Interiors as historical artefact

Interiors and furnishings are commonly portrayed as static settings of historically significant events and rarely studied as sources, images, or memories of these developments. The fallacy of understanding an interior as, in the words of French curator Nicolas Bourriaud, a blank slate, has been increasingly challenged in scholarly discourses (especially over the past three decades). Interiors, especially in private contexts, do not exist in a historical vacuum, detached from their contexts of creation, life cycles, and materiality. As meeting, retreat, and exhibition spaces, they not only tell the stories of their creators and users, but also reflect their location-specific contexts. Interiors are expressions of personal identities and have an active role in the construction of these very identities. Contrary to the functionalist tendency to reduce interiors primarily to their form and function, this article considers interiors as valuable historical artifacts in which design, spatiality, and personal meanings are closely intertwined.

Private interiors allow insights into family histories precisely because they are usually locked behind closed doors and not intended for the public eye. Each interior is a museum of personal experiences, onto which individual symbolisms, needs and nostalgias are projected. Interiors are, in consequence, not arbitrary arrangements, but follow conscious or unconscious choices, patterns, and narratives. The design of a home is one of the most private representations of a person. Which furnishings, materials and forms reflect us? What are objects supposed to remind us of and what are they supposed to make us forget? Meanings can already be extracted from the relationship between objects within a space, based on, among other things, their arrangement, colour, and form. This article analyses the interior of the Goldbergs' vacation home in Pinamar / Uruguay as a gateway into a turbulent family history in which interior design has always played a significant role.

Vienna, the escape, and a new beginning in South America

Otto Goldberg was born in Vienna on March 1, 1921 (just like his sister Liesel, who was three years older) and grew up in an acculturated Jewish family. His mother, Katharina Goldberg (née Katalin Bauer, March 25, 1888 in Szemenye, Hungary), had moved from Transdanubia in Western Hungary to the Austrian capital, where she married Viktor Goldberg (born 10.6.1889 in Vienna) on August 17, 1913. Viktor had studied architecture in Vienna and then established a major furniture business as an interior designer, which granted the Goldbergs a bourgeois lifestyle. The family occupied a spacious apartment at Mariahilfer Straße 47, a busy shopping street in Vienna's sixth district. After the “Anschluss” of Austria to the German Reich in March 1938, the Goldbergs decided to escape to Uruguay. While the mass flight of Jews from Nazi Germany was reaching its peak at this time, possible countries of refuge were increasingly tightening their entry conditions. The largely inconclusive refugee conference in Évian, France (July 6-15, 1938), made it clear to Jewish families that there were hardly any open escape routes. Although the documents do not clearly indicate why the Goldbergs chose Uruguay as their flight´s destination, this decision was likely linked primarily to the availability of visas. Passport stamps show that the Goldbergs entered Uruguay on a tourist visa on November 23, 1938, exactly two weeks after the November Pogrom. Although the documents give no indication of a direct connection and the Goldbergs had possibly already escaped Vienna at the time of the pogroms on November 9 / 10, the brutal riots underscored the need for and urgency of this decision.

Pieces of furniture play a special role in the family memories of the flight and the new beginning in Montevideo. In this regard, Veronica Rüter (née Goldberg) described in a recorded conversation from February 20, 2023 that her grandfather Viktor probably acquired precious stones in Vienna to set them into furnishings of the family. Since the Goldbergs were only allowed to take some personal objects to South America, but not their assets, some capital might have thus been shipped to Uruguay unseen. Although this account cannot be substantiated by the surviving documents, the narrative indicates that furniture was more than merely a product of or the backdrop to the family history but had a particular significance in the lives and survival of the Goldbergs. In this regard, the family also benefited from the more liberal immigration policies of the Alfredo Baldomir Uruguayan government, which had emerged victorious from the 1938 parliamentary elections and sought rapprochement with the United States and Great Britain. Baldomir revised the strict immigration quotas of his autocratic predecessor Gabriel Terra (1873-1942), who had opposed the admission of refugees.

In total, between 75,000 and 100,000 German-speaking Jews managed to flee across the Atlantic to Central and South America, of whom around 7,500 Jewish refugees managed to escape to Uruguay. The increasingly restrictive immigration policies in Western Europe, the United States, and the British Mandate of Palestine in the 1930s played a focal role for why many Jews sought refuge on the South American continent. After Argentina also stopped granting visas to Jewish refugees in 1938 (Directive 11), Uruguay became one of the last open escape routes. Moreover, also the fairly high standard of living, the country´s European character, and the deeply entrenched laicism made Uruguay a desirable refugee destination (and transit country). Although Uruguay offered shelter to more refugees, in proportion to its population, than the United States or Argentina, there has been little research on the state along the Río de la Plata as an important country of exile.

After some time in Montevideo, Viktor Goldberg was able to resume his profession and set up a small interior design studio. The family moved into a long house in the south of the city, where Katharina Goldberg ran a lunch canteen and Viktor set up a workshop and showroom. Manufacturing interiors hence remained a common thread in the family's history, which now symbolized the difficult new start in Uruguay, as compared to the bourgeois furniture business and lifestyle in Vienna. Since craft training was not centrally organized in Uruguay by the state, the knowledge, skills, and European designs of German-speaking refugees found a large market in this field of activity. Sonja Wegner's research (1997) highlights the opening of numerous interior design studios and furniture manufacturers in Montevideo by Jewish refugees, as well as their significant influence on the regional interior style. Viktor Goldberg's workshop should also be considered within this context.

Between Montevideo und Pinamar

Otto Goldberg first worked as a technical draftsman in Montevideo before moving to Buenos Aires / Argentina in 1944. There he met Helga Goldberg (née Marcus), whom he married in February 1949. Helga had been born in Mülheim an der Ruhr on November 23, 1918, and had fled with her Jewish family after the Reichstag fire in 1933 to Argentina via the Netherlands, where the family had stayed for several years in precarious conditions while awaiting the opportunity to leave the country. At the request of Viktor Goldberg, who could no longer run his interior design studio alone, the couple moved back to Uruguay, where their two children Veronica Rüter (October 25, 1950) and Jan Goldberg (October 3, 1954) were born. The collaboration between Otto and Viktor was marked by a simmering conflict over style issues, as Viktor adhered to more traditional designs and Otto wanted to pursue more progressive ideas. This discussion over interior issues illustrates a generational conflict in which Viktor was stylistically oriented towards the Viennese past and Otto was more inclined towards contemporary trends. After Viktor's retirement, Otto founded his own interior design business and opened a new work- and showroom in downtown Montevideo with a vernissage in 1960.

Preserved letters of recommendation and acknowledgements prove that Otto Goldberg swiftly made a name for himself, especially among wealthy customers from Montevideo and the fashionable Punta del Este, some of whom commissioned him to furnish entire apartments and houses. The flourishing interior design manufactory and the associated social advancement were reminiscent of the Goldbergs' successful furnishing business in Vienna, which they were forced to sell / abandon 32 years earlier. In 1961, Otto designed a vacation home for his young family not far from the beach in Pinamar (literally “pines by the sea”), 36 kilometres east of Montevideo. Helga Goldberg described the house in handwritten notes as a “little paradise” and the family´s focal point during weekends and vacations. The centrality of the house is also reflected in the “Pinamar” armchair designed by Otto Goldberg (shown in the photograph on the left, standing with its back to the windows), which won an award for good design by the Uruguay Industrial Design Research Centre on December 31, 1970.

A vacation home: reading interiors

The armchair model is representative of Otto Goldberg´s modern design approach, who, unlike his father, had to abandon his education due to the flight and learned his skills mainly autodidactically. The interior and furniture design of the living room space reflects the sleek and functionalist design vocabulary of the 1960s. Goldberg embraces a “less is more” aesthetic, where minimalist elegance, clean lines, and right angles define the interior. The restrained yet intimate interior design is in clear contrast to the more avant-garde trends of the 1960s (propagated, among others, by Verner Panton and Eero Aarnio), which experimented with idiosyncratic and almost sculptural approaches. The interior creates a private retreat for the family that stylistically and symbolically does not look back into the past but is clearly anchored in the (Uruguayan) present. This connection between family and place is reflected in the bright, open space, where the large windows create a smooth transition between interior and exterior areas. The open room design with large glass elements is reminiscent of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who, according to Jan Goldberg, had a formative influence on Otto Goldberg.

This embeddedness within the natural environment is also echoed in the materiality of the interior, where regional, natural materials (especially pine wood) add complexity to the sober, industrial designs. The wooden elements of the “Pinamar” armchair model symbolize this bridge to the surrounding pine forest of Uruguay's Costa de Oro. Goldberg's clever contrasting of smooth surfaces (seat surfaces and backs) with rough surfaces (brick wall, fireplace flue) gives the interior a warmer, more personal seal. The absence of personal objects that indicate a connection to the family´s history is, moreover, striking. No people are depicted in the entire series of photographs, and the static, choreographed nature of the shots suggests an arranged series of images intended to document the design of the vacation home´s interior and exterior. The photo series is a “portrait” of the design composition and not of the intimacy of family life. Above all, the interior of the cottage reflects the Goldbergs' highly acculturated and secular life in Uruguay, which was rooted in the local context and the “now.”

With the increasing demise of democracy in Uruguay in the late 1960s, the Goldbergs experienced repeated mass arrests and arbitrary interrogations in Montevideo. According to Helga Goldberg, the time stirred up “memories of the Hitler era” and the family decided to flee to West Germany. On September 11, 1971, their ship from Montevideo arrived in Hamburg on Jan Goldberg's 17th birthday (October 3), to where Veronica Rüter had moved a year earlier already. Otto and Helga Goldberg eventually settled in Freiburg, where Otto Goldberg found employment as a furniture salesman (but not designer) at the furniture store O. Kramer KG. The hope that he would be able to implement new designs and once again establish an interior design studio would remain unfulfilled. He died in 1974 after a serious illness, only three years after his arrival in Germany. He would not see the pine trees by the sea again. With the photographs, however, memories of the vacation home would remain in the family.

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