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Germansplaining: Bauhaus and the Nazis

The art school embodied a renewed liberal spirit in the Weimar Republic but also had complex intersections with the Nazi Party

Image: The New European

One hundred years ago, Thuringian state elections sealed the fate of the college of applied arts in Weimar, known as the Bauhaus.

Founded in 1919, the same year as the Weimar Republic, Bauhaus embodied a bold, modern spirit with master artists like Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer among the staff.  

The fateful election of February 1924 shifted the tide. The Thüringer Ordnungsbund, a conservative bloc of farmers, nationalists and liberals, formed a minority government. It relied on the Vereinigte Völkische Liste (VVL), an antisemitic and anti-communist alliance.

Only three months earlier the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich had failed, landing Hitler in prison and leaving his party banned – but among the seven VVL deputies in Thuringia, three had been members.

With their help, the ban was soon lifted, transforming the south-eastern state into a Nazi safe haven. At the same time, the new government cut funding for the Bauhaus and terminated the teaching contracts, effective March 31, 1925. The staff resigned beforehand, in December, and the school’s founding director, Walter Gropius (“The mind is like an umbrella, it functions best when open”), moved Bauhaus to Dessau, in the neighbouring Saxony-Anhalt.

In 1932, however, the Dessau council, now with a Nazi majority, shut it down. The school’s new director, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, relocated Bauhaus to a Berlin factory building to keep it going as a private institution.

But after the Nazis took control nationwide in 1933, Bauhaus disbanded. Many members were arrested, many emigrated, and in 1937 more than 450 of their “degenerate” works were destroyed. It is no surprise that after the second world war, East and West Germany alike took pride in the movement’s untainted legacy, seeing it as the antithesis of the Nazis, a symbol of resistance.

But Bauhaus still irritates modern-day nationalists in Germany.

Just last week, the 23-strong AfD faction in the Saxony-Anhalt’s state parliament submitted a motion with the title “The Wrong Path of Modernity – for a Critical Examination of the Bauhaus”, demanding a scientific reassessment ahead of its centennial celebrations in Dessau in 2025-26.

Though voted down, here’s an executive summary: The motion cautions against “overly glorifying” Bauhaus, criticises its “architectural missteps” that render the minimalist buildings “misanthropic” and claims the “universal” Bauhaus aesthetic ignores local architectural identity, alienating people. Ah, and they were all commies, basically.

Here, of course, AfD errs: they weren’t. But by all means, it is time to de-glorify the Bauhaus myth (just not for the reasons AfD has in mind). A recent exhibition in Weimar has already added a lot of grey to the usual black and white narrative.

Yes, more than 20 Bauhaus staff were murdered in prisons and concentration camps, a handful emigrated to Moscow, and Gropius and Mies van der Rohe were among those exiled in the US.

But most of the 1,000 teachers and roughly 1,250 alumni stayed in the Third Reich. Many made a living serving the regime; 188 Bauhaus graduates became Nazi Party members, 15 joined the SA, 14 the SS. Fritz Ertl, one such graduate, helped design the Auschwitz barracks where his classmate, textile artist Otti Berger, would later be murdered in 1944.

Even Gropius, before leaving Germany in 1934, submitted a design for the Nazis’ new Reichsbank building. Mies van der Rohe had put his name to Goebbels’ propaganda text, “Call to Artists to support Adolf Hitler”.

Equally paradoxically, the Nazis didn’t view all of Bauhaus’s “form follows function” design as degenerate. In a story for the French magazine VU in 1935, “Hitler chez lui” can be seen in a Thonet bentwood chair in his retreat in Berchtesgaden.

And in Dessau, rather than demolish the Bauhaus HQ, the Nazis simply added swastikas and repurposed it as a Gauleiter training camp.

Bauhaus, long before the Nazis came to power, was a battleground for democrats, socialists, anti-fascists, antisemites, mystics, and Aryan supremacists along with both progressive and misogynist attitudes.

All in all, very 20th century German.

What can be agreed upon are the Bauhaus principles that simplicity and clarity lead to good design and that everyday objects can be beautiful. As well as the universal principle that great artists don’t necessarily come with great values.

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