Here in Weimar, the cultural and spiritual capital of the Bundesrepublik, a brave group of curators and academics are challenging one of Germany’s most sacred taboos. A trio of exhibitions in this historic city, the birthplace of Deutschland’s first fleeting democracy, are exposing the hitherto unexplored connections between the Bauhaus and the Third Reich.
For bien pensant Germans, it’s hard to picture anything quite so provocative (there’s no real British equivalent but, for the sake of argument, imagine how left-leaning Brits might regard a show which established a direct link between the British Union of Fascists and the foundation of the NHS). Generations of Germans – and Britons, for that matter – have been taught that the Bauhaus was the very best of Germany, the absolute antithesis of the Nazis. These three exhibitions show the truth isn’t quite so clear-cut.
The conventional story of the Bauhaus and the Nazis is a classic tale of good and evil: after Germany’s defeat in the first world war and the abdication of the Kaiser, a group of (largely) German artists, designers and architects establish a new college of applied arts in Weimar. The students are taught a bit of everything. They’re instructed to go back to basics and start afresh. Their radical creations are avant-garde and, above all, supremely practical. Form follows function (today their mantra would probably be ‘chuck out the chintz’).
This bold new style is a fierce affront to the Nazis, whose tastes are devoutly philistine. Its practitioners are liberal and cosmopolitan, so naturally the Nazis hate them, and do everything they can to shut them down. First they drive them out of Weimar, so the Bauhaus moves to Dessau. Then they drive them out of Dessau, so the Bauhaus moves to Berlin. Finally, they drive them out of Berlin, whereupon the key players flee to America, where their innovative work revolutionises every aspect of design.
After the second world war, those Bauhaus emigres return to Germany triumphant, to rebuild its ruined cities in stark modernist style. With the Nazis now defeated, and their dreary neoclassicism now discredited, Bauhaus becomes the house style of the West German Federal Republic, the East German ‘Democratic’ Republic, and almost everywhere else.
It’s a good story, and like most good stories there’s some truth in it. The Bauhaus did indeed transform design, not only in Germany but throughout the world. Its functional no-frills style has become so ubiquitous, so universal, that it’s practically invisible. It has vanished into the foreground, into the fabric of our daily lives. That flatpack furniture you bought from Ikea is a direct descendant of the Bauhaus. Every high-rise hotel and office block is a variation on the Bauhaus theme. Yet, as these exhibitions reveal, the contrast between the Bauhaus and the Third Reich was vastly overstated. In fact, there was considerable overlap, not only in personnel but also in ideas.
It’s easy to see how the Bauhaus became deified in Germany. After the second world war, Germany was utterly vanquished – divided, occupied, disgraced. The Nazis had adulterated virtually every aspect of German culture. Even the German language now felt tainted. German heroes of any sort were in desperately short supply. Founded in Weimar, the hometown of Goethe and Schiller, in the same year as the short-lived Weimar Republic, and shut down in 1933, the year Hitler came to power, the Bauhaus was one of the few things of that era of which Germans could feel justly proud.
Since Germany reunified in 1990, this superficial view has shifted. Old imperial buildings have been reconstructed, Bismarck’s Second Reich has been rehabilitated, and Germans are scrutinising the more simplistic chapters of their national story. Now academics and curators are looking more closely – and more critically – at the Bauhaus. Were those Bauhaus designers and their Nazi adversaries really poles apart?
There was bound to be some crossover between the Bauhaus and the Third Reich. Yes, the school’s three directors (Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer and Mies van der Rohe) all ended up abroad, but between 1919, when the Bauhaus opened, and 1933, when it shut down, over 1,200 students and more than a hundred teachers passed through its doors. Few of them had the means to emigrate. Inevitably, many of them ended up working in Nazi Germany.
Most Bauhaus graduates in Nazi Germany did their best to keep their heads down, churning out uncontentious items like furniture and kitchenware. What’s really interesting about these utilitarian objects is how modernist they seem. The Nazi top brass may have preferred folksy Germanic décor, but the general population weren’t so old-fashioned. They liked the clean lines of the Bauhaus, and so lots of Bauhaus designers carried on making much the same stuff throughout the Third Reich.
This confluence of competing styles was reflected most of all in architecture. The architecture of the Third Reich is generally regarded as reactionary, but the reality is more complex, and Weimar provides one of the best examples. The city’s monumental Gauforum (which now houses governmental offices, and a sombre museum about slave labour in the Third Reich) is one of the largest surviving buildings of the Nazi era. Its style is traditional but streamlined, a blend of old and new. We’re generally inclined to regard Nazi buildings as ugly because the tyranny which made them was ugly. If only life – and art – were so simple. In fact, a lot of Nazi architecture wasn’t so far removed from modernist styles like Art Deco. Hardly surprising really, when so many Bauhaus architects ended up working for the Nazis.
The work of Bauhaus alumni during the Third Reich demonstrates that a lot of artists, then as now, were actually pretty apolitical, happy to focus on the job in hand rather than fretting about the morals of their paymasters. Yet a good many actively embraced the new regime: 188 joined the Nazi party, 15 joined the SA and 14 joined the SS. One SS man, Bauhaus graduate Fritz Ertl, was one of the designers of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Most Bauhaus biographies are more nuanced. Herbert Bayer, a student and then a teacher at the Bauhaus, designed jolly brochures for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, celebrating the achievements of Hitler’s Reich (he called himself ‘the anonymous favourite of the propaganda minister’). He left Germany in 1937, after his work featured in the Nazis’ infamous ‘Degenerate Art’ show (a crude propagandist display designed to denigrate modern art).
The case of Bauhaus graduate Franz Ehrlich is even more complex. Imprisoned in Buchenwald concentration camp (a few miles from Weimar) after he was caught producing pamphlets for the Communist underground, he was put to work inside the camp, furnishing the commandant’s office and designing the creepy motto on the camp gates. Inmates did what they had to do to survive and only a fool would dare to judge them, but Ehrlich continued working for the SS at Buchenwald even after he was released.
What these exhibitions prove is that the relationship between ideology and aesthetics is tenuous, a template which we impose upon a past strewn with human contradictions. The Nazis’ attitude to Bauhaus artists was inconsistent because their work was inconsistent. Some were condemned as ‘degenerate’ and banned from public galleries. Others were lauded in the Nazis’ ‘Great German Art Show,’ devoted to patriotic ‘Aryan’ art.
The Nazis’ attitude to Bauhaus architecture was similarly paradoxical. They harried the school out of existence but they were happy to employ its alumni and even appropriate its buildings. When the Bauhaus was forced to abandon its futuristic HQ in Dessau, the Nazis seized it, draped it with Swastikas, and turned it into a training college for Nazi party functionaries.
The founder of the Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, left Germany in 1934, but not before he’d built the premises for a Nazi propaganda trade fair (called ‘German People, German Work’) and submitted a design for the Nazis’ new Reichsbank building. His reasons for leaving Germany (initially for Britain and ultimately for America) were mainly financial rather than moralistic. Likewise, the last director of the Bauhaus, Mies van der Rohe, also ended up in the USA, but only after he’d entered various Nazi architectural competitions, and put his name to Goebbels’ ‘Call to Artists to support Adolf Hitler’.
So were the Bauhaus just a bunch of hypocrites? Not quite. Like most artists, they were fairly indifferent to the wider world, absorbed in their own work, generally amoral rather than immoral (curiously, I encountered some of the same traits when I met Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s notorious filmmaker). These Weimar exhibitions articulate an important truth – that there’s really not much connection between good morals and good design. Just as bad men can produce great art, so wicked regimes can produce fine buildings. Emil Nolde, the artist with most works in the Nazis’ ‘Degenerate Art’ show, was a member of the Nazi party. The Haus der Kunst in Munich, built by Hitler’s favourite architect, Paul Troost, to house the Nazis’ ‘Great German Art Show,’ is now an impressive venue for the modern art that Hitler hated.
Looking back, a century later, how does the Bauhaus measure up? Rather like its moral record, its stylistic legacy is mixed. Wandering around Weimar’s Bauhaus Museum, the original items still look stunning. From chairs and lamps to chess sets, it’s hard to believe these chic accessories are a hundred years old. However, those stylish (and expensive) prototypes have spawned loads of mediocre modern imitators, the sort of stuff that lasts a few years, then falls apart and ends up in your local council tip. If you live in a bland apartment full of cheap chipboard furniture, blame the Bauhaus. For most of us, this is where its modernist aesthetic has finished up.
And yet something very special did happen here a hundred years ago, and you can find the evidence on the green edge of town, in an unassuming building called the Haus am Horn. Hidden down a quiet avenue, overlooking a leafy valley, it was built by the Bauhaus in 1923, a new house for a new age. A square bungalow, plain and simple, from the outside it doesn’t look like much but inside it’s like a Tardis. A central living room full of natural light, all the other rooms surround it. Each room is fit for purpose: four bedrooms, a fitted kitchen, a children’s playroom. Everything fits together, everything works. It’s an ideal home, a design for living, a vision of a better future. You’d love to live here. When you come here, at last you realise what the fuss was all about.
The Bauhaus never lived up to its vast promise, but that’s not the fault of its protagonists. Sure, they weren’t knights in shining armour, and some of them were far too friendly with the Nazis, but for a few years, here in Weimar, they showed the world that everyday objects could be both practical and beautiful. British architects and designers should be required to come here, to see how the Bauhaus began and what got lost along the way. Maybe then we can rediscover the basic principles of good design, and finally build and furnish houses as effective and attractive as the Haus am Horn. Meantime, if you get the chance, check out these excellent exhibitions. They dare to tell the real story of the Bauhaus, not the sanitised version, and they remind us that the truth is always much more interesting than the myth.
Bauhaus and National Socialism is at the Bauhaus Museum, the Schiller Museum and the Museum Neues in Weimar until 15th September 2024. For more information visit www.klassik-stiftung.de.
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