I travel to Berlin to see an exhibition catalog. It lives in the Universität der Künste library’s media archive, for in-person viewing only. I am assigned a seat. Above me, an exposed ceiling installation. In front of me, the small book I have wanted to open since I first came across the exhibition poster by Lotte Laserstein during my research about women in architecture. Apart from this catalog, the poster, a newspaper review and a newspaper advertisement nothing else of the exhibition remains. No photographs. These few documents are the closest thing to prove that it happened at all.

“Die gestaltende Frau” (The Creative Woman) ran for eighteen days in October and November 1930, organized by the Deutscher Staatsbürgerinnen Verband. It was not a modest show. Architecture, interior design, garden design, photography, art and technology; the exhibition insisted on the full scope of women’s creative work. A lecture series ran alongside, opening with the question: “Do we still need women’s associations?” The fact that this question was asked then, and still is today, tells you everything. 

To stand on that first floor of the Wertheim department store on Leipziger Strasse in Berlin, among those women, to feel the energy of those eighteen days. I wish I had been there. And I am glad I wasn’t, because of what came shortly after. This contradiction is part of what sitting with this catalog feels like. It would turn out to be one of the last occasions such a space was possible for a very long time. Among the architects listed are Marie Frommer, Hanna Löv, Elisabeth von Knobelsdorff, Emilie Winkelmann; women who built, documented, and claimed space before 1930. I reached the end of a master’s degree in architecture in twenty-first century Germany before encountering any of them, and only because I went looking myself. For eighteen days in late October 1930, they were simply in a room together. Seen, heard and represented. I keep wondering how they must have felt. Empowered, angry, proud, taken serious? They are now. Next step: rewrite architecture history books. All of them, so that collective memory can catch up. 

iss.