The history of Haus am Waldsee

The Haus am Waldsee looks back on an eighty-year history as a cultural institution, as well as on a past as a residence that goes back to the 1920s. The building and garden tell stories of notions of property, bourgeois privacy and prosperity, of persecution and expropriation under National Socialism, of cultural policy in the postwar West and changing conceptions of art up to the present. Chapter by chapter, the history of the Haus am Waldsee reflects wrenching social transformations and the marks they leave on architecture, the landscape, and institutions.

An escape to the countryside and bourgeois ways of life ca. 1900

As the nineteenth century draws to a close, Berlin’s upper middle class increasingly expands into the rural communities that ring the city. In Europe’s major cities, industrial capitalism has grown the wealth of the affluent bourgeoisie while also leaving behind an increasingly crowded and forbidding urban landscape. These changes prompt a yearning for nature that leads bourgeois circles to relocate to the area southwest of the city, which beckons with forests and lakes. In Zehlendorf as elsewhere, villa neighborhoods and other large-scale real estate projects emerge as a new form of opulent housing and capital investment. In 1901, the developer Zehlendorf-West-Terrain-Aktiengesellschaft acquires land around what is today Mexikoplatz square. A swamp is dredged to create an artificial lake, the surrounding land is drained, and plots are parceled out and offered for sale as prestigious building sites with private lake access. S-Bahn and, later, U-Bahn services provide direct connections to the center of Berlin. In 1922, the textile entrepreneur Hermann Knobloch’s company purchases the plot on which the Haus am Waldsee now stands.

The English country house and the “natural” garden as a backdrop of bourgeois life

Hermann Knobloch hires the architect Max Werner to design a residence for his family in the English country house style. That style’s leading exponent, Hermann Muthesius, envisioned a harmonious integration of garden, home, and landscape in an aesthetic whole. Werner builds a stately upper-class home that maintains a rather conservative and sedate distance from the emerging tendencies in the architecture of the time, yet is nonetheless equipped with the latest technical amenities and numerous ancillary buildings, including a garage with a dedicated fuel system, a workshop, a boathouse, a greenhouse, stables, and servants’ quarters. While the front yard with fruit trees and vegetable beds provides a measure of self-sufficiency, the park facing the lake is designed as an English landscape garden, with meandering paths, clusters of trees, and a gently contoured meadow that slopes down toward the lake. Contrasting with the rigid geometry of absolutism-era gardens, the English landscape garden, an eighteenth-century development, is linked to the Enlightenment-era bourgeoisie’s appreciation of nature. The staging of a “liberated” and ostensibly “natural”—though in fact carefully curated—nature reflects bourgeois moral values in which “naturalness” is associated with health, authenticity, and purity.

The Knobloch family: entrepreneurship, persecution, and exile

In 1923, Hermann Knobloch and his family take up residence in the house. With his partner Isidor Rosenmann, Knobloch has built a successful textile business specializing in the manufacture of men’s rainwear. In 1926, however, they are compelled to file for bankruptcy. The house is sold, and the family moves to Charlottenburg. In 1933, a period of systematic disenfranchisement and persecution begins for Jewish entrepreneurs like Knobloch. In 1935, the so-called Nuremberg Laws are enacted, further escalating the persecution, and in 1936, the Knoblochs finally emigrate to Buenos Aires; their son settles in Vancouver, Canada. The Nazi authorities confiscate most of their assets. Restitution proceedings in the 1950s result in only minimal compensation.

A home for perpetrators: the Nazi arms industry and the politics of film

In 1926, the house is sold to Otto Müller, who resells it just two weeks later to Richard Anger, a high-ranking official in the Reich Ministry of Transport. The next resident is Anger’s son Wolfgang, who, beginning in 1933, profits from the prewar economy and the use of forced labor as managing director of Hasse & Wrede. In 1942, he sells the property to Allgemeine Filmtreuhand GmbH, which oversees the assets of the Nazi film industry on behalf of the Reich Film Chamber. Starting in 1943, the house serves as the official residence of Karl Melzer, who, in his capacity as vice president of the Reich Film Chamber, plays a key role in shaping the industry in accordance with Nazi ideology. Shortly before the end of the war, Melzer flees to southern Germany, where he is briefly interned; his denazification proceedings, however, conclude with his categorization as a mere follower.

The “Zero Hour” myth and the Haus am Waldsee as a cultural venue: discontinuities and continuities after 1945

Immediately after the end of the war in 1945, cultural activities in Zehlendorf resume with the support of first the Soviet, then the American occupiers. The Haus am Waldsee, which has suffered only minor damage and is initially vacant, is used for events as early as June 20, 1945—the Berlin Philharmonic gives a concert in the garden, theater performances are staged by the lake, and an International Music Institute is established in the building. With these activities, the Haus am Waldsee remains entangled in personal and material continuities across the rupture between the Nazi era and the postwar years: the programming that establishes its profile as a cultural venue features both formerly persecuted artists and others who have actively helped shape and profited from Nazi rule. In restitution proceedings during the 1950s, a group of film producers successfully asserts claims to assets of Allgemeine Filmtreuhand GmbH, including the Haus am Waldsee. Many of them held high-ranking positions in the Nazi film industry. They are granted co-ownership; the government of Berlin eventually buys back their share for 70,000 marks.

The reassessment of modernism and art amid the tensions of the postwar order

From late 1945 onward, the building houses the Zehlendorf District Art Office, which also presents art exhibitions there beginning in 1946. The first display showcases works by Käthe Kollwitz, who died shortly before the end of the war. In April 1946, the writer and musicologist Karl Ludwig Skutsch is appointed the Haus am Waldsee’s first artistic director. His programming invites visitors to rediscover the modernism that was blacklisted by the Nazis, with exhibitions of works by artists like Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Oskar Schlemmer, Max Ernst, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Furthermore, he broadens horizons, bringing in contemporary art from across Europe and women artists like Renée Sintenis and Hannah Höch. In the Zehlendorfer Kunstschauen series, Skutsch also promotes local artists. With his exhibition programming, the Freier Kulturbund association headquartered in the building, and the annual shows of the Berliner Festwochen festival, the Haus am Waldsee builds a reputation over the following years as a stalwart champion of the cultural-political vision of the Western powers as opposed to the one propagated by the Soviet Union.

After Skutsch’s death in 1958, the Haus am Waldsee’s next artistic directors are Eberhard Marx, then Manfred de la Motte, who serves until 1964. They expand the programming with non-European perspectives and, in the major group exhibition Gegenwart bis 1962, open it to positions in postwar modernism, especially from the United States.

Three decades of contemporary art under Thomas Kempas

Becoming director in 1964, Thomas Kempas, who has a background in theater studies, art history, and German literature, shapes the programming at the Haus am Waldsee for three decades, until 1994. The exhibitions he curates respond to the social upheavals of the time, which are reflected in the diversity of artistic strategies and the social issues being addressed. They probe questions concerning the political nature of art and the relationship between realism and abstraction, gender, sexuality, and physicality, and spotlight art made outside the art world’s institutions. Exhibitions present works by artists including Frida Kahlo, Niki de Saint Phalle, Cindy Sherman, Meret Oppenheim, Andy Warhol, Georg Baselitz, and Markus Lüpertz. The standout 1980 show Heftige Malerei featuring the “Neue Wilde” Rainer Fetting, Helmut Middendorf, Salomé, and Bernd Zimmer causes a stir.

After the fall of the Wall: postmodernism and budget cuts

For the next ten years, from 1994 to 2004, the art historian Barbara Straka serves as artistic director of the Haus am Waldsee. Taking its cue from the changes of the post-reunification era, her programming places special emphasis on contemporary Eastern European art and on questions of collective memory and remembrance, postmodernism and the “end of history,” and the former West’s evolving position in new political structures. Straka also promotes formats that explore the dialogue between artistic practices and philosophical and academic discourses; for example, exhibitions showcase artistic engagements with the ideas of Walter Benjamin and Friedrich Nietzsche. In response to an administrative reform and redrawing of district boundaries that results in budget cuts, the Verein der Freunde und Förderer des Hauses am Waldsee (Association of the Friends and Supporters of the Haus am Waldsee) is established in 1996. Further cost-cutting measures adopted by the government of Berlin prompt a change in the Haus am Waldsee’s operating structure in 2004. Since then, a private sponsoring organization has served as the recipient of grants from the district and city governments.

Berlin’s international and interdisciplinary arts scene

In 2005, the art historian Katja Blomberg takes over as director of the Haus am Waldsee. She sets out to invite the many international artists, designers, architects, composers, and fashion designers who have flocked to Berlin to present their work in exhibitions that allow for in-depth engagement. Her program includes solo exhibitions by artists such as Jonathan Monk, Norbert Bisky, Olav Christopher Jenssen, Corinne Wasmuht, Marcel van Eeden, and Bjørn Melhus. Meanwhile, the grounds gradually become an open-air sculpture park boasting pieces by Tony Cragg, Wilhelm Mundt, Michael Beutler, Michael Sailstorfer, Thomas Rentmeister, and others. Indoor as well as outdoor presentations by designers like Werner Aisslinger, architects including J.MAYER.H and GRAFT, fashion designers like Lisa D, and composers like Peter Ablinger spark discussion of their work. Not least importantly, Blomberg leads a comprehensive renovation of the Haus am Waldsee in 2017–2018. The project, which receives funding support from LOTTO-Stiftung Berlin, brings the building up to contemporary technical standards. Until 2022, the sculpture park, too, is redesigned in accordance with preservation guidelines.

Questioning the institution

In 2022, Anna Gritz succeeds Blomberg as director. The program that Gritz puts together in collaboration with the curator Beatrice Hilke opens in the fall of 2022 with the artist Leila Hekmat, who transforms the institution into a sanatorium for patients and their caregivers, and continues with an exhibition by Margaret Raspé, who, working not far from the lake for more than five decades, has created a visionary oeuvre that intertwines questions of perception, the role of women, and ecological concerns. The programming places special emphasis on projects that grapple with current social, political, and economic realities impacting art and so speak to a contemporary discourse. In addition to introducing Berlin audiences to emerging international artists including Beverly Buchanan, Tolia Astakhishvili, Bruno Pelassy, Carol Rhodes, Jenna Bliss, and Josephine Pryde, the Haus am Waldsee offers a platform above all to undiscovered or previously underappreciated artists. The park, designed in the tradition of the English landscape garden, is an indispensable stage for art at the Haus am Waldsee, hosting creative interventions that subject the relationship between humans and nature to critical scrutiny. Last but not least, the programming turns the spotlight on the building’s legacy and examines its specific qualities as a former residence, institution, and site marked by an eventful history as an instrument of curatorial work.