Hegemann,Werner b.June 15, 1881; Mannheim, Baden d.April 12, 1936; New York City
City planner, architectural critic, and author. He played a vital part in the transatlantic network of his profession. For several years, Hegemann was enrolled at the universities of Berlin and Paris before he studied political economy at the universities of Philadelphia, Berlin, Straβburg, and Munich, finishing his PhD with Lujo Brentano in 1908.
Traveling to the United States with his first wife Alice (nee Hesse) and their daughter, he met with reform groups in Philadelphia and New York and became a member of the Exhibit Committee of Boston’s “1915” Exposition in 1909. He returned to Berlin to be made general secretary of the International City Planning Exhibition of 1910, a show devised by his uncle, the Berlin architect Otto March, to show Berlin’s competition plans within a vast exhibition. Hegemann popularized reform and planning, especially American park and inner-city planning. Commissioned to write the exhibition’s official presentation, he composed two volumes on Der Stadtebau (City Planning), documenting the state of the art.
In 1913 Hegemann returned to the United States to lecture in several cities for the People’s Institute of New York. Engaged by the municipalities of Oakland and Berkeley in California, he delivered a broad analysis of planning for the East Bay cities, published in 1915, thereby taking a crucial part in shifting the focus of planning from the “City Beautiful” to the “City Functional.”
World War I interrupted his way home. From internment in Africa, Hege- mann fled by ship back to the United States to work as a city-planning consultant. Opening their own firm, Hegemann and the landscape architect Elbert Peets from Harvard specialized in suburban development, notably Washington Highland, Milwaukee (1916—1919, a historical site in 2005), and Wyomissing Park in Reading, Pennsylvania (1917—1921).
Meanwhile, Hegemann (divorced about 1913) met his second wife Ida Belle (nee Guthe). Married in 1920, they were to have four children.By 1922 the partners had authored a vast documentation of American civic art, American Vitruvius. Peets contributed sketches from his European tour, and Hegemann presented model buildings. Opposing the traditional Harvard School and stressing inner-city texture, their book at first was not well received but quickly acquired a reputation as a thesaurus.
After his return to Germany, Hege- mann edited a German version of the book in 1924, now designed to contradict European modernists and their idols Henry Wright, Louis Sullivan, and Lewis Mumford. From 1924 to 1933, he edited an architectural review Wachsmuths Monatshefte fur Baukunst (Wachsmuth’s History of Civic Art). The journal was remarkable for its international range, its opposition to blunt modernism and sheer traditionalism, and Hegemann’s effective debates with his critics that took place on its pages.
Hegemann also engaged in political criticism. In weighty literary volumes (published 1924, folios in German; 1929, folios in English) Hegemann invoked the German traditions of political thought and its heroes Frederick the Great, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Jesus Christ. Debunking Frederick II, he divested the Prussian king of his alleged qualities of mythical leadership to educate republicans. Despite his views being heavily contested by historians, his books reached a wide readership. In his book Das Steinerne Berlin (Berlin in Stones, 1930), Hegemann merged architectural and political criticism, exemplified by the history of building Berlin (Berlins Baugeschichte). After this return from a lecture tour in southern American cities in 1932, Hegemann vocalized his criticism of National Socialism. His books were burned in May 1933 after he and his family had already left for Switzerland. He was expatriated in 1935.
Alvin Johnson invited Hegemann to lecture at the New School of Social Research in New York, where the Hegemann family arrived in November 1933.
In 1935 his former staff member Joseph Hudnut, now dean of Columbia’s School of Architecture, succeeded in raising money to appoint Hegemann an associate professor of architecture. He taught city planning within the new curriculum, lectured on the New York Regional Plan, and tried to resume political criticism in City Planning Housing (1936), in which he argued for the expropriation of property from slum lords in the abolitionist’s tradition to support the New Deal.Caroline Flick
See also Intellectual Exile; Landscape Architects, German American; Mumford, Lewis
References and Further Reading
Crasemann Collins, Christiane. “Werner Hegemann (1881-1936): Formative Years in America.” Planning Perspectives 11 (1996): 1-21.
Flick, Caroline. Bildungsburger als Profession. Arbeitsleben eines Kritikers, Werner Hegemann (1881—1936). PhD thesis. Free University Berlin, 2003.
Oechslin, Werner. “Between America and Germany: Werner Hegemann’s Approach to Urban Planning.” In Berlin-New York, Like and Unlike: Essays on Architecture and Art from 1870 to the Present. Eds. Joseph Paul Kleihues and Christina Rathgeber. New York: Rizzoli, 1993, pp. 281-295.