Historias espaciales de disidencia: imaginación, memoria y resistencia en Estambul, Viena y Santiago de Chile, 1938-1945

Abstract

Para Sonia y sus hijos Für Sonia und ihre Kinder This essay illuminates a story of friendship between the Austrian Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky and the Chilean Victoria Maier Mayer, two architects who took part in the resistance against the Nazi regime. The observation of their lives opens up ways of writing spatial histories of dissidence and pose question about kinship after trauma. The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces. Comprehension does not mean denying the outrageous, deducing the unprecedented from precedents, or explaining phenomena by such analogies and generalities that the impact of reality and the shock of experience are no longer felt. It means, rather, examining and bearing consciously the burden, which our century has placed on us-neither denying its existence nor submitting meekly to its weight. Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated attentive facing up to, and resisting of reality-whatever it may be (Arendt, 1958:viii). Comprehension or Resisting of Reality1 In 1953, the Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (1897-2000) wrote from Vienna to her friend and colleague, the Chilean architect Victoria Maier Mayer (1914-2004) in Santiago.2 It was one of the many written communications between the two women who had shared a political and architectural life in Turkey and Austria during the early 1940s, where they had been active in the Communist resistance against the Nazi regime. "I live in Vienna, I separated from my husband," Schütte-Lihotzky wrote to Maier Mayer, "now I am alone at Hamburgerstrasse 14, in Vienna's fifth district, of which you would not have so pleasant memories."3 Those "not so pleasant memories"