The Bauhaus Group

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  Two weeks later, she wrote “My Walter” that she wanted to bear his child. Again, she signed herself “Your wife.”30

  WHEN ALMA ASKED WALTER whether he shared her desire for them to have a child while she was still married to Gustav, knowing that eventually the day would come when they might, “secure and composed, sink smiling and forever, into each other’s arms,” he responded by return mail, “I see a younger, more beautiful life arise from the pain endured.”31

  He told her, “What we experience together is the highest, greatest thing that can happen to men’s souls.”32 Gropius thought in extremes and envisioned apogees. To bow to the rules and regulations that most people considered inevitable and irrefutable was anathema to the man who would change forever the nature of art education and design. The same faith in a new and wonderful future that he conveyed to Alma Mahler would inspire him to launch the Bauhaus. Conflict had to be overcome and battles won; in the relationship with his mistress, he developed the willpower and fortitude that he would need in Weimar.

  But the obstacles did not go away. Gustav Mahler again fought to hold on to his wife. He was going to New York that fall to conduct the Metropolitan Opera, and he insisted that Alma and their daughter join him on the trip. Alma summoned Gropius to Munich, where Gustav was getting ready to conduct the premiere of his Eighth Symphony. The composer had dedicated the masterpiece to her, but she focused only on having every possible moment with Gropius before an ocean separated them.

  The architect was equally avid. Day after day, he lurked impatiently at the entrance of his hotel, the Regina, waiting for Alma. The Mahlers were in another hotel nearby. Once Gustav left to rehearse, Alma rushed to the Regina, where they repaired to Gropius’s room for the few hours she had free. Alma always timed the encounters so that when the perpetually suspicious Mahler arrived back at their hotel, she was there waiting for him as if she had never left.

  The premiere of the Eighth Symphony was an unmitigated triumph. Mahler’s only reaction to his success was to obsess over whether Alma was sufficiently pleased that her name was printed in the manuscript, while Alma obsessed over how much she wanted to have a child with Gropius.

  The Mahlers would be sailing to America from Bordeaux toward the end of the third week of October. Alma was to take the Orient Express from Vienna to Paris four days ahead of Gustav. She instructed Gropius to get on the train in Munich, and to use the pseudonym Walter Grote when he bought his the ticket, in case the wary Gustav looked at the list of travelers. She would be waiting for him in the second sleeping car, in compartment number 13. When the train pulled into the station in Munich, Alma wore a veil so no one would recognize her through the train window. She sat nervously twisting a handkerchief inside her muff, hoping the encounter would come off without a hitch. When the compartment door slid open and Gropius appeared, she was in paradise. The bliss of that evening continued for four days in Paris; immediately afterward, Alma wrote Gropius, “Only a god could have made you. I want to take all your beauty into myself. Our two perfections together must create a demi-god.”33

  ONCE IN NEW YORK, Alma Mahler demanded from Walter Gropius the fidelity she had good reason to think he might not offer. Almost as soon as her ship had docked in America, she wrote him: “Don’t squander your lovely youth, which belongs to me. … Keep yourself healthy for me. You know why.”34 Alma’s mother, still in Vienna, continued to encourage the affair. Anna Moll wrote Gropius that even though this was not the moment, she believed that the love between him and her daughter would “last beyond everything.” Frau Moll laid down the rules: “I have unlimited trust in you. …I am firmly convinced you like my child so much that you will do everything not to make her more unhappy.”35

  Alma was mentally living in two worlds simultaneously. Gustav Mahler was in good form; even as she longed for Gropius, she enjoyed an American Christmas with her brilliant husband and their child. It was bliss to look out of the ninth-floor window at the Savoy Plaza Hotel and watch the elderly father and their six-year-old daughter walk through Central Park cheerfully throwing snow at each other. Then, suddenly, everything changed. Mahler developed a high fever from tonsillitis. He conducted at Carnegie Hall in spite of it, but soon the composer was so weak from a streptococcal infection that his wife had to feed him with a spoon. They immediately returned to Paris to see a bacteriologist in whom they had more faith than the American doctors. In France, as Gustav Mahler further deteriorated from the endocarditis that resulted from the infection, his wife began to sign letters to Gropius “Your Bride.” At the clinic where Mahler was being treated, in the Paris suburb of Neuilly, Alma wrote her lover from the room where she kept his picture hidden, imploring him to visit so she might feel his “warm, soft, dear hands.”36

  The Mahlers and their entourage returned to Vienna. On May 18, Mahler received an emergency application of radium bags. Then, as Alma later recalled, “There was a smile on his lips and twice he said ‘Mozarte’ “—an affectionate diminutive of the great composer’s name.37 Alma watched her husband use a finger to conduct Mozart on the quilt until he suddenly stopped, his hero’s name still on his lips, and died at fifty-one. Alma noted what she considered an extraordinary coincidence: it was Walter Gropius’s birthday.

  A few days later, Gropius wrote Alma about Gustav Mahler’s death. “As a human being he met me in such a noble way that the memory of those hours is inextinguishable in me.”38 That aplomb and tact would be crucial to Gropius’s effectiveness as the leader of the Bauhaus.

  GROPIUS WENT TO VIENNA, where he and Alma were reunited in his room at the Hotel Kummer. She told Gropius that during the time she was in New York, she and Mahler had had sex whenever he wanted. Gropius, who had remained faithful to Alma during their separation, was furious. He could not bear the idea that Alma had been making love with Mahler regularly during all those months when she was acting as his nurse. That she had betrayed him with the dying man to whom she was married did not lessen the sting.

  The next day, Gropius wrote Alma a letter from the Kummer: “One important question which you have to answer, please! When did you become his lover again for the first time? …My sense of chastity …is something overwhelming; my hair stands on end when I think of the unthinkable. I hate it for you and me, and I know that I shall remain faithful to you for years.”39 After he mailed the letter, he went back to Berlin—before she could answer.

  As soon as Gropius arrived back in the German capital, he received a letter from Alma saying she was afraid she was pregnant and did not know what to do.

  Mahler had been dead long enough that Gropius believed he was the father. He wrote her, “A feeling of shame is welling up in me …on account of my lack of mature precaution. … I … feel deeply saddened about myself.”40 Nonetheless, when Alma said she was coming to Berlin in September, he said he would not see her.

  Then Alma discovered she was not pregnant after all. Liberated, she moved to Paris with her daughter. She begged Gropius to come to her.

  This was one occasion when events so exhausted Walter Gropius that he could not function. He wrote Alma that the emotional turmoil of the previous month had left him too weak to travel; at the end of 1911 he checked into another sanatorium, the Weisser Hirsch, near Dresden. Informing his mother that “I know now how feeble I really am” and that he required a complete rest, he spent most of his time there walking in solitude.41

  Alma Mahler continued to pursue Gropius for most of 1912. Feeling too wounded to respond, he left her letters unanswered until the end of the year, when he wrote her: “Everything has become basically different now. … I don’t know what will happen; it doesn’t depend on me. Everything is topsy-turvy, ice and sun, pearls and dirt, devils and angels.”42 That sense of life as the violent opposition of good and evil, with beauty vying to vanquish ugliness, would soon impel Walter Gropius to create and run the Bauhaus.

  Oscar Kokoschka, The Tempest, 1913. Seeing this canvas in an exhibition, Gropius realized that his wife had an
other lover.

  AT THE START OF 1913, Gropius went to the Berlin Secession exhibition. He was riveted by a painting by Oskar Kokoschka, who lived in Dresden. Kokoschka’s previous work had left him cold, but this time one picture grabbed his attention. The Tempest showed a man and a woman being tossed around in a boat on a stormy sea. It took a moment before Gropius realized who the couple was. The woman was Alma, “lying calmly, trustfully clinging to” Kokoschka, “who, despotic of face, radiating energy, calms the mountainous waves.”43 That description was subsequently provided by Alma, who recounted how Gropius deduced from the canvas not just that she and Kokoschka were lovers, but also that, when he looked at its date, Gropius realized that the couple had begun their affair while she was still telling him that he was the love of her life.

  When Alma later wrote about the impact of this moment on Gropius, she made no effort to conceal her excitement. She had met the tall, lean Kokoschka in the winter of 1912. The starving artist in torn shoes and a frayed suit captivated her immediately. He was “handsome … but disturbingly coarse. … His eyes were somewhat aslant, which gave them a wary impression; but the eyes as such were beautiful. The mouth was large, with the lower lip and chin protruding.”44 She had gone to him to have her portrait done, and he had interrupted his sketching to sweep her into his arms. The following day, she received a letter saying, “I want you to save me until I can really be the man who does not drag you down but lifts you up. … If you, as a woman, will strengthen and help me escape from the confusion of my mind, the beauty that we worship beyond our power to know will bless us both with happiness.”45 Alma’s weakness for irregular-looking, emotionally overwrought men was even greater than her craving for the one who looked like a stage idol and was determined to exercise control.

  After seeing that painting, Walter Gropius would wait more than a year before having any further communication with Alma Mahler. But he was far from through with her. Only when he was directing the Bauhaus would he grasp that her need to have tortured, brilliant lovers was chronic—and that he alone could not satisfy her.

  3

  It was in Gropius’s nature to leap into treacherous territory with giant steps. In 1914, the Deutscher Werkbund—an organization of independent artists and craftspeople “determined to combat conservative trends in design, and to grapple with the impact of mechanical production on the arts”46—was staging a major exhibition in Cologne. Gropius, who was developing a knack for befriending influential people, prevailed upon the Werkbund secretary to persuade the exhibition planner to hire him to design several of its structures. For what he rightly sensed would be a turning point in the history of design, he moved to Cologne. The luxurious cabin he created for a train sleeping car was a highlight of the Werkbund show; it summed up the notion of stylish, up-to-date travel and delighted the public. The journey from Munich to Paris with Alma was probably in his thoughts as he conceived it.

  The ambitious young architect made an even greater impact with a pavilion for displaying machines. Revolutionary in its mix of simplicity and bravado, this structure, one of the largest at the exhibition, had a façade that was like a perfectly drawn thick bracket encasing a wall of glass with the bracket’s arms supporting an overarching roof, the profile of which was articulated in pure and simple white brick. A well-lit, unfettered, generous space, the building had both esprit and efficacy.

  Alma Mahler heard about the Werkbund from Berta Zuckerkandl, the friend at whose house she had first met Gustav Mahler. Zuckerkandl had become a prominent journalist whom Alma considered an insider on the latest artistic developments. That May, telling Alma about the groundbreaking presentation of modernism, Zuckerkandl began to enthuse wildly about a young architect named Walter Gropius, saying he was the talk of the show. Zuckerkandl had no idea that the name would mean a thing to Alma. It was more than Alma could bear.

  She sent Gropius a letter, which she signed “Alma Mahler (and nothing else anymore in this life).” She made no mention of Kokoschka. “I have a great desire to speak to you,” Alma wrote Gropius. “Your image is dear and pure in me and people who have gone through so many beautiful and strange experiences should not lose each other.”47

  Alma beckoned her former lover to Vienna with an entreaty few men could have resisted: “I long for a will that would wisely guide me away from what I’ve acquired, back to what is inborn. I know I could get there by myself, too, but I would so much like to thank someone for it!”48

  THERE IS NO KNOWING whether Gropius was tempted to take the bait. The military conflagration that would soon evolve into a world war had begun. On August 5, Gropius reported to his regiment with the rank of sergeant major.

  Within days, he was fighting against the French in the Vosges. He quickly demonstrated his leadership qualities, and in November he was promoted to lieutenant. Then, characteristically, Gropius plunged from intrepidness to anguish. In mid-December, a grenade exploded right in front of him. Although he was not injured, he fainted from shock. Shortly thereafter, his captain was killed before his eyes by a shot in the heart. By New Year’s Day, nearly half of Gropius’s regiment of 250 men had been lost. He was emotionally shattered.

  “At night I got the screaming jeebies,” he wrote his mother.49 A military doctor sent him back from the front lines to a secure camp in the hope that he would begin to heal. But Gropius’s insomnia became so debilitating that he had to be hospitalized in Strasbourg. Afterward, he required a convalescent leave back in Berlin.

  A letter from Alma awaited him. The German newspapers had written about Gropius as a military hero, and she was desperate to see him. From his sickbed in Berlin, Gropius allowed that he might agree to meet up with her again. In February, she made the journey from Vienna to Berlin. Following their meeting, she wrote in her diary that he was “one of the most civilized men I knew, besides being one of the handsomest.”50

  The reunion lasted two weeks, best described by Alma: “Days were spent in tearful questions, nights in tearful answers.”51 Gropius hammered away about her betrayal of him for Kokoschka, but, finally, at their farewell dinner at Borchardt’s Restaurant, the evening before he was to take a train to Hannover to return to the front, Alma knew she again had him in her clutches.

  At the train station, during their final embrace, he pulled her onto the moving train. When Alma returned to Berlin the next day, after an unanticipated night in Hannover, it was clear that the woman who had signed her letters “Your wife” would get what she wanted.

  GROPIUS’S COURAGE WAS RESTORED. That March, he again acquitted himself with valor on the battlefield by deliberately attracting fire from the French troops in order to determine their precise location. One bullet penetrated his fur cap, another the sole of his shoe; a third went through the right side of his coat, a fourth through the left. His bravery won him the Bavarian Military Medal 3rd class with swords.

  In spite of the heat of combat, he was writing to Alma every day, as she was to him. Again Alma thought she might be pregnant. Having said a year earlier she was and would always remain “Alma Mahler,” she now signed a letter “Alma Gropius! Alma Gropius!” with the instruction “Do write this name in one of your letters.” Alma proposed that he take a furlough so they could marry, while initially keeping it a secret. The prospect excited her unbearably: “I am glowing and cannot sleep.”52

  One reason to conceal the marriage was that Gropius’s mother objected strenuously to the love affair. Having been essentially on her own in the world since the death of Walter Gropius, Sr., in 1911, Manon Gropius threatened that she would leave Berlin if her son did not put a halt to his relationship with a woman she considered tainted by scandal. Gropius would not be cowed, however. He had not acceded to Alma’s wish for a secret marriage, but now he and Alma met with his mother and told her that they intended to wed.

  His mother embodied the attitudes that he would devote his life to changing. Arguing with her, he demonstrated the iron will with which he would start the Bauhaus. Gro
pius explained to Manon that he had always challenged convention, while she embraced tradition. With her, he was not merely confronting conservatism and old-fashionedness, but also dealing with extreme belligerence and a lack of compassion he found intolerable. Walter Gropius relished the path to rightness, and nothing would stop him once he had made up his mind; he had the confidence that his viewpoint was the correct and humane one.

  Gropius advised his mother to write the woman he intended to marry. That will to broker peace was one of the architect’s most powerful traits, and he had what it took to get difficult people to comply. Manon sent a conciliatory letter. Still, Gropius and Alma married in a secret ceremony in Berlin on August 18, 1915, without telling his mother.

  By now, Gropius was addressing Alma by her middle name, Maria. Supposedly this was because he wanted to differentiate himself from the men who called her Alma. But Maria, of course, was what Mahler had called her—the habit to which Freud had attached such significance. Gropius’s real reason was very likely to identify himself further with the brilliant composer who had preceded him in Alma’s bed.

  The day after the clandestine wedding, the rich young widow wrote of her marriage to the handsome lieutenant: “My objective is clear—simply to make this man happy. I am unshakeable, calm, stimulated as never before.” But Alma almost immediately became annoyed with him. She blamed Gropius when he was forced to return to the front soon after their wedding; she saw no justification for his abandoning her to his family and the city of Berlin, both of which she disdained.

  Even though Alma regarded her husband’s military obligations as a personal insult, she dutifully accompanied him to a military equipment store on an exceptionally hot summer day so he could choose the leather for his riding boots. When he deliberated too long over the selection, however, Alma lost patience. Unable to tolerate the strong smell of the Russian leather in the heat, she rushed outside. She complained that “Gropius took his time,” while she always bought things “quickly, unthinkingly, and not always wisely.”53 Waiting in the fresh air and contemplating this difference from her meticulous, design-obsessed husband, Alma bought a magazine from a peddler. In it was a poem by Franz Werfel, “Man Aware.” It made an indelible impression on the woman who was anticipating her husband going off to war, and she noted the poet’s name.