MUSIC: Zuruck In Unserer Stadt by Feine Sahne Fischfilet
The Bauhaus was the first true revolutionary design movement.
It's a movement that only existed for 14 years,
and yet, it had a kind of worldwide impact.
The Bauhaus was never one thing.
It was a school.
But unlike most schools, it has this remarkable legacy.
It was just this incredible historical moment,
where you have some of the leading avant-garde artists
coming to this one place,
for the purpose of defining what art would be for the coming age.
I think most people are really pessimistic
at the moment, and they don't see design as a means of
saving the world, or moving on to a more beautiful future.
I think we can learn a lot from that attitude of positivity
and the belief that you can change the way that people think
and the way that people do things, through design.
The amazing thing about the Bauhaus is its continued influence.
And the fact that so many of the things they produced,
if we look at them now, look so modern.
We would not recognise those things now as being revolutionary.
But at the time, they were beyond imagination.
Despite its brief life, the impact of the Bauhaus School
of Art and Design continues to be felt today.
Now, as it approaches its centenary,
it's attracting headlines, once again.
Shocking, funny and raucous,
Left-wing punk band, Feine Sahne Fischfilet,
has had its fair share of controversy.
The band was due to play the iconic Bauhaus building in Dessau.
Once home to the world-famous School of Art and Design.
But far-right extremists threatened to protest at the concert
and the director of the Bauhaus cancelled the gig.
The director's actions have provoked a backlash from critics,
who say the Bauhaus
has played into the hands of these neo-Nazi groups.
2019 marks the centenary
of the opening of the Bauhaus school in Weimar.
But is there a danger that, in seeking to protect itself,
the institution has actually forgotten its past?
Well, we're here in Weimar,
on one of the campuses of the Bauhaus University.
This is actually where the original Bauhaus school was founded.
That school eventually wound up being one of
the defining early Modernist movements.
Now, in this building here, the theme was not the human figure,
it was the geometric figure. So, shapes.
And we can really see here, as we go up this staircase,
we've got three different murals that are showing
the three fundamental shapes as the Bauhaus saw it.
So we got the circle, we've got the triangle
and we've got the square.
Looking at this one here in particular,
is a big arrow pointing towards the Sekretariat.
Where you find the secretary is also where you find the director.
So that's what we're going to do now, is we're going to take
a look at Walter Gropius' office.
The Bauhaus was the brainchild of Walter Gropius,
who created the school
and became its first director.
And is now considered
one of the greatest architects
and educators of the 20th century.
Walter Gropius came from a family which was very well-known,
in Berlin, especially.
He had some famous ancestors who were architects.
And when he was born, it was already absolutely clear
that he also would have to be an architect.
The good architect always had a wider view of society,
how your in-built environment changes, as of course it does.
Beyond being an architect, he was a thinker.
He certainly had this concept in mind.
Let's go and redesign society.
His most important building was the factory in Alfeld,
which can be seen as a predecessor of the Bauhaus building
that he later created.
So, really, at the edge of the avant-garde back then.
War broke out in 1914
and Gropius was drafted into the cavalry.
He was soon to receive a message that would lead to the formation
of the Bauhaus school.
At the beginning of the war,
the director of the School of Applied Arts in Weimar
contacts Gropius because he is looking for his replacement.
He feels strongly that Gropius, because he has gained
this reputation, would be a good successor.
But war interrupts the proposal.
Gropius was a lieutenant.
At the beginning he was actually, like so many men,
eager to go on the battlefield.
The reality of war proved very different to his expectations.
Gropius experienced fierce combat on the front lines
and was injured on numerous occasions.
Gropius was obviously affected by the war.
He described how he had the screaming jeebies in the night,
because his experiences had been so terrible.
He survived some really desperate incidents.
There's story told that he led his men in Normandy to shelter
in a building that was hit by a bomb.
And the building collapsed.
And everyone died except for Gropius.
So I imagine him, in the rubble,
thinking about what he's going to do when he gets out.
This is an architect, almost crushed by architecture.
A little bit broken and very idealistic.
And at this point, Gropius was a man on a mission.
What could we do new, how could we use technology
in a progressive way, rather than a destructive way?
Gropius was really a visionary.
I think it took a particular personality to dream this big.
People came out of the First World War and really wanted to see change
on so many levels.
The old world wasn't trusted any longer.
And I think the Bauhaus is a direct result of that.
They wanted a different art, different architecture
and a different education.
I still remember when I came out of the First World War,
I thought everything would snap back as it has been before.
But all of a sudden, I became aware that
I would have to take part in something completely new,
which would change the conditions I had been living in before.
Driven by this new radical thinking, Gropius decided to accept
the invitation he'd had from Weimar before the war.
But instead of just taking over the Applied Arts school,
he would merge it with the School of Fine Arts,
bringing together all the disciplines under one roof.
This was just the idea of the Bauhaus, to mix up these things.
To see that there is no barrier, of any real meaning,
between a painting or the other things of our environment.
When you make a chair, it's a very practical thing.
But beyond that, also, it should be beautiful.
I consider beauty a basic requirement of life.
Defeated at the end of the war, the Kaiser abdicated,
paving the way for something new and hopeful,
but also leading to a period of unrest and chaos.
Coming out of the First World War, Germany founds its first democracy,
the Weimar Republic.
There were radical groups on the far-left and on the far-right,
who were just trying to get to power
and who were shooting at each other.
Everything had been destroyed.
There was a real need to rebuild.
So, to me, the Bauhaus is really a series of experiments
in trying to rethink the place of art and design in society
after the First World War.
The first Bauhaus in Weimar
was a hostile takeover of a traditional art school.
Full of much more traditionally minded artists, who were absolutely
horrified by what's going on in the world of academic politics.
Of course, intrigue and infighting and factionalism
are part of the deal, and the early Bauhaus was no exception.
Weimar is the classical spot for Goethe and Schiller,
the big poets of German literature.
So this wasn't the place to start off something new.
On the face of it, Weimar was an unlikely location
for a radical project like the Bauhaus.
So, to attract teachers and students to his new school,
Gropius now produced a manifesto -
a kind of mission statement, in which he outlined his vision.
At the Bauhaus, all the disciplines would come together,
to create what he considered to be
the pinnacle of artistic achievement - a building.
The manifesto proclaimed...
It wasn't that new, of course.
A lot of the ideas that Gropius put into the first manifesto
came from William Morris.
He was talking about the unity of the arts,
it was about making painting and architecture and design
all part of the same thing.
This manifesto was distributed throughout Germany.
And we know, from many, many students, that they got hold of
this manifesto, and that was like a strike of lightning
and they said, "Wow, that's something where I have to go."
But, maybe even larger than founding the school,
you find, if you look at the staff of the Bauhaus,
if you look at the famous teachers, Gropius brought together
all the most important people and stars at their time.
I was aware, after what I had done already, as an architect,
that in order to really penetrate,
that couldn't be done by one person alone.
You have to build-up a whole school, which follows certain principles,
out of which it may develop.
And that gave me the idea for organising the Bauhaus.
The other thing that's interesting about Gropius as an architect,
especially an architect of his era, is that he couldn't draw.
So he, either by necessity or temperament,
was a born collaborator.
As his teachers, Gropius assembled
a Who's Who of the greatest artists and thinkers of the period,
including Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Marcel Breuer,
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Oskar Schlemmer.
Wassily Kandinsky, he is, at this point,
one of the most famous painters in Europe.
He's Russian, he brings this idea of a new kind of painting,
which is not representational,
and is much more kind of a tool for expressing the spirit.
Paul Klee is an incredibly influential teacher.
He was, one can see in his paintings, quite a spiritual person.
You know, he's painting ghosts, he's painting angels,
a lot of Bauhaus students recall his lectures as transformative,
in terms of thinking about how art and spirituality can go together.
If we look at Oskar Schlemmer,
it's always the human figure in his field of interest.
He was first a painter and then a sculptor,
but he was also quite active in theatre or dance.
Exploring sculpture in motion.
They talk about the total work of art.
The stage, of course, is an excellent field
where you could explore the togetherness of many
disciplines, like in architecture.
At the Bauhaus, architects and designers dance themselves.
To play with temporary architecture,
to make a space in a second and to change it.
And this is quite unique.
I think you couldn't found any other school where such a thing
like dancing for architects, and dancing for designers
is part of the curriculum.
They didn't hire teachers
because they followed a certain style or ideology. On the contrary.
They hired people because they were different.
And you name me one school today that does that.
Why, just look at the breadth. Look at the Kandinsky painting
and then the chair without hindlegs.
Bent wood turned into metal.
And then you look at a Klee painting,
which was like a child's dream.
And that's what it was such a fantastic revolution.
They redefined everything.
It was an amazing time.
Now that Gropius' team was assembled, the students
began to arrive in droves, seeking out the teaching
that had been promised in the manifesto.
Students came to the Bauhaus from all over.
Students who wanted to break with tradition,
with the old, wanted to look to a hopeful new future.
There were students who had gone through a traditional art training,
there were young students, 18-year-olds who just came
straight from high school education,
and then there were so many returning soldiers.
Some who, famously, literally walked to the Bauhaus
because they were so poor.
And so, it was a really vibrant, diverse mix of students all coming
for different reasons but who then became involved in this project,
this project of modernism that was the Bauhaus.
Gropius and his team set about putting his manifesto into practice
and planning the school's curriculum.
The prevailing artistic movement of the time was Expressionism,
and the Bauhaus was to be a reaction against this.
There was a lot of undercurrents going on
in the culture of post-World War I Europe.
There were the Expressionists
who were, I suppose you'd call them sort of, moody Goths.
It's like those Gothic films of the period
that were going on in the Berlin film studios.
The early Expressionist movement within the Bauhaus was suppressed
by the teachers. Mainly by Itten, who gave the introductory course.
Johannes Itten, this crazy vegetarian, sun worshipper,
who had his head shaved, putting a star on the back of it
and persuading his students to join the cult.
The man who was most responsible for the Vorkurs -
what became the foundation, you know,
which every art school in Britain still follows.
The students were supposed to forget everything
they had learned at school and to start off without any
kind of preconception.
The six months preliminary course was really quite revolutionary.
Up until then, everyone had been a specialist.
You were a chair designer or you made pottery or lamps or weaving.
But never before had these things been brought together.
So the six months, what we now call a foundation course,
equipped people with transferable skills
to understand how to work in all of these different media.
Many of them had already started their education in art academies.
Famously, Marianne Brandt burned all her previous work when she
got to the Bauhaus and realised how traditional it had been.
Itten really was responsible for coming up with this idea
of colour as having a kind of power of its own, an emotive resonance.
That it wasn't just about something that you used to create
a representation of the natural world, but this was your grounding.
The Bauhaus was really interested in going back into the fundamentals
of art and design, and really asking basic questions
about how things worked, trying to find rules,
trying to figure things out.
And so, in this particular case,
their theory they were trying to represent here was
that shapes have other attributes associated with them.
So this isn't randomly a red square, this is supposed to represent
their idea that all squares are red.
Now, that would mean if you took a white sheet of paper and drew
yourself a square, where there was no colour visible,
they would argue it was still somehow intrinsically red.
It's really a turning point when there's no longer
just copying the masters, but instead thinking about how to become
an artist through movement.
So Johannes Itten said that before you draw a tiger
you have to roar like a tiger.
He was assisted in this endeavour
by a teacher who was much less-known called Gertrud Grunow.
She was actually a musician, a composer and a concert pianist,
who had developed a new synaesthetic theory that there was
a harmony between colour, sound and movement.
Students were instructed to feel these resonances
and connections between these different senses
within their bodies.
So she would teach students to, one of them famously recalled,
"Dance the colour blue."
What they were trying to do was a kind of artistic esperanto.
Something international, something which would enable
these students to go out into the world.
Itten had a really quite excellent method of getting us relaxed
by breathing exercises to loosen us up.
He was really the first who saw the importance of the subconscious
in creative art.
But, during that time,
he got more and more involved with
this quasi-religious cult of Persian origin called Mazdaznan.
And, in consequence, he became more and more remote,
less involved, and gradually more and more aloof.
Yeah, there was quite a big sort of, spiritual movement in Germany.
I'm not talking about Christian - a more spiritual, you know,
dancing and being naked and stuff, going back to nature.
Also, it existed before the First World War but again,
the first war, this amazing catastrophe,
the biggest up to then, had made people more aware of things.
And he was sort of into that.
And even his teaching, his colour schemes and his drawings
and paintings were all little sort of, hippie-ish,
one would say. He was a very early hippie.
And then he also... like some of those gurus, he had followers,
who would, like, you know, pray with him and dance on the roof.
He certainly wasn't what you would expect -
the rigorous, mechanical, Gropius kind of engineer.
On the contrary.
Johannes Itten, the students really needed to leave their prejudices
at the door when they entered his classroom.
He also restricted what the students would eat.
There is a very famous quote of the early Bauhauses,
that everybody smelled very strongly of garlic.
When you take somebody in as a teacher,
as a member of the faculty, you cannot interfere.
But when it doesn't work,
you have to say no and get rid of him.
Johannes Itten was an extraordinary teacher
but he mixed it up so very much with Mazdaznan,
there was a clash between us, and he withdrew.
Which I was sorry about,
because he was a strong personality and gave very much to it.
But this idea of the Vorkurs, as he taught,
was taken up by Moholy-Nagy.
Moholy-Nagy, who was completely different,
if you compare him to Itten.
But he was more interested in technology.
So here the Bauhaus takes,
with its different masters and different teachers,
it takes different shifts and different directions.
And with Moholy coming, Gropius also has this new motto
which is art and technology - a new unity.
You need a lot of strength to change the direction of a school,
to convince all the others around you who are teaching,
and also to take all the students along with you.
And, this was something that he was doing
every three or four years.
The first generation of young people educated in the Bauhaus were now
ready to be head of the workshops, and that's what I did.
When Itten left, Gropius asked me suddenly,
to my surprise, to teach the introductory course.
I said, "What?"
But he persuaded me and so, I decided that the material,
as such, is the beginning.
I presented wire and said, "Let's try what we can do
"new with wire. Give it a new shape."
And then later I introduced study of paper.
What was, at that time, considered wrapping material.
So, their approach to practice
was really to understand the material itself.
The object that takes its own nature, effectively.
"Form follows function" is right there at the heart of it.
The Bauhaus is probably one of the most crystallised versions
of form following function, as an overriding ethos
to the entire institution.
I think, in many ways, form does follow function.
That thinking would have come out, Bauhaus or not.
But they managed to encapsulate it
and make it into slogan and make it into a movement.
The Bauhaus school was truly revolutionary in its approach
to art education.
However, by today's standards it was anything but radical
in its treatment of the female students.
According to the law of the land at the time,
women were entitled to absolutely equal rights.
In practice, this was not how things worked.
The very first semester of the Bauhaus, there were 51% women
studying there and Gropius became concerned about this.
This was a man who was a realist
about what society was ready for, and wasn't.
He thought that if the school was entirely filled by women
it would not be taken seriously.
Not only Gropius, also all the other male,
and they were almost only male, teachers at the Bauhaus,
were brought up in the 19th century.
So, they had this very male view of society.
The big failure in my mind is the workshop experience.
In the preliminary course, all the students, men and women,
had very similar experiences.
When they advanced to the workshops, the men had the choice -
they could go to the carpentry workshop, they could go
to the printing press, they had options.
Women, of course, had to go into the weaving workshop.
They had no choice.
Anni Albers came to study with the great painters.
To study with Klee, Kandinsky or Feininger.
And she was extremely upset
when she learned she wouldn't be able to continue.
And she talks about
how dismissive she was of the weaving workshop at the time.
But, there were a few women who opposed,
who said, "No, I do not believe that textile is the right thing
"for me, I want to go to the metal class."
And it was extremely difficult for them.
Marianne Brandt told an interesting story about the metal workshop,
of which she was the only female graduate.
When she first got there,
she was given the most boring task to do over and over again.
And she thought that everyone just had to do that when they were new.
And only later when her male colleagues decided she would
probably be acceptable,
they told her they were just trying to get her to leave.
She in fact, became the head of the workshop's assistant.
The head was Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
And, when he left, she took over as the acting director.
She's one of the examples of a real Bauhaus success story.
I think it's typical of its time.
And I'm sure there would be people who would say,
"Oh, that's trying to force a feminist perspective on it."
I don't see it like that at all.
I just think it's re-establishing the facts, really.
Outside the school, both men and women alike were proving
far too radical for the quiet town of Weimar.
Weimar then and now has a reputation.
It's a very sleepy, historical city, it's more associated with Goethe
and Schiller, or its lovely parks, its lovely historical homes,
and there was something very enervating
for some of these young artists to be in Weimar.
Wherever you have an art academy with a young group of students
who feel that they themselves are something completely different
than the rest of society, you have these conflicts.
When I see some of those strong images of the students at that time,
the most famous one would be Marcel Breuer and his wife,
and two other female students, which they called Breuer's harem.
And they make me think about Siouxsie and the Banshees.
They look like art students in London in the 1980s.
The students who were here, we could call them certainly
the equivalent of young radicals now.
Perhaps they would have been in punk bands,
they would have been protesting.
They wanted to be different.
They wanted to provoke.
To some extent, they could be seen as being out to shock
but they could also just be expressing the new,
a celebration of modernism, of modern life, of just being young -
after the horrors of war.
There was so much optimism.
Young people with a new look.
They were so enthusiastic. No other school was so free.
In a way, they are much more modern than we're now.
You know, in terms of how they challenged the norms
and really believed that what they were going to do
was going to influence the world for the better.
Cutting their hair short, men taking a more androgynous look,
breaking down gender codes and gender norms.
Opening up homosexuality and being more out in culture.
They were women and they were men and they danced together
and they socialised together, and the women drank and smoked,
and it was everything that the good citizens of Weimar
associated with the major cities and thought they were free from.
And they were probably seen by the natives
as weirdos from outer space.
It was radical, they must've had a lot of fun.
They would parade through the town
in whatever they happened to have on.
And, of course, the citizens thought the Bauhaus
was a terrifically immoral place.
They wore these outlandish costumes, a lot of them.
The students thought that the Weimarians were living in the past
and that they hadn't noticed that times had changed since Goethe died.
So one day they took a bucket of paint and just poured it over
these sculptures of Goethe and Schiller,
and everybody, of course, knew that it had to be
the Bauhaus students who had done this.
So, obviously, I mean, they were students.
It's like they're doing it today, you know.
They were, like, provoking the society
and it created a big opposition.
Which eventually led to the Bauhaus leaving Weimar.
And at this point, the local government is getting
a little tired of the Bauhaus.
They just are not ready
for something quite as progressive as this.
The money was coming from the government and, of course,
the politicians wanted to know what they were doing at the Bauhaus.
And they wanted to see results.
Germany was incredibly unstable, the economy was in freefall.
Gropius, he's periodically having to go to the government
and say, "I need several million more marks just to cover the basics
"that we were already covering."
At a certain point, the government had to look at manifesto and said,
"Well, you're not really doing what you're promising here."
With tensions on the rise, the Weimar government pressured
the Bauhaus into holding an exhibition to justify its funding.
Despite Gropius' reservations, it was given a year.
August, 1923 marked the opening of
the first great Bauhaus exhibition.
Gropius was furious. In his opinion, it was way too early to hold
an exhibition like that.
Because he was still creating the infrastructure here
in order to provide this teaching.
But I'm imagining that the students were actually pretty happy about it.
Because now they had a goal, they had a clear direction.
And if you look at
the amount of stuff that was being produced for this exhibition,
you can really see there was a lot of energy, there was a lot of drive.
They did something really incredible.
They built an entire house.
I mean, imagine a school building a house nowadays,
just for an exhibition.
And a house which was not supposed to be torn down again
after the exhibition, but to be lived in.
A huge production that the entire school is involved in.
Everything goes into that.
They also cancelled the preliminary course for a semester,
just so that everyone could work towards this.
And it was completely furnished
by the works of the Bauhaus students
to demonstrate their ideas of what they thought was
the modern kind of living in this new kind of house.
Through the sheer ingenuity and variety on display,
Gropius and his students sought to convince the Weimar public
and government of the importance of their work.
This was nothing less then a battle for the survival of the school.
Gropius, being such a brilliant networker, also invited a lot of
industrialists, professors, journalists from all over the world
to bring them here to Weimar
and to really show what his Bauhaus is doing.
Among the foreigners, people were leaving Weimar
and seeing, "OK, you know, these Germans, they are obviously
"producing something valid for the new society
"for the post-war period."
But the local people and the government
who was actually in charge, they were not really impressed.
So, there was a lot of criticism about it.
This great exhibition was to show the town that, "Look,
"this is what we have achieved.
"This is what we have done."
And that actually backfired because the people of Weimar
didn't like what they were presented with.
Yes, they had made things,
but they had made, in the Weimar residents' minds, the wrong things.
If you look at all the cut-outs that Gropius collected,
something like 80 or 90% were negative.
There was no understanding for what they were doing.
And just a year later, the money that they received
from the government was cut down by 50%.
Gropius, very wisely resisted every attempt of the pupils
to be active in politics.
But the government changed, became a nationalist government,
according to the whole trend of development in Germany,
and that was the end of the Weimar Bauhaus.
Gropius and other people at the Bauhaus ensure that the story
of the defunding of the Bauhaus becomes, in modern terms,
a social media success.
There are news stories about it across the country,
it's shocking, it's controversial.
Gropius encourages that like a shrewd businessman,
because he knows that it's attracting attention
to his cause, and he starts, unbidden, to receive offers.
Probably any other director would say,
"OK, folks, that's it.
"Beautiful time, but now we're all going somewhere else
"and living our own life."
No, the entire school moves on.
Most of the students and all of the teachers
just go to another place and restart.
It was at this point that Gropius' a talent for self publicity
came into its own.
He embarked on a tour to raise awareness for his school.
And it was during one of these talks that he met his future wife, Ise.
She told him that the Bauhaus ideals had captured her totally.
He married Ise.
She was really an important influence on the Bauhaus.
The loving companion of his life.
You think to yourself, "How would he have managed the Bauhaus
"without Ise by his side?"
And she became known as Frau Bauhaus.
By the time the traditionalists had won in Weimar,
Gropius was already a serious celebrity
and the Bauhaus had become a pretty famous brand.
Most ambitious German mayors looking to put their city on the map
were offering bids to persuade Gropius to relocate.
Gropius' charm and connections become important,
as do those of his new wife, Ise Gropius.
And she travels to various cities.
They go to the city of Dessau and the mayor there
particularly makes notes about how charming Frau Gropius is.
Dessau was a very small city,
but a dynamic place for industry and technology.
It was left-leaning, there was a Communist government
that was as progressive as they were.
It was also where the Junkers aircraft and metalworks factory is.
This allowed the Bauhaus to have a ready home
where it could then send its students out
to look at actual manufacturing practices.
They are given a significant parcel of land just on the outskirts
of town, and they can build their first and only large-scale
purpose-built building and a campus around it.
And so, it was a wonderful offer
that the Bauhaus got from the city of Dessau,
and one that allowed them
to bring a lot of what they had talked about to fruition.
Gropius very quickly sets to work and is able to build,
really in record time, a very modern, very large school building,
full of light with a glass curtain wall with a steel structure
that allowed for this.
And that you could also live and work together
through the wonderful dormitory wing.
A large cafeteria which then opened up also to the stage,
a full auditorium.
I would say that the Bauhaus building is the best building
that Gropius ever built.
It's a symbol of the Bauhaus itself.
You have to walk around it. It's not a building in an old-fashioned sense
that you stand in front of a facade.
It must have been like a spaceship landing in Germany.
I mean, it's so radical.
And it's a complex building,
which is why it's a little bit difficult to photograph it.
You always see this one side with the Bauhaus lettering
but that's not what you see when you come out of the train station.
The first thing in front of you is the student wing
with the famous balconies.
And then just a short stroll away, of course, you have
the masters' houses set amongst the pine trees nearby.
And you have the bridge.
And Gropius, as a director, would be sitting in the bridge
and looking down at everything passing by.
Of course, it's a very good opportunity, if you move from
one place to the other, to reinvent yourself.
When we came to Dessau there was a little bit more money
available and I thought, "Now is the moment where we have
"to build-up an architectural department."
And I got in Hannes Meyer from Switzerland, who had done some
very good design work for the United Nations and others,
which I liked.
And so he started to build-up this architectural department.
The Dessau period under Walter Gropius,
these were the most stable years in German society.
And they're also most stable years at the Bauhaus.
With his new building, Gropius had finally realised his dream.
The Bauhaus Dessau was now home to painting,
sculpture, weaving, furniture design,
pottery and architecture.
But for Gropius, the work inside the school
was only part of the picture.
We have this, perhaps, image of the Bauhaus
being this very serious place where everything's rectilinear
and we all follow the rules,
but, in fact, they threw these wonderful parties.
The metal party or the paper party
or any number of other themed parties.
But, they were clearly out having a good time.
The Bauhaus fests were also these ideas of a total piece of art
which includes costumes, music, movements.
Oskar Schlemmer famously said, "Show me how you party,
"and I'll show you who I am."
They took over the whole school.
They had these great festivities every few weeks.
They're legendary.
And the biggest party of the year is one still celebrated,
which is Gropius' birthday, May 18th, called Gropius Day.
And then there were these big performative parties that were open
to the outside, that also could potentially bring in some money.
There were a lot of relationships, couples, a lot of children,
a very free kind of sex life.
Nowadays, we would say, "OK, during the 1960s everything changed."
No, everything had already changed in the '20s
and especially at the Bauhaus.
A lot of people in Dessau were very traditional,
from sceptical to real enemies of the Bauhaus.
The fight of right-wing people started from the beginning,
giving out leaflets against an un-German Bauhaus,
against these not serious teaching methods,
against the modernist architecture and so on.
People were writing brochures, they were publishing articles,
they were criticising projects,
in order to undermine Gropius' credibility,
not only as an architect but also as a director.
There were affairs being invented between him and students
in order to discredit him as a person.
Gropius' ongoing difficulties running the Bauhaus were well-known,
but it was still a shock to everyone at the school
when he suddenly announced his departure.
Despite the efforts of staff and students to persuade him to stay,
Gropius had made up his mind to leave.
When I stepped out because I thought that,
with the coming up Nazi movement, that I was a factor which did harm
to the Bauhaus because they attacked always me.
I stepped back and wanted to go again into private activities
and made Hannes Meyer my successor.
I think that, after nine years, he also might have had enough.
It was a very good time to leave, to leave when something
is at its best, and knowing that it would start to get
more and more difficult, it was even easier to go.
Then you have the world economic crisis in 1929
and everything starts falling apart rapidly, and also at the Bauhaus.
Imagine how you feel if you're Walter Gropius
after six years of exhausting work building the school, and realising
that actually your real motivation is not to be a great teacher,
but to be a great architect, and schools are a distraction.
Bringing in Hannes Meyer was a reflection and a commitment
to making architecture more important.
Hannes Meyer was perhaps the true functionalist.
He was a Swiss-born Marxist architect and, for him, aesthetics
and art were bourgeois distractions.
It was not really a clever idea, like, the closer we get to
the 1930s, to bring a foreigner and a Communist as the Bauhaus director,
but he was approaching the whole issue of the Bauhaus
from a totally different direction.
So, whereas Gropius was the one who was encouraging the invention of
new forms that would relate with the spirit of a new society,
Hannes Meyer said, "In the end, the lower classes don't really
"care for style, they care for cost and they care for function."
Even though the students were very sad with Gropius leaving
because he had this, like, almost aristocratic way of leading
the Bauhaus, of keeping the group together and defending the school,
shortly after Meyer was taking over, there was this new spirit
of the early years being revived, like a new departure.
What Gropius had actually always wanted to do
but never really achieved was to bring prototypes into industry.
Under Hannes Meyer, if you look, for example,
at the so-called Bauhaus wallpaper, it was a giant success.
They sold millions and millions of these wallpaper rolls
so that was something which also brought money in.
One of the problems that Gropius had was always finance,
partly because of the German hyperinflation, but also
the cost of running the whole place, so they were relying partly on
income from students' designs, and it is a little bit ironic
that most of the women were put into the weaving textile workshop -
that was the only workshop that actually ever generated
any real money, together with their wallpaper programme.
So what the men were doing didn't actually generate that much money.
It was also ironic that, despite his Marxist sympathies,
Meyer embraced capitalism during his tenure at the Bauhaus,
and, for a brief moment,
the institution seemed more financially secure.
But Meyer's political views would soon land him in trouble.
Hannes Meyer, it turned out, he was very uncompromising
in his politics, which were very left-leaning and very Marxist,
and in this period that becomes difficult.
Hannes Meyer had not told me about his strong leanings
towards the very left-ish political side.
I think he did very much harm by bringing too much politics
into the Bauhaus.
There was a significant body of the students that were Communists,
and they became increasingly more dedicated to their cause over time.
It is also important to remember that
there were extreme right-wingers in the Bauhaus.
The canteen would be divided between the lefties on one side
and the right-wingers on the right.
As the political situation in Germany
became more and more conservative and pitched more to the Nazis,
the National Socialist Party,
the Bauhaus became an object of scrutiny.
This made a difficult and controversial problem
for the Mayor of Dessau,
and ultimately Hannes Meyer was asked to leave.
He had some very good ideas but under the very bad conditions
of the Nazis coming up at that time, Hannes Meyer came into hot water
very soon, and that was the end of him.
He made the institution open to attacks, but I think it also
was inevitable because the Nazis were there,
whether Meyer liked them or not.
At least he had attitude and guts.
In 1930, Meyer's strong political convictions made his role
as director untenable, and he was removed from his post
by the Mayor of Dessau.
The mayor asked Gropius
who he would recommend to take over as director.
Gropius suggested Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who had become well-known
after the success of his pavilion at the Barcelona fair
the year before.
I don't want to express myself.
I am looking for grammar
that can be understood and used by everybody.
Where as Gropius was more of the manager in an architecture firm,
bringing skilled people together,
Mies was really the master architect.
He's the one who can draw like a god, so he is really like
the genius architect.
Mies van der Rohe, in 1930, was a superstar,
so the Bauhaus becomes a school of architecture,
finally, at the very end.
Again, the Bauhaus completely changed in a different direction.
Meyer was playful, experimental.
On the other hand, Mies van der Rohe was a very serious
and much more authoritarian character.
The first thing that Mies did was to talk to every single student.
He was trying to find out if they were politically active or not.
About 20 students who were near to Hannes Meyer
were thrown out of the school.
Many said he was a great teacher, he was also a caring teacher,
but he took this role very seriously.
He kicked out any students he could identify as Communist,
and declared that there would be no politics to the Bauhaus.
The Bauhaus had been attacked from the beginning
from the right-winged parties, especially the National Socialists.
They did not agree with this kind of art and architecture
because they thought it was internationalist, and not German.
It was named a Bolshevik and Jewish institution
and it was neither Bolshevik nor was it Jewish.
This was just the invention of the National Socialists.
So Mies van der Rohe,
despite his efforts to depoliticise the Bauhaus,
was not successful in saving it.
And in 1932, when a Nazi government comes to power in Dessau,
their funding is cut, they are kicked out of their own building.
Nazi do come in, they close down the school,
they take control of the school, they arrest certain students.
Nazis go into the building and throw furniture out the window.
There's talk of burning the building down which, I think,
given how much glass and steel and concrete it has,
would have been a challenge, but they are stopped from doing this.
What they did is that they took it over,
and it became a party headquarters.
Mies responded by moving the school once again
into a disused telephone factory in Berlin.
That was really a swansong, Berlin.
In Weimar, it was a State Institute.
In Dessau, it was municipal. And in Berlin, we were a private institute.
During the time of the Bauhaus in Berlin, there's a hope that
if they just can bridge some of the finances and can keep things
going, then it can start to build back to what it was.
We have the Reichstag burning, and that is the moment when Hitler
takes his stance in the new politics.
He accuses the Communists and with it, all leftist groups,
all avant-garde groups, and among them is also the Bauhaus.
From this point on, the writing was on the wall for the Bauhaus,
and it was only a matter of time before the Nazis closed it down.
So, one morning, Mies van der Rohe turns up at the ex-factory,
the new Bauhaus, and found it full of Gestapo who had locked the doors
and were interrogating students.
Eventually, Mies was allowed to reopen the school
if he agreed to expel Jewish and Communist faculty members.
But it was too late for that, because the Bauhaus,
in the eyes of the Nazis, was this centre of not only Bolshevists
but, of course, a lot of the teachers and students were Jewish.
So it's a very sad story and a sad end for the Bauhaus, really.
The teachers, in July of 1933, gathered for a meeting.
Mies brought a bottle of champagne and they decided that
they would rather close the school
than to hand the school over to the National Socialists.
They opened the bottle of champagne, drank it,
and then everybody went their own way. That was the end.
When the school ended, it enabled the ideas
to really get a foothold in society as a whole, in the world.
As awful as it sounds, I think we actually have the Nazis to thank
for dissolving the school, because it sent this talent worldwide.
That also had a lot to do with it.
The destruction of the Bauhaus
actually helped propagate it in a way that
really hasn't happened to any other art school,
so you see them suddenly turning up in Israel,
in the UK, in the States, and having inordinate amounts
of influence over other design courses.
Many had to leave, many wanted to leave.
Albers and his wife were the first.
They went to the United States, to Black Mountain College,
and became teachers there.
Hannes Meyer, he goes to the Soviet Union
to work on big projects there.
Gropius left in 1934, relatively early.
He first went to London
and from there he continued on to the United States.
He went to Harvard,
where he became the head of the architectural department.
Mies was bitterly, bitterly pissed off
that Gropius got to go to Harvard and he was stuck in Chicago IIT.
Harvard was the place which, for a long time,
trained the elite of American architects.
When Mies got to Chicago, he was able to design the campus for IIT.
Mies also began to build high-rises to house people.
This had always been an idea
that people would live in tall apartment towers,
but really it's in this period where Mies' particular aesthetic
and structural system allow these tall towers of glass and steel.
Tom Wolfe, the late, great novelist, wrote the famous account
of the Bauhaus and he described the arrival of the Bauhaus gang
in America as being like one of those black and white movies
in which the silver princes arrive in the jungle,
and are worshipped by the natives.
And Wolfe saw that as America being infected
by these alien European modernists.
Mr Wolfe has turned on the architects in a book called
From Bauhaus To Our House.
It was very exciting to people at a place like the Bauhaus
to be brought together under a figure like Walter Gropius,
and to be told to start from zero
is like saying, "You are the young gods of the future."
The great irony is that all these forms were created for the workers
after the First World War, under a social democratic government,
and somehow these same forms
are housing the corporate giants of America.
The paradox about the Bauhaus was that it apparently embraced
the machine age, but without industry
to make its products it was carefully making things by hand
to look like they had been turned out by machines.
Its idea about a social message
didn't last the transition to America.
America embraced the look of the Bauhaus but turned it into
a corporate style, rather than one about social inclusion.
Critics argued that the Bauhaus had lost its way in America,
and betrayed its ideals, that the project which had meant
so much to Gropius must ultimately be considered a failure.
The unique and incredible and wonderful thing about creativity
is I think you can never call anything a failure.
It's all exploration and experimentation,
and failure compared to what?
It was completely unique in what came before it,
it stands alone with what came after it.
It was, instead, just a way of looking at things
that was different and revolutionary and brilliant.
A school that has moved already three times,
Weimar to Dessau to Berlin, so I'm not sure if this
is about failure. It's kind of about a certain strength.
So, we have actually 12, 13 years that was so new and radical,
that maybe later it would not have worked in the same way.
But on the other hand, we will never be able to prove that,
because of that traumatic break
that was introduced with the arrival of the Hitler regime.
We very often think that everybody
at the Bauhaus must have been upright,
or maybe even socialist, or left-wing.
This isn't true.
You will find Communists, you will find conservatives,
right-wing, even National Socialists.
What was more interesting is what became of all these people.
There are many that collaborated, that stayed in Germany,
and who gave up their Bauhaus spirit.
Remember, the early Nazi regime,
they were much more concerned about Communists.
Franz Ehrlich, who was a Communist, was imprisoned in Buchenwald,
so the gates of Buchenwald, which say, "Jedem das Seine",
to each his own, are done in a Bauhaus font
because they were designed by him.
Of course, there were also quite a number of Bauhaus people
who were from Jewish families
and were taken to concentration camps and murdered.
You will also find National Socialists,
architects who designed the barracks for Auschwitz concentration camp,
also there again, a Bauhaus person.
The Bauhaus school lasted only 14 years, but its legacy continues
to be felt around the world today.
Other movements may have come and gone but we're living
still in the Bauhaus here.
The reality is, they prepared us for modern life.
They took the creative risks and leaps of imagination and faith,
and they set the benchmark
for the way we actually live our lives today.
I think it has had huge influence.
The idea that beauty isn't marginal,
that beauty is part of human understanding,
we need to cling to that thought.
At its most simplistic, Bauhaus is about the most refined forms,
so the idea of a shop like Ikea, which is about mass production,
but also with an attention to design,
this is probably the thing of their dreams.
Our iPhones today - I mean, it's this beautiful marriage
of form and function. I mean, that's what they were all about.
Well, I think that the Bauhaus was very influential
over the 20th century, but what I suggest to keep in mind
is that the Bauhaus was really a school,
so in most of the designs and most of the devices that we use
that are being connected with the Bauhaus in their simplicity
and elegance, they don't carry the idealism.
Bauhaus, it was a teenager when it died.
The things that it moved and the meaning it still has now,
100 years is later, it's amazing. What other institution has that?
Not many. The way they taught, the way they hung out is...
You can see in that building, and that's why it's even
more of a shame that that building has become a dead museum.
I mean, it's nice and flattering that
it's become a UNESCO World Heritage site,
but it also means that you can't change anything.
It's dead. It's a mausoleum,
it's not even a monument any more, which is too bad.
We shouldn't celebrate a corpse,
we should celebrate the spirit that was in that corpse at one time.
The time is, to an extent, comparable to the '20s.
We have a society that is very rich and very poor, and we have got
right-wing movements starting again.
People kind of need new ideas
and the Bauhaus would be perfectly suited. It's too bad.
One of the German television channels, they have a series
of concerts that they have been recording in the Bauhaus,
and they had this sort of leftist punk group.
They were going to have a concert there and record it.
The right-wing mob said, "We're going to go there,"
there was suddenly a threat in the air.
"If you will let them perform there,
"we'll have a demonstration of right-wing people there."
In other words, a bunch of Nazis.
And that's how, unfortunately, that part of Germany at the moment
is kind of, like, infamous for,
having more than their fair share of Nazis.
The Bauhaus took that threat, went, "Oh, my God,
"if we have a demonstration of Nazis, not only is it bad for
"our image, but also it might damage the building."
I think the biggest concern was,
"Oh, my God, someone is going to scratch the paintwork."
I don't blame the director.
I mean, she really is in this awful position,
"What am I going to do, I've got to protect my institution?"
That's her duty, that's what she's paid for,
but she talks about the building and we talk about the idea.
What's happening throughout Europe is that more and more governments
are right-winged party governments, so we've observed this in Italy,
in Austria, in Hungary, in Poland, even in the United States.
We are noticing a great change in society right now in Germany.
We are moving into an absolutely new time where things are getting
more and more difficult for cultural institutions.
Gropius was battling against attacks from the first day he opened
the Bauhaus until he left Germany.
Every attack which went into his direction and the Bauhaus,
he stood up at once, he would react at once, and I think
that's also what one has to do.
Maybe it's a little scandal and the Nazis threatening and stuff,
maybe it's all useful.
It's not pleasant, but then those discussions never are,
and the process is unpleasant,
but I got the impression maybe something will come of it.
The Bauhaus was opening new worlds for a new generation.
This utopian spirit, I think, is something that we admire today.
Originally, it was just an idea of a better society through work,
through design, which I think is a pretty tall order
but a good one.
Who doesn't want to change the world for the better?
Walter Gropius died in Boston, Massachusetts,
on 5th July, 1969.
At his request, a metal themed fiesta a la Bauhaus was held,
with drinking, dancing, laughing and loving.