Читать книгу Bauhaus. 1919-1933 - Michael Siebenbrodt - Страница 8

Probably no other school in Germany was so closely connected to the cultural, political and socio-economic developments of the Weimer Republic as the Bauhaus. The Bauhaus foundation date of 1st April 1919 coincided with the negotiations of the constitutional assembly in the Weimar Hoftheater, which adopted the so-called Weimar Constitution on July 31st. Only a few weeks after Hitler’s seizure of power, on 30th January 1933, police searched the Bauhaus for Communist materials and closed it down, before the Academy was dissolved on 19th July 1933 in a final act of freedom of decision.

In between lay two site changes, in 1925 to Dessau and in 1932 to Berlin, as well as two changes of directorship, in 1928 to Hannes Meyer and in 1930 to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, which were all politically motivated. Local parliaments always played a part in the development of the Bauhaus, the Thuringian Landtag in Weimar until 1925 and the Dessau City Council until 1932, and even longer with political activities and legal proceedings.

As early as March 1920, extremist right-wing military personnel and politicians led by Wolfgang Kapp (1858–1922) and Walther Freiherr von Lüttwitz (1859–1942) tried to destroy the young republic with a military coup (Kapp Putsch). This coup d’état was put down by a general strike during which numerous demonstrators were shot by the rebels. For those killed in Weimar, Gropius created the Memorial for the March Victims in the Main Weimar Cemetery in 1922, and in that same year he also designed a memorial plaque on the German National Theatre for the Weimar Constitution. The memorial for the murdered Karl Liebknecht (1871–1919) and Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919), created by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and commissioned by the KPD (Communist Party of Germany), was inaugurated in Berlin’s Friedrichsfelde Cemetery in 1926. The poverty of the post-war years, which was dramatically increased by the reparations ordered by the Treaty of Versailles, led to the economic collapse of 1923. While the exchange rate for the Dollar to the Mark was still at 1:8 in January 1919, the figure fell to 1:50 at the beginning of 1920, to 1:200 in 1922, to 1:7,000 at the beginning of 1923, and until the currency stabilisation at the end of 1923, it was 1:4.2 billion! The period of economic upswing and relative stability – ”the Golden 20s” – in Germany lasted from 1924 to 1929, when “Black Friday” at the New York Stock Exchange started a worldwide economic crisis on 25th October 1929.

The Bauhaus became the focal point of the avant-garde in education, design and architecture: in 1923 with the large Weimar Bauhaus Exhibition and Attached Exposition of International Architecture, in 1926 with the Bauhaus buildings in Dessau, in 1929/1930 with the Travelling Bauhaus Exhibition, and in 1930 with the German section at the Exposition de la Société des Artistes Décorateurs, led by Walter Gropius in Paris.

Discussions and conflicts within the Bauhaus in Weimar and the programmatic and structural changes often dramatically mirrored these connections: the Groß Case in 1919, the secession of former Art Academy professors and the refoundation of the Weimar Academy of Fine Arts in 1920/1921, Theo van Duisburg’s De Stijl course and the Constructivist Congress in Weimar, the Gropius-Itten conflict and the foundation of a Bauhaus development co-operative in 1922, a Bauhaus limited company and the Society of Friends of the Bauhaus in 1924 up to the politically forced change of site to Dessau on 1st April 1925.

Building of the former Grand-Ducal Saxon Academy of Fine Art in Weimar, architect: Henry van de Velde, 1904/11 (UNESCO World Heritage Site)

Building of the former Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar, architect: Henry van de Velde, 1905/06 (UNESCO World Heritage Site)