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angelika schnell Seite 1 09.06.2008 

Déjà vu 

Angelika Schnell 

The city is an industrial city with a large inland port and mighty factories; these days not 

every smokestack is blowing out smoke and those that do smell less nasty; ruled by social 

democrats for generations (in a conservative Land), even prior to 1933; mayors holding office 

for several terms there are not a rare phenomenon; a favorable geopolitical situation but still 

always runner-up; awkward initial planning and construction of the main railroad station and 

tracks still causing problems today; well connected to the “Reichsautobahn” freeway, 

however, and therefore consistently developed as an automobile-friendly town after the war 

with all the resulting urban sprawl that is now impossible to curb; a regional airport; a much- 

sung-about river in which bathing is now possible again and which regularly bursts its banks; 

peaceful surroundings; various problems with incorporating surrounding villages and loss of 

tax income to the affluent commuter belt; a university that was founded only in the 1960s; a 

central hospital; a trailblazing avant-garde cultural institution, yet only once in its existence as 

a town of culture and science did it draw the attention of the potentate who left it with 

unfinished monumental buildings of little architectural appeal and a good deal of 

embarrassing debt; but the town still enjoys some name-dropping regarding those who lived 

or worked there then. 

The place in question here is not Linz, but Mannheim, a mid-sized town in southwest 

Germany (in the northernmost part of Baden-Württemberg), which has not yet ventured to 

compete for the title of European Capital of Culture. Despite the fact that Mannheim has 

about one third more inhabitants, is situated on not just one but even two much-sung-about 

rivers – the Rhine and the Neckar –, has a larger port and industrial sector, has an older and 

more developed working-class background (during the National Socialist regime, “red” 

Mannheim was one of the few centers of resistance in Germany), has a general hospital that is 

also a university clinic and has several more important technical and/or cultural institutions 

(the automobile was invented here; it has a national rather than a regional theater; the 

“Kunsthalle” owned an excellent collection prior to the Nazi period and was host and name- 

giver to the famous exhibition “Neue Sachlichkeit”). And while the “Ars Electronica” may be


more internationally famous, Mannheim’s dynamic music scene led to the establishment of its 

own pop music academy several years ago, where one can study pop music design or the 

music business. And, of course, the potentate who at least temporarily made the town a center 

of culture was not Hitler but Elector Karl Philipp, who moved the seat of the Electoral 

Palatinate to Mannheim in 1720 and started to build Europe’s second-largest palace modeled 

on Versailles. He was succeeded by Karl Theodor who brought renowned scientists and artists 

to the town (including Mozart, Schiller and Goethe). In 1778, succession issues required a 

transfer of his residence to Bavaria. Pressure from Prussia forced Karl Theodor to cede the 

Bavarian Innviertel to Austria, and he left the country behind with a huge amount of debt. 

So what is it then that commends Linz for its part as a Capital of Culture? Perhaps its famous 

cultural institutions (Linzertorte cake, Bruckner festival, Ars Electronica)? Or is it the idea 

that it has morphed from an ugly industrial town into a beautiful city of culture? The latter 

explanation is favored by its Mayor, Franz Dobusch. Or is it because Linz boasts a rare asset, 

i.e. nature, industry and culture mingling together to form a harmonious whole? Martin 

Heller, artistic director of Linz09, thinks that this “trinity” is Linz’s unique selling 

proposition. 1 A big claim that needs to be corroborated by facts. The preface of the city’s 

Cultural Development Plan, for instance, says this: “At the end of the 20 th century, culture is 

no longer limited to a narrow arts context, but also involves the social, technological, societal 

and economic spheres.” 2 As the definition of culture gets blurred at the edges, almost any 

epithet can be taken as enhancing or justifying the title of “city of culture”: social model city, 

clean-air city, city of economic power and full employment. Initiated in the 1990s at the 

political level and subsequently unanimously adopted by the City Council, the Cultural 

Development Plan is not linked to the concept for the Capital of Culture 09 in either structural 

or substantial terms - with good reason, probably. While some take a widening definition of 

culture as leading to the clouded sphere of cultural events management, others perceive it as a 

politicization process. In their preface, Mayor Dobusch and City Councillor for Culture and 

the Arts Reinhard Dyk have this to say: “Overall changes in society and the transition of the 

City of Linz from an industrial to a cultural city carry in their wake the need for theoretical 

analysis and for cultural-policy action proposals.” Hence, social-democratic policy makers 

want Linz to leave behind its provincial status, and therefore the city needs “action proposals” 

for those working in the cultural sphere and more intellectual support (“need for theoretical 

1 Martin Heller, Artistic Director of Linz09, in an interview, in: SPÖ Linz-Stadt (ed.), Bürgermeister Franz Dobusch. 

20 gute Jahre für Linz, Gutenberg-Werbering, Linz, 2007, p. 155 

2 http://www.linz.at/kultur/kep/vorwort.html


analysis”). While this sounds ambitious, one should not overlook one thing: the transition 

from an industrial to a cultural city is not a prerogative of Linz alone. It has already been 

achieved by others. 

In 1955, the City of Mannheim published what was, for that time, a lavishly illustrated book 

about “Mannheim on its way up” which eulogized the rebuilding of Mannheim “as a center of 

culture and economic activity” (the city had been almost completely destroyed in the Second 

World War). The book contained mainly black-and-white photographs of the port and 

industrial zone, of factories and workers, engines and machinery, ships and warehouses, and 

of course new department stores, banks and insurance companies in the city center, residential 

buildings, schools and a few buildings of special interest. While the economic boom of the 

German “Wirtschaftswunder” was in progress, the social-democratic city fathers engaged in 

modern and assertive PR for a new understanding of the city and made targeted use of 

contemporary visual instruments for that purpose. If most of the photographs show the world 

of factory workers, it was not only because earning a living and having one’s daily bread were 

the most important goals after the war, but because the world of work was to be a natural and 

important part of Mannheim’s culture (there are shots showing a “skipper on the Rhine” or a 

“metal welder taking a cigarette break” posing as though they were doing screen tests). The 

photographic style chosen was not documentary but artistic, one of the photographers 

recruited being Robert Häusser who had his studio in Mannheim. Before the war, an artistic 

portrayal of industrial labor as part of the city’s official cultural policy would have been 

inconceivable. The middle classes and the proletariat were segregated in geographical and 

cultural/intellectual terms. Albert Speer, Mannheim-born chief architect of the Third Reich, 

would very naturally reminisce about the upper-middle class world of his childhood which 

repeatedly served him as justification for distancing himself from the formerly adulated 

dictator (a “petty bourgeois”) who, in turn, had grown up in Linz. 3 

One must therefore challenge the claim of the Mayor of Linz that cities such as Linz or 

Mannheim had yet to develop from industrial into cultural cities, since the needs and visions 

of reconstruction determined the identification of both spheres at a much earlier point in time. 

Particularly we must not forget that the transformation from an industrial to a cultural city 

was triggered mainly by the transition from an industrial to a consumer society, which again 

is not just a current development and also affects large industrial locations such as Linz and 

3 Albert Speer, Erinnerungen, Propyläen Verlag, Berlin, 1969, pp. 20


Mannheim. Since the 1960s, if not earlier, the most important drivers of urban development 

have included shopping and residential needs, not just out of mere necessity, but reflecting 

cultural forms of leisure (shopping) and individualization (comfortable living). This means 

that cities need to endure the process of being defined no longer on the basis of their 

characteristics, but more and more in relation to their sprawling suburbs. 1972 saw the 

opening of the “Rhein-Neckar-Zentrum”, one of the first shopping malls in the Federal 

Republic of Germany boasting some 60.000 square meters of shopping area. The name and 

the location clearly showed that it was a product of and for the region which includes the 

large cities of Mannheim, Ludwigshafen and Heidelberg as well as several smaller cities with 

a total population of approximately 1.4 million people in three different Länder (Baden- 

Württemberg, Hessen, Rhineland Palatinate). As the shopping center was located in the 

Hessian town of Viernheim, that is where the tax revenue accrued. Because of the favorable 

location near a freeway junction on the A5 (a section of the freeway designed to connect 

Hamburg, Frankfurt and Basel that had already been planned during the Weimar Republic), it 

also attracted the Baden-Württemberg inhabitants of Mannheim, Heidelberg and their 

surroundings. In the late 1970s this fact resulted in a heated debate about the economic 

decline of city centers, to which Mannheim and Heidelberg reacted rapidly by installing 

pedestrian zones in their inner cores. Hence, what is currently going on in and around Linz, 

where the local municipalities of Leonding and Pasching apparently want to best each other 

by building glammed-up shopping malls, has already been known elsewhere for quite some 

time. 

What is correct is the assessment of there being a “need for theoretical analysis”. Planners and 

scientists are still trying to cope with the phenomenon of urban sprawl in terms of instruments 

and definitions. The existing uncertainties are so substantial as to foster unreasonable and 

illusory undertakings. This includes the incessant development of individual car use in the 

region – something for which a reference to the non-existence of legal bases in Austrian 

regional and national planning can no longer serve as an excuse, now that climate change has 

been proven to exist. Something that the city of Essen intends to do for its term as Capital of 

Culture in 2010, i.e. to act on behalf of the entire Ruhr area, would hardly have been possible 

for Linz without raising a good deal of embarrassing questions. Even though the city itself 

may be a model in terms of environmental polices, the surrounding region pays shamefully 

little heed to environmental protection.


Moreover, the theoretical problem of urban sprawl also relates to the expansion of the notion 

of culture into a romantic idea of a harmonious blend of work and nature. The ideological 

nucleus is the single-family home in the green belt, which, unfortunately, is not addressed in 

the context of Linz09 – although Martin Heller declared the interconnection of nature, 

industry and culture to be the event’s guiding theme. In 1955, the City of Mannheim hardly 

ever mentioned nature in its proud publication. Twenty-two years later the city – still social- 

democratic -- had no qualms about publishing a city manual called “Mannheimer 

Stadtkunde” 4 which in its very first chapters deals exclusively with “landscape, nature 

conservation and public parks” and, notably, with the surrounding regions, whereas the 

industrial and urban residential areas are mentioned only in passing. In the 1970s, Mannheim 

still held the naïve belief that the toxic fumes emitted by industry were filtered through the 

“green lungs” of parks and forests, 5 which is why the city decided to shed its image of a grey 

industrial town (which it had been so proud of twenty years earlier) and apply for hosting the 

German national garden show (a “Capital of Culture” being unknown then). Between April 

and October 1975, the show with the telling slogan of “Living in the Countryside”, attracted 

more than eight million visitors 6 . Apart from the enlargement of the two main municipal 

parks, the garden show also brought in its wake the establishment nearby of one of the first 

German prefab model-house sites, the “Deutsche Fertighaus Center”. There was palpable 

evidence of what became -- as of the following year and until today -- the almost mythical 

synthesis of the idea of a blend of nature, culture and industry: the family home nestled in the 

green belt. One still witnesses the unabated pursuit of the paradoxical development of urban 

dwellers who want to get out into the green belt (nature), build a home there (culture), then 

commute to the office (industry) on newly built freeways, which, however, markedly impair 

the enjoyment of nature. So there is need again for new building land on the (as yet) green 

field, where other new dwellers can erect their dream house, which in turn requires 

development and infrastructure efforts, which demand additional resources and cause an 

increase in polluting emissions. 

Although, by virtue of its successful environmental policies, Linz would actually be well 

positioned to break this vicious cycle by coming up with alternative models, there seems only 

muted enthusiasm for doing so. There is also a tendency to engage in self-deception: despite 

4 Stadt Mannheim (ed.), Mannheimer Stadtkunde, SVA Südwestdeutsche Verlagsanstalt, Mannheim, 1977 

5 “Mannheim and Ludwigshafen are situated in an industrial conurbation. Day and night, factory chimneys and 

smokestacks, but also the many motor vehicles, release toxic fumes of visible and invisible exhaust gases into the 

air. Such immissions are filtered in the forest through billions of leaves and needles. This is why the forest is also 

called the “green lung” of the city.“ Ibid., p. 28 

6 A record number of visitors to this day.


many claims that it was just such an alternative model, the much-praised “solarCity”, for 

instance, is simply a new housing estate and not an urban expansion project. Building a 

manageable amount of straight or curved lines of terraced housing spaced apart at roughly 

equal distances on a green field, which do not even achieve the same level of design and 

spatial complexity as Puchenau in overall planning, will hardly be of great appeal to the “non- 

family” user groups that the city would so much like to see there. It was mainly the traditional 

social models – the small nuclear family with kids – who moved to the “solarCity”; the fact 

that the “share of migrant tenants”, as pc language has it, is below the Linz average fits the 

picture well. 7 This can hardly be called urban culture. The “city” part in “solarCity” is a 

rhetorical subterfuge. 

While it is true that a few urban densification projects have been introduced, too many people 

obviously continue to profit from the status quo which still tries to accommodate lifestyle 

dreams that reality has long shown to be non-viable. The omnipresent Raiffeisen-Landesbank 

Oberösterreich, for instance, not only gives financing advice to private homebuilders but also 

recommends that they should choose their land according to ecological criteria – it should 

“not be near heavily used roads or industrial sites” – as though there were an endless supply 

of such building land available. In addition, the bank gives very frank advice on the topic of 

“attractive home design”. This ranges from the above “biologically appropriate building 

choices” to “conservatories”, “water oases” and even “garden design”. It goes without saying 

that their service also includes “Interior design. Tips for creating a beautiful home”. Under 

this heading one finds advice such as this: “The living room should have a focal point, such as 

a large potted plant, a curved window, an illuminated or nicely framed piece of art, a piano or 

an old-fashioned tiled stove. This focal point should stand out from the rest of the furniture 

and act as a guiding theme for the overall interior décor.” 8 In addition there are tips for 

creating “contrasts”, for the “center of the room”, for how to use color and upholstered 

furniture. There is not one single cliché missing that you could find in relevant interior 

decorating magazines, and yet the authors are convinced that they are helping people to 

develop “individual design”. The helpful advice is not selfless, of course. A part of 

Raiffeisen-Landesbank is Real-Treuhand Immobilien Vertriebs GmbH, a holding company 

for ten further real estate companies that provide all services involved in public or private 

construction projects, from building-land development to utility connections, project 

7 

http://www.linz.at/images/Beitrag_Evaluierung.pdf, ed. by Stadtteilbüro solarCity Pichling, Heliosallee 84, 4030 

Linz 

8 

http://www.rlbooe.at/eBusiness/rlbooe_template1/1029084571550- 

26257612983006457_1011376485453_1034468417717-1015630729806-NA-6-NA.html


development, construction, furnishing and facility management. It seems very likely that this 

comprehensive consortium has more influence on building activities in Upper Austria than 

anyone else. The fact that they give tangible advice for comfortable living is even a pivotal 

aspect. Anyone can recalculate financing models, but aesthetic issues are more subtle and – as 

a city with a Cultural Development Plan designed to be a “systematic” cultural policy 

instrument should know very well – they have political clout. A “curved window”, a “piano 

or a tiled stove” are not only interchangeable decoration pieces but models of a bourgeois- 

conservative lifestyle that is presented as worthy of emulation. The things suggested for 

individualized living actually seem to require control by authorities on individuality and 

comfort such as a Landesbank for home builders to feel safely “individual”. Karl Kraus’ 

famous statement that all he needed from a city was “asphalt, street cleaning, house keys, a 

heating system, hot water pipes, …. “Gemütlichkeit” (comfort) I can provide for myself!” still 

equated individuality with freedom. That appears to have become obsolete. 

“Prettification” of the “Biedermeier” type is an issue that might be much more the focus of a 

different cultural debate, particularly in a city such as Linz. According to architectural 

historians, it belongs to the architectural repertoire of residential buildings from the Nazi 

period. Friedrich Achleitner emphasizes that this type of architecture was derived from 

historical models and goes as far as to call it “ideology-free” because the dictatorship had 

obviously failed to produce its own distinctive style. “Nazi planners”, he writes, had used “an 

architectural vocabulary which was developed before their time in the conservative-middle- 

class building style of the “Heimatschutz” movements and partly of the English-German 

garden city movement”, which meant that these buildings were not “a priori political”. 9 

Achleitner’s idea of an “autonomy of the architectural medium” is of course a typical 

statement of his time and, above all, constitutes in itself a political-ideological rejection of 

modern urban development in the post-war era. In this way, National Socialist buildings are 

made both accomplices of a “post-modern” notion of architecture and representatives of a 

both universal and folksy inherited architectural idiom. Every time mention is made of terms 

involving “gemütlichkeit”, Biedermeier-lifestyle or individual comfort, they support the 

aspiration of a “cosy home in the green belt” which people will continue to dream about for 

some time to come. 

9 Friedrich Achleitner, Österreichische Architektur im 20. Jahrhundert, vol. 1, Residenz Verlag, Salzburg/Wien, 

1980, p. 108, 109


A dream that people should wake up from soon is the idea of a clear separation of city and 

countryside, urban culture and unspoilt nature. The vague concept of Linz as the Cultural 

Capital with its “trinity ” of culture, industry and nature, is not clearly enough related to the 

omnipresent urban sprawl, which Thomas Sieverts calls a “Zwischenstadt” (intermediate city) 

between culture and nature”, 10 and which requires a redefinition of terms such as nature and 

culture. One might just as well recall in this context the notorious myth of the “indestructible 

bond between technology and nature”, i.e. the “Reichsautobahn” freeway, which was 

designed to “render the countryside even more beautiful”, 11 and to which Mannheim was 

linked in 1937 and Linz in 1939. Mannheim even boasted “Germany’s most beautiful freeway 

access” and, on top of that, a direct connection to Heidelberg (A 656). Motorists driving along 

the twenty kilometers of relatively straight freeway from the lowlands of Upper-Rhineland to 

the Neckar-valley entrance in Odenwald are confronted with the persistence of provincial 

thinking, which endures despite all freeways and extended notions of culture. Heidelberg is 

situated at the end of this section of the freeway. Before one enters the town in a rather 

prosaic manner, one finds the prescribed yellow road sign announcing “Heidelberg”. Make a 

u-turn and drive back the same stretch to the already mentioned “most beautiful freeway 

access of Germany” and you will of course encounter yet another yellow sign which reads: 

“Mannheim. University City”. 

10 Thomas Sieverts, Zwischenstadt, 3. Aufl., Vieweg, Braunschweig/Wiesbaden, 1999, p. 55 

11 Quote from: Erhard Schütz / Eckhard Gruber, Mythos Reichsautobahn. Bau und Inszenierung der „Straßen des 

Führers“ 1933-1941, Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin, 1996, p. 7

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