"We know Mies read a lot and thought  intensively. The essentials he would compress into a short, clear formula. There was no room for speculation and rhetoric in his teaching. He was for the concrete, he was for work. With the generation of 1968 he would not have had much sympathy with their fixation on the sociological, psychological, political, with their constant discussions, back-stabbing inquiries, criticizing and so forth. He had similar experiences when he took over the Bauhaus from Hannes Meyer.
The politically radical students did not give up delivering noisy oratory in the cafeteria. The classrooms and study rooms were empty. With a note of satisfaction, Mies explained his first official activity: he had the cafeteria closed and brought the students back to their workplaces. He liked this story so much that he told it to me often, and in German. We must have been alone then. Also in German, he related his efforts of keeping the Bauhaus going in Berlin after the Nazi takeover. He wanted architecture, not politics. He finally realized that that would not be possible and that for the Nazis architecture was also National Socialist politics. These conversations did not fit with the image of Mies as the man of a few well-chosen words. On these occasions, he even showed something like compassion. Later I didn't remember specifics, but only my feelings of rage and shame that we drove such a man as Mies out of Germany. Later, the theme of architecture and politics occupied me very much."

Werner Buch
(b. 1917)