Hamhŭng’s Two Orphans (To Konrad Püschel)
East German Internationalism in North-Korea Emerging through a Chronopolitical Lens

 

“The tale says that an orphan, rediscovering her parents’ home after many years of exile, had the surprise of finding herself there already – a double of herself, identical down to the smallest detail, who obviously greeted her as an intruder. Until the day when a neighbor (a skeptic) came to see them—with a cat. At the sight of it, the usurper jerked bolt upright with fright and took her true form again – that of a rat.” – Chris Marker, Coréennes, 1959^[1]

 

The reconstruction of the North Korean industrial city of Hamhŭng, which among other things included a youth club with a theater and film-projector—gifts from the German Democratic Republic (GDR)^[2]—was part of a project of architectural internationalism undertaken by the GDR between 1955 and 1962. The GDR architect Konrad Püschel, who trained at the Bauhaus from 1926 to 1930 and was among the first group of students to study in Dessau, directed the first construction phase in Hamhŭng— between 1955 and 1959—as a “city building brigadier.”

Looking for photos from the Hamhŭng reconstruction in 2018, I landed on a flickr.com user’s profile. Many of this user’s albums contain photographs of different cities and towns in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), including Haeju, Kaesong, Pyongyang and Wonsan. Other albums consisted of photos collections of places in East Germany—Brandenburg, Teltow, Wernigerode, etc. This geography of a contemporary, or post-1989, choice seems to reflect pre-1989 geopolitical entanglements the GDR had with North Korea, which this essay wishes to unpack through Konrad Püschel’s architectural work. One of the flickr-user’s albums, named “Hamhŭng,” contained 56 photographs dated March 2008, and included the following short description: “Hamhŭng (Hamhŭng) is the DPRK’s second largest city and an important industrial center. The old city was heavily destroyed during the Korean War and rebuilt with aid from the German Democratic Republic from 1955–62. Several buildings from that period show the influence of Bauhaus design. The project ended two years earlier than planned for political reasons.”^[3]

Whoever created this flickr folder was very well-versed in the history of Hamhŭng’s reconstruction. The description contains information not easily retrieved, not the usual case with well-known Bauhaus projects. As with many other architectural projects undertaken abroad by the GDR—geopolitical geographies of “socialist friendship”^[4]—the reconstruction of Hamhŭng by the city and building construction brigades from the GDR following the devastating war of 1950–53 has not yet been sufficiently researched on the level of architectural practice (micro-political), nor has it been sufficiently contextualized outside of Cold War protocols (macro-political). However, with respect to recent publications,^[5] it should be mentioned that the intensity of these debates is currently changing. Both this and my own curatorial research on Püschel’s participation in the Hamhŭng reconstruction project may also be based on concern over contemporary European political tendencies, which can be read as part of crises multiformes^[6] (multidimensional crises) or a “global swing to the right”^[7]—phenomena connected to transgenerational symptoms emanating from the experience of speechlessness, discomfort, ignorance or breaks, one of the many consequences of the “transnational turn”^[8] of 1989. As if he could see into the future, in his book Coréennes from 1959—written after a trip to North Korea in the mid-1950s—Chris Marker described the figure of the search for remembering as an orphan, basing this description on a Korean fairy tale. With Chris Marker’s observation in mind, I view the project of remembering Hamhŭng in the present moment as an orphan of history. As such, it has to confront a historiography that now appears in the parents’ house, as Marker wrote, “after many years of exile”; a memory that has settled invisibly at the margins of history and that calls out the fascistic “usurper” of today, whose aim has been to replace the memory of revolution. This orphan’s lived experience appears in the form of “ephemeral bits, the off-cuts and the outtakes” that would have “would have vanished into the dustbin of history”^[9]—i.e., whose habitat, if any, may be detected in the fringe zones of institutions and libraries, but foremost, in unspeakable bodies.

In the case of Püschel’s Hamhŭng project, the “embarrassing silence”^[10] about one of the largest post-war construction projects in the GDR is all the more astonishing since, in the first phase of both planning and implementation, Püschel led the project as an “urban planning brigadier,” one who studied at the Bauhaus Dessau with the likes of Hannes Meyer, Ludwig Hilbersheimer, Mies van der Rohe and other architects. While studying, Püschel was also involved in the construction of Walter Gropius’s Dessau-Törten housing estate, where he tested basic urban planning concepts for designing and building low-cost living spaces for working people—two decades before Khrushchev’s 1954 call for a socialist “industrialization of construction” was realized. Thanks to Püschel’s having studied at the Bauhaus, one can today locate comprehensive photographic documentation of his work in North Korea (1956-59), available in the archives of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. It was this fact which first prompted bauhaus imaginista’s organizers to commission a research project. However, in the course of my examination of Püschel’s work in North Korea, I could hardly—with a few exceptions^[11]—fall back on existing analyses of the Hamhŭng project. This gap in what is otherwise a meticulous documentation of the Bauhaus confirms the “embarrassing silence” that Fredric Jameson diagnosed in the narratives, archives and projects related to the brand of state socialism practiced within the GDR, noting that projects from the GDR are exposed to “systematic neglect” by “West Rhineland liberals and radical intellectuals alike,” who often morally categorized or silenced projects such as Hamhŭng “in the name of Stalinism and totalitarianism.”^[12] This silence seems to have been normalized over the years—perfect for the arrival of the orphan’s double that Chris Marker refers to in Coréennes. Revisiting her parents' home after many years of exile, the orphan—the parent’s lost daughter—was surprised to find herself there already, identical down to the smallest detail. She had never been mentioned, thus, had not existed. The orphan’s double greeting her as intruder. This double, erroneously and scrupulously had replaced the daughter after the revolution had taken place; she has been silenced, or went to exile; she is the figure who has settled imperceptibly at the margins of history.^[13] It is the silence of the West, however, that is now gradually being questioned—by projects such as bauhaus imaginista—and which today provokes the reappearance of these exiled voices, the orphans of history. An orphan, for example, who goes by the name Hamhŭng or Baubrigade (urban development brigadier), and who employs a practice outside conformism or dissidentism—meaning outside the binary extremes commonly used to depict socialist reality from a distance. This practice also calls for an analysis of the deviation from Soviet socialism, which the Hamhŭng project wanted to claim as early as the founding period of the GDR. Up until the early 1970s, the pre-war Bauhaus in Dessau was accused of “bourgeois cosmopolitanism” by the political elite of the GDR, irreconcilable with the ideological principles of the postwar peasant and workers state, although the “Activities of the Hannes Meyer Group in the USSR between 1930 and 1937”—as Püschel named an article he wrote for Form+Zweck in 1976—did move the orientation of the Bauhaus closer to the Co-mintern, the Fourth Communist International.

In 1931, Püschel accompanied Philipp Tolziner, a Bauhaus colleague, to Moscow. A short time after arriving, he was involved in the planning and realization of a “Sotsgorod” (socialist city) in the industrial city of Orsk in the Urals.^[14] After his work on the Dessau-Törten housing estate, this was another chance for Püschel to refine his work on modern urban planning processes. The GDR’s Hamhŭng project in North Korea, on the other hand, could already be understood as an act of self-determination taken by the newly founded state. While Moscow negotiated and collaborated with Pyongyang, exploratory talks between the DPRK and the GDR took place on the fringes of the 1954 Geneva Conference (“Otto Grotewohl told a North Korean delegate that his country would be willing to help rebuild one of the cities destroyed in the war”^[15]), although East Germany was still far from being recognized as a sovereign state by the United Nations, and thus was relegated to the role of onlooker at the conference. That same year, a contract was signed between the two young countries for the reconstruction of Hamhŭng. This deviation from Moscow-oriented Soviet socialism could be one reason why the reconstruction under the direction of Püschel and his colleagues^[16] was not documented in the large-format journal Deutsche Architektur, although the Hamhŭng project was the most ambitious project the GDR had undertaken at that early stage in its existence, both as a socialist urban development project and as an “international solidarity” project. Founded in 1952, Deutsche Architektur was published by the GDR’s Deutsche Bauakademie—for many years under the leadership of editor-in-chief Kurt Liebknecht, architect and nephew of Karl Liebknecht—and regularly featured detailed documentation of urban development projects and buildings undertaken by the GDR, both at home and abroad, as well as building plans and speeches regarding the construction industry made by officials of the Central Committee of the GDR and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). Such documentation of architectural projects is evidence of the profound role accorded to architecture for crafting the new socialist state that within a few years—with the closure of the wall on 13 August 1961—had turned into a communist dictatorship.

It is no coincidence that what differentiates the framework of the bauhaus imaginista research project is that it takes place outside the normative economies of academic discourse. The contemporary labor of re-narrating the postwar urban development project in Hamhŭng requires the use of para-academic research methods. These are often methods of artistic non-discipline or future-oriented speculation. It is precisely these methods with which the Hamhŭng project can be analyzed in relation to “entangled geographies.”^[17] My interest in Püschel’s work in North Korea was in its production conditions; a means of getting closer to the specifics of the GDR’s architectural internationalism. These also included the congeries of political, social and cultural elements that made possible the “planning of the reconstruction of the cities of Hamhung and Hungnam in North Korea by the DAG urban development brigade of the GDR.”^[18] The investigation of the conditions of production allowed us to consider both micro and macro-structural narratives of architectural, educational, social and political significance. In other words, with whom did the orphan “Hamhŭng” study? What did it see? What did it think? What did it disagree with? Who did it listen to? What books did it read? Which films did it watch? However, in contrast to the work of the architectural historian, who has to detail something like a history lesson as precisely as possible on the basis of found documents from the past, a “para-disciplinary tendency”^[19] of curatorial work in the field of art mobilizes an outside of historicity at the site of a “monster’s wounds.”^[20] This outside claims to articulate the gaze of these orphans of history, as Chris Marker would say: in other words, the outside of historicity casts a glance of the present, partly confronted with an “embarrassing silence” due to a politics of power or with the disapproval of the double, who perceives the orphan as an intruder. The view of the orphans mobilizes a chronopolitical present; an asymmetrical present in which affects of aversion and esteem mix to direct the authority of the document against itself as a method of historiography.

While my curatorial work attempted, with the help of archival material, to stay in close contact with a historical treatment of Püschel’s Hamhŭng project, it would also be a matter of critical reflection and articulation of this historical treatment in relation to questions of the present. In collaboration with the conceptual graphic designer Laure Giletti, this has resulted in a stratification of narrative strands, taking the form of a spatial installation with the title Hamhŭng’s Two Orphans (To Konrad Püschel). Between two and four text and image elements were placed on a total of 13 panels—in chronopolitical rather than chronological relation to each other. The form of articulation may move closer to the idea of montage, but I see the installation more as a research display consisting of a constellation of text and image elements raising a series of questions.^[21]

As part of the installation, visitors had three A2 posters at their disposal to take away, each with a question—the idea being that visitors could literally carry into the city of the present the question of the undead of internationalism, the social contract of the city and the geopolitics of architecture. My contribution to bauhaus imaginsta is thus about a differentiation of Püschel’s urban planning work, on the basis of the urban planning project in Hamhŭng, with the idea of both (1) contributing to a diversification of the debate about the history of the Bauhaus as proposed by bauhaus imaginsta (in that it problematizes the Bauhaus beyond extremes of the Cold War—i.e., beyond the binary interpretative prerogative of Chicago vs. Moscow), as well as (2) to propose an architectural internationalism from the GDR that at the same time had a state-crafting and diplomatic function within the conditions of the Cold War.

Let us focus on Püschel’s own visual records for a moment: The collection of photographs of Püschel’s trip to North Korea in the 1950s includes a photograph of a young chemical worker in a laboratory.^[22] She has a writing pad in front of her which is open and upon which she might be documenting laboratory results. In her hands she holds a thermometer, while in front of her stands a shelf with numerous gas bottles, beakers and glass flasks. She is wearing a white protective coat. The room is flooded with daylight, which enters the laboratory through a large window, flowing through the shelf with the laboratory equipment and illuminating the right half of the chemical worker’s face. The chemical worker is almost imperceptibly smiling, provoking a gesture of a laughing look. Her eyes look to the left, as if she wants to look beyond the photographer, who cannot keep her from her work. Thus, her gaze leads her into the room, exceeding the encounter with the East German architect and photographer Püschel. Does she seek the gaze of a colleague in the room? Is she thinking of family members who survived one of the devastating battles in the first hot war of the global Cold War? … it’s a moment of work, waiting, research and gaze that might easily have found its place in Marker’s Coréennes: a moment with which Püschel makes an impression of North Korea for himself. That is, of the province Hamgyŏng-namdo and the people living there after the war, about which the GDR party newspaper Neues Deutschland was then reporting daily.

Püschel took plenty of photographs during his stay. He not only visited the provincial capital Hamhŭng, he also documented four forms of settlement construction in Hamgyŏng-namdo province, taken with a view to examining the power relations between different social orders. For example, he comments on the influence of Japanese colonization in Korea, which produced industrial buildings along the coastal areas, writing: “Here it is no longer the design that speaks, but only technology and economy.”^[23] This is also where a city planner speaks, who learned and rehearsed architecture as a design practice with Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Hilbesheimer at the Bauhaus in Dessau. Furthermore, Püschel’s photo albums contain photographic observations focusing on the natural landscapes of Hamgyŏng-namdo; as he writes in “Ein Überblick über die Entwicklung und Gestaltung koreanischer Siedlungsanlagen,” he visited the tomb of the parents of the founding king, Ri Song-Gä of the Choson dynasty, located near Hamhŭng; it also contains reproduced drawings of log houses belonging to the fire field farmers of the Kaima highlands, and a hand-drawn floor plan of Hamhŭng from 1956, etc.

In the photo album the landscape pictures are often combined as diptychs or triptychs. A factory installation—it could also be a collective farm—is photographed in color. All the other photographs are reproduced in black-and-white 35mm format. It is as if photographic observation provided a research tool to learn about a North Korean building history so as to understand both the historical structures left undestroyed by the Korea-Indochina war; as if the visual research of the region delivered a profound method for planning Hamhŭng’s postwar future, for the reconstruction of the city by the construction working group from the GDR is not only a project of “brotherly friendship,” undertaken in the context of the GDR’s internationalist reconstruction aid to North Korea, but also a comprehensive urban planning program (a residential city machine would be worth mentioning) for constituting a new socialist society after a war that had destroyed infrastructure and urban space and forced millions of people to flee. In other words, just as the founding of the GDR was a consequence of the Second World War, the establishment of the DPRK was also preceded by a war with a global dimension, who’s ceasefire was negotiated for months at the 1954 Geneva Conference of the United Nations.^[24] It seems as if it is the power of war, a power able to establish the modernist tabula rasa, is also considered the modernist principle of a Plan Voisin (translated literally as “neighborhood plan,” this was the name of Corbusier’s planned redevelopment of central Paris).

In North Korea, it was war itself that realized the utopian idea of a tabula rasa, enabling the building of a new city from scratch. The Second World War being only recently concluded, the partitioning of Korea after 1953 can be viewed as a symptom of the reorganization of a global social system orchestrated by competing powers, just like the formation of Europe’s so-called Iron Curtain, of which the Berlin Wall was a part. Notes Marker: “it’s naive to ask where the war comes from: the border is the war.”^[25] The Second World War was over, a Third World War had immediately begun: the Cold War. The Korean War was the first hot war of this global Cold War—begun only five years after the Second World War had ended. It is the devastating destructive power of these wars that creates the condition for constructing, spatializing, locating, delimiting, and programming a new—here socialist—society. The architect and Hamhŭng project interpreter Dong-Sam Sin writes: “As facilities to be planned for the functioning of life in the district, there are: district administration, cultural center with cinema, post office, police, bank, hotel, restaurants, department stores, polyclinic, pharmacies, craftsmen’s yard, central building yard, coal and other storage places, operation of street cleaning and garbage collection, fire brigade and finally, for the 11 or 12 residential complexes still schools, children’s facilities, shops and health facilities will be necessary. This will provide a crucial basis for the district’s planning and the second stage of the work in Hamhŭng can really get underway.”^[26] Atop the tabula rasa created by war, the construction working group envisioned a residential city machine, producing a socialist-Korean society in the entanglement of administrative, economic, vegetative, medical, logistical, productive, social and cultural principles that led to discussing “Korea[as] an example of proletarian internationalism.”^[27]

Besides the documentation of what existed, Püschel’s photo albums also specifically documents construction methods, North-Korean workers, technologies and different work phases of the construction of the city of Hamhŭng itself. Numerous photographs describe the step by step production of the “wall block,” a kind of slab used in prefabricated buildings, seemingly under the direction of Korean workers.^[28] Sometimes one photograph of the situation is not enough but several photos create a sequence, as if Püschel had wished for a film camera in order to follow the course of events. After all, we are in the 1950s, and Püschel is economical in his use of photographic material; we may assume that the pictures were taken with an awareness of material resources. Püschel’s detailed photographic documentation of the production of the slab wall blocks, the clay blocks and the pounding of the mortar suggests that these must be at least partly Korean construction technologies. It also confirms the production method described by Dong-Sam Sin—“The clay used from time immemorial for housing construction in Korea should be used as a building material.”^[29] Püschel’s focus, both on the existing landscape and architecture, as well as his structural analysis of a particular North Korean construction method and the involvement of North Korean construction technologies are essential features of the practice of a specific internationalism by the means of architecture—meaning, the realization of the reconstruction of Hamhŭng by GDR architects/town planners such as Püschel.

In summary, it can be said that the architectural internationalism of the GDR in Korea between 1955 and 1962 cannot be separated (a) from the inscriptions of war which generated the tabula rasa of modernity. As the anti-colonial author and architect Samia Henni avers, it is necessary to discuss the history of architecture—including that of the Bauhaus—in the context of imperialism and colonialism, with a focus on precisely those forms of practice that introduced an internationalist idea into imperial wars. Specifically, for the work of the Bauhaus-trained architect Konrad Püschel, his study (b) of existing Korean architecture and (c) his exchange with North Korean workers must be considered in relation to how it reflects this Cold War project as a form of architectural internationalism.^[2] This approach seems contrary to the radical-modernist utopia of the tabula rasa with the need to remember the past and the practice of a society involved in building a future. This relationship of different temporalities is complex. It is impossible to grasp this relationship as a historical event alone, but rather as a stratification of different time courses, in which the contemporary evokes the past as unfinished conversation. Its complexity becomes apparent when two orphans of history, whom we have called Hamhŭng and Baubrigade, reappear after many years of enforced silence, discovering their documents lying in inaccessible archives, not perceived, not complete, fallen speechless or simply over-looked. It is precisely in this situation that a project like bauhaus imaginista takes on the role of a skeptic towards the established and the categorized. It may not lead to a complete transformation of the supposedly established daughter (a.k.a. usurper of the throne) into a “rat,” as Marker described the moment of confrontation between the orphan and her double, but to the search for a language that reflects and transforms this unsettling encounter through a constellation of temporal layers.