Bauhaus. 1919-1933. Michael SiebenbrodtЧитать онлайн книгу.
for co-operatives as well as for building commissions, the city of Dessau provided a good opportunity with the commission of the Laubenganghäuser (Balcony Access Houses). Other buildings produced from 1928 to 1930, such as the complex for the Federal School of the ADGB (General German Federation of Labor Unions) in Bernau near Berlin and the Nolden House in the Eifel were also successful. The exhibition Bauhaus Housing for the People, which had been designed by the Bauhaus and was travelling the country in order to open up a market for Bauhaus products, gained much attention but not the hoped-for sales. Only the Bauhaus wallpaper created by Bauhaus students in Dessau in 1929 became a sales hit.
Hannes Meyer failed. This failure was mainly a result of the fact that he had permitted a left-wing political radicalisation to develop within the student body starting in 1928 and was not able to mediate the process enough to prevent damage to the institution’s image. The school’s practise of open discourse, its general love of experimentation, including discussion of political and social problems was, as it turned out, hard to convey to the general public. In fact, the general public did not permit it. When an organised group of Communist students, which had been banned under Hannes Meyer’s directorship following outside pressure, eventually called publicly for participation in the “world revolution” and 60 % of the school’s students participated in a KPD demonstration, the relationship between the Bauhaus and the Dessau city elders, who feared a loss of votes with such a “red Bauhaus”, became intolerable. With the support of anti-communist Bauhaus teachers such as Josef Albers and Wassily Kandinsky, who saw their positions threatened by Meyer’s restructuring, and also of Walter Gropius, who disliked Meyer’s criticism of the Bauhaus, as well as the mayor Fritz Hesse and his state curator Ludwig Grote, Meyer was discharged from his post of director of the Bauhaus in August 1930. Initially, Meyer successfully fought the discharge but resigned from his post as a result of an arbitration settlement.
Portrait of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, c. 1931
The Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Era
Hannes Meyer, fallen into political and governmental disfavour, had after his discharge taken critical stock of his Bauhaus time in an open letter to the Mayor of Dessau entitled My Discharge from the Bauhaus and shortly thereafter had gone to Moscow with a “red Bauhaus brigade.” In his post, he was succeeded by the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Earlier, the attempt to reinstall Gropius as director had failed, as had the appointment of architect Otto Haesler (1880–1962), suggested by Gropius.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had drawn attention to himself one year earlier with the design of the German pavilion for the World Exposition in Barcelona. In 1926/1927, he directed the planning of the Weißenhof housing development in Stuttgart, a unique summary of achievements of the so-called Neues Bauen (New Building), with the participation of seventeen leading modern architects from all over Europe. With Mies van der Rohe, the Bauhaus was to focus on teaching at a time when economic and thus political problems intensified in Anhalt following a spreading world economic crisis and the increasing instability of the Weimar Republic. At the time of his installation, he announced: “I do not want marmalade, not workshop and school, but school.” Politically, the Bauhaus was no longer to make itself visible. The school was temporarily officially closed and reopened for the autumn 1930 semester. What remained of the Bauhaus were the name and the building. Everything else was changed in agreement with the city: budget, programme, constitution, content and structure. The students had to reapply. Some were expelled, the politically radical sifted out. School fees were increased, living studios closed. “Five of the most deserving foreign Bauhaus students” were expelled by the Dessau magistrate without explanation.[13] In April 1931, Paul Klee (1879–1940), one of the most important teachers, left the Bauhaus in order to take up a teaching position at the Düsseldorf Fine Arts Academy. Shortly thereafter the only Junior Master, Gunta Stölzl (1897–1983), also left.
Mies van der Rohe did not strive for new experimental education methods at the Bauhaus. The social reference which may have applied to the designs of Gropius and Meyer did not play an important role for Mies van der Rohe. In spite of this, he continued many things begun by his predecessors. This included the adoption of the changes to the workshop structure initiated by Meyer. The experimental approach of Mies van der Rohe lay in the quality of new architectural designs themselves. He deemed all other areas dependent on architecture and, based on this conclusion, he developed the specifics and a variety of educational propositions. His aim was not social efficiency, but the highest aesthetic and constructive quality. The art of building, a term that had been frowned upon earlier, became used again in everyday language and meant that not only the purpose but also the values and humanistic components were of importance. The architectural education now had an even more central role than under Hannes Meyer, with its studies reduced to six semesters, even though the previously characteristic combination of theory and practise had been lost.
Only Ludwig Hilberseimer (1885–1967), who had been appointed by Hannes Meyer, was able to include a practical approach in his classes. Even though technical education was not overly emphasised, the Bauhaus took on more similarities with a regular Technical Academy for Architecture with subdivisions of art and workshop, whose productions had been all but obliterated and reduced to the production of models for industry purposes. Mies van der Rohe himself taught, as Hannes Meyer did before him. His team was reinforced by the appointment of interior designer Lilly Reich (1885–1947) in the spring of 1932, who took over the department of interior furnishing. Starting from the fourth semester the students had the opportunity to attend instruction by the Bauhaus director, the so-called “Construction Seminar.” The influence of Mies van der Rohe, for whom architecture was mainly the commanding control of space, material and proportion, had lasting effects on his students’ understanding of architecture.
Iwao Yamawaki, The Attack on the Bauhaus, collage, 1932
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
Der Fall Bauhaus. In:
See Bauhaus Diary, Entry dated 10.02.1932, in: Hahn, Peter (ed.):