Behind the Glass: The Villa Tugendhat and Its Family by Michael Lambek (review)

Reviewed by: Behind the Glass: The Villa Tugendhat and Its Family by Michael Lambek Andrew Brandel Michael Lambek. Behind the Glass: The Villa Tugendhat and Its Family. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2022. 384 pp. Commissioned in 1928 in the city of Brno, seized by Nazi authorities in 1939, relinquished by the family who built it to the city 1969, and declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2001, the house that stands at the center of Behind the Glass has been a main character in films and novels, welcomed world-famous intellectuals, and set the stage for major political events. It is also a remarkable family's house. In crisp prose full of erudition, Michael Lambek, whose grandmother Grete owned and lived in the Villa Tugendhat, tells the story of the family who inhabited the house and who appear as characters (sometimes as themselves, sometimes fictionalized) in the stories told about it. But unlike most of what has been written about the Tugendhats' house so far, Behind the Glass foregrounds the lives of these characters themselves—their struggles, their relationships, their contributions—and ultimately offers a profound meditation on what it means to be part of a family. A celebrated anthropologist whose research has spanned issues of religion, memory, kinship, ethics, and the body, Lambek weaves elements drawn from an impressive range of sources into an original tapestry, one that shows the family and their worlds with a deep and abiding respect for their complexity. Over the course of seventeen chapters, he also thinks aloud about his own relationship to their intellectual legacy, the challenges their philosophical and artistic predilections offer his own aesthetic, ethical, and conceptual commitments, the frequency with which certain complexes seem to reproduce themselves across generations (not least, the tendency to idealize End Page 233 particular members), and their involvement with historical figures like Mies van der Rohe and Martin Heidegger. Among the book's most important contributions is the multifaceted approach it adopts. The first two chapters of the book (part 1) together ask how one tells the story of a family and what sort of genres of knowledge are required. They relay not only the impetus for the project, but its false starts and difficulties. Lambek describes his account as belonging to a "blurred" genre, one with both objective and subjective aspirations and features. It is part memoir, he writes, insofar as it draws on memories (a selection of his own and those of other family members). But it is also what he calls an "anti-memoir," since the work that underlies the account is premised on "catching up" with the family about things he never knew. It is part ethnography, understood here as a "method that is no method, but rather a sustained, if temporary, being with others and a particular focus of attention" (26). And it is a social history, in that it provides a glimpse of a "broader" historical context by means of one family, though it does not pretend to be exhaustive about its sources, or impartial. It is equally fascinating to see when and how these shifts in genre occur: when, for example, the disclosure of an anxiety gives way to kinship charts and official records, or where a photograph triggers a long-suppressed memory. Part 2 starts not from the memories of living family members, but from the point of view of a "founding ancestor," Moses Löw-Beer, and proceeds forward in time. If one way to define a family is through property relations (i.e., as a legal unit with certain claims to an estate or holding and rules governing membership and descent), Lambek argues that this view is especially salient in the early days of the family Moses began. The relocation of the family from the ghetto in the small town of Bokskovice to Brno and then to Vienna after the First World War tracked with ever-changing legal regimes and restrictions set upon Jews in the region, as well as with their financial fortunes. An industrial capitalist, Moses founded a textile firm that expanded considerably over the next two generations, and relied on several bourgeois marriage alliances—a process Lambek painstakingly tracks through...