THE BAUHAUS IN WEIMAR, GERMANY, 1919–1933 term paper

Walter Gropius, a well-known architect, began the Bauhaus in 1919 in the city of Weimar by merging an academy of art and a school of applied arts. Expanding on prewar artistic concepts, Gropius called for artists and craftsmen to join together to produce the building of the future, a building that would combine function and beauty.

The Bauhaus was simultaneously a course of studies, a series of workshops that accepted architectural and design commissions, and a commentary on political and social issues. The course of studies consisted of an elementary course and training in a workshop. The basic idea was to provide the artist with a mastery of the materials available for work as well as an understanding of aesthetic questions. It was a form of education designed to erase the line separating artists from craftsmen, bringing the two together in building projects that would create the material basis for a good life.

Those involved in the Bauhaus not only designed buildings but also worked in a great variety of other fields: furniture design, lamps, rugs, pottery, typography and book design, even dance and theater. Perhaps the best-known product of the Bauhaus is Marcel Breuer’s tubular chair, copies of which may still be found in homes, colleges, and airports around the world. Among the many prominent artists and architects associated with the Bauhaus are Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, Oskar Schlemmer, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

The Bauhaus was a controversial institution and the object of considerable hostility both because of its radical design ideas and the bohemian outlook of students and masters. In 1925 the Bauhaus moved from Weimar, an increasingly conservative city, to the industrial town of Dessau, a more congenial location. There Gropius designed and built his most famous buildings and the Bauhaus enjoyed its most productive period. Gropius’s primary aim was to make the most of advantages offered by technology: “Our object was to eliminate every drawback of the machine without sacrificing any one of its real advantages.” Despite Gropius’s efforts to keep the Bauhaus nonpolitical, it became associated with communism. The ideas it represented, the work it carried out, even the existence of the Bauhaus as a community and way of life—everything about it had political overtones. In 1932, hampered by both the Great Depression and the increasingly conservative political situation, the Bauhaus moved to Berlin. It survived the end of the Weimar Republic by only a few months. Participants in the Bauhaus movement spread its influence around the world in the 1930s and 1940s. For several decades after World War II its concepts dominated architecture and design.
Suggestions for Term Papers
1. Find out more about Walter Gropius’s career before the founding of the Bauhaus and trace the development of the ideas that came to be associated with that movement.
2. Investigate the lives and careers of some of the well-known participants in the Bauhaus.
3. Read about the artistic and cultural scene in the Weimar Republic more generally and determine the place of the Bauhaus.
4. Compare the ideas about architecture and urban planning associated with the Bauhaus to Nazi ideas, especially those of Adolf Hitler and Albert Speer, Hitler’s collaborator in his architectural projects.
5. Follow the career of Gropius or other well-known participants after the end of the Bauhaus movement.
6. Interview local architects on the extent to which they have been influenced by the Bauhaus. Ask if there are any local structures that embody some of the principles of the Bauhaus.

Research Suggestions

In addition to the boldfaced items, look under “Pablo Picasso and Cubism, 1907” (#3), “The New Economic Policy (NEP) in Russia, 1921–1928” (#14), and “The Nazi ‘Seizure of Power’ in 1933” (#24). Search under Erich Mendelsohn, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, De Stijl (Dutch group similar to the Bauhaus), and Vkhutemas (Russian group similar to the Bauhaus).

SUGGESTED SOURCES

Primary Sources

Gropius, Walter. The New Architecture and the Bauhaus. 1935. London: Faber and Faber, 1965. The most complete statement of Gropius’s ideas.

———. Scope of Total Architecture. 1955. New York: Collier Books, 1962. Shorter pieces.

Kaes, Anton, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimenberg, eds. The Weimar Source-book. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. A comprehensive and very useful selection of documents from the Weimar era, including many related to the Bauhaus.

Secondary Sources

Friedrich, Otto. Before the Deluge: A Portrait of Berlin in the 1920’s.New York: Harper and Row, 1972. A dependable popular study of the 1920s in Berlin and other parts of Weimar Germany.

Gay, Peter. Weimar Culture: The Outsider as Insider. New York: Harper and Row, 1970. An excellent introduction to Weimar culture in general and the Bauhaus in particular by one of America’s best historians.

Hughes, Robert. “Trouble in Utopia.” The Shock of the New. New York: Time-Life Video, 1980. Number 4 in the series places the Bauhaus in the context of architectural and design trends in the 1920s. A companion book to the television series is also available.

Klotz, Heinrich. Twentieth Century Architecture. London: Academy Editions, 1989. A highly readable survey that includes a good discussion of the Bauhaus movement.

Lane, Barbara Miller. Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918–1945. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985. A useful discussion of architecture and urban planning as a political battleground between left and right. Well illustrated.

Willett, John. Art and Politics in the Weimar Period: The New Sobriety 1917–1933. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978. An excellent overview, with over 200 illustrations, that places the Bauhaus not only in a German but also in a European context. Wingler, H. M. The Bauhaus. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969. Considered the standard work on the Bauhaus.