Closure and Exile
Bauhaus & German Design
Course 1 · Chapter 7 · Closure and Exile
The Bauhaus lasted fourteen years (check) and had three directors. Its last years were shaped by rising political pressure in Germany, and its end in 1933 sent teachers and students across the world, which is a large part of why its name is known today. This chapter covers the two later directors, the political events that led to the closure, and the way the school's people and ideas spread abroad, with a caution that the picture of a neat "Bauhaus export" is a simplification. It deals with a dictatorship and with people who were persecuted, so it takes care over what is documented. Names, dates and accounts are from general knowledge and flagged for checking.
Three Directors
| Director | Years (check) | Character of the school |
|---|---|---|
| Walter Gropius | 1919 to 1928 | From the craft ideal of Weimar to the industrial cooperation of the first Dessau years (Chapters 3 to 6). He resigned in 1928 to return to architecture. |
| Hannes Meyer | 1928 to 1930 | A Swiss architect, left-wing in outlook, who set up a full architecture department and stressed the social purpose of design, summed up in a phrase usually translated as "the needs of the people, not the need for luxury" (check). He was dismissed by the city in 1930 after political controversy (check the reasons). |
| Ludwig Mies van der Rohe | 1930 to 1933 | An architect already famous for the Barcelona Pavilion (1929) and the Tugendhat House (1930) (check). He tried to keep politics out of the school and made architecture the centre of the curriculum. |
- A split image. The school's reputation as left-wing or as apolitical depends on which director and which years you look at (check).
- A building for a trade union. Meyer's team designed a trade-union school at Bernau near Berlin (1928 to 1930), now part of the World Heritage listing (check the details).
- The cost of fame. The more the school was publicised abroad, the more it attracted attention, and criticism, at home.
The Road to Closure
| When (check each) | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1930 | Meyer dismissed; Mies takes over and expels students seen as political agitators (check the numbers and reasons). |
| 1931 to 1932 | The Nazi party gains strength in Dessau and in Saxony-Anhalt; in 1932 the Dessau council, with Nazi support, votes to close the school (check the votes and the date). |
| Autumn 1932 | Mies reopens the school in Berlin as a private institution, in an old factory building (check the site and the arrangements). |
| April 1933 | Police search and close the Berlin school after the Nazi seizure of power; talks follow about reopening it on conditions (check the sequence). |
| July 1933 | The teachers vote to dissolve the school (check the date and the reasons). |
Closed, or closed itself?
Accounts differ on how to describe the end. The school was shut by the authorities in 1932 in Dessau and again in 1933 in Berlin, and then its masters formally dissolved it rather than accept conditions (check). It is accurate to say it was driven out by political pressure from the Nazi movement, and also accurate to note that the final decision to dissolve was the teachers' own. Both statements appear in serious histories.
Exile and Spread
| Person | Where they went and what they did (check each) |
|---|---|
| Walter Gropius | To England in 1934 (working with Maxwell Fry and linked with Isokon), then in 1937 to Harvard's school of architecture in the United States. |
| Marcel Breuer | To England, then to Harvard, where he taught with Gropius, and later a prominent architect in the United States. |
| Ludwig Mies van der Rohe | To Chicago in 1938 to head the architecture school at what became the Illinois Institute of Technology, and designed its campus. |
| László Moholy-Nagy | After London, to Chicago in 1937 to found the "New Bauhaus", which closed quickly and was refounded as the School of Design and later the Institute of Design. |
| Josef and Anni Albers | To Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1933, where Josef taught for many years (check). |
| Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee | Kandinsky to France; Klee, dismissed from a German academy, to Switzerland (check the dates and places). |
| Bauhaus-trained architects | Several went to Palestine, where buildings in Tel Aviv's "White City" are often called Bauhaus in style and are part of a World Heritage listing (check how directly they link to the school). |
- Not everyone left. Some Bauhaus teachers and students stayed in Germany, and some worked in the Nazi state in various ways (check the individual cases and avoid generalising); others were persecuted and some died (Chapter 5).
- The 1937 exhibition. The Nazis' "degenerate art" show included works by Bauhaus teachers such as Klee and Kandinsky (check the details), showing that the school's culture was condemned by the regime even if its architecture and graphics were sometimes borrowed.
- The United States. The 1938 Museum of Modern Art exhibition on the Bauhaus and the American schools helped establish the school's reputation (Chapter 1; check).
A simplification to avoid
It is common to say the Bauhaus "went to America" and shaped modern design there. The truth is more complicated: the people who emigrated took their own versions of its ideas into institutions with their own traditions, and modern design in the United States and Britain had other sources too. The influence is real, but it is a story of individuals and schools, not of one idea being moved intact (check, and see Chapter 9).
A British comparison
Gropius and Maxwell Fry designed Impington Village College near Cambridge in the late 1930s (check the dates), one of the best-known buildings in Britain by an émigré from the Bauhaus. Along with the Isokon flats (Chapter 6), it shows how the school's people brought their ideas into British architecture during the 1930s.
Exercises
Exercise 1
Describe how the school's character differed under its three directors, and say why a single description of "the Bauhaus" is risky.
Exercise 2
Set out the sequence of events from 1930 to 1933 that ended the school, and say in what sense it was closed and in what sense it dissolved itself.
Exercise 3
Choose two people who emigrated, say where they went and what they did, and explain why "the Bauhaus went to America" is too simple.
Quick Reference
- Directors: Gropius (1919 to 1928), Meyer (1928 to 1930), Mies (1930 to 1933) (check)
- Closure: Dessau council votes to close it in 1932; Berlin school shut in April 1933; the masters dissolve it in July 1933 (check)
- Exile: Gropius and Breuer (England, Harvard), Mies (Chicago), Moholy-Nagy (Chicago), the Alberses (Black Mountain), others elsewhere (check)
- Not everyone left: some stayed in Germany; some were persecuted
- Caution: the spread of the Bauhaus was a story of individuals and institutions, not of one idea moved intact