The interaction between politics and architecture in Germany can be divided into two long sections. The first shows the fairly rapid succession of political regimes between German unity in 1871 and the end of the Cold War, marked by the Wende in 1989-1990. The second reveals the profound transformations in architectural theory and practice during these 120 years, informed by those in science, culture and the arts. Shorter cuts are essential to measure the more internal dynamics of architecture, revealing the peripatetic trajectories of several professionals whose production crossed regimes, from the activities carried out in the 1920s and 1930s by those trained before 1914, to those carried out under Nazism by architects trained under Weimar, to the more tense activities of architects whose practice unfolded over four successive regimes. Laterally, the movements of certain people between the two Germanys, exiles and returnees, must also be taken into account.
An analysis of the length of the architects' careers and their ability to cross the different regimes without necessarily changing their approach sheds light on this configuration. The paths of some twenty individuals born between the end of the 1860s and the beginning of the twentieth century are considered, as they intersect with the successive political regimes under which they operated. The analysis focuses on the careers of such key figures in German architectural culture as Peter Behrens, Hans Poelzig, Paul Schultze-Naumburg, Heinrich Tessenow, Paul Schmitthenner, Paul Bonatz, Wilhelm Kreis, Hans Scharoun, Ernst May, Bruno Taut, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Egon Eiermann.
