The Bauhaus Group

by Nicholas Fox Weber

  Whether people liked or disliked Alma, being married to the Madame Pompadour of the twentieth century heightened Gropius’s stature. His wife contributed to the daunting reputation of the man who, with the courage that had recently won him military medals, was now attracting brilliant faculty members and capable, enthusiastic students to the school he had organized so rapidly. That he was married to a vixen of fantastic sexual capabilities, one who had famously used them on some of the great creative geniuses of the time, added to his luster. And Alma’s renown was such that it immediately conferred a certain international importance on the Bauhaus.

  AT THE START OF JUNE, there was a second party to welcome the Gropiuses. It was the first of many amusing festivities that would become an essential part of Bauhaus life. More relaxed than Richard Klemm’s tea, this party took place in a large reception hall, decorated for the event in cubist designs. An imaginative covering over the chandelier, made of wire and paper, added dazzle and an exciting hint of danger, although the paper was a safe distance from the heat. The large central space was adorned in yellow and black, the alcove in gray, and the small stage in light blue. Most of the students wore costumes, and, as Lyonel Feininger wrote Julia, “there was a fantastic master of ceremonies …so innocent and nice and trusting.”114

  In spite of the high jinks, while Alma had coaxed her husband to move to Weimar by implying that she would happily settle there, she probably never actually believed she could flourish anywhere other than Vienna. Even Berlin had seemed like a backwater to her. Weimar, small and remote, was a nice place to visit, but only that.

  Moreover, while Gropius was an idealist, Alma had little interest in theoretical issues or society at large. And to Alma, the unabashed romanticism of Mahler’s music and the rigor of Gropius’s architecture and theories paled before the dizzying force of Werfel and his poetry. Besides, Werfel was younger, and more totally devoted to her, than was Gropius.

  Alma arrived in Weimar at the start of May, when the Bauhaus was a month old. She lasted only six weeks. In the middle of June, she told her husband that she was heading off to Franzenbad for a cure. Wherever she went, Manon and Gucki went, too. Rather than going to a spa, however, they returned to Vienna and an eagerly awaiting Franz Werfel.

  After the “beautiful” weeks he had “savored” with his wife, daughter, and stepdaughter, Gropius felt “great emptiness” when they left. So he wrote his mother, whom he remained determined to prove wrong for her distrust of Alma.115 He did, nonetheless, allow to his opinionated parent that his wife was mentally unstable. But rather than acknowledge a personality disorder, Gropius attributed Alma’s problems to the conditions of life in postwar Germany and then the illness and death of her baby boy.

  The architect’s mother knew better. She warned her son in no uncertain terms that Alma, in spite of her promises to be back in Weimar at the end of July, would never set up house with her daughters at the Bauhaus.

  For once, Gropius heeded his mother’s advice. On July 12, he sent Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius a legal document enabling her to divorce him.

  ALMA, OF COURSE, had to be the one to call the shots. She replied that she would give up neither her marriage nor her presence at the Bauhaus. In response to her letter, Gropius wrote his “Beloved” to say not only that their marriage must end but that there was no point in her continuing to make promises she would not keep. The cause for her lying was clear to him: “Your splendid nature has been made to disintegrate under Jewish persuasion which overestimates the word and its momentary truth. But you will return to your Aryan origin and then you will understand me and you will search for me in your memory.”116

  Organizing the Bauhaus, Gropius was calm and resolute, negotiating complex issues without ever seeming perturbed; in private, he unleashed his furies. He chastised his wife as if she were a nymphomaniac, for allowing each new passion to rule her because her “sexual fervor” made her blind to everything else. She had, he told her, no recognition that such feelings are short-lived. Moreover, she was a liar whose promises were “just words.” All of this was part of her ultimate betrayal of Christian values with the Jewish Werfel: “Our bond has come to an end, and there is now only the bitter solution of divorce—because you cannot mock God.”117

  His riposte renewed Alma’s desire for him. She responded by proposing that they could “live a life full of love and beauty” with her spending half of every year with him and half with Werfel. In the summer of 1919, just as he was gearing up the Bauhaus for its first full year, Gropius wrestled with her proposal. He weighed its value primarily for his daughter and stepdaughter, and then for himself. None of the colleagues with whom he was developing the various workshops, or the prospective teachers and students he was interviewing as the school began to grow, had a clue about his marital preoccupations.

  After reflecting on his wife’s proposition, Gropius became enraged. Proud as he was of his own rejection of tradition, he wrote “Almschi” to say, “I am hurt … don’t do this to me, my beloved, to offer something that is a half measure.”118

  Divorce was the only option. He saw it as a clean break, a separation from the evils of the past, much as the Bauhaus was an answer to the decadence of existing German society. Gropius begged Alma to sign the necessary document. It was, he wrote, imperative “to clarify everything now; the sickness of our marriage demands an operation.”119

  The confidence that came with his new role as head of an institution that embodied everything he believed in gave him a courage he had previously lacked. He now declared, “Our marriage was never a real marriage; the woman was missing in it. For a short time you were a splendid lover for me, then you went away without being able to outlast and heal my war impairments with love and tenderness and trust. That would have been a marriage.”120 The blindness and illusions that had lingered in him only a couple of months earlier, before his mother set him straight, now gave way to perceptivity. Seeing the truth, he told the truth.

  Gropius went on to inform his wife that he was not bitter and would never forget her kindness and brilliance. But the Bauhaus had made it possible for him to envision a new life. Besides, when he wrote Alma that “I long for a companion who loves me and my work,” he already had someone in mind.121

  ADDRESSING THE BAUHAUS STUDENT BODY in July 1919, Gropius referred to “these turbulent times.” This moment, “a colossal catastrophe of world history,” required “a transformation of the whole of life and the whole of inner man.” Ostensibly, he was referring to the crisis of postwar Germany—inflation, and the changes within the national government—but in his thoughts he could have been focused equally on the issues revolving around Alma, their child, her other lovers, his other lovers, even the roles of their parents. The point was, as Gropius told the students, that “what we need is the courage to accept inner experience, then suddenly a new path will open for the artist.”122

  To lend harmony to human existence, Gropius envisioned aesthetic and technical perfection on every level, from drinking glasses to public buildings. These advances, to be achieved by a community of artists working together, would have far-reaching benefits. “This great total work of art, this cathedral of the future, will then shine with its abundance of light into the smallest objects of everyday life,” Gropius declared of the Bauhaus. It was essential for people to cooperate with one another and combine their energies, enjoying mutual support rather than depleting their force through the sort of rifts that were plaguing him in private. “We artists therefore need the community of spirit as much as we need bread.”123

  Struggling to resolve his relationship with his only child and with the woman who had dominated his thoughts, Gropius instructed the students about the need to overcome “the scattered isolation of the individual.” Artistic integrity and faith in the power of honest design could provide a true sense of community and a rich stability. Gropius’s agenda was to demonstrate, through the Bauhaus, “that for us artists the crafts will be our salvation.”124


  9

  A new German constitution was drafted that summer, and in August the. … Weimar Republic was established. It gave the government a new seat, no longer Berlin but Weimar, which had been a pilgrimage site for the intelligentsia ever since Goethe moved there in the late eighteenth century. Lucas Cranach, Johann Sebastian Bach, Martin Luther, Friedrich Schiller, and Franz Liszt had all lived there. The great hope in a defeated and floundering Germany was that the wisdom and creativity of these geniuses would pervade the nation’s new incarnation.

  The move of the governmental seat put the Bauhaus at the center of things. For Gropius, it was a great moment. But just when he would gladly have devoted all of his energies to the first full year of his increasingly important institution, an entreaty came from Franz Werfel. It was misguided, but Gropius still had to deal with it.

  Having nearly died on the battlefield for Germany, Gropius was unlikely to respond favorably to a man who had recently been tried for treason and was his wife’s lover besides. But Werfel naively described two blissful weeks he had just spent with Alma and assured the man who, in spite of his request for a divorce, was still Alma’s husband that the idyll made him—Gropius!—”especially close to my heart and before my eyes.” He implored Gropius to join him in helping their poor Alma, who was “torn apart by the heavy conflict that tortures her.” Because of their mutual devotion to “this wonderful woman, who was born only for divine purposes,” Werfel maintained that no other man was as “dear and close” to him, and that they should go along with her idea of each spending six months of the year with her.125

  Gropius did not answer the remarkable letter. Nor did he destroy it. Rather, he put it in a desk drawer.

  WERFEL’S PROPOSITION came at the end of August, just as the Bauhaus’s first full academic year was about to get under way. Alma beseeched Gropius to think of their nearly three-year-old daughter. She wrote, “I am looking forward to the time when you will want to see her again. But when do you want to see her?” The child was only a ploy; Gropius, after all, had sought full custody of her. The issue was that Alma was again pining for her husband. She now insisted that she would jump at the chance to make another trip to Weimar, however rugged the travel. She found Gropius’s “dreadful silence” agonizing.126

  Alma was suffering because this time the terms were his. She was jealous of Gropius’s devotion to the institution that had become his cause in life, and she also knew that his charisma, handsome face, and firm soldier’s body were irresistible to many women. By now she may also have suspected that he, too, had another lover.

  Indeed, the tall, buxom Lily Hildebrandt—another dark-haired beauty, but one whose radiant calm and serenity made her Alma’s opposite—had become his latest obsession. Unlike Alma, she was younger than he—thirty-one to his thirty-six—and completely admiring of what he was trying to achieve in starting up the Bauhaus.

  Lily was married to the established art historian Hans Hildebrandt, with whom she lived in Stuttgart. This was another point in her favor. It meant that she might help with the pressing task of raising some money for the school. The need was desperate: many of the young students were living in virtual poverty, and Lily was eager to help.

  While Alma was bemoaning the absence of communication from Gropius and using their daughter as bait, he was sending letters to Lily about how much he longed for her. A letter Lily wrote from Stuttgart that October made him “wild, my senses in tumult.” He could resist his urge to rush to hold her only because their separation would be brief. He craved her unabashedly—and with an erotic intensity that made the missives Alma had once written him seem restrained by comparison. Illicitness again heightened the thrill. Gropius wrote her, “We shall both overcome this short period and kiss each other in our minds—and then—we shall rush into each other. Darling, my whole warmth will caress you. My hands search for the sweet naked skin, the ravishing young limbs which are longing for me! …I want to inhale your fragrance! Put a flower between your lovely thighs when you are hot from thoughts of me and send it to me in a letter.”127

  The flower would not be necessary. The next day, he wrote again to say he had reserved rooms in two different hotels in Frankfurt for six days hence. In spite of the impecuniousness of the Bauhaus, these were establishments of the highest quality. The only thing Lily needed to do was to choose who would be booked in which one, since she knew the city better than he did.

  In his office in Weimar, Gropius was pushing forward his agenda to forge ties between the Bauhaus workshops and German industry. He applied himself rigorously to the task of making the new school work on a shoestring budget. At the same time, he was organizing the details of his tryst. The latest issue was his new mistress’s proposal that they register as brother and sister in just one of the Frankfurt hotels. The idea, he let her know, “made me really laugh. Nobody will believe that your little nose belongs in the same family as my monster nose.”128

  Lily wanted reassurance that, even if they cheated on their spouses, she and Gropius would remain loyal to each other. She had reason to worry: Gropius’s success as a Don Juan was growing. With his aristocratic good looks, he had more than the allure of being married to the infamous Alma. Adventurous and passionate, he was undaunted by anything, and as a result the school he had founded was achieving international renown.

  WALTER GROPIUS DID NOT pretend to be unaware of his own appeal. But he reassured his mistress of his faithfulness to her, letting her know that three weeks after their Frankfurt idyll, at a big party at the Bauhaus, he had not even kissed anyone. For she had left him sexually exhausted. “It seems that I am at an age and in a state of mind which attract women. Many invite my advances. But that should not trouble you, on the contrary. After the deep saturation in Frankfurt, I am in an erotic-free phase and am completely absorbed by my mental work.”129

  His language, however, did not remain “erotic-free” for long. On December 13, Gropius wrote Lily, “I would like to penetrate you with the sword of love.” His staying powers—or else his imagination—were impressive: with that “sword of love … enveloped by your sweet body …we would stay this way for hours not knowing where the I ceases and the you begins.”130

  Gropius wrote this letter the day after a large public meeting at which authorities and prominent citizens in Weimar vehemently attacked the Bauhaus. He had, fortunately, felt equally potent as a speaker. He reported to Lily that he had been “sharp and witty” in a speech he gave responding to the diatribes that accused the school of violating Weimar’s classical tradition and personally demonized Gropius for his disregard of sacred artistic values. His discourse elicited “continuous endless applause. … I advance without compromise. … I had to summon all my strength and calmness to stop the assault of the howling mob.”131

  Gropius elaborated on these harrowing events not only to Lily, but also to Alma and to his mother. To his mother, he wrote, “I am proud of this fight.” Having broken with the world of his childhood, he had “become a very primitive man.” He told Manon he now spent most of his time with the students, took his meals in the canteen with them, and preferred this new life of “less hustle and more inner intensity” to the one he had been leading before the war, when he was gallivanting from one family estate to another.132

  Most of the former soldiers who had endured four years on the front lines in one of history’s most gruesome wars now craved only safety and calm. But it suited Walter Gropius to be at “the terrible vortex of dangers.” At the start of February 1920, he wrote Lily from Weimar, “The mob agitates against me.” He begged her to visit “so that I can feel again how it is to have a hot, loving heart beat against mine.”133 She had to do it immediately, since Alma was going to arrive some two weeks later.

  At this tender moment in the Bauhaus’s history, a “Citizens’ Committee” published a pamphlet that exacerbated Gropius’s problems. The committee was made up mostly of members of the right-wing National People’s Party, backed by conser
vative landowners and industrialists who were against the new Weimar constitution and favored the restoration of monarchy. They commended Gropius’s original Bauhaus manifesto for representing ideals they respected, but said those worthy goals remained an unrealized promise. This publication attacking the school became immensely popular, for it represented mainstream opinion.

  The opposition to the new school and to Gropius specifically was scurrilous and mocking, making no allowance that the great educational experiment was not yet a year old. According to the pamphlet, “The dithyrambic ending of the inspiring call for new action, which precedes the program, still reminds one, in thought and tone, of ‘Meister Heinrichs Wunderglockenspiel’ in Gerhart Hauptmann’s ‘Sunken Bell.’” As for the comparison Gropius made between the Bauhaus and the Gothic cathedral: “Parallels to past ages, much as they flatter the ear, always bear many a concealed flaw.” The Bauhaus was accused of being “an artistic dictatorship” linked inexorably to “the personality of its leader. … Such one-sidedness is a sin against the spirit of art.” The students, who were seen as outsiders to their historic milieu, showed “little gratitude. They consciously act as foreigners, deliberately display their contempt of the old Weimar, and by their conspicuous conduct provoke the opposition of the most patient citizen.”134

  WHEN THE FURIOUS BURGHERS of Weimar were not at Gropius’s throat, Alma was. Gropius’s steely reserve, evinced in his ability to manage the difficult affairs of the Bauhaus and weather attacks others would have found insurmountable, was driving her off the deep end. She wrote him, “Your beautiful male hardness is a wall around you. I shall not let you know anything that may still interest you a little bit around me.”135 If he would love her, all would be different; otherwise, she would keep him ignorant of her and the children. She reiterated the threat time and again.