Bauhaus. 1919-1933. Michael Siebenbrodt

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      The Closure of the Bauhaus in Dessau

      Mies van der Rohe had tried to keep the Bauhaus politically neutral. Still, the school remained a thorn in the flesh of the National Socialist Party, which was gaining strength at that time. In the Bauhaus’s end-phase in Dessau, relations with the city had reached their nadir. The NSDAP declared its fight against the Bauhaus, which was now denounced as a “Jewish dive” and for the party embodied an intellectual opposite to its own world view, one of its central topics. The budget was cut further so that the school became largely dependent on licence income and was hardly able to survive.

      In May 1932 the parliamentary elections in Anhalt led to the fall of the state government, which had up until then been in favour of the Bauhaus, and the right-wing gained the majority. Anhalt thus became the first German state with a government led by National Socialists, who seized the opportunity to weaken the Dessau magistrate with a targeted personnel policy. On 8th July 1932, Paul Schultze-Naumburg, the National Socialist Prime Minister Alfred Freyberg, and other city and NSDAP representatives including Fritz Hesse, who was still mayor, visited the Bauhaus. Just a few days after this visit, the NSDAP, who in the Dessau city council elections of November 1931 had become the strongest party, proposed the closure of the institution. Hesse and four Communists agreed with the proposal, while the Social Democrats abstained. Thus the dissolution of the Bauhaus was sealed. Student protests with petitions in newspapers and to the Reichspräsident (national President) were as ineffective as a tour with more than nine hundred people from Chemnitz, who had specially travelled there by train.[14] On the last day of September 1932, the Bauhaus left Dessau.

      Bauhaus Berlin: Free Education and Research Institute (1932–1933)

      On the basis of a settlement which Mies van der Rohe was able to reach with the Bauhaus Masters against the dissolution order, the city of Dessau was forced to continue to pay the teachers until 1935, let the Bauhaus keep furniture and equipment on loan and transfer the patents and utility models issued to the school as well as any rights form licensing agreements to van der Rohe as the last Bauhaus director. With that and the tuition income there was at least a material possibility that the school might continue its existence, for which the two Social Democrat cities of Leipzig and Magdeburg had lobbied. Mies van der Rohe, however, had already, prior to the closure of the Bauhaus in Dessau, had the intention of continuing the school as a private institute in Berlin, should the necessity arise. In the former telephone factory of J. Berliner at the corner of Siemensstrasse and Birkbuschstrasse in the Steglitz district of Berlin, he found the necessary rooms, which were provisionally outfitted and equipped mainly by the students. A small building with a glass roof housed the workshops, while theoretical instruction and classes in painting and photography were set up in a two-storey building.

      In Berlin Mies van der Rohe provided the Bauhaus with the suffix “Free Education and Research Institute.” The studies now lasted seven semesters. With the exception of Alfred Arndt and Joost Schmidt, who had not been taken on because of their political positions, the entire teaching staff and more than one hundred students moved to Berlin. As early as October 1932, thirty-five new applications were also registered, so that the school had again reached four-fifths of its Dessau enrolment. Since the institute’s status was that of a private establishment, the authority now lay with the director, which was noted accordingly in a study guide. Mies van der Rohe wanted to continue in Berlin the content of the working programme which had been developed in Dessau. Wassily Kandinsky headed the free painting class and Josef Albers took over as a crafts teacher; Walter Peterhans was in charge of photography, Hinnerk Scheper directed the training in colouring, Lilly Reich ran the weaving and interior furnishing seminar, the engineer Alcar Rudelt headed the instruction in structural engineering and modern building construction, Friedrich Engemann ran the construction of buildings and interiors, and Ludwig Hilberseimer oversaw the subjects of building studies and urban development. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe himself ran a construction seminar.

      “It is our goal,” he explained, “to educate architects in such a manner that they command all the fields which touch onto architecture, from small residential apartment construction to urban development… as well as all the furniture and down to textiles.”[15]

      Thus Mies van der Rohe also strove – as did Walter Gropius in Weimar before him – for a type of synthesis of the arts in building. Under this premise oriented on “the needs of the masses” and striving for a “refinement of quality and taste”,[16] he also sought collaboration with industry, for which the workshops were to develop models. Mies van der Rohe placed great importance on the courses taught by visual artists. In addition to the contributions of Kandinsky and Peterhans, he insisted that Albers also teach drawing from nature.

      The Bauhaus building in Dessau as NS-Gauführerschule (Nazi-regime School for the training of ministers of different regions), 1935

      The Closure of the Bauhaus in Berlin

      When, at the beginning of 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Reichskanzler (German Chancellor), reality slowly set in at the Berlin Bauhaus and thoughts about the survival of the school started to be considered. In the same way that progressive museum and academy directors were subsequently attacked and works of modern art removed from museums, attacks against the Bauhaus also increased. On 11th April 1933, a police raid of the rooms of the Berlin Bauhaus took place upon the petition of the Dessau Attorney General, who was already investigating Hesse, the mayor. Supposedly “incriminating material” was seized, students temporarily СКАЧАТЬ