“Which image of the Bauhaus, which understanding of Modernism, and which concept of National Socialism are we even prepared to bear?,” asked CHRISTIAN FUHRMEISTER (München) in his closing remarks at the two-day conference “Bauhaus und Nationalsozialismus” in Weimar on May 24–25, 2023. The question reflected both the enthusiasm and the many doubts that had engaged the audience during eighteen talks and numerous discussions. In ever increasing complexity, the contributions showed the many threads interweaving the histories of the Bauhaus and National Socialism from the late German Empire through the present. The organizers noted that this long overdue occasion provided an opportune moment to launch this critical investigation set to culminate in a comprehensive exhibition program at the Klassik Stiftung Weimar’s museums in 2024.1 The event marked the passing of three decades since Winfried Nerdinger and Magdalena Droste edited Bauhaus-Moderne im Nationalsozialismus: Zwischen Anbiederung und Verfolgung (Munich: Prestel 1993). Extending the study’s scope beyond individuals and the years of the school’s existence from 1919–1933, speakers and audience members pointed to institutional ties and the long history of anti-modern cultural-political agendas in Weimar, Thuringia, and Germany.

The first day focused on local histories and places. In a section dedicated to “early controversies,” JUSTUS H. ULBRICHT (Dresden) explained that the radicalization of the language against the Bauhaus was pushed by the educated middle-class fearing loss of authority in cultural-political matters. A poignant example, the so-called threat of “cultural Bolshevism” yelled from the pages of Weimar’s papers as early as 1918 before becoming one of the Nazis’ key battle-cries. Extending the inquiry beyond 1925, ZSÓFIA KELM (Berlin) and GERDA WENDERMANN (Weimar) turned to Expressionist architect Otto Bartning’s Bauhochschule (1925–1930) and the further radicalization following the NSDAP’s win in the elections for state parliament in 1930. The NSDAP replaced Bartning with the art and architecture historian Paul Schultze-Naumburg (S-N), notorious for his racist publication Kunst und Rasse (“Art and Race”) in 1928. He remodeled the Bauhaus’s former facilities, including painting over Oskar Schlemmer’s murals after his wall reliefs had already been broken off in 1927. Also among the victims of the new government was Wilhelm Köhler, director of Weimar’s state gallery and responsible for collecting the work of Bauhaus affiliates.

Turning to the Bauhaus’s subsequent iterations in Dessau and Berlin, MIRJAM DECKERS (Groningen) discussed the weaving workshop’s co-leadership of Gunta Stölzl and Walter Wanke. Considering the latter as more than an “evil Nazi”, who allegedly had forced Stölzl to resign in April 1931, Deckers described a more complex situation, recognizing Wanke’s distinguished craftsmanship and knowledge of the workshop’s Jacquard looms as well as his role in the workshop’s teaching and artistic production. Providing yet another perspective, REGINA BITTNER (Dessau) explored the surprising ease with which the Nazis repurposed the Bauhaus Dessau’s famous building for their Landesfrauenarbeitsschule (“women’s state school of work”). She stressed the precarious footing of her research because of the hitherto lacking interest in the buildings’ history between 1932 and 1945 — a missed opportunity, it seems, to learn about differences in popular education between the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era.

AYA SOIKA (Berlin), then, examined the Bauhaus’s chapter in Berlin and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s relation to Alfred Rosenberg, a key figure in NS cultural politics. The discussion pivoted on their conversation at the offices of the Völkischer Beobachter on the day after the Bauhaus’s facilities were searched and shut down. Following Mies’s own minutes of the conversation — written down days later and then again edited to take out his declaration of “love” for Rosenberg — his efforts to keep the school open must be considered in the context of earlier attempts to seek Rosenberg’s support and to accommodate himself with the regime. As KATE KANGASLAHTI (Leuven) demonstrated in her talk on Wassily Kandinsky a day later, the famous abstract painter was very much on Mies’s side of the argument and attempted to involve the Italian Futurists in his last effort to convince the regime of the school’s national importance.
Already in the first section, UTE ACKERMANN (Weimar) had referred to the shared history between Expressionism and National Socialism as a significant extension to the Bauhaus-discourse. She presented the thesis that, in 1919, the school’s central ideas, especially in its manifesto, could have been thoroughly “mis-understood” by portions of its faculty and student body. The latter consisted of ca. 80% of students who Gropius took on from his predecessor, among others, Karl Peter Röhl and Hans Groß. For them, the philosophy appeared to continue in the footsteps of German Expressionism, which had been a contested ground for nationalist identity politics long before the early years of the Nazi regime. After Gropius’s crackdown on antisemitism and “general ban on politics” at the Bauhaus in the winter of 1919/1920, Groß left Weimar. He joined the NSDAP (already in 1930) and held various cultural offices under the Nazis while his works were declared as “Degenerate Art.”

The conference’s second day focused on individual artists’ lives and careers, introducing more biographies similar to Groß’s. KATJA SCHNEIDER discussed furniture designer Erich Dieckmann, who built the desk chair in Gropius’s office. Committed to the early school’s focus on craft, he remained in Weimar until S-N used his Bauhaus education against him. Regardless, his integration into the Nazi state was complete when he joined the Amt Schönheit der Arbeit in 1936 and exhibited his work there that same year. Adding another related story, CAROLINE KÜHNE’s (Cottbus) paper analyzed Else Mögelin’s practice as a successful textile artist, which culminated in two moments as seemingly opposite as her wall-hanging for Walter Gropius’s office and her furnishing of the Kraft-durch-Freude Hotel in Waldbröl. Together with fellow Bauhaus-graduates Kurt Schwerdtfeger and Vincent Weber, Mögelin also taught at the Stettiner Werkkunstschule (in today’s Sczeczin, Poland), which was the subject of SYLVIA CLAUS and MIRIAM-ESTHER OWESLE’s contributions. They focused on Weber, whose teaching methods clearly followed the Bauhaus spirit. A member of the NSDAP working as an interpreter in northern Italy, he had connections to Rudolf Levy, the half-Jewish painter who sought refuge in Florence but was murdered by the Nazis in early 1944. The Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern is dedicating an exhibition to the painter in fall 2023.

ANKE BLÜMM (Weimar) discussed the participation of sixteen former Bauhaus-students at the Grosse Deutsche Kunstausstellung (GDK) in Munich, the exhibition set up to propagate the regime’s idea of German art. The examples of Lilli Gräf, Wilhelm Imkamp, Elly Ney, and Ottilie Schäfer are important cases of accommodation and even active support of NS by fractions of the Bauhaus. The most prolific case is Walther Klemm, head of the graphic design workshop in Weimar. Both a target and beneficiary of the regime, he was included in the National Socialists’ defaming “Degenerate Art” exhibition as well as in all seven GDK exhibitions establishing him as a regime-sanctioned artist. The presenter also hinted at the little-known history of the Nazis’ Deutsche Architektur- und Kunsthandwerkausstellung in 1938 and 1939 that might uncover many more names. PATRICK RÖSSLER (Erfurt) revisited some of his published research on Herbert Bayer’s work before his emigration in 1938 and CHRISTOPH WOWARRA’s (Berlin) tried to assess Wilhelm Wagenfeld’s choices following 1933 when he became Creative Director of the Vereinigte Lausitzer Glaswerke, Europe’s largest glass producer at the time.

Focusing on Hubert Hoffmann, WALTRAUD INDRIST (Graz) analyzed an architect and Bauhaus graduate who, in the 1980s, cast himself as an active anti-fascist to obscure his active involvement with the Nazis. Among a group charged with the development of plans for the reconstruction of German cities, he co-authored the influential book Die gegliederte und aufgelockerte Stadt (“The structured and aerated city”) in 1945. Defeat in the war and the ensuing changes in politics did not result in a need to change these plans and Hoffmann continued to have a successful career as an urbanist. JENS-UWE FISCHER (Hamburg) and PHILIPP OSWALT (Kassel) took on the perhaps most evident case of a Bauhäusler-turned-Nazi-collaborator, Fritz Ertl, architect of the notorious concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. He joined the SS in 1938 and became Bauleitung (construction manager) at the KZ Auschwitz in May 1940. Ertl even took on several more powerful positions, all of which are known but hardly researched. As with many other less prolific perpetrators, the architect was accused of his role in NS only in 1961. The trial did not even begin until 1971 and Ertl was found Mitläufer (“follower”) and therefore not guilty. The Bauhaus-students Otti Berger (1898-1944), Eva Busse (1909-1942), Friedl Dicker (1898-1944), Lotte Mentzel (1909-1944), Zsuzsanne Banki (1912-1944), Elza Hirschl (1908-1942?), Senta Schlesinger (1898-1943), and Hed Slutzky (1894-1943) were all murdered in Auschwitz. Discussing the lives and works by Alice Glaser, Charlotte Rothschild, and Richard Grune, ELIZABETH OTTO (Buffalo) focused on some of those Bauhäusler who were persecuted and killed by the Nazis, also exploring the limits of what may be considered as Bauhaus-related artwork, i.e., a card game, forged documents, and book illustrations.

The space of this report clearly is insufficient to reflect adequately on the wealth of content that was developed and shared in this very dense conference. What became clear, however, was the realization that the Nazi regime was much more integrating and that there was a degree of “diversity in its cooptation,” as Patrick Rössler put it, which allowed members of the avant-garde to continue to be successful, at least during the first four to five years of NS-government. Listeners also learned of a politically diverse student body that always had fractions affiliated with nationalist and antisemitic groups in society. Not least, there is a dilemma that opposition to NS cultural politics — in cases like Wagenfeld, for example — might have been based on aesthetics and practical arguments rather than political ones. This level of discontent hardly seems to meet the requirements of the moral standards that we hold high today.

In a special talk on the evening of the first day, GÖTZ ALI (Berlin) spoke of the necessity to speak of National Socialism in the first person: our National Socialism, as in my grandfather, my aunt, my cousin, the Nazis. Of course, Hannah Arendt had already demonstrated the need to humanize the Holocaust, but it is paramount if we are to push on with the reckoning. The importance of this mission was not only highlighted by the conference’s location, Thuringia’s most prestigious museum building realized by the Nazis in the mid-1930s, but also — a few weeks later — by the first elections that helped the AFD, Germany’s new fascist party, to its first governmental offices in south Thuringia, of all places. To prevent a historic repetition of a fascist state government at the elections in 2024, one century after National Socialism gained its first victory in Thuringia, we all need to take history and the challenges of our present seriously and get involved.

Conference overview:

Anke Blümm (Weimar) / Elizabeth Otto (Buffalo) / Patrick Rössler (Erfurt): Introduction

Sektion 1 – Das Bauhaus im Konflikt (1919 – 1933)

Moderation: Ulrike Bestgen (Weimar)

Justus Ulbricht (Dresden): Wider Bauhaus und „Falschmoderne“ oder: „Revolution von rechts“ – Bildungsbürgerliche Frontenbildung in einer „deutschen Klassikerstadt“

Ute Ackermann (Weimar): Missverständnisse. Völkische Fehlinterpretationen der Bauhaus-Idee

Zsófia Kelm (Berlin): Zwischen Bauhaus und Nationalsozialismus: Die Wege der Schülerschaft der Bauhochschule Weimar (1926-1930)

Gerda Wendermann (Weimar): Modellfall Weimar. Der Angriff auf die Kunst 1930

Mirjam Deckers (Groningen): Walter Wanke vs. Gunta Stölzl: Revisiting a Conflict

Regina Bittner (Dessau): Schwierige Gebrauchsspuren. Überlegungen zum heutigen Umgang mit NS-Nachnutzungen des Bauhausgebäudes

Aya Soika (Berlin): ’Der Kulturbolschewismus schreckt mich weniger als der Amerikanismus.’ Mies van der Rohes Begegnungen mit der NS-Ideologie

Götz Aly (Berlin): Unser Nationalsozialismus. Lesung und Diskussion

Sektion 2 – Fallbeispiele im Kontext

Moderation: Patrick Rössler (Erfurt)

Anke Blümm (Weimar): Ehemalige Bauhaus Studierende auf der Großen Deutschen Kunstausstellung

Sylvia Claus (Cottbus) / Miriam-Esther Owesle (Cottbus): Bauhaus in der Provinz: Die Werkschule für gestaltende Arbeit in Stettin während des Nationalsozialismus

Caroline Kühne (Cottbus): Else Mögelin. Weben im ‘Dritten Reich’

Sektion 3 – Fallbeispiele im Kontext II

Moderation: Jens-Christian Wagner (Weimar)

Christoph Wowarra (Berlin): Im Spannungsfeld zwischen eigenen Grundsätzen, Auftraggebern und Kulturpolitik. Wilhelm Wagenfeld im Nationalsozialismus

Katja Schneider (Halle/Saale): Anpassung aus Verzweiflung? Der Möbeldesigner Erich Dieckmann im Banne nationalsozialistischer Ideologie

Jens-Uwe Fischer (Hamburg) / Prof. Dr. Philipp Oswalt (Kassel): Der Bauhäusler Fritz Ertl: Planer des Vernichtungslagers Auschwitz-Birkenau

Elizabeth Otto (Buffalo): Das fehlende Archiv: BauhausDesigner:innen und der Holocaust

Sektion 4 – Ideologie und Aufarbeitung

Moderation: Annemarie Jaeggi (Berlin)

Kate Kangaslahti (Leuven): On Wassily Kandinsky’s Late Painting (1933–1944) and the Complicated Question of His (Right-Leaning) Politics

Waltraud Paula Indrist (Graz): Eine Collage an „Erinnerungen“ – Der Bauhaus-Schüler Hubert Hoffmann und das Setzen eines kritisch zu hinterfragenden Narratives

Arie Hartog (Bremen): Die Nase. Das Hitlerporträt (1941/49) von Gerhard Marcks

Christian Fuhrmeister (München): Resumé

Note:
1 Klassik Stiftung Weimar, “Bauhaus und Nationalsozialismus,” https://www.klassik-stiftung.de/ihr-besuch/ausstellungen/bauhaus-und-nationalsozialismus/