In countless ways, the Bauhaus gave form to the modern experience — from the shapes of the letters we read to the arrangement of the cities we inhabit. Its canonical status has made it an object of both praise and scorn. As its admirers argue, the school synthesized novel aesthetic and technological developments into an approach whose longevity proves its enduring relevance. To its detractors, the Bauhaus represents the origin-myth of “objective” design, whose apparent universalism conceals the narrow particularity of its time and place. Discussions of the Bauhaus legacy quickly become not just formal or methodological arguments but political ones. Such debates threaten, however, to inflate the Bauhaus’s political effects while effacing the political conditions in which it was formed. The life span of the Bauhaus is coextensive with that of the German Weimar Republic; as I hope to demonstrate, the former makes little sense in abstraction from the latter.

Atmospheres

The Weimar period begins with the German Revolution of 1918–19, which deposed Kaiser Wilhelm II and brought World War I to a halt. With Berlin still engulfed in political unrest, a new constitution was announced from Weimar on August 11, 1919.1 The young republic was founded by the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in a coalition with the moderate Democratic and Catholic Center parties.2 Responding to significant pressure from the extra-parliamentary Left, the SPD went on to win several measures that we now take for granted as the baseline for liberal democracy: It extended voting rights and gender equality, and guaranteed legal protections for unions and an eight-hour working day.3 Nominally socialist, the SPD framed postcapitalist society as a compelling but distant goal, one that could only be reached after a long period of peace and recovery.4 This, in turn, relied upon restarting the capitalist economy. But that economy, already burdened by harsh postwar reparations agreements, proceeded to lurch from one disorienting crisis to the next. Wartime debt produced inflation, which spiraled into → 61 hyperinflation by 1923. The economy was stabilized the following year, but mostly on the backs of the workers: High unemployment and deteriorating working conditions were the necessary side effects of a five-year boom.5 During this period, cities spent massive sums — often lent by American banks — on new housing developments (many of which employed modernist architects and designers).6 The links to US finance, however, meant that the Depression of 1929 had a direct and devastating effect on Germany’s economy.7 By 1932, a third of the national population was unemployed, and the legitimacy of the republic was seriously in question.8 The Weimar period ends with Hitler’s consolidation of dictatorial powers in 1933, at which point the SPD was immediately banned.

 
The origins of the Weimar-era Right can be traced to paramilitaries like the Freikorps, populated by nationalist veterans. But its more respectable wing extended from the traditional classes of the countryside to the large capitalists of the cities. Prominent figures in parliament, the churches, and the courts shared a resolve to overturn the gains of the revolution.9 Respected military officers secretly funneled arms and training to paramilitaries.10 The Right was broadly united by the Dolchstosslegende, or “stab-in-the-back myth,” which held that the German army had not been defeated abroad, but rather undermined at home by Jews, the Left, and other “degenerates” — all of whom were to blame for Germany’s humiliating terms of surrender.11 Such groups were depicted as parasites in a discourse that increasingly resorted to a language of racial hygiene.12

To the left were the communists, whose opposition to World War I had provoked a traumatizing split with the pro-war SPD. Throughout the unrest of 1918–19, their aim was to push the social-democratic revolution toward a more fundamental upheaval: the German contribution to an international revolution, of which the Russian Revolution was but the first successful act.13 The Left’s base of power was in massive street demonstrations, as well as widespread strikes and mutinies. From occupied factories and armories, workers’ and soldiers’ councils proposed an immediate socialization of productive relations; they largely rejected invitations to enter government and negotiate with the representatives of property and power.14 For communist theorists like Rosa Luxemburg, World War I represented the ultimate — and, potentially, the final — catastrophe of → 62 Western capitalism. Gesturing mockingly at the grand promises of “our lofty European civilization,” Luxemburg depicted the wartime crisis as a crossroads: The choices were “socialism or barbarism.”15

The SPD’s support for the war made it many enemies on the left, while its signature on the peace treaty cemented the hostility of the right.16 Taking fire (sometimes literally) from both sides, the SPD ordered a crackdown. Given the conservatism of the institutions of law and order, this was destined to fall much harder on the left.17 In early 1919, the SPD dispatched Freikorps units to put down a communist uprising.18 The paramilitaries then launched a brutal campaign of repression against strikers and militants, culminating in the assassination of Luxemburg and fellow communist leader Karl Liebknecht.19 In a bid to establish stability, in short, the governing social democrats wiped out their erstwhile comrades on the left, while empowering a radicalized Right that had no intention of returning the favor.20

During the Weimar years, an unbroken mood of crisis translated to continuing appeals from both ends of the political spectrum: those who desired a complete break with capitalism (even in this more “democratic” guise) and those who wished to violently reassert pre-democratic hierarchies and exclusions (or far worse).21 For most of the 1920s, decisive and stable victories for the right, left, or center were elusive; communists and fascists alike alternated between electoral politics and street confrontations.22 In the 1928 election alone, forty-one separate parties participated, with fourteen of those achieving some level of representation in the Reichstag.23 Accelerating political fragmentation, combined with the unprocessed trauma of the war, left many with the impression of a social world in which everything was up for grabs. For many historians and theorists, this provides some explanation for the interwar period’s experimentation and innovation, which extended well beyond questions of economic or political organization.24

Foundations

The Bauhaus existed in three different forms: It was first a multidisciplinary art and craft school in Weimar (1919–25), then a production-oriented “Institute of Design” in Dessau (1925–32), and finally a private architecture school in Berlin (1932–33). Over the course of its brief and turbulent life, interpretations of the institution’s politics varied widely. Under Walter Gropius, the eclectic → 63 experimentation of the Weimar period gave way to a more practical footing in Dessau. During the final, crisis-wracked years in Dessau and then Berlin, the Bauhaus swung from an overt engagement with Marxism under Hannes Meyer to an attempted coexistence with National Socialism under Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. But even as some Bauhaus designers acquiesced to right-wing pressure, their embrace of geometric abstraction and machine rationalism met passionate resistance. Flat roofs, bare industrial materials, and sans serif typography were read by nationalist commentators as irredeemably un-German and internationalist — or, in less restrained language, as inherently “Jewish” and “cultural-Bolshevist.” […]