debauhaus1-3, Exercise 3: The school and the town

Model answer:

Two reasons the school and Weimar came into conflict (check each):
1. Local suspicion. Many townspeople and local artists distrusted the school's unconventional students, its experimental teaching, its politics and its parties. Weimar was proud of its heritage (Goethe and Schiller) and conservative in many ways, so a radical art school was always going to be controversial. Note that many surviving accounts come from the school's opponents.
2. Politics and money. After a change of government in Thuringia in the early 1920s, funding was cut and the school's contracts with its masters were ended, which led the masters to look for a new home in 1924 and 1925.

Why the funding made the school vulnerable: it was a state school, paid for by the Thuringian government, so its survival depended on the politics of one region. When the government changed, the school's money and its legal basis could be taken away, without the school being able to do anything about it. The same pattern returns in 1933, when political pressure ended the school for good (Chapter 7).

(Internal disagreement also played a part: Gropius and Johannes Itten disagreed about craft and spirit versus industry, and Itten left in 1923, check the causes.)