Richard Riemerschmid’s Extraordinary Living Things

Richard Riemerschmid (1868–1957) has long been a seminal figure in German design history but his role as an architect and co-founder of the “Vereinigte Werkstätten für Kunst im Handwerk” (1898) tends to overshadow the scholarship outside of his native Germany. Freyja Hartzell’s painstakingly researched and beautifully produced book Richard Riemerschmid’s Extraordinary Living Things offers a timely corrective. Hartzell introduces readers to the breadth and critical depth of Riemerschmid’s design practice prior to the First World War and puts his work into dialog with recent theories from material culture studies and philosophy that take seriously the “thingliness” of objects. This enables Hartzell to convincingly deploy the thorny German notion of Sachlichkeit (often translated as objectivity but, as Hartzell rightly points out, much closer aligned to an inherent vitality of material objects) to fundamentally rethink the role of everyday objects in Riemerschmid’s practice and in German design discourse more generally.

She argues that Riemerschmid endeavored to design “extraordinary living things” that animated objects and imbued them with an energy that could potentially recalibrate object–subject relations. Hartzell offers an important intervention into the scholarship on German art and design by exploring the multidimensional meanings of Sachlichkeit—then and now. In the process, the author demonstrates the concept’s valence in German design discourse from the mid-1890s onwards. Impressively, Hartzell does not impose a preconceived theory onto Riemerschmid’s prolific artistic and kunstgewerbliche output, but delves deeply into complex aesthetic, philosophical, psychological, scientific, and spiritual theories of the time that provide an important context for his work and lend credence to Hartzell’s innovative rethinking of the role of objects in the formation of modern subjectivity. This methodology generates an exciting new way into German modernism that is no longer predicated on a one-dimensional teleology toward the Bauhaus.

In this context, I commend Hartzell for using Riemerschmid’s pre-First World War design practice as a point of entry into Wilhelmine Germany’s (1871–1918) tangled cultural history. Between 1897 and 1914, calls for “design reform” demanded a new style that was both national and modern—two notoriously slippery, and at times even incongruous, concepts. Hartzell assiduously taps into these historical discourses and uses Riemerschmid’s “living things” to “understand the character of modern life at the turn of the twentieth century” (p. 34). Whilst running into the perpetual quandary of writing a history of the material world through words and images, Hartzell takes seriously the material objects at the heart of Riemerschmid’s long and fruitful career. Her work introduces English-speaking readers to an impressively scoped selection of unfamiliar material ranging from drawings, paintings, and prints to photographs of textiles, garments, pattern designs, ceramics, furniture, interiors, and exhibition designs. This visual corpus is drawn from a diverse range of archives and primary sources, and a considerable number of illustrations are published for the first time. This alone makes the book a valuable resource for researchers and design aficionados alike. It is a well-known fact that Riemerschmid championed the modern interior as a Gesamtkunstwerk and Hartzell’s monograph pays homage to his efforts in terms of its own design and layout.

The book is divided into six chapters plus an introduction and an epilogue. The introduction puts into place important theoretical concepts pertinent to Riemerschmid’s design practice and Hartzell’s proposed analysis thereof. It also introduces the author’s methodological approaches and provides a brief historical framework for her analysis. The introduction does not give the reader a sense of the scholarship on Riemerschmid more generally or, indeed, his place in German design history. But Hartzell’s project is of a different nature and she refuses to be constrained by a seemingly ever-present requirement for scholars of German art and design to set the scene before making an original contribution. She delves right into her topic and each chapter engages the concept of Sachlichkeit from a different critical perspective and through a set of (material) aspects of Riemerschmid’s design practice. As such, Sachlichkeit serves as the book’s pulse. It might be worth noting that Hartzell retains original German terminology in much of her analysis, which is a highly effective strategy when combined with her eloquent contextualizations of key concepts that exceed simple translation.

Chapter 1 locates Riemerschmid’s early career as a Symbolist painter within late nineteenth-century medical discourses preoccupied with the outward manifestations of human emotion and character. Chapter 2 charts Riemerschmid’s move from art into design after his successful participation in the “Seventh International Art Exhibition” at the Munich Glaspalast in 1897. Here, Hartzell links Sachlichkeit with the uncanny and the vernacular to trace the domestic interior’s potential as a modernist space. Chapter 3 explores Riemerschmid’s interest in dress reform and establishes connections between physical garments and interiors through his wife Ida’s body in space as well as Gottfried Semper’s architectural theory of Bekleidung. This chapter features wonderful visual material that has not been evoked in dress and textile histories to date. Chapter 4 revisits a familiar event, the 1906 “Third German Applied Arts Exhibition” in Dresden where Riemerschmid first exhibited his standardized Maschinenmöbel. Much has been written about this breakthrough but Hartzell opens up a fascinating new way to understand Riemerschmid’s machine furniture as material conduits (wood) between Germany’s past (Northern Renaissance), present, and future. The penultimate chapter tackles the, at times problematic, collusion between utilitarian objects such as salt-glazed stoneware ceramics and nationalism. This chapter beautifully builds on the preceding chapter’s discussion of a distinctly German past and, to my knowledge, is the book’s only chapter to feature previously published material.¹ Chapter 6 brings together many of the themes explored throughout the book and offers a truly exciting interpretation of Riemerschmid’s long-overlooked pattern designs for textiles and wallpapers that showcase his ongoing interest in plant life and its cellular structure. This chapter stretches beyond the stated parameters of the book (1896–1914) but combined with the epilogue, offers an unexpectedly moving conclusion to a masterly crafted analysis of this complex progenitor of modern German design.

Hartzell acknowledges that this book “has been a long time coming” (p. 339) but the result has been worth the wait. It shows what is possible when a scholar of Hartzell’s caliber engages with their subject over a sustained period of time. Richard Riemerschmid’s Extraordinary Living Things is an extraordinary book that offers a first account in English of Riemerschmid’s pre-First World War design practice and firmly places his innovative designs for everyday objects, furniture, garments, and interiors within the parameters of German modernism. Hartzell tracks the somewhat familiar story of modern design from Jugendstil to the Werkbund (and beyond) but her rigorously conceived and meticulously researched analytical framework of Sachlichkeit animates the material heritage at the core of her investigation and offers exciting new insights into this key period of German design history. Hartzell courageously reframes subject–object relationships without losing sight of the historical specificity of Riemerschmid’s designed objects. Although firmly located within the spatiotemporal parameters of Wilhelmine Germany, Hartzell’s fluid narrative encourages readers to probe their own relationship to the world of objects around them. To me, this is critical history at its best.

Footnotes