ABSTRACT
I had heard these titillating opinions years ago, but I came across them again, more recently, reading a book I recommend to you highly, called Architects of Fortune: Mies van der Rohe and the Third Reich by Elaine S. Hochman.1
(Johnson knew Mies van der Rohe in the late 1920s, before the National Socialist Party’s rise to power, which was all but complete by 1935.) At issue for Hochman is to understand why Mies was so reluctant to leave Germany, which he only did in 1937. Gropius had by then emigrated (to London), and so had many others long before left the country. Jewish architects, artists, intellectuals had totally disappeared, but not to such pleasant places as London. All this Mies knew. Moreover, the Nazis had repeatedly closed down the Bauhaus in Dessau and in Weimar. It had arrested Bauhaus students; it had meddled in its faculty affairs. Was Mies van der Rohe a Nazi sympathizer, as Philip Johnson was, because Philip Johnson was, or vice versa?
