The Bauhaus Group

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  The architect was at the sanatorium because, overworked, he was suffering from a cold that refused to abate. But ill health did not prevent the young man from falling instantly head over heels for Alma. Her husband, the renowned composer and conductor Gustav Mahler, was fifty-one years old to her thirty-one, and she was restless. Her young daughter’s presence did not impede her availability.

  Alma Schindler Mahler was a force to reckon with. Her appearance was more fascinating than classical; she had fiery eyes and a vibrant presence that many men found irresistible. Because of her partial deafness, she stood especially close to anyone speaking to her and carefully read the person’s lips, a posture that many men regarded as a sexual invitation. Alma’s early romantic liaisons had included theater director Max Burckhard and composer Alexander von Zemlinsky. She had married Gustav Mahler in 1902, when he was director of the Vienna Court Opera.

  For Alma, an essential ingredient of male greatness was artistic creativity. As a child she deified her father, Emil Jakob Schindler, a landscape painter who did well enough with his art to bring up his family stylishly in a castle on the outskirts of Vienna, where he devoted almost as much energy to throwing lavish parties as to painting. Alma never recovered from the jolt of his sudden death when she was thirteen.

  She had far less regard for her mother, Anna. When her younger sister Grete was put into an asylum following two suicide attempts, her mother said the reason for Grete’s illness was that her father (who was not Schindler) had syphilis. Alma held Anna in contempt, and resented her all the more for marrying yet another former lover, the painter Carl Moll, soon after Schindler’s death. Moll had been a student of Schindler’s when he and Alma’s mother first had an affair.

  At least Moll, who was a major figure in the contemporary art scene in Vienna, attracted interesting people to the house. Young Alma gave her first kiss to the painter Gustav Klimt, whom she met when she was seventeen. Klimt had recently become president of the Secession, an artistic movement he had conceived with Moll and a third artist, Josef Engelhardt. Its goal was to break away from the traditional academic style that dominated the artistic establishment in Vienna. Alma was by nature attracted to rebellious groundbreakers who were in positions of power (Gropius would be a prime exemplar), and it’s no surprise that the painter fell for her in return. Klimt deliberately confronted societal norms—he sported a fringe beard and wore voluminous monk’s robes—and considered his colleague’s teenage stepdaughter a perfect quarry. The slightly oversize features that made her face so riveting, her unabashed mischief, and her skill at singing Wagner with her mezzo-soprano voice enchanted him to the point of obsession.

  When Alma’s mother and Moll heard about her kissing the painter, who was more than twice her age, they tried to put an end to the relationship, to which Klimt responded with a letter saying that Alma was “everything a man can wish for in a woman, and in abundant measure.”8 Alexander von Zemlinsky, who was Alma’s music teacher, was also obsessed with her. Although Alma considered him “a hideous gnome,”9 a private rendition he gave her of Tristan led to passionate embraces.

  Alma remained a virgin, but it was a struggle. Even at an early age, the future first lady of the Bauhaus confessed her sexual longings in her diary. While she would not allow Zemlinsky full intercourse, she wrote, “I madly desire his embraces, I shall never forget the feel of his hand deep in my innermost self like a torrent of flames! … Perfect bliss does exist! …I would like to kneel down before him and press my lips to his naked body, kiss everything, everything! Amen!” Although she would have been “in the seventh heaven” if she had allowed him to bring her to orgasm, she would not give him “the hour of happiness” he craved.10 The reason was that she had met Gustav Mahler.

  In February 1901, Alma, age twenty, saw the forty-one-year-old tyrant with famously unruly hair and unkempt clothing conduct the Vienna Philharmonic in The Magic Flute. While most young women were repulsed by Mahler, Alma, noting his “Lucifer face” and “glowing eyes,” was completely thrilled.11 Without knowing that his agonized expression was caused by his deep hemorrhoids and the onset of a rectal hemorrhage, she realized that he was someone of unequaled intensity and made it her mission to rescue him.

  Later that year, a friend of Alma’s, the journalist Berta Zuckerkandl, organized a meeting between Mahler and Alma. The two began a tempestuous courtship. At the start, Zemlinsky was still very much a player; as Walter Gropius would discover, initially to his advantage, Alma required the simultaneous presence of at least two ardent pursuers.

  ALMA SCHINDLER AND GUSTAV MAHLER were married in March 1902. It was a small private ceremony, designed to keep the press at bay, for Mahler was already a Viennese celebrity. Alma agreed to give up her own wish to compose in order to support her husband’s work, and while Mahler composed and conducted and toured, she practiced diplomacy on his behalf. When Mahler sulked silently at public dinners or stormed out in the middle of them, Alma smoothed the waters. Her striking looks helped distract people from Mahler’s unpleasantness on his New York tour; the pianist Samuel Chotzinoff called her “the most beautiful woman I have ever seen”—a complete contrast to the husband who was enthralling in “the force of his genius,” but, besides being awkward and homely, was given to fits of rage.12

  The Mahlers soon had two daughters, and for a while all went well. Then, in 1907, the older girl died of diphtheria. Alma began to suffer from deep depressions. Her spirits further declined when, in a splendid concert hall in Paris, during the middle of the second movement of Mahler’s Second Symphony, Claude Debussy—who had been Alma’s dinner partner the night before—walked out conspicuously, as did the two other French composers, Paul Dukas and Gabriel Pierné, who were with him. They subsequently explained that the music was “too ‘Schubertian,’ … too Viennese, too Slavonic.” Mahler was devastated. Alma had to pamper him to such an extent that she ended up exhausted. “I was really sick,” she later explained, “utterly worn out by the perpetual motion necessitated by a giant engine such as Mahler’s mind. I simply could not go on.”13 In the spring of 1910, the doctors recommended that she treat her severe melancholy by going to the resort spa of Tobelbad for a rest cure. This was where, in early June, she met Walter Gropius, in an encounter that revived her more effectively than anything the doctors had in mind.

  ALMA HAD BEEN COMPLETELY dispirited when she and her little daughter, Anna, known as Gucki, arrived at the spa, in the duchy of Styria in the southern reaches of what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire and is today Slovenia. Despite the beautiful location—a fir forest that blanketed a valley surrounded by mountain peaks—initially Alma showed no signs of rebounding. Neither the diet of lettuce and buttermilk, nor the walks in rain and wind that were supposed to bring her back to health, had any effect, and the baths in hot springs made her faint. Finally, the German doctor in charge of her care resorted to persuading her to dance and meet young men. “One was an extraordinarily handsome German who would have been well cast as Walther von Stolzing in Die Meistersinger,” Alma later recalled.14 Gropius had what it took to bring her back to life.

  Alma Mahler at the time of her marriage to Gropius. Her profile could have been on a Greek vase, but there was nothing classical about her personality

  In Gropius’s arms on the dance floor, the forlorn patient felt her humor change completely. The dashing young man, “handsome, fair-haired, clear-eyed …the son of an eminently respectable Prussian bourgeois family,” was her husband’s opposite.15 As they slowly glided around to the music of the small orchestra, Alma learned that he had studied architecture with a friend of her beloved father’s; she considered it a magical connection.

  Then Mrs. Mahler and Walter Gropius went for a walk in the moonlight. They talked until dawn. The young architect’s “aristocratic bearing, unwavering gaze, and restrained demeanor” had their effect on the tormented young mother.16 In return, Alma’s intensity and arresting looks took Gropius by storm.

  Gropius st
retched his stay at Tobelbad to mid-July. Alma was convinced that no man had ever made her as happy. Her mother, who had arrived at the spa, sanctioned the affair and took care of Gucki so that the lovers could spend entire nights together. When Mahler, who wrote regularly, became anxious over the dearth of mail from the woman he addressed as his “child-wife,”17 his mother-in-law sent a letter reassuring him that all was well but that Alma was too fatigued to be in touch.

  Mahler was then composing his Tenth Symphony in Toblach, a village in the Tyrol where he and Alma had a country house. Once Alma returned to him, she and Gropius began sending daily letters back and forth. The longer they were apart, the more fervently they expressed their love.

  Alma relished having a lover and a husband at the same time. Mahler had become “more amorous than ever” since her return;18 she attributed his increased ardor to the new allure she had acquired in Gropius’s arms. The combination of the confident young lover and the tormented yet brilliant older husband was ideal.

  THEN CAME ONE of the great slip-ups of all time. Walter Gropius put a love letter to Alma Mahler in an envelope that he addressed to “Herr Direktor Mahler.”

  When Gustav Mahler returned home from the concert hall one evening, the envelope was on the piano. As soon as he read the incriminating document, he handed it to his wife. He told her he was convinced the so-called mistake was deliberate on the part of the young architect. Mahler believed this was Gropius’s way of asking him to release her, a ploy that enraged him almost as much as the affair itself. Alma was less certain; she didn’t know “whether the youth had gone mad or had subconsciously wanted this letter opened by Mahler himself.”19

  Gropius’s letter was full of explicit references to what was going on between him and Alma, and posed the question, “Did your husband not notice anything?”20 Alma answered by writing Gropius that while Mahler had not previously detected the affair, everything had changed because of the misaddressed letter. She demanded that he write her an explanation for the catastrophe, letting her know whether it was a faux pas or by plan, and send it to her private post office box.

  IN THE INCIDENT of the letter sent to Gustav Mahler may lie a clue to the real nature of the man who launched the great art school. Alma’s biographer Frangoise Giroud—who maintains, “One thing is certain; it was no accident”—asks, “Was it Mahler he was in love with, through Alma?”21 Gropius’s taste for women married to fascinating husbands would be borne out again at the Bauhaus.

  Gropius himself never made any effort to explain what had happened. Meanwhile, in response to the crisis, the Mahlers grew closer. They took long walks on which they both wept, Alma telling all, Gustav blaming himself for having made Alma forsake her own work. Alma let her husband know she now realized she could never leave him; ecstatic, the composer clung to her “every second of the day and night.” Mahler took to writing her love letters; in one he described standing by her bedroom door “with longing” while he kissed her “little slippers a thousand times.”22 He also insisted on keeping the door between their adjoining rooms open at night just so that he could hear her breathe.

  During the days, when Alma went to the forest hut where Mahler worked so that she could summon him for meals, she often found him lying on the floor, weeping in fear that he might lose her. But all signs pointed to the marriage lasting, especially when Alma’s mother appeared on the scene to offer them both her support—even if she had abetted the secret liaison with Gropius.

  Alma instructed Gropius that under no circumstances was he to come to Toblach. He was not, however, someone who followed instructions. With the resolve and determination that would mark his tenure at the Bauhaus, he showed up anyway. After wandering around town, he went to the Mahlers’ house, where a guard dog chased him away. Alma inadvertently spotted him concealing himself under a bridge. She immediately told Mahler, who ferreted Gropius out of his hiding place and invited him to the house. The swashbuckling former hussar walked up the dark country lane with the bedraggled musical genius who was old enough to be his father. They said nothing to each other. Mahler then left Gropius and Alma alone in the parlor to work out things by themselves.

  The lovers spoke only briefly before Gropius left the room and found Mahler, whom he asked to divorce his wife so that she would be free to marry him. When Mahler calmly asked Alma if this was what she wanted, she replied that her lover’s proposal was out of the question and that she would stay with her husband. Mahler led Gropius down the lane up which he had guided him only an hour earlier, the darkness requiring him to carry a lantern. Again the two men walked in complete silence.

  The next day, Alma went into Toblach to bid Gropius farewell at his small hotel and accompany him to the train. There is no way of knowing the precise conversation on the platform, but every time the train stopped on the way back to Berlin, Gropius dashed out to wire another telegram to Alma, begging her to reconsider.

  THEN THE LYING BEGAN AGAIN. After assuring Mahler that she had renounced her lover completely, Alma continued to write to Gropius. When she and Mahler returned to Vienna, she sent the architect a letter explaining her predicament: “My remaining with him—in spite of all that has happened—means life to him—and my leaving—will be death to him. …Gustav is like a sick, magnificent child. … Oh—when I think about it, my Walter, that I should be without your love for my whole life. Help me—I don’t know what to do—what I have the right to.”23

  Alma’s mother, Anna Moll, again became the lovers’ accomplice, so that Gropius, rather than risk having another letter fall into the wrong hands, could now write via this indulgent lady. The pace of their correspondence picked up, and Alma invited Gropius to Vienna. They fell into each other’s arms. The first meeting was followed by another, and another, always in secret. Alma studied her husband’s schedule in order to organize trysts when he was in rehearsal or performing out of town, and she and Gropius invented brilliant pseudonyms to use when registering for their hotel rooms. Physically, Gropius was everything Mahler was not: trim, well toned, impeccably dressed without being a dandy. He was terrifically handsome; even if he considered his nose too large, his well-proportioned features were those of a classical marble sculpture. His sallow complexion and thick, dark, straight hair were striking, and he had made a wise decision to go clean-shaven after sporting a slightly foolish mustache during his army days (it would periodically reappear at the Bauhaus). His ears stuck out, but rather than detracting from his looks they only increased the impression that he was listening attentively. The perpetual look of mischief on his face made him all the more irresistible.

  When Mahler went on a concert tour, leaving Alma at home, he barraged her as never before with telegrams and letters and sent a stream of presents and flowers. Alma thought he had stepped over the edge into madness. “The idolatrous love and worship which he shows me now can hardly be considered normal,” she wrote Gropius.24 Mahler became even more unbalanced when, after he returned to Alma in Vienna, he found himself repeatedly impotent.

  The composer urgently sought a consultation with Sigmund Freud, and was upset to learn that Freud was on a family holiday in Leiden, in Holland. Alma’s cousin Richard Nepallek, a well-established nerve specialist, persuaded the inventor of psychoanalysis to see Mahler even during this time away from work. Freud consented under the condition that Mahler come to him. The composer took off on the long journey to Leiden.

  Following an initial fifty-minute session in Freud’s hotel room, Freud and Mahler walked through the ancient city’s narrow streets for four more hours. Freud later described the encounter to both Marie Bonaparte and Theodor Reik, which is why we know a surprising amount about it. The great doctor made Mahler aware that he often called Alma by her rarely used second name, Marie. This was only one letter different from Mahler’s mother’s name, Maria. And while the composer was looking for elements of his mother in his wife, Alma was seeking a replacement father. According to Alma’s account of the one-day treatment, Freud told
Mahler, “I know your wife. She loved her father and can seek and love only his type. Your age, which you are afraid of, is just what attracts your wife. Don’t worry about it.” Alma thought Freud was completely “right. … I really was always searching for the short, stocky, wise, superior man I had known and loved in my father.”25

  The session with Freud succeeded in accomplishing one of its primary goals. Freud wrote Reik that Mahler’s understanding of “his love requirements” had enabled him to overcome “the withdrawal of his libido.”26

  With Mahler transformed, Alma concluded that the lean and fit Gropius, four years her junior, had been her attempt to escape her natural attraction to her father’s type, and to compensate for Mahler’s sexual failings, which had now been cured. With that knowledge, she considered herself over her love affair and content in Toblach.

  WALTER GROPIUS, HOWEVER, proved irresistible. Alma wrote asking him if he would support her having “a life of love” with him. While the revivified Mahler was composing with feverish zeal in their mountain retreat, Anna Moll helped Alma engineer a cover story so she could sneak off to Vienna to be with Gropius. Alma now had a theory that the affair was necessary for her health; she needed the intensity and frequency of her orgasms “for the heart and all the other organs.”27 She craved “not only the sensual lust, the lack of which has made me prematurely into a detached, resigned old woman, but also the continuous rest for my body.”28

  Time apart from Gropius was unbearable. When she returned to Toblach, Alma wrote him, “When will there be the time when you lie naked next to me at night, when nothing can separate us any more except sleep?” She signed this letter “Your wife.”29