In contrast to the Bauhaus, Nazi aesthetics have been almost unvaryingly interpreted as hopelessly nostalgic, aesthetically backward, and unfailingly anti-modernist. However, despite the prevalence of these views, historical facts tell a different story. The majority of Bauhaus members—Bauhäusler, as they called themselves, whether masters or students—remained in Germany after 1933, and only a few of them can be counted as victims of the regime. Most continued working in a wide range of cultural, practical, and even ideological spheres of Nazi Germany, where their applications of Bauhausian aesthetics were tolerated and at times even welcomed.
It was only in the 1990s that a group of scholars first undertook an initial investigation of this history with a major conference and a resulting edited volume, Bauhaus-Moderne im Nationalsozialismus (Nerdinger ed., 1993). In the thirty years since that time, while numerous new sources have come to light and several significant individual analyses have appeared in print, a comprehensive and systematic reappraisal of this important subject has yet to be undertaken.
This scholarly conference thus takes up the task of examining the confluence of “Bauhaus and National Socialism” anew, and it will contribute to an exhibition of the same name set to open in Weimar’s Bauhaus Museum in May 2024. In order to examine this theme in its full complexity, the period of investigations begins not with the National Socialists’ assumption of power in 1933, but in 1919, the founding year of both the Bauhaus and Germany’s first democracy, the Weimar Republic. From its inception, the Bauhaus was the scene of polarized political discussions, which, along with the history of the school’s politically motivated expulsion from all three of its institutional homes—first Weimar (1925), then Dessau (1932), and finally Berlin (1933)—proved an essential prelude to what followed. With the National Socialists’ assumption of power in 1933, debates about the school and its former premises did not end in any of these three locations, evidenced perhaps most vividly in the ideological about face in usage of the Dessau Bauhaus building, which served as home to several Nazi institutions.
The analysis of the divergent life paths of various Bauhaus members after 1933 is another key focus of this project. A number of Bauhäusler participated in exhibitions or received commissions for graphic-design projects. Others were active in industrial design and craft professions; they worked as architects or taught at art schools. This meant, in turn, that they had to be registered as artists in the Reich Chamber of Culture in order to be able to work at all. A significant number of Bauhäusler became members of the NSDAP.
A further major research area draws on the most recent institutional-historical studies on the collection in Weimar, particularly as it was impacted by the Nazi concept of “Degenerate Art,” which resulted in the deaccessioning of works now proudly displayed as modernist masterpieces in museum collections outside of Germany. Weimar played an inglorious pioneering role with regard to National-Socialist cultural policy. As early as 1930, with the election of a National-Socialist majority state government, museum curators were ordered to remove modern art works by Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, László Moholy-Nagy, and other prominent Bauhaus masters from view; meanwhile, Oskar Schlemmer’s famed mural in the Bauhaus building was destroyed this same year. In 1937, these directives culminated in the "Degenerate Art" confiscation action, during which four-hundred-fifty works were removed from the Weimar collections. In 1939, the Nazi blockbuster exhibition of the same name was held in Weimar’s Landesmuseum, with works by numerous Bauhaus members—including Klee, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy, and Herbert Bayer—prominently displayed in a defaming manner. The destruction of Walter Gropius’s Monument to the March Dead in Weimar’s Historical Cemetery also occurred during this period. But here, too, it would be wrong to assume simple dichotomies: Bauhäusler whose works were withdrawn as "degenerate" also actively participated in prominent state-sponsored exhibitions, such as Hans Haffenrichter, or joined the Nazi party, such as Hans Groß.
We invite submissions and new research on these focal points, as well as on the following topics:
- Political and aesthetic conflicts at the Bauhaus 1919-1933 in Weimar, Dessau, and/or Berlin
- Politicized external conflicts with the Bauhaus in Weimar, Dessau and/or Berlin
- New research on the lives and works of Bauhaus students and teachers who did not emigrate between 1933-1945 (or who emigrated to countries later annexed or conquered by the Nazi regime) or scholarly analyses of their activities in specific media including but not limited to fine art, industrial design, film, graphic design, weaving, photography, and architecture
- New findings on works of art by Bauhaus artists confiscated as “degenerate”
- Exhibition participation by Bauhaus students and teachers in the Nazi art establishment
- Nazi cultural policy and its effects on former Bauhaus members
Please note that the conference will not include contributions on the more general aspects of the relationship between National Socialism and Modernism. Proposals should clearly relate to the Bauhaus and its members.
Organizational Information: Invited participants will receive lodging and a modest honorarium to help offset travel costs. A publication of the conference proceedings is planned.
Organized by:
Dr. Anke Blümm (Klassik Stiftung Weimar)
Prof. Dr. Elizabeth Otto (Buffalo University)
Prof. Dr. Patrick Rössler (Universität Erfurt)
Please submit the title of the proposed twenty-minute paper, a summary of the topic (max. 2,000 characters), and short CV (max. 1,000 characters) by February 18, 2023 to Dr. Anke Blümm (Anke.Bluemm@klassik-stiftung.de).
We encourage international submissions from scholars outside of Germany.