The Bauhaus Group

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  While in the hospital, Gropius received a letter from the School of Arts and Crafts in Hamburg, asking him to teach there. He declined the invitation by making clear his greater intentions: “I cannot decide to say yes. I cannot imagine myself fitting into the existing curriculum. I am too self-willed for that and have had my own very definite ideas for a long time, very different from the existing ways, as to how architecture is to be taught. On this one cannot compromise and I see no other way but to continue my efforts to found a school program of my own.”92

  Lying in that makeshift hospital on the front, absorbing the shock that he was the only one still alive when so many friends and comrades had died at his side only days before, Walter Gropius now knew without a doubt what he had to do in Weimar.

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  On August 2, before dawn, Alma Mahler Gropius went into labor in her house in the countryside. The infant was going to be dangerously premature, and her own health was in danger.

  Alma summoned Gropius, who had managed to get himself transferred to a military hospital near her. He rushed from his bed and fetched a gynecologist and a midwife. When they arrived at Alma’s bedside, the doctor ascertained that the baby was in breech position and the delivery could not be performed at home. When Alma left the house, she had to be transported head down and bundled against an icy wind, while little Manon stood there as if to say good-bye forever. Gropius led his miserable wife and the doctor and midwife by carriage, cattle wagon, and train to a sanatorium.

  A baby boy was born. But, as feared, there were complications. The baby had convulsions on his third day of life, and was too weak to nurse. Several days later, Gropius was awarded the Iron Cross 1st class, and with it came the exciting news that if he returned to the front he would have his own horse. To abandon Alma and the children was, however, out of the question. He let his superiors know he could not leave Vienna.

  Two weeks after the birth, Gropius wrote his mother that throughout the long ordeal “I stood with admiration before Alma’s bed. This control, this standing above it all, always thinking of others, not of herself. She has a great magnificent heart and it is no accident that people love her so much. She deserves it.”93

  Lieutenant Gropius had no idea that three days after the baby was born Franz Werfel had asked Alma, “Is it my child?” The following day, when Werfel saw the baby for the first time, he wrote in his diary, “I felt at once and distinctly that it belongs to my race. … The rhythm of its substance seems strongly Semitic.”94 He set to work on some verses he called “The Birth of the Son.”

  Then, on August 26, Gropius, who had managed to extend his leave, overheard a phone call. Alma was talking with Werfel in an endearing voice, addressing him with the familiar “Du,” discussing what name should be given to the baby, and agreeing on Martin. This was the name of Gropius’s famous great-uncle, but that was a red herring. Without letting Alma know he had heard anything, Gropius went to see Werfel later that same day.

  Werfel was napping and did not hear the knock on the door. Gropius left his card and attached a note to it. He followed Mahler’s example of a betrayed husband acting with dignity. He wrote Werfel, “I am here to love you with all the strength at my command. For the love of God, be careful with Alma. A disaster could happen. The excitement, the milk—suppose we lost the child.”95

  Werfel was unnerved by Gropius’s generosity. He thought he might faint out of guilt at inflicting pain on someone of such noble feelings. He wrote Gropius to convey his deep thanks and admiration. Alma was overcome with remorse, especially when she considered how Gropius had taken care of her throughout the difficult delivery and its aftermath.

  Shortly after Gropius wrote Werfel, his furlough came to an abrupt end. Germany’s military situation had suddenly taken a turn for the worse. He immediately returned to the front, near the Marne. He was not there for long, however. At the end of September, Hindenburg and Ludendorff requested an armistice and accepted the defeat of Germany.

  WALTER GROPIUS RETURNED to Berlin. From there he went to Vienna and proposed to Alma that they divorce—with the condition that he have custody of their daughter. He anticipated that he would be released from the military on November 18, 1918, the day he would be thirty-five and a half years old. Then he would be in a position to care for Manon. Alma could remain with Werfel to bring up Gucki and the infant Martin.

  When Alma refused, Gropius tried a different tactic. On November 4, he went to Werfel’s hotel and persuaded the poet to go with him to call on Alma.

  Facing her husband and her lover, Alma announced that they both had to leave her. Her plan was to go off alone with the children. Gropius “threw himself at his wife’s feet, beat his breast, implored her to forgive him. … All he wanted was to keep her, nothing else.”96

  Alma then decided that she would break with Werfel and resume married life. Yet when Gropius returned to Berlin, she began to see Werfel every day, in spite of her repeated promises that she would not do so. Meanwhile, it was becoming clear that baby Martin’s head was growing disproportionately fast and that he was showing early signs of mental retardation.

  Martin’s condition worsened. In January he had a cranial puncture, the prescribed treatment of the era, but it didn’t help. The outside world was no less confusing than the child’s health and Gropius’s marriage. A leftist-backed revolution swept Berlin; a state of anarchy ensued when two of its leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were murdered. On January 19, a prime minister and a temporary president were elected, but control of the government was up for grabs.

  In March, little Martin, no longer able to live at home, was put into a clinic so that he could receive medical treatment full-time. Alma blamed herself for his illness, as if it had resulted directly from her personal conduct. Nevertheless, when Gropius went to Vienna a month later to see his wife and try to sort things out, she was too busy going to and giving soirées to engage in a serious discussion with him. He spent time with his daughter, who was now three years old, and his stepdaughter, and attended Alma’s parties—at one of them, he met Johannes Itten, an eccentric painter who would become one of the key figures at the Bauhaus—but he did not settle any of the major issues confronting him.

  After being gone for more than four years, it was nearly impossible for Gropius to rekindle his architectural practice in Berlin. Trying to find design projects, he imagined “something entirely different now, which I’ve been turning over in my head for many years—a Bauhütte!” Again he used the word for a medieval masons’ lodge and imagined a similar idea of living and working communally “with a few like-minded artists.”97 The person to whom he breathed this was Karl Ernst Osthaus, one of the few people he knew who could be counted on to help in his effort to replace uncertainty with hope and clarity.

  The milieu in which Gropius had been raised seemed increasingly alien. When his uncle Erich died around the same time that Luxemburg and Liebknecht were killed and Martin showed the first signs of illness, the war-shattered soldier felt completely estranged from his relatives at the funeral. He wrote his mother: “I was totally alone among them. They are … obstinately prejudiced and full of arrogant political megalomania, without ever looking at their own faults. They see only what is coming down, but not what is growing up. They know nothing about the mental processes of humanity.”98 Gropius distinguished himself from what he considered the loathsome mentality of Germany’s class of wealthy landowners: they were attached to an obsolete way of life, but he was different—interested in progress and determined to focus on what was good for the masses.

  Appalled by the brutal killing of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, whom he considered rare for their idealism and tenacity, Gropius identified with their support of revolutionary goals—even if his were in the realm of building rather than politics. He became all the more fervent once he was elected chairman of the Arbeitsrat für Kunst, a group of artists and architects committed to “a total revolution of the spirit;” they sought to create “large Pe
ople’s Houses,” high-rise housing structures in which it would be evident, in Gropius’s words, that “the building is the immediate bearer of spiritual powers, creator of sensations.”99

  THE TIME HAD COME for Gropius to pursue the directorship in Weimar he had discussed before the war intervened. The grand duke had been deposed, but Freiherr von Fritsch had become Oberhofmarschall of the new government. On January 31, Gropius wrote him that he, too, was starting afresh. Using the oldest ploy in the book, even if it was true—that he had been offered another job but would rather take this one—he stated his case that the arts “must be freed from their isolation,” and that, perhaps contradictorily, “a small town” with “the remains of an old tradition” was the place for an approach that would infiltrate all of society in a completely modern way.100 Gropius assured von Fritsch that he was prepared to dedicate his life to this project.

  Von Fritsch agreed to a meeting on February 28. Gropius used the occasion to propose combining the two Grand-Ducal Saxon institutions—the Academy of Fine Art and the School of Arts and Crafts—and making them into a single entity that would be “a working community of the collective artistic disciplines, which … should eventually be capable of producing everything related to building: architecture, sculpture, painting, furnishings, and handicrafts.” New workshops would function alongside the existing master studios, and the school would be “in closest contact with the existing crafts and industries of the state.”101

  Von Fritsch fully supported Gropius’s vision. Within a few weeks, he had secured official approval. On hearing that the authorities had agreed to his proposal, Gropius suggested that it be called the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar.

  Plans zoomed along. The former School of Arts and Crafts, which had served as a hospital during the war, would house the new institution. Henry van de Velde’s handsome building would clearly make a splendid setting for the school. The north façade had floor-to-ceiling windows that allowed copious daylight to pour into the workshops and studios; what was almost a wall of glass wrapped around the roof cornice so that the top floor had skylights as well. The inside was generous in scale, and, while nothing in it was as streamlined or pure as Gropius’s own architecture, every door pull and hinge betrayed an impressive eye for detail and a gracefulness.

  Gropius was hired to start work as director on April 1, at a salary of ten thousand marks a year. Declining the title of professor—”I have decided to keep free of these ridiculous external things which no longer belong in our time,” he wrote his mother—the architect set out to find other radical thinkers to join the old guard from the Academy of Fine Art as faculty members.102

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  Gropius’s first faculty appointment was Lyonel Feininger, an American artist who had been living in Weimar. Feininger made a woodcut for the cover of a four-page leaflet that explained the aims of the new school. The image was an abstracted Gothic cathedral, its steeple a soaring triangle. The amorphous structure was surrounded by a flurry of lines and flashing stars that impart radiant energy. Gropius wrote a brief manifesto that was the sole text for the leaflet. Summarizing the ideals he had initially formulated in his military tent, he declared, “There is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman.” In writing as in speaking, Gropius exuded confidence. “When young people who take a joy in artistic creations once more begin their life’s work by learning a trade, then the unproductive ‘artist’ will no longer be condemned to deficient artistry, for their skill will now be preserved for the crafts, in which they will be able to achieve artistic excellence.”103 Emphasizing the importance of technical capability, Gropius demystified what it meant to be a painter or a sculptor.

  Nonetheless, Gropius voiced great faith in the potential achievement of artists once they had the necessary know-how. “In rare moments of inspiration, transcending the consciousness of his will, the grace of heaven may cause his work to blossom into art. But proficiency of craft is essential to every artist.”104

  To achieve that expertise, students would be offered instruction in a range of fields. Whether they were trained as apprentices, journeymen, or junior masters, they would pay 180 marks per year—double for foreign students. The assumption, however, was that the Bauhaus would soon earn enough money for its designs to be able to waive these fees.

  Students immediately flocked to Gropius’s Berlin office. He decided to start classes as soon as possible. By the end of April, the school was up and running.

  Lyonel Feininger, cover of the program for the Staatlichen Bauhaus Weimar, 1919. This modernized Gothic cathedral became a summons for students from all over.

  OTHER THAN ONE QUICK TRIP to Vienna Gropius had made early that spring before moving to Weimar, he saw nothing of his wife and the girls; he settled into his role as director of the Bauhaus in solitude. In spite of Alma’s earlier enthusiasm for the idea of moving to Weimar, every time she planned a trip there from Vienna she subsequently canceled it. After exploding to a friend, “What! Vegetate in Weimar with Walter Gropius for the rest of my days?” she let her passport expire.105

  Alma decided that she wanted neither Werfel nor Gropius, but Kokoschka.

  She nevertheless went through the motions of renewing her passport so that, in theory, she could go to Weimar, and was glad to have done so when her financial situation changed dramatically after the American government seized Gustav Mahler’s royalties in this postwar period because of his status as an alien. The loss of that income was so significant that Alma had to consider the possibility of living with her husband. In mid-May, she and Manon and Gucki finally made the journey to the Bauhaus. Taking the train from Vienna, they crossed the recently created Czechoslovakia before reaching Berlin and continuing on to Weimar.

  SHORTLY AFTER ALMA ARRIVED in Weimar, the baby Martin died in the Vienna clinic where he had been placed three months earlier. Gropius, who was legally Martin’s father, received the telegram announcing the baby’s death. Spontaneously, he turned to Alma and burst out, “If only I had died instead.”106 He then sent a telegram to inform Franz Werfel of his son’s death.

  Few people at the Bauhaus had any inkling of the tortures that their founding director, always upbeat in public, was suffering in private. On the surface, it was as if nothing had happened. For Alma it was the same. She was a hit in Weimar—at least with those people who did not find her too much to take. One of the professors at the former academy, Richard Klemm, gave a tea to present the Bauhaus director and his wife to the city’s old guard, and also to welcome the new faculty. The renowned enchantress from Vienna offered a sharp contrast to the more traditional Weimar types. “All who saw Alma were charmed by her beauty and superior bearing,” according to Lothar Schreyer, a painter from Dresden whose work mainly consisted of human figures reduced to abstract elements, with circles and crosses and stripes taking on the roles of body parts, and who was among the first people Gropius invited to teach.107 Following the reception at Klemm’s, Lyonel Feininger wrote his wife, Julia, his impressions of the Gropiuses as a couple: “In him and her we are facing two completely free, honest, exceptionally broad-minded human beings who don’t accept inhibitions, characteristics of great rarity in this country.”108

  That, at least, is how the situation was represented by Reginald Isaacs, Gropius’s late-life biographer, who was a friend of Gropius’s at Harvard, where the Bauhaus director ended up after World War II. But there is another version to this history. Lyonel Feininger wrote Julia, who was in Berlin, on almost a daily basis that May. Unpublished letters in the Feininger Archive give a very different impression of Alma’s impact. On May 20, Julia wrote Lyonel: “Say hi to Gropius and his dear, fat wife. Has the püppchen [a derogatory German term that translates to ‘little doll’—said as if with a sneer] in the meantime given you her hand?” That same day, Lyonel wrote to Julia: “She [Mrs. Gropius] is visibly bored and is a very lively and spoiled Cosmopolitan who won’t be able to navigate Weimar for long.”109

  On May 22, J
ulia referred to “Madame Gropius—always for herself!” She wrote Lyonel four days later: “But oh, if all men there have such beautiful wives, so big and impressive, and so whatever, how will I, a poor little plant, feel among them all? I’m really dreading that, I don’t even dare. And you of all people, the most important and first one of all, will then have such a wallflower for a wife!”110

  For Lyonel Feininger, the greatest hazard in Weimar was the cost of living. He wrote his wife, “I’m totally beside myself over my expenses for a tiny amount of food. … Life here really costs a lot of money. Just for myself I need more money than usually all of us together. … Food itself costs between 12 and 20 marks per day!”111 In light of those hardships, Alma’s worldliness was all the more grating. Julia understood his complaints, replying, “I think you’re completely right in your judgment about the Gropiuses. You know how much I admire and like him. Regarding her, I have the impression that she has too much of an aura and is too much of a Grande Dame to hold out in small Weimar for long. She needs more of a current around her. After our one meeting—please bear that in mind—I have the impression that she needs more width and breadth around her than depth. But she is generous and has a big heart, that I know for sure.”112

  THOSE RESIDENTS OF WEIMAR who were mired in tradition disapproved of Alma’s scandalous love life the way that Gropius’s mother did. And even though many of the Bauhaus students admired the licentiousness the townspeople deplored, like the Feiningers, they were put off by Alma’s apparent sophistication. But in spite of the reactions she engendered in people and her initial reluctance to go to Weimar, once she was there, Alma’s enthusiasm was palpable. Later she recalled her first impression of the Bauhaus: “There was a new artistic courage abroad in those days, a soaring, passionate faith.”113