Bauhaus. 1919-1933. Michael Siebenbrodt

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      The Bauhaus spent seven years in Dessau. During this time buildings and products emerged which to this day continue to shape the image of the Bauhaus all over the world. The clarification process as to content, which had started with the Weimar exhibition in 1923, led to a consolidation in Dessau, on which even the forced change of site had a stabilising effect. The Bauhaus found unique support in Dessau. Here, it became an Academy for Design carried by the community; here, the workshops developed into “laboratories for industry.” But in Dessau, too, there were conservative circles which did not like having the school in town. External and internal conflicts led to the fact that after Walter Gropius, there were successively two more directors. Political, social and economic developments in Germany eventually also had their effects on Dessau.

      The new beginning came during a phase when the country was in an economic upswing; after 1929, the remaining years of the Bauhaus were characterised by rising unemployment and the battles of political forces which radicalised each other.

      Since initially there was no building available which would have been large enough to hold the entire institution, provisional arrangements had to be made so that work could continue. This type of decentralised work corresponded to the situation in Weimar and did not seem to have hindered the new beginning in Dessau. With the express consent of the magistrate, Walter Gropius integrated his own architecture office and the Bauhaus administration into the old building of the Dessau School of Arts and Crafts (called the Technical Institute from 1926) with which a merger was planned in order to give the institution technical backing. Teaching began here on 14th October 1925, and on its upper floor, the plans and models for the construction of the Bauhaus building and Masters houses were created.

      The workshops commenced their work on the upper floors of an annexe to a former Dessau mail-order firm which had been rented for this purpose. Individual studios were set up and art exhibitions organised. In the tower and other rooms of the former Leopold Dank Monastery (today’s Museum for Natural and Pre-History), Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer temporarily set up their studios, in which some of the classes also took place. Until their move into the Masters’ houses, the Bauhaus Masters lived in the Gründerzeit (time of rapid industrial expansion) apartments which were situated in the northern part of the city, while the students mostly lived in the nearby district of Ziebigk. The relationship between the city and the Bauhaus was extremely ambivalent from the beginning. The ideas and new products of the Bauhaus obviously seemed to have asked too much of the majority of Dessau’s population, who were reserved towards this innovative kind of institution and full of hesitant scepticism. The Bauhaus people, on the other hand, tried to reduce those feelings of resentment and misunderstanding by practicing openness and tolerance.

      The Society of Friends of the Bauhaus also lent its support to this cause. Founded in 1924 by Walter Gropius to save the Bauhaus in Weimar, in Dessau it took over the important role of benefactor as well as mediator between the school and the city. As an association of intellectuals and industrialists close to the Bauhaus and a potential “association of sponsors”, the Society of Friends of the Bauhaus also developed great influence and cultural charisma. It granted, for instance, an interest-free loan to make the Bauhaus’s relocation from Weimar to Dessau more easily bearable. Furthermore the Society, whose membership grew to approximately five hundred in Dessau, financed the magazine Bauhaus, which was published beginning in December 1926, bought Bauhaus products, organised lectures as well as musical and theatre performances, initiated publications and arranged for annual gifts for the Bauhaus artists. The support also related to the provision of larger amounts or subsidies, for example for the free student meals.

      The Bauhaus Becomes an Academy

      In the autumn of 1926 – the new school building had not yet been opened – the constitution was published. From that time, the Bauhaus was recognised by the Anhalt state government as the Academy of Design. Thus the Masters were henceforth called professors and the pupils, who now had the opportunity to gain the Bauhaus diploma, became students. The aims of the school were clearly defined in the constitution: first, “to shape the intellectual, crafts and technical abilities of creatively-talented human beings to equip them for design work, particularly construction”, and second “to perform practical experiments, notably in housing construction and interiors, as well as to develop model types for industry and manual trades.”

      The holistic and comprehensive Bauhaus pedagogy was continued and reinforced. In Weimar the institution had been regarded as a pedagogical project for which the prestigious School for Arts and Crafts was a forerunner. The city of Dessau had remarkable school traditions to offer as well. A 1927 edition of the newspaper Dessauer Zeitung effusively reminded its readers of a “… Dessau Bauhaus 130 years ago” and referred to the General Preparatory Education Establishment for Mechanical Trades and Fine Arts for Dessau planned by the classicist architect Friedrich Wilhelm von Erdmannsdorff (1736–1800) in the eighteenth century. The Dessau Philanthropin, one of the most important schools founded in the eighteenth century, can in the broadest sense be seen as a regional forerunner of the Bauhaus on the basis of noticeable intellectual correlations. The Dessau education system, too, did not remain uninfluenced in the following period by these rich educational, political and reformist pedagogical traditions. In the second half of the 1920s there was, for instance, talk of a time of “pedagogical reforms and new reorganisation”, while “student practical education, independence and self-administration, connection of individual subjects, physical education, [and] teacher co-operation” were seen as “new values”.[5] The Bauhaus, that experimental school from Weimar which was very aware of this tradition, was able to continue this.

      Apart from preparatory courses and workshop education there was also more complex instruction in natural science subjects as well as sports at the Dessau Bauhaus. In 1927, Walter Gropius was finally successful in appointing the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer, who would subsequently build and head the architecture department. Finally it was officially possible to educate architects in a two-level programme involving the completion of a builder’s apprenticeship and work in the building studio. The lack of a building department or an architecture class as an appropriate conclusion of the Bauhaus curriculum had been recognised as a defect from the beginning. It was only later, with the establishment of an architecture department and the recognition of its academy status, that a renewed change of the teaching profile was brought about. Architecture was now above everything else. Almost all workshops were combined in the department of “Construction and Interior Furnishing.” The advertising and, finally, the theatre departments remained separate areas. To this the “Seminar for Free Sculpting and Painting Design” was added, a course which was mainly run by Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee and later continued as a “Free Painting Class.”[6]

      Laboratories for Industry – Workshop Work

      Balanced economic and pedagogical considerations had preceded the structural changes as well as reorganisation of the curriculum in 1929. Among other things, this resulted in the fact that some of the Weimar workshops such as stained glass, painting, and bookbinding were not reinstated in Dessau. The stone sculpture and woodcarving department became a plastic workshop СКАЧАТЬ