Our Bauhaus Our Bauhaus Memories of Bauhaus People Edited by Magdalena Droste and Boris Friedewald PRESTEL Munich · London · New York 7 Preface 11 71 126 Bruno Adler Lotte Collein Walter Gropius Weimar in Those Days Photography The Idea of the at the Bauhaus Bauhaus: The Battle 16 for New Educational Josef Albers 76 Foundations Thirteen Years Howard at the Bauhaus Dearstyne 131 Mies van der Rohe’s Hans 22 Teaching at the Haffenrichter Alfred Arndt Bauhaus in Dessau Lothar Schreyer how i got to the and the Bauhaus bauhaus in weimar 83 Stage Walter Dexel 30 The Bauhaus 137 Herbert Bayer Style: a Myth Gustav Homage to Gropius Hassenpflug 89 A Look at the Bauhaus 33 Lydia Today Hannes Beckmann Driesch-Foucar Formative Years Memories of the 139 Beginnings of the Fritz Hesse 41 Dornburg Pottery Dessau Max Bill Workshop of the State and the Bauhaus the bauhaus must go on Bauhaus in Weimar, 1920–1923 145 43 Hubert Hoffmann Sándor Bortnyik 100 the revival of the Something T. Lux Feininger bauhaus after 1945 on the Bauhaus The Bauhaus: Evolution of an Idea 150 50 Hubert Hoffmann Marianne Brandt 117 the dessau and the Letter to the Max Gebhard moscow bauhaus Younger Generation Advertising (VKhUTEMAS) and Typography 55 at the Bauhaus 156 Hin Bredendieck Johannes Itten The Preliminary Course 121 How the Tremendous and Design Werner Graeff Influence of the The Bauhaus, Bauhaus Began 64 the De Stijl group Paul Citroen in Weimar, and the 160 Mazdaznan Constructivist Nina Kandinsky at the Bauhaus Congress of 1922 Interview 167 226 278 Felix Klee Hannes Meyer Lou Scheper My Memories of the On Architecture Retrospective Weimar Bauhaus 230 283 177 Lucia Moholy Kurt Schmidt Heinrich König Questions of The Mechanical Ballet: The Bauhaus: Interpretation A Bauhaus Work Yesterday and Today 244 291 181 Georg Muche Helene Richard Koppe Speech on the Schmidt-Nonne The New Bauhaus, Seventy-Fifth Birthday Interview Chicago of Johannes Itten 297 193 250 Lothar Schreyer Ferdinand Kramer Pius Pahl Hope for a The Bauhaus and Experiences of an New World New Architecture Architectural Student 304 198 257 Ursula Schuh Kurt Kranz Gyula Pap In Kandinsky’s Bauhaus Pedagogy Liberal Weimar Classroom and Thereafter 260 309 215 Emil Rasch Gunta Stölzl Erich Lissner Working with Weaving Around the Bauhaus the Bauhaus at the Bauhaus in 1923 264 313 219 Karl Peter Röhl Ladislav Sutnar Gerhard Marcks The Idea, Form, and The Bauhaus My Short Stay Times of the State as Seen by a Neighbor in Weimar Bauhaus in Weimar to the South 221 267 319 Carl Marx Xanti Schawinsky Frank Trudel A Brief Moment bauhaus Memories of with Joost Schmidt metamorphosis a Bauhaus member 329 List of Names 334 Photo and Text Credits 336 Colophon In August 1976, Eckhard Neuman interviewed Nina Kandinsky in her apartment in Paris, where this photograph was taken, for his book Bauhaus und Bauhäusler. (Photo: unknown) Preface This book compiles a unique treasury of memories at whose center stands the Bauhaus. They are retrospectives by friends, directors, masters, and students, who not only experienced the Bauhaus but above all helped shaped it. These texts are of exceptional importance. They depict everyday life; tell of experiments and utopias, both their successes and their failures, of difficult political and social circumstances; they speak of heated discussions, ideas, desires, and struggles. They offer insight into the particular teaching methods and into the highways and byways of design. They report on the first days of the founding of the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919, of its time in Dessau, and extend to its closing in Berlin in 1933. They also tell of the subsequent founding of new institutions that saw themselves in the tradition of the Bauhaus, such as the New Bauhaus in Chicago or the failed attempt to revive the Bauhaus in Dessau after 1945. They are personal memories of eyewitnesses who report things that no object, no building, no photograph, and no manifesto or statutes could tell us. Reading these texts, moments of the history of the Bauhaus come alive again; indeed, one even gets a feeling of living them oneself. And yet the book also shows that “each Bauhäusler had his own Bauhaus,” as Lou Scheper said. These memoirs were written long after the events took place—most of these essays were written from the early 1960s to the early 1980s. They are not responses to standardized questionnaires, like those sent to former Bauhaus people all over the world by the Bauhaus-Archiv in Darmstadt and Berlin or by Reginald. R. Isaacs in the United States, but rather their themes and length were chosen freely by their authors. Precisely their diversity, their thematic range, and their lively, “unscholarly” approach and language account for the peculiar charm and uniqueness of these retrospective views, which are of irreplaceable value. For all that, however, one can also see that those looking back from a distance are often inconsistent, not without substantive errors, and that sometimes facts and myths are interwoven. The majority of the texts collected in this volume were written at the initiative of Eckhard Neumann (born April 15, 1933, in Königsberg, Germany [now Kaliningrad in Poland], died March 24, 2006, in Frankfurt am Main). After the Second World War, Neumann studied to become a poster designer in Dessau, where he first became 7 interested in the history of the Bauhaus—an interest which took hold of him for the rest of his life. From 1953, he attended the technical school for advertising in Berlin and decided to then study at the Ulm School of Design (Hochschule für Gestaltung), where his studies took a special turn. When he had just arrived, he made his way by foot from the Ulm train station to the school, soon a Bentley pulled up next to him; it quickly became clear they were headed to the same destination and so Neumann got in the car. The driver was the former Bauhäusler Max Bill, the co-founder, architect, and director of the Ulm School of Design. Over the years, it grew into a fine friendship. In the end, Neumann attended only the basic course at the school as he took an opportunity in 1957 to become the advertising director in Germany for the airline Swissair. At the same time, he began to visit and meet avant-garde artists on his trips throughout the world, including many Bauhaus people, with whom he often initiated lively exchanges. The design historian Jörg Stürzebecher once wrote: “His address book reads like the index of an encyclopedia of the avant-garde.” Neumann’s particular interest was in the typography of the 1920s, a subject to which he devoted an exhibition, organized with a friend, in the legendary Göppinger Galerie in Frankfurt am Main in 1963—probably the first on the subject in Germany after 1933. He also had a profound interest in visual communication. In 1964, he founded the annual publication Werbung in Deutschland (Advertising in Germany), which he edited for a decade, and in 1967, his book Functional Graphic Design in the 20’s was published in the United States. He also taught the history of communication at the Ulm School of Design from 1965 to 1967. From 1973 to 1975, he worked in the advertising department of Braun AG in Kronberg, and from 1975 to 1985 was director of design promotion at the Design Council in Darmstadt, where he also compiled the press pub lication Design Report. From 1985 to 1988, Neumann taught at the Mannheim University of Applied Sciences (Städtische Fachhochschule Mannheim) and then again from 1988 as professor of communications design. The true love of this graphic designer, lecturer, archivist, curator, collector, author, and connoisseur of the art of living, however, was always the Bauhaus. In 1964, he was co-organizer of one of the first comprehensive exhibitions on the Bauhaus, which was shown at the Göppinger Galerie. The accompanying exhibition catalog, Idee – Form – Zweck – Zeit (Idea—Form—Purpose—Time), for which Neumann was responsible, was the first compilation of a number of reports by former Bauhaus people on their time at the Bauhaus. Walter 8 Gropius wrote the foreword, in which he redefined the goal of the Bauhaus in a surprising way: “The Bauhaus was and is a movement with dynamic momentum. Its goal: unity in diversity and overcoming the ego cult.” The contributions to the catalog—several of which were taken from other publications, but the majority of which had been written for the catalog at Neumann’s suggestion—formed the core of the book Neumann published in the United States in 1970: bauhaus and bauhaus people: personal opinions and recollections of former bauhaus members and their contemporaries. In addition to numerous new texts, Neumann himself had written a brief biography of each author. This book appeared on the German-speaking market in 1971 under the title Bauhaus und Bauhäusler: Erinnerungen und Bekenntnisse and in an expanded paperback edition in 1985. That the nearly all the texts from Neumann’s Bauhaus und Bauhäusler are included here is thanks not only to the copyright holders but also to the collector Bernd Freese, who owns the extensive correspondence between Neumann and the former Bauhaus people. For this book, therefore, the texts could be checked again, modestly edited, missing first names added, and spelling errors corrected. In addition, we have included texts by Hin Bredendieck, Lotte Gerson- Collein, Lydia Driesch-Foucar, and Hannes Meyer, most of which appeared in publications that have long been out of print. Another text by Hubert Hoffmann, originally presented as a lecture, is now being published here for the first time.