Soviet era

The Soviet era recasts the Landauer House from a family home into both a children’s physiotherapy facility and a contested monument. Its changing uses expose a conflict between the state’s account of public care and architectural heritage, and the memories of those who lived in, maintained, or were displaced from the house. Even its eventual restoration cannot make the building’s history whole: the preserved modernist interior remains inseparable from political appropriation, war damage, and human memory.

The House as a Public Question

The dispute is introduced through a proposal to make a piece about the building itself, rather than the hospital department occupying it. A correspondent for a local publication frames the contradiction sharply: the city celebrates its architectural riches, yet one of its most important houses serves as a children’s gymnasium. The article acknowledges the value of treatment for sick children, but asks whether it must take place in an architectural treasure. The question makes the house a site where public health, preservation, and the uses of the past compete rather than align neatly.

The heritage committee’s account identifies the building as the work of Rainer von Abt, commissioned by the prominent Landauer family in the late 1920s. The article describes it as his masterpiece and his last European work before he fled to the United States in 1938. Its appraisal of the house is also a record of what remains: a living room of 230 square metres, two glass walls facing across the city to Špilas, chrome pillars, cream linoleum, and a partition of solid onyx slabs between the sitting area and library. Specially designed furniture has largely disappeared, although some pieces survive in the Moravian Museum; the structure is mostly intact.

Damage, Repair, and Competing Histories

The house’s apparent preservation is qualified by the war. A bomb blast destroyed the original plate-glass windows, which were replaced by smaller panes. The lowering mechanism for two window frames—once allowing them to descend into the basement at the touch of a button—still works, even though the original sheets of glass are gone. The building thus preserves both its modernist design and the trace of violence that altered its defining transparency.

The article credits former caretaker Josef Laník with keeping the house in good condition. His own account, however, gives its history a political and personal cast: he recalls the Landauers’ life as indecent luxury, describes maintaining the building amid wartime bombing, and remembers defending it with his sister against the Nazis before handing it over to Soviet forces. Now a local district official, he hopes it will open to the public, so ordinary people can enjoy what had once been reserved for a few. Preservation is presented as a public good, but the account also reveals how strongly the meaning of ownership and stewardship depends on who is telling the history.

Heritage and Political Memory

When Liesel encounters Laník again, his account remains focused on his own trials, the building’s dangers, and liberation by Soviet forces. The crowd pressing around her in the Glass Room makes her feel trapped; she asks Hana to take her out to the terrace. Liesel says she always found Laník unsettling and thinks he used to spy on her. Hana responds by describing him as a Party official and comparing the country’s rulers to Good Soldier Švejk promoted to captain. Her bitter recollection of Soviet “liberation” contests the triumphant political version Laník had just been recounting.

The disagreement is not simply over the building’s architectural value. The same house can be described as a capitalist family’s luxurious possession, a wartime structure guarded under fire, a public facility for children, and a monument in a state-sponsored account of the city’s past. Each description selects a different inheritance. The house’s use for treatment is defended in the name of children’s welfare, while its architectural status prompts demands for restoration and public access; neither claim erases the human and political histories embedded in the place.

Restoration and the Limits of the Museum

By 1990, the house is described as fixed in time and space like a fossil. Repairs have been carried out badly; some original furniture has been retrieved from the Moravian Museum and returned approximately to its former positions, while updated bathroom fittings have been ruined. The Glass Room’s small replacement panes, by contrast, are removed and plate glass restored, returning the room to its lucid splendour. Visitors include trade-union groups and official delegations from Soviet states, followed by occasional tourists and architecture students interested in Rainer von Abt’s place in modernism.

The restoration coincides with a different kind of return. Shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Marie Delmas travels from Paris to Město after recognizing the house in a book on modern architecture. The caption, “La Villa Landauer, élévation sud,” makes a remembered view into a printed object and prompts her to revisit a childhood whose people and language she only partly recalls. In Město she asks directions in German, a language she still knows despite its distance from her present life. Her arrival brings private memory into a space increasingly organized for visitors and architectural interpretation.

When Marie asks what happened to the Landauer family, the guide Milada answers that the family left in 1938 and that the house now belongs to the city and is a museum. The answer establishes the official disposition of the property, but the narrative immediately resists the idea that the house is only a museum: it is vibrant and alive, like a chord from the piano standing behind the onyx wall, reverberating with the noise of children and the crying of adults. The restored Glass Room can recover its plate glass and visual clarity; it cannot reduce the building to a finished exhibit. Its public meaning continues to sound with the lives and losses that preservation cannot contain.