Читать книгу Bauhaus. 1919-1933 - Michael Siebenbrodt - Страница 19

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 arrested and the building sealed. Even though, thanks to the efforts of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and several students, a reopening with concessions to the new state was eventually possible, the faculty of the Bauhaus declared the school dissolved on 20th July 1933. Economic and, primarily, political reasons made continuation impossible.

The reasons for such a vehement rejection were primarily in the programme of the institution, which had always been considered “left-wing” and thus not compatible with the reactionary nationalist and racist cultural policy of the Nazi regime. The questioning of traditional academic forms of education, the turning towards industrial production and thus turning away from the manual trades (on which the lower middle classes were dependent) were from the beginning a thorn in the side of conservative forces. On top of this came the international composition of the faculty and the student body, and finally the social claims which were associated with the Bauhaus programme.

Bauhaus Berlin in a former telephone factory, 1932, photograph: Howard Dearstyne

After the dissolution of the Bauhaus, Mies van der Rohe occasionally ran seminars on questions about the art of building with a small circle of former Bauhaus graduates in his private studio. Finally, in 1938, he became Director of the Architectural Department at the Amour Institute, which would become the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Several Bauhaus graduates followed him there. Walter Gropius had left Germany earlier for England, together with Marcel Breuer. From there, he transferred to the Harvard Graduate School of Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1937. Hannes Meyer, who had gone to the USSR after his discharge as Bauhaus director, later worked in Switzerland for some time, as well as in Mexico. Wassily Kandinsky emigrated to Paris as early as 1933. Paul Klee returned to his hometown of Berne the same year. Also in 1933, Josef Albers went to the USA and became one of the first Bauhaus teachers to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. László Moholy-Nagy became head of the “New Bauhaus” in Chicago in 1937, where several Bauhaus graduates worked in the years following. Lyonel Feininger, too, emigrated in 1937 to the USA with Herbert Bayer, while Johannes Itten was drawn to Zurich in 1939.

Bauhaus teachers Oskar Schlemmer, Georg Muche and Gerhard Marcks, whose works had been categorised as “degenerate”, however, stayed in Germany. A large proportion of Bauhaus graduates and former students got by in the Third Reich in some form or other, often moving between conformity and resistance. Some of them were unable to find work in any architectural office or advertising company, while some made careers for themselves. Politically active opponents of the National Socialist system and Jewish students were forced into exile or subject to prosecution. Some lost their lives in prison or concentration camps, such as Susanne Banki, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Lotte Menzel and Hedwig Slutzki in Auschwitz, Willi Jungmittag in Brandenburg and Josef Knau on the concentration ship Thielbeck.

Moving into the Bauhaus Berlin, 1932

Article from a Berlin local newspaper on April 12, 1933 about the police search of the Bauhaus

15

Das Steglitzer „Bauhaus“, in: Steglitzer Anzeiger. October 1932, cited according to: Hahn, Peter (ed.): bauhaus berlin, Weingarten 1985, p.93.

16

Ibid.