"Being Jewish, the architect was forced out of Germany when the Nazis gained power. Taut was promised work in the USSR in 1932 and 1933, and returned to Germany in February 1933 to a hostile political environment. Having Social Democratic sympathies, he fled to Switzerland, then to Takasaki in Japan, where he produced three influential book-length appreciations of Japanese culture and architecture, comparing the historical simplicity of Japanese architecture with modernist discipline. "