Modernism as a Breaking Point within the Capitalist System
In using the image of the Stadtkrone, Bloch is clearly alluding to the expressionist ar-
chitecture of Bruno Taut and others that received much acclaim around 1920 (figure
64).^133 Like the parallel tendencies in painting and literature, expressionist architec-
ture tried to devise an alternative to tradition by concentrating on the power of im-
agery. It developed a plastic formal idiom that expressed utopian longings and
visionary imagery. This imagery was outspokenly bound up with radical ideas of so-
cial renewal.
It is clear that this expressionist current in architecture was far more appeal-
ing to Bloch than the New Objectivity, which was the dominant trend after 1923. This
was no coincidence. During his period in wartime Munich he had made the acquain-
tance of the artists of the Blaue Reiter—Franz Marc, Wassily Kandinsky—as well as
representatives of the New Music. It was they who taught him to respect a willing-
ness to experiment, the quest for the unknown, and the rejection of the indolence
and complacency of the bourgeois order.^134 Bloch’s own writings have an expres-
sionist literary style—passionate, rich in imagery, asystematic, and sharp in tone. He
continued to speak out as an advocate of expressionism even after Lukács and other
Marxist intellectuals had denounced it as decadent.^135
Expressionism, in Bloch’s view, was an authentic response to the experiences
of discontinuity and fragmentation caused by the modern condition. The world of
capitalism is fissured, its spotless order is a mere pretense: behind its glittering sur-
face there is nothing but a void. What expressionism does is simply to point to the
3
Reflections in a Mirror64
Bruno Taut, Stadtkrone, 1919.
(From Bruno Taut, Die Stadtkrone
[Jena: Eugen Diedericks, 1919].)