Behind the heroic façade of the Bauhaus, built on the ideals of the artistic avant-garde and political resistance, lies a complex and not always well-known history: the ambiguous relationship of some of its members with Nazism. Closed by the Hitler regime, the school of arts and crafts has gone down in history as a focus of resistance and leftism, as a refuge for martyrs branded as “degenerate artists” by the Third Reich and condemned to exile or disqualification. A new exhibition in Weimar, the German town where the Bauhaus was founded by Walter Gropius in 1919, tells a different story, made up of tacit connivance but also explicit collaboration.
Derived from a three-year investigation, the sample Bauhaus and National Socialism, which can be visited until September 15, remember that many of the teachers and students who passed through their classrooms continued working without problems after the Nazi victory in 1933. They did not hesitate to accept commissions from the regime out of necessity or conviction: they designed posters, furniture and household items, but also portraits of Hitler and allegories of an eternal and pure Germany. And, in some cases, they actively participated in Nazism and even became SS. The figures are devastating: of the 1,400 members of the school, at least 900 stayed in Germany under the Third Reich. Only 130 left the country after Hitler’s victory at the polls, while 188 decided to join the Nazi party.
Through 450 works and objects, the exhibition traces the Bauhaus’s ambiguous relationship with the Nazis, but also in the opposite direction. The school was closed in 1933, after moving first to Dessau and then to Berlin, and many artists who had emerged from its ranks were later banned from exhibiting their works in public, considering them an attack on beauty and potential vehicles for Bolshevism. “But, not without a certain schizophrenia, the Nazis also used these artists, designers and architects to project an image of a sophisticated and modern state, especially abroad,” says the exhibition’s curator, Anke Blümm. After initial rejection, the Third Reich appropriated the avant-garde postulates of a movement that, after all, fit the Nazi taste for art without ornamentation.
For the curator, enough time has passed to dispel the myth of an immaculate Bauhaus. “From the 1950s onwards, the image of the school as a refuge for socialists and Jews was consolidated, and stories that did not fit into this legend were ignored. In the post-war context, many Germans wanted to believe that all its members were heroes. We are the third generation after the Holocaust and we have the necessary distance to look at this reality in the face,” says Blümm.
From its beginnings, Nazism paid particular attention to modern art. In 1930, upon joining the Thuringian regional government, the party banned the works of the school’s priests. Seven years later, he confiscated several hundred canvases and sculptures, gathered in an exhibition room. A harmless-looking floral watercolor, signed by Klee and from MoMA, has returned to Weimar, a nursery of culture and small homeland of Goethe and Schiller, as has an abstraction by Kandisnky and another constructivist composition by Moholy-Nagy. The exhibition, spread across three different venues, contrasts them with the art that the Nazis privileged. Wilhelm Inkamp, a former member of the Bauhaus, favored inane portraits of old women, while Heinrich Basedow, who was also a teacher at the school, abandoned abstraction to sign paintings kitsch about seagulls and Hans Haffenrichter designed animal figurines before daring to create a bust of Hitler.
In total, 16 teachers and students from the school participated in the great art exhibition organized in Munich by the Nazis in 1937. Among the former members of the Bauhaus who were active in the party were the designer Karl Pieter Röhl, the architect Friedrich Engemann or the artist Lili Schultz, who appear in different photos with Nazi uniforms or alongside party officials. Ernest Neufert, author of a reference architectural manual and Gropius’s right-hand man, collaborated with Albert Speer, official architect of the Third Reich. The artist Oskar Schlemmer participated in a public competition to sign a fresco where figures appeared giving the Nazi salute, while Fritz Ertl, an architect who became an SS during the war, designed the so-called “baths” of Auschwitz, crematoriums in which corpses disappear. He was tried in 1972, when he said that he did not know what his designs were for: he had only applied what he learned at the Bauhaus to respond to the commissions received. The banality of evil, only in an architectural version.
For his part, Franz Ehrlich, arrested for his communist sympathies, did not hesitate to collaborate to save his life. He designed the gate of Buchenwald, the concentration camp located on the outskirts of Weimar, using the fonts used by the Bauhaus. He then signed the decoration of the homes of several kapos party members and even built a guest house for Hermann Göring. At the other extreme, 24 members of the Bauhaus were deported and murdered in the camps, including the painter Friedl Dicker-Brendeis and the textile artist Otti Berger, who was unable to escape: she was Jewish, communist and deaf.
The exhibition also focuses on the best-known names at the school, who had an ambivalent attitude, sometimes out of self-interest, before choosing the path of exile. Gropius himself, who was suspected of anti-Semitism, was part of the Chamber of Culture founded by Goebbels and participated in an architectural competition organized by the Nazis.
In 1934, he designed a pavilion for the propaganda exhibition German people, German workjust as Mies van der Rohe, director of the Bauhaus between 1930 and 1933, did before expatriating himself to the United States. Most of the former Bauhauser They preferred to adapt to the new context. “Not everyone had the money to go into exile, they had to feed their families and, after all, this was their homeland,” explains Blümm. “It was easy for them to settle down working as graphic designers. It wasn’t like killing someone, they thought. They were young and naive,” says the commissioner.
Nevertheless, the exhibition does cover examples that reflect a great deal of wilful blindness. For example, there is the case of Herbert Bayer. The great Bauhaus designer and typographer, who favoured lower-case writing and block letters, was not suspected of having any Nazi affiliation: he was married to a Jew and many of his friends were also Jewish.
Still, he agreed to design posters for the regime featuring the swastika, another for a union of “Aryan workers,” and a third for an advertisement advocating the sterilization of Erbkrankena category used by the Nazis to define “genetically inferior” individuals, such as people with disabilities. In 1938, Bayer went into exile in Aspen, where he began a new life doing advertising for ski resorts. When reminded of that uncomfortable chapter, he replied that he made the mistake of thinking that art could be apolitical.
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