Mumford, Lewis b. October 19, 1895; Flushing, New York d. January 26, 1990;Amenia, New York
Writer, reformer, social philosopher, cultural critic, historian, biographer, and urban planner who during his long career published some 30 books and 1,000 articles. His interests were wide-ranging, in- cluding—prominently and continually— Germany and the German-speaking world.
Although Mumford never spent a single protracted period in Germany, he must be considered a key player in the transatlantic dynamic involving Germany, German culture, and Germans. His links stem from family relations, personal friendships, and intellectual and political interests. Mumford’s engagements ranged from architecture and urban planning to technology and aesthetics, as well as to social reform movements. His attitude shifted profoundly, from admiration of German cities and ways of life to despising the Germans for succumbing to the lures of National Socialism. Following World War II, a demonized Germany figured prominently in his criticism of American society, culture, and politics.Exposed to German language and culture through the family of his mother, Mumford developed an interest in Germany during his childhood. In the 1920s Mumford’s efforts in city planning led to links and, later, friendships, with German architects and city planners such as Walter Curt Behrendt, Fritz Schumacher, Walter Gropius, and Ernst May. Mumford was particularly attracted to the social reform movements within the Weimar Republic. Thus, his association with the Deutsche Werkbund (an arts and crafts movement, founded in Munich in 1898) and the influence of Erich Mendelsohn and, later, of Siegfried Giedion were important in shaping his views on architecture, technology, and aesthetics. In 1931 Mumford wrote a first draft of a book in which he intended to bring together his ideas on technology, cities, buildings, urban life, and humankind in general. But a 1932 trip to Germany on a Guggenheim fellowship transformed the project into a monumental scheme in several volumes of a series titled The Renewal of Life.
Mumford did much of the research for Technics and Civilization (1934) at the Deutsches Museum (German Museum) in Munich. In The Culture of Cities (1938) he depicts Lubeck as the consummate example of “medieval order,” at the same time as he extols the “biotechnic order” of the modern workers’ houses at Frankfurt-Romerstadt. The bibliographies in many of his books list numerous works of German scholarship, many of which he read in the original language. In particular, Mumford was influenced by the regionalist emphasis of the historian Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl and by Karl Bucher’s study of work and aesthetics. Karl Vossler’s study of Dante inspired him as he began work on the Renewal of Life series. Mumford visited Thomas Mann in Munich in 1932. There are numerous references in Mumford’s writings to Mann’s works, and an essay on The Magic Mountain is part of The Condition of Man (1944).The high opinion Mumford had of Mann even survived the shift in his general attitude toward Germany from admiration to contempt. In response to what he conceived of as the “Nazi disease,” Mumford publicly urged, as early as 1935, that the United States declare its intention of fighting, if necessary, on the side of Western democracies. This attitude crystallized in an article, “Call to Arms,” published in The New Republic in May 1938, and was further developed in a series of speeches, articles, pamphlets, and books, notably Men Must Act (1939) and Faith for Living (1940). It also led him to assist refugees from Germany, among them writers Thomas Mann and Carl Zuckmayer, philosopher Aurel Kolnai, and architect Josef Frank. In Green Memories (1947), Mumford mourned the death, in combat, of his only son, Geddes.
After World War II, Mumford’s main concern was to make people understand the moral dilemmas and political embarrassments that resulted from the invention and deployment of the atomic bomb. His 1946 book Values for Survival includes a series of letters on politics and education written to German friends.
Yet the “Letters to Germans” not only reveal Mumford’s disappointment with Germany’s becoming the country of National Socialism. They also show that in Mumford’s mind, Adolf Hitler’s Germany merged with a view of the United States as an industrial, urban, and cultural wasteland, the home of empty liberties and stifling values, and thus the unacknowledged alter ego of the totalitarian enemy it had opposed in Nazi Germany and was now opposing in the Soviet Union and its Communist allies. Unsurprisingly, therefore, Mumford opposed the war in Vietnam. Deploying a demonized Germany for his criticism of American culture and politics, he called President Lyndon B. Johnson, together with Senator Barry Goldwater, “fit allies for the Nazis.”This all-out attack on official America greatly contributed toward Mumford’s popularity in Germany when The Myth of the Machine was first published in translation in 1974. Paradoxically, however, the venture also propelled the decline of his reputation there. Mumford was suspected of harboring the kind of reactionary antimodernism that had for so long plagued German intellectual life. In German-language criticism, therefore, the prevailing picture of Mumford is that of a conservative critic, if not of a Spenglerian prophet of doom. This is not to deny Mumford’s debt to Germany and to German thought, although few Americans have acknowledged such a debt. Generally, however, American critics have placed Mumford toward the left of the political spectrum, focusing on his adversarial posture in matters of culture and politics.
Heinz Tschachler
See also Gropius, Walter Adolf; Mann, Thomas; Zuckmayer, Carl
References and Further Reading
Miller, Donald L. Lewis Mumford: A Life. New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989.
Mumford, Lewis. Sketches from Life: The Autobiography of Lewis Mumford. The Early Years. New York: Dial, 1982.
Tschachler, Heinz. Lewis Mumfords Reception in German Translation and Criticism. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994.
Wojtowicz, Robert. Lewis Mumford and American Modernism: Eutopian Themes for Architecture and Urban Planning. Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1996.