With its straight lines, functional apartments and steel lamps, the Bauhaus shaped modernity. The ideas of the Weimar Art School are still present in architecture and design today, despite the fact that its style was rejected by the Nazis as “Jewish” and “Bolshevik”, until its closure in 1932. The history of the Bauhaus and the German extreme right have now crossed paths again, just in time for the centenary of the opening of the school in Dessau, which the city is preparing to celebrate in style.
The parliamentary group of Alternative for Germany (AfD) in Saxony-Anhalt has presented a motion in the Magdeburg parliament under the title ‘The wrong path of modernism’, in which it calls for a “critical examination” of the Bauhaus, to create a “serious and cultural-historical overall image”, and in which he cites the alleged “alienation of people from their environment” as the reason.
The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar in 1919 and, due to political pressure, moved in 1925 to Dessau, a city then governed by the Social Democrats. He Hitler’s National Socialist Party (NSDAP) He also won the elections there in 1931 and closed the Bauhaus as soon as possible. The school only continued to exist in Berlin, but the Nazis ordered arrests and raids, as part of the persecution of ‘degenerate art’, until the artists finally broke up in 1933.
Like the Nazis back then, AfD deputies now see the Bauhaus buildings as architectural sins. “The emphasis on sobriety and minimalism often resulted in impersonal, cold, unwelcoming and unattractive architecture,” says the parliamentary text, “suppresses regional traditions” and, ultimately, “in its uniformity, closer to communism. That is why they have asked the regional parliament to prevent a “unilateral glorification” of his legacy in the anniversary events planned for 2025 and 2026.
Parliamentary debate
During the parliamentary debate, the AfD deputy Hans-Thomas Tillschneider he literally said that the Bauhaus had “violated the human need for security and comfort in accordance with all the rules of art.” “I am an admirer of the Wilhelmine era and Art Nouveau,” the leader of the regional parliamentary group clarified his tastes to the press, Oliver Kirchnerin reference to two styles that belong to the imperial period. When asked if he could name a successful building built after 1920, Kirchner preferred to remain silent. Although it does not have a sufficient majority to move the motion forward, its mere presentation is already mediating and conditioning the celebration of the anniversary.
“Yes, everything would be funny if it weren’t so tragic,” laments the director of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, Barbara Steinerwhich guarantees that the celebrations will not carry out any “unilateral glorification” and has recalled that museums are important sources of income for tourism and attract thousands of visitors each year. Steiner denounces that “we are talking about an instrumentalization of the nationalist discourse and the movement towards isolation and exclusion, deliberately taking the movement out of its context.”
And he insists that the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation has been scientifically examining the legacy for years, including the role of its artists in National Socialism, such as the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The director of the Moritzburg Art Museum in Halle, Thomas Bauer-Friedrichhas warned against “a new threatening development”, in which “AfD wants the government to influence the substantive work of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, which constitutes a clear interference with academic freedom, with the freedom of art and science.
Since the AfD entered the city council in 2014, it has been continuously arguing against the Bauhaus University and the foundation. In 2018, he torpedoed a concert by the punk band Fine Sahne Fischfilet that the Bauhaus management, fearing for the integrity of the event, decided to cancel. It now constitutes the second regional parliamentary group, with 25.5% of the votes in the last elections.
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