The new not quite new and radical reform as Realpolitik

Bauhaus Centenary

The new not quite new
and radical reform as Realpolitik

text: Anca Sandu TOMASZEWSKI

The covers of a lifestyle magazine, published between 1929-1943, with graphic design and illustration by Bauhaus members such as Herbert Bayer, Moholy-Nagy, Marcel Breuer. The contents sometimes included texts by Gropius.

Under the sign of the new
We went through the 1989-1990 borderline episode, which we saw as a saving moment, the starting point from which our accumulated frustrations would be resolved and which would bring us the changes we wanted. So we can understand the German enthusiasm of 1919-1920, when the transition from one system to another was also taking place, with its promises of wiping away the troubles of an era and offering the chance of a new beginning. But in the Germany of 100 years ago, things were just the reverse: while we were shaking off communism and longing for capitalism and even monarchy, the Germans, who had been swept out of an uninspiring monarchy by the left-wing parties in the November ^Revolution1, had expectations of the new parliamentary democracy (not to call it socialism). Not that the Weimar Republic was wanted, but if it came, the newly created openings had to be ^seized2. That is why many did not wait, but committed themselves with sincerity and good intentions to "a new, better and fairer world".
It was under such auspices that a new outlook on life was born and, expressed in a much-used phrase - the new spirit. In the general political and social sphere, after Bismarck's brilliant but authoritarian government, and the subsequent stuttering politics and a war in the dark, the temptation of a "republican unanimism", fair and humanist, above private interests, was emerging. At the same time, the artistic avant-garde was born, fighting subjective individualism in favor of objective universalism. This globalist tendency was a central characteristic of the new art, melted into life and put at the service of the "new man" everywhere. It was under this Zeitgeist that the Bauhaus emerged - a small group, but with a purpose as big as the house.
Some would say now that they were kind of hated with the good. Others, that it didn't work either, with an exalted, conservative and stubborn emperor, when the whole world was becoming modern, i.e. democratic, and art a people's good.
The conviction of the younger generation of creators seemed to be that human existence was once again (after Christ) at ground zero, and history was calling them to rethink the world, this time correctly. And modern, appropriate to the new times. They were all proposing germinating bases for this promising future. Even the temperate Gropius had allowed himself to be contaminated by constructive enthusiasm - in his more rational style. They poured their hearts and souls into shaping this bright future which - through "gute Architektur" - would ensure the harmonious development of each individual's personality and thus elevate society. From this level, the masses would know how to enjoy the new democratic aesthetic, and it would bring them happiness.
I have used the word "new" and its declensions ten times so far to suggest that the atmosphere of those years was characterized by the "new", the watchword in Germany and Europe. There were others, too, such as universal, collective, rational, society, total art (Gesamtkunstwerk in Germany), synthesis. All of them were encompassed in "new music", "new order", "De nieuwe beelding"³ etc. What about architecture: "new quality of living", "new interiors", "new interiors", "new kitchen", "the modern woman - a new incarnation", "new building technologies", "the new city"...!
This little vocabulary was so powerful that it became a concept and was often capitalized in publications. It also appeared frequently in headlines, for example in "Die neue Linie", a lifestyle magazine that presented the latest in everything from fashion to advanced technology; it was graphically designed and illustrated by Bauhaus artists. In the book "The New Home. The creative woman", Bruno Taut advocated that women should take ownership of the new concept of living, as it was only through their involvement that the ^modern home could be successfully realized4. In the magazine "Frühlicht" he also published articles such as "1920-1922. The realization of the new building concept" and "The art of city building in the old times and the new times"^5.

"The New Man" also appeared as a book title. He was presented as everyone imagined him to be: the embodiment of a pure soul and an imaginative mind, supported by a healthy and athletic body; active in self-knowledge - which was also oriented to social benefit, self-confident, but empathetic and in solidarity with his fellow men. It was not a creation of political demagogy, but a sincere belief, perhaps only the fruit of the lingering influence of Nietzsche, the spiritual father of the ^{intelligentsia6}.
Then there were magazines like "Das neue Berlin" and "Das neue Frankfurt" - later renamed "Die neue Stadt" - which featured the modern housing estates, Siedlungen, under construction. The Großsiedlung Siemensstadt, in which Gropius and his colleagues around the Bauhaus, Römerstadt and other groups participated, were a start on the prospect of collective housing. Le Corbusier was also writing at the same time about a restart from ground zero, but he saw things differently than they were seen on the Rhine and Elbe. Under the influence of the Bauhaus, the rhetoric of the new was never accompanied by the practice of demolishing heritage. It is true that the new often demanded sacrifices, demanded renunciations - such as the comfort of large dwelling sizes, individualized expression, the friendliness of ornament, the unicate, the elegance of detail and expensive materials, etc. - but it never went so far as to replace the old city centers with the new that had to solve the housing crisis optimally - that is, quickly and out of poverty.
Finally, the supremacy of the "New", honest, clear and altruistic, did not last until 1933, when the National Socialists took power. Then, like so many others, its meaning derailed. Its innocence lasted as long as the life of the Bauhaus school and the Weimar Republic. What a coincidence: both institutions were born in Weimar, five months apart: the Weimar Republic on November 9, ¹⁹¹⁸⁷ and the Staatliches Bauhaus on April 12, 1919, and both were founded in 1933. But the School's fame and influence alone went far beyond the boundaries of Weimar and time.
A third coincidence was that neither was much loved by society. As the universal took the place of the individual, so society took the place of communities. And just as people were no more at home with abstractionism than with bourgeois art, so they remembered that they were no more at home in their communities than in the "new town." The architects, however, were delicately endeavoring to preserve some of the old values, such as the neighborly relationship, the play with relief, the relationship with nature, the familiarity of public space. Yet they have lost their tender privilege as artists.
Paradoxical, when you consider that all the achievements that produced the distance between the Bauhaus and society at that time were created out of responsibility and love for society!

Old Weimar and Neues Weimar
Here is the New, mobilizing New Weimar, taken from the last line of the Bauhaus Manifesto: "... Let us therefore create a new guild of craftsmen, without class distinctions...". "... Let us strive to conceive and create together the new building of the future... which from the millions of craftsmen's hands will one day rise to the sky as a crystal symbol of the new faith to come" (i.e. socialism, ed.).

Among all this novelty, we find throughout the Manifesto many elements of continuity with the past. We recall the memory of the old cathedral - symbol of community cohesion, then the memory of Nietzsche's crystal - symbol of structured purity, we discern admiration for traditional craftsmanship - which has been enhanced by Pugin, Ruskin, Morris and Muthesius. The very name Bauhaus carries within it the reference to the simple hut in the medieval building site, which through etymological derivation has become the economical, functional and aesthetically respectable house of the ^future8. In fact, yes, the novelties derived from values of the past.
The manifesto was published by Walter Gropius in April 1919 in Weimar. Here, too, in this small provincial town, what was new was an extension of a great cultural past which the community cherished. The town's glory began with German classicism, with Goethe, Schiller, Herder and Wieland, residents of the town until their deaths. Goethe was visited by such luminaries as Felix Mendelssohn, who came to play his piano. Bach had worked in Weimar for a decade, the pianist Hummel for a couple of decades, then Liszt settled in the city and under his direction the first performance of Wagner's Lohengrin took place; Richard Strauss and the patriarch Friedrich Nietzsche complete the short list of non-architectural headliners of 18th and 19th century ^Weimar9.
By the early 20th century, this venerable Weimar was fast becoming the effervescent Neues Weimar, a term consecrated by its policy of cultural openness to the ^new10. Here, modern-oriented artists were offered possibilities of expression that the greater Berlin did not allow, blocked as it was by the restrictive Wilhelmian cultural policy, confined to the national style (Heimatsstil). Among them was Henry van de Velde, who founded the Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts in 1905 and became its director. Thus for Gropius, Feininger and Itten (the first Bauhäusler), the city was primarily the bearer of the Arts & Crafts and Art Nouveau traditions - the Van de Velde variant. This continuity was also supported by the fact that the Staatliches Bauhaus occupied, from 1919 until it moved to Dessau, the same premises, consisting of two buildings built by Van de Velde in the spirit of the two trends. It was also he who proposed Gropius as his ^successor11.

But continuity is to be found above all in the filiation of ideas. For example, the idea that the paradigm of classicist form had to be replaced by the unity of form and function, emphasized by the "art of craftsmanship", under the impulse of social command. Or that ornament had become structural and was reduced to the "protean line". Nor was it a new dream in Germany that good architecture, embracing the arts, would contribute to the harmonious development of the human personality and that it would ultimately bring happiness to people. Neither revolution nor socialism was driving the ideas, they were simply creating a new platform for ideals that dated back to the heyday of Bismarck and Nietzsche, through young men like Van de Velde, Olbrich, Behrens and others; they dated back perhaps even to the time of the Liberal Revolution of 1848 - in which, for example, Gottfried Semper had temporarily lost his freedom. The social happiness created by art had been the dream of a progressive and responsible bourgeoisie, which the war had shattered. And the housing crisis, the social crisis, the great economic crisis and Taylorist influences on productivity, economy and efficiency were to revive it in a more down-to-earth form. Gropius took this on.
The new, however, at the Bauhaus, was older than it seemed, the radicalism less radical and its promoters more culturally sensitive than they recognized.

"Realpolitik
With the exception of its authoritarian nature, Gropius's politics at the Bauhaus somewhat resembled the (mostly) good side of Bismarck's politics. "Realpolitik" meant a judicious blending of democratic principles with conservative ones, a flexible blending constantly molded to the changing conditions of reality, applied diplomatically but resolutely. And Gropius was, by the way, that man with a strong personality, a skillful manager (including of his own business and image), handsome, polite, balanced and with a sense of reality. Sensitive to artistic beauty, an enemy of bad taste and formalism (hereditary Anglo-Saxon qualities), he was, on the other hand, a weaker draughtsman. Not weak at all, but he was judged in relation to the visual artists around him. He was perhaps a better talker than them. On the other hand, because where there is no genius in expression, the orientation is inward, his qualities found their place in his role as ideologist of the movement.
As skillful as Bismarck's pacifist alliance diplomacy, Gropius's policy as head of the school was one of consideration for colleagues and students, of exchange and absorption of ideas. In his first three years, he left Itten the primacy in constructing the pedagogical system and designing the aesthetic program. On such a basis, new ideas were picked up, but introduced cautiously and smoothly, assimilated in doses only if they fitted in with the established direction. Examples of the fact that not all novelties, however interesting, were swallowed whole at the Bauhaus are the effects of contacts with El Lissitzky and Theo van Doesburg.
Gropius and other Bauhäusler were introduced to Theo van Doesburg in December 1920. The De Stijl movement had already emerged in 1917, so its ideas were already being heard in Germany. Gropius, with an open mind, gladly invited Van Doesburg to lecture in Weimar. The Dutchman's courageous vision also supported him in his effort to get rid of some remnants of Romanticism and Expressionism.
Van Doesburg's lectures struck a chord with students, who were fascinated by the clear, powerful forms wrapped in the dizzying perspective of "modern life." (Gropius had less of this gift.) Van Doesburg, also a painter by origin, had turned his theory increasingly toward architecture and enriched it with constructivist ideas - taken from El Lissitzky and Dadaist - through the poet Schwitters. In addition, the students were enthusiastic about the advocacy of industrial technology, even though the Bauhaus at that time had a fairly pronounced craft orientation and did not have an architecture ^course12. In Weimar I radically changed everything ... I spoke to the students night after night and injected the poison of the new spirit everywhere ..., Van Doesburg wrote in a letter.
To a certain extent, Van Doesburg's ideas were acceptable, as there was no difference in architecture between the modernist mentalities in Holland and Germany. The architecture and housing estates of Oud, Wils, Rietveld, Mart Stam and others, who were just as tempted by the new functionalist solutions and industrializing technologies as Mies, Ernst May, Forbat, Gropius and others, prove this. But Van Doesburg was not an architect and was pushing things too far towards a phantasmagorical plastic aesthetic - which triggered antagonism among his teachers. I sincerely believe that it was not a matter of rivalry between the two men, as has been suggested; Doesburg and Gropius were neither Latin nor Balkan, and were too intelligent, honest and moral to get into a dispute of egos. It was merely an objective matter of principle, a difference of method.

Van Doesburg was the man of a utopian vision, with which he wanted to control architecture against its practical rationales. But to elevate it to abstractionism was inconceivable for Gropius, who may have been a visionary and a progressive, but he was also a practicing architect. What's more, De Stijl's formalist-dogmatist ideas ran counter to the Bauhaus program, and Van Doesburg's aestheticism risked hijacking his philosophy.
Here, the rules were being extracted from practice, yet Doesburg was starting from an abstract formal theory and trying to force it from the top down as a style in architecture. Gropius, on the other hand, believed that the new modern architecture, which really had to be created for the benefit of society, could only start from the bottom up, from a basic unity between art and the people. It had to start from needs and possibilities. The possibilities of execution, for example, remained for a while anchored in craftsmanship. He was soon to move towards industrialization, but when the time came.
I opened the school to all influences, to let the students find their own way, Gropius said. But Doesburg had too much personality, too convinced of his own truth and of the need to impose it, to run the risk of indoctrinating them. And to allow the school to enter into a system of dogmas would have meant allowing a return to the academism he had just opposed. So he did not allow Doesburg to lecture, but only to lecture outside school hours. He didn't offer him the coveted professorship in the school, although one had been vacated by Itten's departure, but in this way the school did not lose its way. Moreover, Gropius recognized the positive influence of De Stijl's ideas on the school and on his own architecture, as evidenced by the design of his famous headmaster's office and the competition design for the Herald Tribune.

It was only after Doesburg's departure that Moholy-Nagy was offered the vacant chair. The reason for Itten's departure was more or less of the same nature: the mismatch between the subjectivism inherent in the artist and somewhat exaggerated in Itten and the pragmatism inherent in the architect. The ideological split occurred when the creative and charming Itten, a follower of a Persian cult that would have helped him to intuitively grasp art, came up against the rational Gropius and his "Realpolitik", which was more about mass production than mystical revelation. Only Kandinsky, with all his individualist-mystic-emotive orientation, managed to stay in school until the end of the story.
The story became legend. One about new and old, craftsmanship and art, duchies and prefabs, politics and architecture, craftsmanship and industry, enthusiasm and temperance, individualism and universalism, past and future, personal and social, architecture and art, imagination and reality. A legend that has been written about for a centenary, and will continue to be written about.

Bibliography:

The Art - That's one Thing! When it's there, Marcel Bois, article related to the Bauhaus Imaginista events, Goethe Institut, Bucharest, 2019
Wolfgang Pehnt, Der Neue Mensch und der alte Adam, conference Frankfurt 2010
Heinrich A. Winkler, Der lange Weg nach Westen, Munich, 2000

NOTES

1 The revolutionary movement led by the Social Democratic Party and the communists in November 1918 overthrew the constitutional monarchy and, on November 9, 1918, the Weimar Republic, a declared regime of parliamentary democracy, was proclaimed. Initially, both the disliked Weimar Republic and the National Socialist Party itself had been created to combat the influence of the Communist Party.
2 Some historians argue that it was then that the conditions of long-lasting instability and revolutionary mood were formed, which in later circumstances (the frustrating conditions of the Peace of Versailles, the economic crisis, fear of communist danger, illusions of strong-arm rule, ethnic unrest across Europe and bad luck) led to Nazism. Under Bismarck, right next to Wagner's dramas and Nietzsche's readings, this would not have happened.
3 "De nieuwe beelding in de schilderkunst", "The new plasticity in painting", the first article in the first issue of De Stijl, by Piet Mondrian.
4 "Die neue Wohnung. Die Frau als Schöpferin", by Bruno Taut, Leipzig, 1928.
5 "Frühlicht 1920-1922. Eine Folge für die Verwirklichung des neuen Baugedankens" and "Stadtbaukunst alter und neuer Zeit", Bruno Taut, editor of Frühlicht.
6 The new man as seen by art critic Karl Scheffler. See Wolfgang Pehnt, Der Neue Mensch und der alte Adam, lecture, Frankfurt, 2010.
7 Weimar, located not too far from Berlin and in a more central position, was chosen as the capital of the new republic because Berlin was in those days too disturbed by the street demonstrations of the revolution.
8 Dombauhütte (worker's shack on the cathedral building site) - Bauhütte (shack) - Bauhaus (house). The last two derivations have retained the prefix "Bau", from bauen, meaning to build, but also to cultivate the land.
9 The long list is also spectacular: from Martin Luther and Lukas Cranach the Elder to Marlene Dietrich, Schopenhauer, Berlioz, Rudolf Steiner, Itten, Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger, Marianne Brandt and many others. See Wikipedia Weimar.
10 Policy initiated by Grand Duke Wilhelm Ernst and centered around Harry Graf Kessler.
11 A well-known fact, however, which I recall, is that the Staatliches Bauhaus had a double root: it was founded by the merger of the Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts, headed until 1914 by Van de Velde, and the Grand Saxon Ducal School of Fine Arts, headed by Fritz Mackensen.
12 The architecture was done through Gropius's private office, which sort of mixed the two jobs.

SUMMARY OF ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE, ISSUE 5-6/ 2019
COMPETITION