In 1909 Arthur Krupp had an income of 906,012 gold crowns; the following year it amounted to substantially more than one million. This made him the 30th richest Viennese of his era, slightly ahead, even, of the industrialist Karl Wittgenstein. It was a time – much like our own – when earnings in the top echelon were very high indeed. By comparison, the average yearly income for a factory labourer in Austro-Hungary in 1910 was 936 crowns. Vienna was then the seventh-largest city in the world with a population of more than two million, quite a few more than it has today.
The youngest son of Hermann Krupp (who invented the spoon roller and was himself the younger brother of the more well-known Alfried of Essen), Arthur was technical director of, and a major shareholder in, the Berndorfer Metallwarenfabrik, in every sense a sibling enterprise to the Krupp steel-and-armaments empire. By 1911 Arthur employed about 5,000 workers, who churned out some 48,000 sets of plated cutlery and other goods in the Lower Austrian village each day, much of it for hotels, railway dining cars and shipping lines. The company logo eventually featured a bear, mid-stride on its hind legs, nonchalantly shouldering an enormous silver spoon. In the similar crest of the town of Berndorf itself, the bear appears to be licking the spoon.
Arthur had been a lacklustre schoolboy – theory bored him – and when his parents first packed him off to boarding school in Dresden at the age of 12 he travelled by train unaccompanied. (‘It would be a sad thing,’ his father remarked dryly, were he unable to find his way on his own.) He may or may not have enjoyed the journey, but he hated what followed. He later described the attic dormitory there and classrooms as ‘sadder than prison cells’. He grew into his role as a man of wealth and power, by turns appreciated, revered, envied and not infrequently resented by those whose lives and livelihoods were subordinate to his.
Do the grandest visions of patriarchy develop in the minds of younger sons of younger sons? Arthur, in this regard, thought big. He and his wife, Margret – childless since their daughter’s death only a few days after birth – turned their attentions to the company town and moulded it, with equal parts benevolence and firmness, like progeny they were bringing up. Across from the couple’s imposing 1890s Beaux Arts villa, and in direct sight of it, were workers’ cottages leading up to the grand Catholic church Arthur (himself Protestant) directed to be built in 1910.
Flanking the church then as now are twin Neo-Baroque municipal school buildings of about a year earlier (at the time, one for boys, the other for girls; today they serve as primary and secondary schools). The architects Max Hegele and Hans Peschl worked from a concept by Arthur’s house architect Ludwig Baumann. Painfully conscious of the educational tristesse of his own youth, Arthur stepped in to pay for the interiors to be fitted out according to a novel plan: the academic painters Franz Wilhelm Ladewig and Robert Jüttner were to create, together with the noted furniture-maker Bernhard Ludwig, a dozen colourful rooms in each building following art-historic styles – Egyptian, Doric, Pompeian, Byzantine, Moorish, Romanesque, Gothic, Roman Renaissance, Baroque, Louis XIV, Rococo and Empire. In addition, the schools would have sanitary and hygiene facilities then unheard of in such settings, along with their own doctors and a free dental clinic.
Each of the ‘style classrooms’, as they came to be known, consisted of decorated walls and ceilings, as well as elaborate entrance doors and surrounds, and, in some cases, flooring to match. The teacher’s lectern/desk and chair, a cupboard for classroom supplies and, originally, a facing on the pupils’ bentwood and cast-iron desks completed the scheme. Paul Wilhelm, a writer in 1909 for the Wiener Tagblatt, surely came close to capturing Arthur’s intent when he claimed that the ‘best method of teaching is looking, with no instruction at all. For it is only through unforced, gentle leading, and not through schoolmasterly drilling, that an appreciation of art can be awakened in children. Familiarity shall replace the necessity of having to learn.’
The bill for one of the Moorish rooms alone is supposed to have come to 40,000 gold crowns; one source claims that the entire project cost Arthur more than his 1909 and 1910 incomes combined. But no good deed, as they say, goes unpunished. As World War I approached, the Berndorf concern teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. Further funds were required from Essen, and one cousin commented that Arthur had ruined the family business through his excessive philanthropy. Meanwhile, others weighed in, usually with agendas of their own: Henry van de Velde, Hermann Muthesius and Josef August Lux, all fighting battles against historicism, were critical. Lux called the parade of styles a ‘masquerade’: ‘The only style in which we may and must build is the modern. [...] Godforsaken Berndorf! Hopeless!’
More recently class theorists have focused, unflatteringly, on Arthur’s imperiousness and on patriarchal social structures in general, positing that the true purpose of the rooms was only ever to prepare children for a future life as workers in Krupp factories anyway. (‘Only the child who is studying and learning, and who is also clean, is the pleasing child who will one day find admittance to the Krupp workers’ family.’) The art historian Mara Reissberger has drawn amusing parallels between the uniform rooms and their disparate décor and the firm’s mass-produced goods with their slight surface variations over normed shapes.
Adolf Loos once said: ‘The difference between myself and the Bolsheviks is that they want to turn everyone into a proletarian whereas I want to turn everyone into an aristocrat.’ In this Loos shared some common ground, at least, with Arthur Krupp, who, born with a silver spoon in his mouth, gave it to the town he made.
Stilklassen, Margaretenplatz 2 and 5, 2560 Berndorf. Details & Guided tour times: kruppstadt-berndorf.at/stilklassen
A version of this appeared in the June 2015 issue of The World of Interiors. Learn about our subscription offers
.jpg)
