededicated as the exhibition pavilion of the German empire. The existing exposed-brick side buildings were given a bright plaster coating to unite them with the main building, and the pediment above the portico and the entire volume of the building was given a classical figurative frieze with an accompanying ornamental band. Largely unaltered, the pavilion in this form also served both the Weimar Republic when it resumed exhibition activity for the Thirteenth Biennale in 1922 and the Nazi regime in 1934 and 1936. It was probably Adolf Ziegler—professor at the Kunstakademie in Munich since 1933 and president of the Reich Chamber of the Fine Arts within the Reich Chamber of Culture and the man responsible for the Entartete Kunst(Degenerate Art) exhibition—who was able to persuade the Nazi regime to renovate and expand the pavilion extensively. The design for the pavilion, conceived as a branch of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst (House of German Art) in Munich, was provided by Ernst Haiger (1874–1952), who in the 1930s and 1940s would also be responsible for the planning of large Nazi architectural projects in Munich, including the interior design of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst—and also submitted designs in 1938–39 for the redesign of the German Pavilion at the Biennale on the occasion of the Second German Architectural Exhibition in Munich. He expanded the pavilion by adding three rooms in the back, with the central one forming a kind of apse that extends the main hall, and increased the height of the building as a whole, so that all the rooms received light from above (on the sides) and the exterior structure as a whole had more volume. He replaced the historical portico by an enormous central pillared hall with an inscription on its architrave dedicated to “Germania.” The architecture of the colonnade recalls the corner pillars of the Haus der Deutschen Kunst in Munich by Paul Ludwig Troost; the row of square pillars is perhaps even more reminiscent of the Ehrentempel (Honor Temples) honoring the “blood martyrs of the movement” on Königsplatz in Munich, which were blown up in 1947. The “De-Nazification” of the building begun after 1945 was initially limited to removing the Nazi national emblem with a swastika above the entry portal. Later, Eduard Trier had the wall between the main hall and the apse removed—an enlargement that can be understood as a “subtle break” with the intended design and effect of the Nazi period. More extensive interventions—such as Arnold Bode’s proposal in 1957, typical of its era, to extend the axial main access on the sides and thus create a rigorously asymmetrical redesign of the building with a fluid floor plan between freely adjustable exhibition walls—fizzled out. A renovation proposal by Brandt und Böttcher architects in the 1990s, once again in the spirit of a post-modern realism , that would have added windows in the apse also came to nothing, as did later thought games and improvised designs to replace the German Pavilion in Venice completely. As was bound to happen, the Soprintendenza per i Beni Architettonici e Paesaggistici di Venezia e Laguna declared the German Pavilion in the Giardini to be a historical monument—under “Italian law,” as the Bundesarchitektenkammer emphasized in 2010—just as buildings from the “Third Reich” in Berlin, Munich, and Nuremberg have since been protected under German regulations for landmark buildings. Many a landmark building in Germany dating from the Nazi period has been transformed into a seat of one of the constitutional bodies of our free and democratic fundamental order.
Text: Common Pavilions
