A major milestone on the middle-class journey through life is the acquisition of a home: your own four walls. This is associated with the idea of freedom and comfort, the basis for independence and happiness, so to speak, especially for the less well-to-do classes. That was also the view of the publicist, philanthropist, author of the book on happiness and Methodist lay preacher Georg Kropp, who founded a housing association in Wüstenrot in Swabia in 1921, from which the famous building society emerged in 1924, then still called the Community of Friends (GdF) Wüstenrot.
The idea that these four walls should be made of wood and not stone is what makes the concept of the garden city of Pullach, as designed in the 1920s (and in the implementation and development of which Wüstenrot was also to play a role), so special, even unique. “One of a kind” judges Angelika Bahl-Benker. The chairwoman of the Pullach History Forum has written a book on the subject, which she will be presenting this Monday, October 24th, in the community center: “Artist idea and business model – the garden city of Pullach” is the title, it is now the tenth volume of the Municipal published “Pullacher series of publications”.
What was the background and starting point for this extensively researched, ambitiously designed book, which is interesting not only in terms of local history but also in general history in the context of the time? In the mid-twenties, the timber construction entrepreneurs Moritz Kowalski and Fritz Glasser developed their business model: the construction and sale of almost 200 affordable wooden houses with gardens on the “Baierbrunner Feld”: The settlement was to be built southwest of the old town center, between Jaiserstraße and Birkenallee, Isar Valley Railway (Gistlstraße) and Wolfratshauser Strasse. For the urban planning concept, including the designs for the houses, they cooperated with the Munich artist and architect Richard Riemerschmid, who had experience through his planning for the garden cities of Hellerau (near Dresden) and Nuremberg (and is also known for his leading role in Art Nouveau interior design). of the Munich Kammerspiele).
“At that time there was an insane housing shortage,” says Bahl-Benker. And building materials were scarce. It was the time after the World War and inflation – and before the global economic crisis of 1929. Riemerschmid designed the development plan for Pullach, the first wooden house garden city, and designed innovative “prefabricated houses” for it. He had long since left Art Nouveau behind, his work was “decisively shaped by factual, functional and social aspects”, as the Pullach architect Justus Thyroff, who will also be giving a lecture on Monday, writes in his foreword. Riemerschmid’s “Typen” houses combined rational, serial building, affordable living space and good living quality. “A highly modern concept,” says Bahl-Benker – also with a view to sustainability and wood as a building material, which is again a very topical issue today. Of course, the concept only worked to a limited extent at the time. The houses prefabricated in the factory were in fact built quickly and in 1927 the first families moved in, who obviously also felt at home there. There were, of course, far too few.
Of 180 planned houses, 16 were built
Riemerschmid’s development plan originally envisaged 370 wooden houses, it soon went down to 180, but in the end only 16 houses were built. And only a few of them remain today. What was it? Kowalski and Glasser, who quickly got into trouble because of the costs of site development, wooden house manufacture and loans, initially found support from the building society in Wüstenrot. This acted entirely in the spirit of the socially conscious ideas of its founder Georg Kropp, but only gave loans on the condition that stone houses in solid construction should also be possible. After the financial failure of the entrepreneurs, Wüstenrot soon took over the company “Gartenstadt Pullach GmbH” and sold the land. Kowalski, who lived in the Geiselgasteig district of Grünwald, and Glasser went bankrupt with their wooden house factory. Her innovative approach had not worked in difficult economic times. In the 1930s, many stone buildings were added to the Gartenstadt area.
Angelika Bahl-Benker, chairwoman of the Pullach History Forum, with her new book.
(Photo: Claus Schunk)
Well, for Bahl-Benker, who is a social scientist and since 2014 has chaired the Pullach History Forum founded in 2012, it was precisely these few wooden houses, sometimes dubbed locally as “Riemerschmid houses”, that aroused her particular interest. A report discovered in the newspaper in November 2014 that a wooden house that used to stand in the garden city of Pullach was being auctioned off, had been dismantled there in 1983 and then rebuilt elsewhere in the meantime, further fueled the urge to investigate. “I’ve been interested in it for a long time,” says Bahl-Benker, who was born in Munich. She grew up in Pullach and, after living outside of Bavaria for a while, has been living in the Isar Valley community again since the 1990s. The difficulty was that almost nothing was known about this exciting side chapter in the development from a farming village to a Munich suburb. “I then went into the depths of the archive,” says Bahl-Benker. She spent many, many hours in the Pullach municipal archive, in the Munich state archive and also in the Wüstenrot archive. The research dragged on for several years.
In any case, the result is very readable and also optically demanding. There are informative chapters on the general housing issue in the first half of the 20th century, on garden city concepts and ideals of life reform (the artist Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach, known as the “Kohlrabi Apostle”, lived for about a few years in a quarry near Höllriegelskreuth), on local development since 1900. In addition to the central, eponymous chapter “Artist idea and business model”, there are suggestions on building aesthetics, as well as other texts on the development in the thirties and exciting personal stories from residents of the garden city (from the Jewish family Dreifuss to the caricaturist and painter Sepp Mauder to to the strapping Nazi musicologist Blessinger) and the further development of the settlement after the war.
The house “Brigitte”, built in 1926, at Parkstrasse 29 (later Jaiserstrasse 33). The picture is from 1973, the house was dismantled ten years later and is now in Kochel am See.
(Photo: Pullach municipal archive)
Historical photos, advertising brochures from the 1920s (“On practical building and sunny living”), drawings, historical development plans, pictures of houses from various eras or rare source documents illustrate the volume. Also interesting for scientists: the lush and beautifully designed appendix with further (image) sources.
What remains? Bahl-Benker, who has devoted herself to the subject with the accuracy and great passion of a local historian, fears that important buildings worthy of preservation will continue to be lost (in the 1970s quite a few of the wooden houses, which were not that many anyway, were demolished and sometimes rebuilt elsewhere). One of their worries is that the townscape of modern Pullach is not pleasing to the eye everywhere, that in some places there are now somewhat ostentatious villas and that valuable building fabric is disappearing again and again. “What is necessary to preserve what already exists and to develop it with a sense of proportion?” she asks in the final chapter “Outlook”. She raves about the beautiful location of Pullach, attractive quarters and its 35 historical monuments, many gardens. Nevertheless, she warns: “Once this cultural heritage is destroyed, it will be gone forever and the place will lose its character and charisma.”
The presentation of the book “Artist Idea and Business Model: Die Gartenstadt Pullach” (Pullach Series of Publications, Volume 10) is on Monday, October 24, beginning at 7:30 p.m. in the Pullach Town Hall.