DURING THE SAME SUMMER as the German defeat at Verdun, Gropius wrote his mother: “I am livid with rage, sitting here in chains through this mad war which kills any meaning of life. … My nerves are shattered and my mind darkened.”73 Such despair would be shared by many of the most creative people he would summon to the Bauhaus. Wassily Kandinsky and some of the others turned to visual experience as a lifeline in part because they felt that the outside world was beyond their control, incomprehensible, and deeply upsetting. The balance lacking in their surroundings, in their own minds and personal connections, had to be found elsewhere. The making of buildings and art could help them restore that lost sense of meaning.
For the architects and painters at the Bauhaus, cerebral doubt and uncertainty could be counteracted by the reassuring resistance of steel, the clarity of large sheer planes of glass. The muddiness created by governments could be tempered by the luster of polished chrome. The emotional anxieties generated by militarism and inflation formed a compost that nourished a passion for a stability derived from visual harmony. As Gropius’s problems with one of the most tyrannical women of the twentieth century became insurmountable, his resolve to realize marvels in the aesthetic realm would only intensify.
During that gruesome August of 1916, while Gropius went back and forth between the battlefront and his field headquarters in the Vosges, Alma let him know that a married man was making her loneliness bearable. “His wife is in no way disturbing,” she informed her husband, while explaining that “I must surround myself with serenity.”74 It was her pregnancy, she told Gropius, that justified her need for a man at her side. She relished every kick of their baby inside her and could not endure such a rich experience in solitude.
AT HOME, with her activities limited by her pregnancy, Alma was, in spite of her own peccadillos, jealous of her husband at the front. Gropius had a gig he loved to drive on his rare day off, and Alma often envied him galloping along in it. That he was in danger most of the rest of the time had no bearing for her. She thought he was using the gig to search for women. Then one day Gropius went out driving and the gig turned over just after he left the stables. Gropius was injured and the carriage shattered to bits; the horse ran away. This time Gropius did not keep his injury from Alma. When she heard the news, she blamed herself for being a wicked sorceress.
Alma’s impact on her lovers was certainly beyond the norm. Around this time, Oskar Kokoschka, who had been injured by a bayonet when serving with the Austrian army in Russia, returned from the front and learned of her marriage to Gropius. Shortly thereafter, Kokoschka commissioned a Munich dollmaker, Hermine Moos, to make a life-size doll of Alma. Kokoschka provided a drawing, also life-size, of his former mistress, and instructed Moos:
I ask you to copy this most carefully and to transform it into reality. Pay special attention to the dimension of the head and neck, to the ribcage, the rump and the limbs. … Please permit my sense of touch to take pleasure in those places where layers of fat or muscle suddenly give way to a sinewy covering of skin. For the first layer (inside) please use fine, curly horsehair; you must buy an old sofa or something similar; have the horsehair disinfected. Then, over that, a layer of pouches stuffed with down, cottonwool for the seat and breasts. The point of all this for me is an experience which I must be able to embrace! Can the mouth be opened? Are there teeth and a tongue inside? I hope so.75
During the six months it took to make the doll, Kokoschka bought Parisian undergarments and clothing for it. Once it was completed, he painted it just as he had painted Alma’s portrait, traveled in an open carriage with it, and bought opera tickets that allowed the doll to have the seat next to his. Finally, he gave a party at which the doll, exquisitely dressed by his maid, was present. “When dawn broke—I was quite drunk, as was everyone else—I beheaded it out in the garden and broke a bottle of red wine over its head.”76
IN SEPTEMBER, Gropius was granted a furlough to coincide with Alma’s due date. The baby, however, failed to appear during the seventeen days allotted. On October 6, he was back in the Vosges when he received a terse telegram announcing that a daughter had been born the previous day.
Gropius was devastated to be so far away. “My child has entered this world. I don’t see it, I don’t hear it,” he lamented to his mother. He had no idea, either, that after ten months of pregnancy Alma had deliberately injured herself to make it appear that she was hemorrhaging so that the doctor would be willing to perform the delivery surgically. It was nonetheless an excruciatingly painful labor, following which Alma, upon learning she had given birth to a healthy girl, immediately cried out, “Now, I also want to have a boy.”77
A week after the birth, a desperate Gropius still had no information about how Alma and the baby were doing. On October 16, he wrote his mother, for whom the little girl had been named, “I wait with chattering teeth for what fate has in store for me, who is so miserably helpless.”78
Alma did one of her turnarounds. She overcame her resentment at the infant’s being female, and began to adore her and to experience great joy when nursing her. She also started to think favorably of her absent husband. Alma felt that Gropius was “immensely generous” when from the front he arranged for her to receive, as a gift in honor of their baby’s birth, Edvard Munch’s Midnight Sun, a picture she had long adored in the collection of a wealthy Viennese, Karl Reininghaus. But when Gropius was finally granted two days’ leave to go to Vienna to see his baby for the first time, Alma greeted him with hostility. The excited father had taken an overnight train from France where the only available space for him was in the locomotive. He rushed home eagerly, only to have Alma recoil from “him, grimy, unshaven, his uniform and face blackened with railroad soot.” That description is her own; she felt no need to mask her disgust. Deciding that her husband looked like “a murderer,” Alma blocked his way to the swaddling table and prevented him from touching their baby; she only let him “glance at his child from a distance”—this is her proud account of the event—after he pleaded with her. When Gropius accused her of being “like a tigress,” she acknowledged that “there was more to it than notions of hygiene.”79 The real problem was that their relationship was waning.
What Alma had wanted above all from the marriage was a child. Now that she had achieved her goal, and had come to accept the baby’s not being a boy, she had little use for her husband. “I am no longer interested in his existence,” she wrote in her diary. “And yet, I loved him once!” The soot was only one of many things that bothered her. Gropius had been given to fits of jealousy during his brief leaves; recalling how he hurled a fan by Kokoschka into the fireplace, Alma found his rage unforgivable. While she was pleased that Gucki, now thirteen, “loved Walter Gropius,” Alma felt her own relationship with him was comparable to her older daughter’s.80 She was, she decided, like an adolescent who saw the man she loved only on rare occasions; the relationship was not that of a wife who lived with her husband. The reason for Gropius’s absence was irrelevant.
Alma wrote of Gucki, “With Gropius she was really infatuated. What seemed to attract her in particular was his mustache; when he shaved that off he was suddenly much less beautiful in Gucki’s eyes, and her romantic interest diminished.”81 Contemplating her loneliness with her husband off in the army, Alma realized that she felt just as fickle.
ALMA CONSIDERED their Christmas that year a disaster. Gropius jealously insisted that she give away Kokoschka’s portrait of her as well as Kokoschka’s drawings and fans. By Gropius’s account, on the other hand, he was welcomed warmly upon his return for the holidays and their daughter’s christening. He was pleased at how well Alma had managed their separation with a frenzy of shopping, playing the piano, seeing friends, and going to the opera, and he passed a vacation of “the greatest inner harmony” with his wife, baby, and the stepdaughter who continued to adore him.
A similar approach to unpleasantness would mark his tenure at the Bauhaus. He was not naïve, but he deliberately dealt w
ith conflict by acting as if things were better than they actually were and intentionally blinding himself to problems. He was conducting his marriage in the same way that he would direct the art school: by minimizing the impact of controversy.
ON THE MORNING that Gropius left to rejoin his regiment, when he and Alma said good-bye on the staircase outside the apartment that Alma had had with Mahler and still considered her home, she affected her “brightest smile to help him over the sad departure.” But what was really on her mind was a concert that afternoon at which the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra was going to perform Mahler’s Song of the Earth. When Gropius missed his train and rushed home, Alma was appalled when he rang the bell “violently” and “burst in.” Her response was that “coming back is always a mistake.”82
Later that afternoon, the architect walked in the deep snow alongside the carriage in which Alma and Gucki were being driven to the concert. As he plodded in sequence with the horses, he begged his wife to let him join them. Alma had no ticket for him, which was a convenient excuse, since she was adamant that Gropius not attend. A friend had introduced her to Franz Werfel, the poet whose work she had read when Gropius selected boot leather, and she knew he would be at the concert.
Franz Werfel, photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1940. Alma was rarely content to have only one man at a time.
Gropius departed again that evening. When he reached the border, he sent Alma a telegram instructing her to “splinter the ice in your features.” By Alma’s account, the words, ironically, came from a poem by Werfel.
Werfel called on Alma in her box at the concert, and then accompanied her and Gucki home. Alma wrote in her diary, “It had to happen. It was inevitable … that our lips would find each other and he would stammer words without rhyme or reason. … I can repent nothing. … I am out of my mind. And so is Werfel.”83
In February, Gustav Klimt died, making Alma realize that she “had never stopped loving him” either.84 Everything was happening at once. She would periodically take the baby Manon to Berlin, the nearest safe point to Gropius’s encampment, so they could meet whenever he was granted leaves of two or three days, but she remained preoccupied by thoughts of Klimt and, again, Kokoschka. Franz Werfel, meanwhile, had her periodically visit him in Vienna at the Hotel Bristol, where he was correcting the proofs of Day of Judgment.
And, although she did not tell anyone, Alma was again pregnant.
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Gropius next went home in March. He wrote his mother about his five- month-old daughter: “I am totally in love with her. … She is lying next to me and sings endless songs, like a twittering machine. She is a cheerful child and full of vivacity. And very pretty though she looks so very much like me. Alma nurses her almost completely and performs amazingly well, taking care of the child without any help and at the same time finding occasion for music and social life. I felt I was in paradise.”85
Such domestic bliss was the ideal of the architect who would devise the Bauhaus curriculum and design its residences. His goal was to improve everyday surroundings, and his starting point was the wonder of life itself. The greatest artist he would lure to the Bauhaus, Paul Klee, would make a marvelous painting there titled Twittering Machine, of a device that could be cranked to make mechanical birds sing. Sheer joyfulness was at the core of the Bauhaus mentality.
WHATEVER GROPIUS DID, he was consumed by passion. In every realm—architecture, fatherhood, womanizing, his military service—he sought the pinnacle. He was stationed in Belgium, where he taught military communications in an abandoned castle; its gardens and terraces were set into the landscape so as to form “the most beautiful and grandest sight I have ever beheld.”86 When he was transferred to a peasant’s house to direct activities related to military communications—including the training of dogs, signal throwers, and homing pigeons—he delighted in his clean room, however modest, and his independence from the usual army routine. Gropius felt that given the difficulties others faced at that time, he had no right to complain about anything. He attributed the dreadful food—”turnips and so-called liverwurst”—to “the indolence of the gentlemen around here and I shall change all that.”87 That will to eradicate the harm caused by the combination of laziness and excess in the past would peak when he created the Bauhaus.
For now, Gropius was running a school with a very specific purpose: teaching communications. The entire army was counting on him. From his mental darkness of the previous year, he was beginning to soar with faith in his own abilities and effectiveness. He was sent to Italy to instruct Austrian soldiers in the use of dogs to carry messages through crossfire. Gropius’s success at that mission would win him, at the start of 1918, the Austrian King’s and Queen’s Military Merit Medal 3rd Class with War Decoration.
Meanwhile, by the end of 1917, in the cafés of Vienna and Berlin everyone was beginning to talk about Alma’s romance with another cultural celebrity whose name was almost as glamorous as Gustav Mahler’s. Only Alma’s husband, living on turnips and training messenger dogs for the military, remained ignorant. Gropius spent another Christmas leave in Vienna thinking that his life was perfect, that relations with his wife and daughter and stepdaughter were flawless, and that Alma’s sole wish was to move to Baden-Baden to be closer to him. He still had a couple of months of blissful ignorance ahead before he figured out what was going on between Alma and Franz Werfel. It was a piercing wound to his ego from which he would never fully recover.
Werfel had an allure with which Gropius could not compete. The Czech Jewish novelist and poet came from a rich family—his father was a successful glove merchant—and he was a close friend of Franz Kafka, with whom he had attended high school. Werfel, who spoke and wrote in German, had published his first book of poems in 1911, when he was twenty-one; his verse had instantly created a sensation, making him a major figure in the movement of poetic expressionism. Werfel’s line “My only wish is to be related to you, O Man!” was on everyone’s tongue. It had the intensity Alma found irresistible.
The higher the emotional pitch, the more enchanted Alma became. At the start of the war, Werfel had joined Martin Buber in a movement endorsing pacifism, and in 1915 he adapted Euripides’s play The Trojan Women to emphasize the merits of peace and love in those treacherous times.
The intense cigar-smoking rebel pacifist who wrote that he wanted to be “dissolved by feeling,” and who made Gropius seem laconic by comparison, was able to turn Alma’s head and heart from her husband.
Werfel had none of Gropius’s good looks. His irregular features, contorted in a downtrodden expression under a furrowed brow, defined angst. He was not as dashing and was from a less socially acceptable family; even if the Werfels had money and were assimilated, they would always be thought of as Jews. He was so outspoken in his pacifism that after the war he would be tried for high treason. All this only enhanced his allure for the volatile, capricious Alma.
Even before he knew about his wife’s new liaison, Walter Gropius was descending into another period of emotional darkness, from which he would emerge only when he devoted his energies to the Bauhaus. Exhausted by a war that was heading toward a bitter defeat for Germany, he was longing to return to architecture, and to be recognized. He wrote Osthaus, “I’m crumbling inside. … I don’t want to be buried alive and must therefore get mightily busy so that people see that I’m still here.”88 At the start of 1918, he sent his mother a letter from the war zone saying that his life had become “unbearable. I feel that I am mentally reduced and my nerves are getting worse.”89
Like so many Germans at that time, Gropius latched on to a scapegoat for all that had befallen his nation: “The Jews, this poison which I begin to hate more and more, are destroying us. Social democracy, materialism, capitalism, profiteering—everything is their work and we are guilty that we have let them so dominate our world. They are the devil, the negative element.”90 In the same letter he told his mother that he had just learned that Alma was again pregnant. He did not y
et know that his wife’s Jewish lover was the father of the baby.
IN MAY, Gropius briefly cheered up: he believed that the Germans might prevail against the French after all. But then he was wounded in combat. Hospitalized, he again crashed from ebullience to bitterness. Now he deemed the war “insane … What a gloomy fate to have to sacrifice everything that makes life worthwhile for an ever more doubtful patriotic ideal!” His financial situation had become so dire as the result of years without any income beyond his meager military stipend that once he was released from the hospital he could not afford to buy a loaf of bread for his meager meals. The little he earned from the army he sent home to Alma, for he was determined that she not depend only on money inherited from Mahler to bring up their daughter. “My pride does not permit that my child be raised by money that another man has made,” he wrote his mother. Nothing was going his way: his mother, contrary to his instructions, had given one of his suits to the janitor, although it might have been worth as much as four hundred marks. Alma’s “touching noblesse” was the only thing that made his situation bearable.91 He still had no clue about the truth of her pregnancy.
Then Gropius was recalled to the front lines. Between Soissons and Rheims, he fought a battle in which a building collapsed on top of him, along with everyone else in his contingent. Miraculously, a flue penetrated the rubble near his head, allowing oxygen in; for three days, crushed by debris, he cried out, his voice weakening by the hour. Finally, some passing troops heard him. They pulled off the stones, chunks of plaster, and wood under which Gropius was pinned and took him to a field hospital. Of the many men who were buried alive, Gropius was the sole survivor.
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