How the memory of the Bauhaus was rescued from oblivion

The end came in July 1933. After the Bauhaus had moved into the premises of a former telephone factory in Berlin in October of the previous year, director Mies van der Rohe informed his students in Spring that the school was closing: “At its last meeting, the teaching staff decided to disband the Bauhaus. The reasoning behind the decision was the school’s difficult financial situation.” Of course, the situation had become precarious in a different way; the hostilities and discriminatory cultural policies of the National Socialists had wreaked havoc on the life and activities at the 14-year-old school. At its previous location in Dessau, the NSDAP-controlled city council had succeeded in forcing the closure of the Bauhaus. Though it survived by establishing itself as a private institution in Berlin, the police and Nazi storm troopers raided the building in theatrical fashion in April 1933 under the pretext of searching for subversive materials. They subsequently sealed the entrance and would only permit the school to reopen if it complied with the terms of the National Socialist regime: only “non-Bolshevist, Aryan members” would be tolerated, some teaching staff would have to be dismissed and instruction had to include nationalistic content. Under such conditions, any hope of conducting independent teaching activities was rendered impossible.

As fascism took root in Germany, many former instructors and students of the Bauhaus decided to go into exile. Some remained in Germany and adapted to the circumstances. Some packed what little they could carry, and others left with only the history of their school in their luggage. Walter Gropius, the founding director of the Bauhaus, went to London in 1934 and from there, resettled in the United States in 1937. Within a year after his arrival, he organised an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on the history of the Bauhaus under his direction (1919–1928). For the exhibition, he presented his own archive of correspondence, school documents, photographs, student projects, protocols, newspaper clippings and print materials, as well as other items sent to him by colleagues and former students.

It also highlighted the school’s architectural development, from the ground-breaking Haus Am Horn in Weimar to the Bauhaus Building in Dessau, which he had designed himself. Other former instructors also disseminated their ideas, archival materials and visual studies at new locations around the world. Many of them remained in regular contact for the rest of their lives. But there was no central location where the Bauhaus legacy could be preserved, studied and made publicly accessible.

And such a location was exactly what the West German art historian Hans Maria Wingler wanted to establish with Walter Gropius’s support. They did everything they could to ensure that the Bauhaus wouldn’t be forgotten. In the mid-1950s, they both began contacting former members of the Bauhaus and asking for their assistance. Did they still have materials? Wouldn’t it be wonderful to preserve it all in one place? A plan started taking shape to found an institute which would not merely conserve the historical material in museological stasis, but rather use it as a vibrant resource in dialogue with contemporary audiences and designers. These initial efforts led to the establishment of a “Documentary Collection and Library on the Conceptual History of the Bauhaus and Related Cultural Trends” in Darmstadt.

The term “related trends” referred to schools where elements of Bauhaus instruction had been adopted and further developed, e.g. Black Mount College with Josef and Anni Albers, the New Bauhaus in Chicago founded in 1937 with László Moholy-Nagy, the Ulm School of Design founded in 1955 and which closed in 1968, and the American schools of architecture like the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University in Cambridge and the Armour Institute in Chicago, where both former Bauhaus directors Gropius and Mies van der Rohe had taught. Thanks to donations and purchases of artworks, documents, books and even entire estates from more than 500 individuals and organisations with ties to the Bauhaus, the Bauhaus-Archiv has steadily grown over the past 60 years.