IIf the date of Oti Berger’s death is unknown, its place and cause are known. In April 1944, Berger (who was half-deaf, Jewish, and a communist) was arrested in his hometown of Zmayvac in German-occupied Yugoslavia. On May 29, she was sent to Auschwitz. After that there was nothing.
Of the eight Bauhaus students who died at Auschwitz—half of those murdered in other concentration camps and ghettos—Berger was the most famous. Together with Anni Albers and Gunta Stölzl, she revolutionized weaving, transforming it from craft to art.She came to Dessau – an iteration of what most of us think of as a school this Bauhaus—1927, when she was 28 years old. A few months later, a young Austrian named Fritz Ertl enrolled in the school.
The Bauhaus has always been small, with barely more than 200 students. In 1944, their lives crossed again, for the last time.Eitel, then a member of the Nazi Party and Führer of the SS, designed the building labeled “Badeanstalten” on the architectural plans – Swimming pool at Auschwitz. They are the crematoriums where Oti Berger’s body will be burned.
In December 1938, an exhibition titled “Bauhaus 1919-1928” opened at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. The exhibition was curated by Herbert Bayer, who also wrote the catalog. Bayer, who designed Bauhaus’s famous sans-serif typeface, was invited to the United States by Alfred Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art.
Bayer was the last of the school masters to arrive. Already there were two former directors Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, the architect Marcel Breuer, the weaver Albers, her artist husband Joseph and László Moholy – Najib. Berger tried to join them but only made it as far as London. She found her designs too radical for British tastes and the English language was difficult for her to understand, so she returned home to Zmayvac the following year.
By then it was clear what National Socialism meant. The Bauhausers had first-hand experience of Nazi methods, and their school was expelled from Dessau by the newly formed National Socialist government in Dessau in 1932, and was eventually closed the following year under pressure from the Gestapo in Berlin. Now, an exhibition at MoMA defines the Bauhaus as everything Nazism was not: democratic where authoritarian, rational where ignorant; barbaric where high-minded.
This is a one-sided view, but it is a fixed view. After 1945, when Germany began to rebuild its modern history, angels were needed to replace the recent legions of demons. In the American imagination, the Bauhaus became a site of heroism and even martyrdom. By definition, Nazism was inflicted on schools, not schools.
As three exhibitions in Weimar this summer show, this is not the case. Eighty years after Berger’s murder, the city that was both the seat of Germany’s post-1918 government and the first of the three Bauhaus schools took the courageous step of reexamining the school’s relationship with National Socialism. step. If Bayer’s story is told in black and white at the Museum of Modern Art, Weimar tells it in shades of grey.
In each exhibition—The Bauhaus as a Site of Political Contestation; Removal-Confiscation-Assimilation; and Living in a Dictatorship—the same question is raised: What would have happened if Mies van der Rohe had not closed the city in 1933? school, what would we think now? The premature demise of the Bauhaus meant that it never had to deal with the difficulties faced by the vast majority of its students who did not live in exile during the subsequent 12 years.
Ninety years after the school ended, its clean design lines are still a hallmark of the school – Breuer’s Wassily chair, Marianne Brandt’s silver teapot – many of which are still in production. Bauhaus promoted modernity with simplicity, democracy, and mass production (even though its products were always expensive). The Bauhaus were liberal, liberal people with eccentric tastes for costume parties. But what if it struggled until 1938, the year Bayer left for the United States?
His case offers an answer: The Nazis may have hated the Bauhaus, but they knew good design when they saw it. Commissioned by intermediaries rather than directly from Goebbels’ propaganda ministry, Bayer produced advertising posters for the Nazi movement in the years after Hitler came to power.One of them, Miracle of Life, sells forced sterilization hereditary disease (“feeble-minded,” including epilepsy patients, homosexuals, and congenitally deaf-mutes) on the German population.
After the war, Bayer, who lived in Aspen, Colorado, refused to talk about the time, calling it “advertising hell.” Is he a collaborator? There is no suggestion that he had National Socialist sympathies. His wife, daughter and many of his Berlin friends were Jewish. but. If the exhibition he curated at the Museum of Modern Art in 1938 framed the relationship between the Bauhaus and Nazism as that of angels and devils, his own story suggests the need for a more nuanced view.
The same goes for most of the Bauhausers, whose names are now largely forgotten and whose stories are told in exhibitions in Weimar. Photographer and communist Willy Jungmitage was one of only two Dessau students executed by the Nazis for political resistance. However, his appearance in the exhibition catalog does not begin with his hanging at Gordon Prison in Brandenburg in 1944, but with two photographs he took in the mid-1930s, one of a small man holding a model airplane. boy, the other is a girl holding a teddy bear, girl with teddy bear.
Both children were Teutonic blond and blue-eyed, and each fit the gender stereotype promoted by National Socialism—boys like boys, girls like girls. The photos may have been intended to be Nazi propaganda, but given Jonmitage’s murder, they were actually taken by one of the few Bauhaus students whose anti-Nazi credentials were unquestionable. One must be wary of jumping to premature conclusions.
Like most Germans, the Bauhaus seemed to have largely kept their heads down, waiting for the horror to pass. Painter Wilhelm Imkamp abandoned abstraction to work as a war artist, adopting the kind of sentimental realism the Führer endorsed. In early 1944, Imkamp was sent to Paris and visited Wassily Kandinsky, the old Bauhaus teacher who was living in exile in Neuilly-sur-Seine. After the war, he quietly returned to abstraction.
Wilhelm Wagenfeld, the designer of the famous Bauhaus WG 24 lamp, was classified as a “political pest” and sent to the Eastern Front for refusing to join the Nazi Party. But before that, he participated in high-profile Nazi exhibitions, supplying glassware for the bar of the German Pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exposition.
If there were few heroes in the Weimar productions, there were also few obvious villains. Ernst Neufort, keeping in mind Walter Gropius’s Fordist assembly line doctrine, invented a standard building unit he called the octave, which Hitler’s pet architect Albert Speer viewed as The key to winning a total war. In 1944 Neufert requested that his book on the subject be shown “to Reichsleiter”. [Martin] Bormann, he might be able to show it to the Führer”. Whether this happened is unclear; whether Gropius responded to a delightful letter Neufort sent him at Harvard in 1947, reminding him of the work they had done together on the subject in Dessau .
Surprisingly absent from the Weimar exhibition was the ceramicist Theodor Bogler, who left the Bauhaus to become a monk at the Benedictine monastery of Maria Lach in the Rhineland. In the years after 1933, Bogler combined the production of modernist pottery with the publication of virulent anti-Semitic pamphlets.
Despite Bögler’s absence, the Weimar show showed no mercy. In a quote from the 2016 Paris exhibition catalogue, Auschwitz is described as “the architectural achievement of the Bauhaus movement”. The school’s motto—— Art and technology: a new unity! (Art and Technology: A New Unity!) — One thing for Berger, and another entirely for Eitel. When Ettel was finally tried in 1972 for designing the crematoriums in which the gassed corpses of his Bauhaus colleagues were burned, he argued that he did not know their purpose. He said he was just an architect putting into practice what he had learned in Dessau. He was found not guilty.
