The Journal of Modern Craft

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Cleanliness, Clarity – and Craft: Material Politics in German Design, 1919–1939

Freyja Hartzell

To cite this article: Freyja Hartzell (2020) Cleanliness, Clarity – and Craft: Material Politics in German Design, 1919–1939, The Journal of Modern Craft, 13:3, 247-269, DOI: 10.1080/17496772.2020.1843787 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17496772.2020.1843787

Published online: 25 Dec 2020.

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Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rfmc20 The Journal of – Modern Craft Cleanliness, Clarity Volume 13—Issue 3 and Craft: Material November 2020 pp. 247–269 Politics in German DOI: 10.1080/17496772.2020.1843787 Design, 1919–1939 Reprints available directly from the publishers Freyja Hartzell Photocopying permitted by license only Freyja Hartzell is Assistant Professor of Modern Design, © 2020 Informa UK Limited, Architecture, and Art at Bard Graduate Center in New York City. trading as Taylor & Francis She received her PhD in the from Yale University and Group her MA in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture from Bard Graduate Center. She is currently completing her first book, Living Things: Richard Riemerschmid and the Modernist Object, and is engaged in research for a second book on glass, transparency, and modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Abstract This essay juxtaposes modern German design with cultural politics from 1919 to 1939, demonstrating the interlocking relationship of craft and industry during this pivotal period. Rejecting conventionally opposing categories of “hand” and “machine,” it reveals instead how material properties and technical processes became charged with political meaning. While the Nazis exploited modern handcraft (like the early, earthy ceramics from the ) in service of their populist nationalism, they also deployed “clean,” progressive, industrial design (like Bauhaus-trained Wilhelm Wagenfeld’s sleek, transparent glassware) as visual and material propaganda, creating the illusion of a modern regime deeply invested in providing German citizens with cutting-edge conveniences in the latest style. Why did the Nazis appropriate an aesthetic rhetoric of transparency for their political agenda, which was so dependent on secrecy, hypocrisy, and opacity? The pages that follow explore how and why modern German design – and transparent glass objects in particular – slipped so easily into enemy hands.

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Keywords: Bauhaus, German design, the mists of the past and the mechanisms of glass, modernism, national socialism, technological reproduction to touch another transparency, Weimar, human hand, their fingers meeting in indexical Wilhelm Wagenfeld comradeship on the vessel’s gritty skin. If ambivalence towards the touch and the trace characterized the development of mod- During the first years of the twentieth cen- ern design in before the First tury, German design reformers struggled to World War, it is the material of clay that perpetuate a sense of handcrafted quality most completely embodies this ambivalence within increasingly industrialized practices of through the complexities of its design and modern design. While the modern wooden manufacture. But after the Great War, chair, for example, became simpler overall – ambivalence towards the vestiges of human cheaper to fabricate thanks to powered tools, presence in design shifted gradually, but con- quicker to assemble by virtue of standardized sistently, towards outright rejection. By the designs, and stripped of what reformers 1930s, this new resistance to touch and dis- “ ”– understood as applied ornament the pat- dain for its evidence – traces – was mounted tern and strokable texture of woodgrain by another material: glass. In his 1933 article, began to stand in for what had been stripped “Experience and Poverty,” German cultural away, and offered a visible, tangible link to “ 1 critic Walter Benjamin writes, [i]t is no coin- vernacular traditions of craft. In the case of cidence that glass is such a hard, smooth – – another material clay this industrial sleight material to which nothing can be fixed. A of hand was perhaps even more deft: at the cold and sober material into the bargain. turn of the century and with the help of Objects made of glass have no ‘aura.’ Glass is, progressive, modern designers, the German in general, the enemy of secrets. It is also the stoneware industry found a way both to enemy of possession.”3 incorporate and to disseminate the singular, Benjamin contrasts this stark, modernist ’ indelible touch of the potter s fingers through image by revisiting one of his pet critiques, technologically advanced, serially produced which centers around Bertolt Brecht’s 2 tablewares. Despite their production in employment of the “trace.”4 Benjamin writes, almost identical multiples, each ceramic vessel “If you enter a bourgeois room in the still delivered an experience of uniqueness, 1880s … there is no spot in which the conveyed directly through the sensation of owner has not left his mark – the ornaments touch: a permanent imprint on the clay sur- on the mantelpiece, the antimacassars on the face, connecting the user not merely to an armchairs, the transparencies in the windows, individual (if nameless) craftsman, but to a the screen in front of the fire. A neat phrase now inaccessible past. Modern techniques of by Brecht helps us out here: ‘Erase the industrial replication, while generally threaten- traces!’”5 To meet this demand, Benjamin ing to sever connections with historical peri- looks to the Bauhaus school –“with its steel” ods and cultural epochs, actually enabled – – and to expressionist science fiction writer for German salt-glazed stoneware – the Paul Scheerbart’s prophetic 1914 work, Glass transfer of history’s traces to the , as models for the creation of household. A human hand reached through modern rooms “in which it is hard to leave

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Fig 1 , Bauhaus, , c.1925. Photograph by author (2003). # 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. traces.”6 Benjamin invokes Scheerbart’s uto- assigns its anti-bourgeois agency – made it pian vision of a “culture of glass,” which the “enemy of secrets.” It was the essential Scheerbart himself describes as a “new glass material trait of modern glass – its transpar- milieu that will transform humanity utterly … ency – that endowed it with the liberating it remains only to be wished,” he concludes, (and terrifying) power to expose and reveal. “that the new glass-architecture will not Glass, in this context, was political: it was not encounter too many enemies.”7 just an enemy, it had the capacity to make In 1933, then, glass takes a distinct stance. enemies, as well. No pliant surface awaiting human imprint, When Benjamin identified glass as the nor passive object of human use, it becomes “enemy of secrets,” the National Socialist instead a subject – an enemy, not simply of German Workers’ Party had already taken an the domestic dust and grime that Benjamin actively adversarial position towards what associates with nineteenth-century plush-lined was, even then, a modern glass icon rooms, but of bourgeois conservatism itself: (Figure 1). In September of 1932, the personal possession, private conspiracy – Nazi-dominated city council of Dessau had dirty secrets. But neither the coldness, nor forced the closure of Walter Gropius’s the smoothness, nor the resistance of glass – brazenly transparent steel-and-glass Bauhaus the hygienic properties to which Benjamin (along with the progressive workshops that

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Fig 2 Wilhelm Wagenfeld, Kubus storage containers, c.1938. Vereinigte Lausitzer Glaswerke, AG. 1. Museum Associates/LACMA/Art Resource, NY # 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild- Kunst, Bonn. occupied it) through funding cuts. The coun- The same transparency that Benjamin (and cil’s antagonism to the school was driven by the Bauh€ausler) hailed as social and political lib- fear of its ties with Soviet artists and move- eration, the Nazis decried as “un-German,” ments, as well as the school’s overall leanings “Bolshevik,” and “degenerate.”9 Despite their towards the political left. The rights to all pat- real and symbolic opposition to both Bauhaus ents, equipment, and even the Bauhaus organization and building, however, the Nazi trademark were put in the hands of architect government continued throughout the Third Mies van der Rohe, who had in 1930 Reich to support and exhibit the work of sev- assumed directorship from the openly social- eral Bauhaus artists, among them the glass ist Hannes Meyer, director of the Bauhaus, in designer Wilhelm Wagenfeld. In 1938, his turn, since 1928 – the year of Gropius’s Wagenfeld designed a set of stackable food ser- departure. Mies reopened the Bauhaus as a vice and storage cubes, whose manufacture private institution in in late October of from cheap pressed borosilicate glass enabled 1932, but even the school’s new private sta- them to travel smoothly from table to refriger- tus failed to shield it for long. While it ator in households across the Reich during the appears that Mies did seek accommodation Second World War (Figure 2). But these mass- for a short period with the government in produced Kubus containers bore an ironic regard to the Bauhaus faculty, he finally dis- resemblance to the quintessential Bauhaus solved the school in August of 1933 as a object. Wagenfeld’s cubic vessels, their con- result of Nazi pressure.8 tents laid bare by clear glass walls, mimicked –

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in miniature – the Bauhaus itself, whose glass technology is clinically clean, its handcrafted “curtain wall” provided a penetrating view of its counterpart is organically earthy. This rhetoric own contents: the school’s activities and actors. of hygiene – a dialectic of controlled, sterile This glassy correspondence signals how cleanliness versus a rampant, fertile dirtiness the inherent, physical properties of materials – became highly charged in Germany, not can transform them from passive objects to only materially and socially, but politically, in active subjects: how these material subjects the years leading up to the Second World communicate specific messages to those who War. The modern desire to sanitize or to rid encounter them, and how, in turn, the mate- objects of unhygienic traits or content through rial’s engagement with its temporal surround- alterations in their materials and design was ings invests it with new – and often recognized and manipulated by a fascist conflicting – meanings. What follows is an regime that propagandized images of cleanli- investigation of the cultural and political impli- ness and dirtiness in a cunning campaign for cations and impact of two materials, ceramic social control, and, ultimately, in the service and glass, both of which offer malleability as of genocide. These micro and macro phe- their fundamental working property. Though nomena – the homely, everyday response to both are ancient materials, their shapes and new trends in industrial design, and the sinis- ’ meanings changed, during Germany s inter- ter political capitalization thereon – betray an war years, in conjunction with developments underlying cultural perception of craft objects in their process of manufacture, promotion, as both invested and infested: already filled up and use. Though both are in these multiple with characteristics and meanings transmitted senses shape-shifters, glass is translucent (and often quite literally “by hand.” Where hand- sometimes transparent), while ceramic is crafted objects appeared opaque or “full,” opaque. Though both can be architectural then, modern industrial products – like materials, I consider them here not at monu- pressed glass or mass-produced porcelain – mental scale, but in the domain of those seemed to become, as Benjamin suggests, modest objects of everyday use whose mate- increasingly “transparent,” open to interpret- rials and forms were (or were intended to ation, evacuated of precise or circumscribed be) the substance of modern life. meaning. Applied to German design between The material politics under investigation the First and Second World Wars, however, here centers around the long-cherished belief these conventional oppositions between the in a polar opposition of handcraft and indus- handmade and the machine-made break trial production.10 Within this binary conven- down. Within the interwar period’s complex tion, “craft” emits that aroma of individuality web of materials, processes, and ideas, “craft” that Benjamin calls the “aura.” No matter and “industry” not only coexisted, but over- how many strikingly similar products the hand creates, each handcrafted object retains lapped and interacted. its uniqueness through the “traces” of the maker’s (fallible) hand, whose touch lives on The Prewar Hybrid: Craft and in the object’s function. Where the machine- Industry in the German Werkbund made object is cool, the handcrafted thing is Well before the Third Reich – and even warm. Where the product of industrial before the Bauhaus – both ceramic and glass

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to ensure its survival in the so-called “machine age.”12 designer Richard Riemerschmid came to the industry’s aid on both fronts with a progressive response to what his countrymen understood as a “rough, hard, manly” material with a unique history of craft.13 Riemerschmid’s simple, sphere-and- cylinder design for a 1903 jug (Figure 3) appears restrained and rationalized in con- trast to the comparative complexity of the sixteenth-century baluster jugs that provided its archetype. The historical jugs were exe- cuted in a multi-step construction process that had involved free-throwing on a potter’s wheel; molding and attaching a decorative frieze by hand; stamping, rouletting, and incis- ing the clay surface; and finally, applying cobalt oxide pigment to accentuate the orna- Fig 3 Richard Riemerschmid, Jug, 1903. Salt-glazed ment. Riemerschmid’s jug, while it alludes to stoneware with cobalt-oxide decoration. # V&A its predecessor’s decorative vernacular, was Images/2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ not handcrafted in this conventional sense. VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Though its decorative lozenges had to be carved – just once – into the body of an ori- had established their own reputations as ginal, “model” jug, these ornamental incisions modern materials, chiefly through design became endlessly replicable reliefs when the projects either directly implemented or sup- original jug was cast to create a hollow mold. ported by members of the German Modern potters – now called technicians – Werkbund. This organization of architects, could then throw jug after identical jug inside designers, industrialists, retailers, and other the mold cast from the original. The surface reformers supported and undertook the lit- decorations were no longer applied painstak- eral re-forming of everyday objects and envi- ingly, one at a time, by hand, but instead ronments as a means of modernizing and imprinted all at once into the jug’s surface as elevating German culture and society.11 A the technician pressed the soft clay against prime target of the Werkbund’s modern the sides of the mold to form the vessel itself. reform project (and eventually, one of its While Riemerschmid’s process modernized most successful products) was German the one-off production of the vernacular pot- stoneware, an industry which had been in ter, it was yet a far cry from the slip-casting operation since the thirteenth century, but at of industrial mass production. The maker’s the dawn of the twentieth century had hand could still be felt in the final product, required a double injection of modern design and yet his role – and certainly his identity – strategies and new manufacturing processes within the making process had become

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Fig 4 Bruno Taut, Pavillon der Glasindustrie, Werkbundausstellung in Koln€ 1914. Foto Arthur Koster€ # 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Akademie der K€unste Berlin, Bruno- Taut-Collection No. 210, Ph. 2a. complex and veiled. Whose fingers had more idiosyncratic historical counterparts, touched the grainy stoneware, and at which were not only simpler to reproduce but eas- step in the mysterious fabrication sequence? ier to clean. Their ornamental schemes, too, If Riemerschmid’s production process straddled a reverence for historical conven- offered the German stoneware manufac- tion and an inclination towards modern taste. turers a compromise between their long- One reviewer noted that although standing craft traditions and the modern drive Riemerschmid’s stoneware decorations towards progress, the forms and decoration “spring from a strictly modern force of line,” of his vessel designs concretized and exter- they still “nestle against the body of the ves- nalized this compromise for the modern sel, as the old reliefs used to do.”14 By ena- German consumer. His straightforward con- bling a production process in which form and structions of reduced, geometric compo- ornament were created simultaneously in nents, though made of the same stuff as their one infinitely repeatable step, while at the

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same time “handing” the consumer the sen- The modernization of weighty, opaque sations and symbols of timeless craft, German stoneware may be understood as Riemerschmid’s design bridged a gap both progressive (despite its dialogue with his- between stoneware’s historical, cultural tory) and socially conscious, not simply in its authenticity, and the modern demand for democratization of well-designed products standardized, sanitized housewares.15 His made from quality materials but in its rehabili- modern stonewares were at once nostalgic tation of a collective cultural memory. By con- and progressive: they manufactured a facsimi- trast, however, experimental, expressionist lie of the aura for the modern age, which designs for glass, like Taut’s 1914 pavilion, con- Benjamin famously called “the age of techno- veyed overtly utopian – and pointedly political logical reproducibility.”16 – meanings. The transformative possibilities of Modern German stonewares, including glass architecture in Scheerbart’s book repre- Riemerschmid’s – with their ties to a shared sented, as Bletter has explained, “the meta- past. and their promise of a future in which morphosis of the whole society, an anarchist all Germans might have culture and conveni- society, which through its exposure to this ence at their fingertips – were featured as new architecture, has been lifted from dull examples of good modern design at the awareness to a higher mode of sensory Werkbund’s 1914 exhibition in . At experience and from political dependence to the same exhibition (cut short by the out- a liberation from all institutions.”18 During the break in August of World War I), expression- First World War, when architectural commis- ist architect Bruno Taut displayed a similarly sions were scarce, Taut engaged with Janus-faced, though far grander and more fan- Scheerbart’s utopian schemes through pictorial tastic object: a pavilion made of colored glass treatises relating glass architecture and anarch- (Figure 4). While Taut’s Glass House was ist society. In Taut’s Alpine Architecture,pub- startlingly and self-consciously new – a con- lished in 1919, transparent, crystal houses scious reflection of Paul Scheerbart’s futuristic perch high up in mountains whose peaks are architectural fantasies – as architectural his- adorned with colored glass, and whose clear torian Rosemarie Haag Bletter has argued at lakes are decorated with floating glass orna- length, both Taut’s and Scheerbart’s projects ments.19 Taut’s text promotes the impractical- were rooted in a vision of glass, extending far ity of these structures in his pacifist response back into the ancient world, as transforma- to the devastating, utilitarian logic of war: tive, alchemical – magical.17 Scheerbart had dedicated his 1914 Glass Architecture to Taut, Yes, impractical and without utility! But and that same year at Cologne, Taut have we become happy through utility? returned the favor. Scheerbart’s vivid descrip- Always utility and utility, comfort, conveni- tions of a fluid, floating, mobile, and multicol- ence – good food, culture – knife, fork, ored architecture of glass are materialized in trains, toilets, and yet also – cannons, Taut’s Glass House, whose interiors were nei- bombs, instruments of murder!20 ther purely colorless nor truly transparent, but polychrome and translucent, enabling and Bletter observes that Taut’s crystalline amplifying the animated play of gemlike color constructions were to be achieved and prismatic light. “communally by the masses in the same way

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that Taut imagined Gothic cathedrals had cathedral of the future, will then shine with been built.”21 its abundance of light into the smallest objects of everyday life …”23 “In Earth, as It Is in Heaven”: Crystal and Clay at the Bauhaus Together, Gropius’s words and Feininger’s The image of the “glass house” as a catalyst picture bound the notion of craft not simply for social and political transformation reap- to expressionist images of crystal and light, peared that same year in an illustration for a but – through the concept of transparency – pamphlet circulated by one of Taut’s to the utopian politics of collectivism. Werkbund colleagues, the architect Walter Ironically, however, while Gropius had Gropius (Figure 5). American-born artist enlisted Feininger’s print to embody tran- ’s woodblock print, The scendent transparency, this woodcut was Cathedral of Socialism (sometimes called The inherently earthy and opaque – its opacity Cathedral of the Future), accompanied cemented by the obvious traces of its craft: Gropius’s Program for the State Bauhaus in the visible, indexical marks of the making pro- Weimar, which included the now legendary cess, in which wood fibers had been gouged text: “Together let us desire, conceive and from the heavy, solid block. More than opa- create the new structure of the future, which que, it was earthy – dirty. Its craftsman had will embrace architecture and sculpture and made no attempt at achieving the crisp, painting in one unity and which will one day “clean” lines synonymous today with the rise toward heaven from the hands of a mil- Bauhaus’s legacy for design. The object’s lion workers like the crystal symbol of a new rough, jagged cuttings, and especially the faith.”22 Gropius’s program (later known as errant flecks of black ink within the white, the “Bauhaus Manifesto”) was a recruitment voided areas, besmirch and fundamentally tool, calling young artists, who had just negate the pristine immateriality of its sub- returned from the trenches or come of age ject: glass. in their wake, to offer up their individual tal- This friction between transparency’s ents in the collaborative service of craft. Later promise of transcendence or social trans- that same year, in an address to the first crop formation and the earthbound opacity of of Bauhaus students, Gropius likened these craft at the Weimar Bauhaus was nowhere modern craft collectives to medieval more pronounced than in the ceramics work- Bauh€utte, or: shop, which, unlike the other Bauhaus work- shops, was located at a 20-kilometer remove small, secret, self-contained societies, from the central Weimar campus: at lodges. Conspiracies will form which will Dornburg an der Saale in the buildings of an want to watch over and artistically shape a abandoned castle, owned by the local state secret, a nucleus of belief, until from the government. Bauhaus ceramic students had individual groups a universally great, endur- initially worked in confining and ill-equipped ing spiritual-religious idea will rise again, quarters in a room rented from a Weimar which finally must find its crystalline kiln factory. Their relocation to Dornburg in expression in a great Gesamtkunstwerk. 1920 was accomplished as part of a collab- And this great total work of art, this orative agreement with the established local

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Fig 5 Lyonel Feininger (artist) and Walter Gropius (author), Manifesto and Program of the State Bauhaus, April 1919, with title page “Cathedral” by Lyonel Feininger. Four-sided leaflet, letterpress on gray-green fac- tory printing paper, on the cover sheet. Original size reproduction (zinc etching) after woodcut. Museum Associates/LACMA/Art Resource, NY # 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild- Kunst, Bonn. potter, , who agreed to take the Middle Ages.26 Burgel€ ’s guild records show it Bauhaus students on as his apprentices, thus to have been the earliest pottery producer in becoming their Werkmeister.24 Krehan, whose Thuringia, and Krehan’s family workshop had workshop was located on the castle grounds, been in operation since 1770.27 Not only did represented the fourth generation of a this firm foundation in local production con- Thuringian pottery family.25 His work was vention serve to root the Bauhaus students characterized by the influence of the well- in the historic soil of the guild system, it also respected local tradition of B€urgel, a nearby established a necessary link between Krehan’s production center whose manufacture of family trade and the next generation.28 stoneware and high-fired earthenware vessels Because he had no heir to carry on his trade, with brown slip decoration had begun in the he welcomed these serious students – not to

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mention the financial support of the State (Master of Form), the sculptor Gerhard Bauhaus at Weimar.29 Marcks, who made clear from the establish- In his Bauhaus Manifesto, Gropius had ment of the workshop that, “in essence we proclaimed craft as the liberator of the are all striving to unite all of the fine arts in “unproductive” (or, as was frequently the the Bauhutte,€ along with a foundation in han- case in postwar Germany, dicraft training.”32 The framework of the unemployed) artist: Dornburg experience rendered this concept practical. Although the self-sufficiency and ini- When young people who take a joy in tiative of the Bauh€ausler were evident in their creation once more begin their life’s work very first project – the construction of a new by learning a trade, then the unproductive workshop in the stables of the old Rococo “artist” will no longer be condemned to palace given to the Bauhaus by the deficient artistry, for their skill will now be Thuringian government – it was largely owing preserved for the crafts, in which they will to the pre-established structure provided by be able to achieve excellence.30 Krehan that they were quickly able to coalesce into something spiritually akin to the It was Krehan’s practical embodiment of time-honored German craft guild.33 the Bauh€utte philosophy, not merely through According to Marguerite Friedl€ander his adherence to tradition but also through (later Wildenhain), an enthusiastic Bauhaus the sales of his “rustic” pottery, which pro- apprentice who would become an inter- duced an income for the Bauhaus ceramics nationally recognized ceramist, the entire workshop (allowing it to be financially as well experience of the Bauhaus ceramics work- as ideologically self-contained), that facilitated shop was earthy, messy, dirty: some would-be a tangible “return to the crafts” for these apprentices arrived at the workshop “in uni- Bauh€ausler.31 Just as it had done before the forms, tattered and torn from four years in war, clay offered significant connections to the trenches, others in old clothes that they the past: to the material past, but also to a had worn since the beginning of the war, more evanescent, idealized past of secret some barefoot …”34 And yet, “all of them societies and their “conspiracies.” were ready to start afresh with all they had in The mystical, and even at times explicitly ideals, energies, gifts, and total devotion … It religious language of Gropius’s early procla- was a rebellious group, afire with ideas of a mations was reflected in the formation of an better future for mankind, where the crafts almost cultic cohesiveness at Dornburg. would be an integral part of art, and art of Gropius’s imagery, revolving around both total life.”35 Workshop members dug their communal and spiritual structures – the own clay from the banks of the local river (in medieval Bauh€utte and the collectively con- which they also washed themselves); they structed cathedral – materialized in the close- chopped wood and slaved day and night knit, earnest band of students and instructors over smoky, wood-burning kilns. The at Dornburg and their vital sense of mission Dornburg Bauh€ausler worked the soil to and moral purpose. grow much of their food, and several women The Bauh€utte model was consciously potters, including the apprentice Lydia adopted by the workshop’s Formmeister Driesch-Foucar, undertook to cook for the

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community.36 Friedl€ander was herself a driv- slip-painted pottery tradition, embraced by ing force in the Ceramics Workshop, and Formmeister Marcks and inculcated by articulated in retrospect her perception of Werkmeister Krehan, mined this mud for all the workshop’s predicament in the context its aesthetic properties: Bauhaus pots were of the Bauhaus financial structure, not to both made from and decorated with dirt. In mention Germany’s postwar economic crisis fact, to those who take the Bauhaus at its and skyrocketing inflation: well-established word about form, function, and “clean lines,” Bauhaus pots (especially What we produced belonged to the when one encounters them “in the flesh”) Bauhaus, which sold our work and gave us a can seem surprisingly humble, rustic, and 39 percentage of the price as remuneration. As brown (Figure 6). the German inflation accelerated, we were For Friedl€ander, the Bauhaus had, from paid three times a week, and rushed to shop her very first encounter with it, embodied the very minute we got our money; a few the hands-on, material process of craft. She hours later it would all have been worth describes a kind of conversion on a trip to only half as much … It was a horrible time Weimar in 1919, when she came upon a for all of us, and food was scarce because poster displaying Feininger’s Cathedral of nobody wanted to sell anything. If we could Socialism, along with Gropius’s manifesto. The buy a hundred-pound sack of oatmeal, we words that stirred her soul – and prompted did, and many times we ate oatmeal for her to enroll as a Bauhaus student – breakfast, oatmeal and home-grown chard were these: for lunch, and chard and oatmeal for dinner.37 Architects, sculptors, painters, we must all [re]turn to the crafts. Art is not a profes- These trying conditions seem to have sion, there is no difference between the galvanized the Bauhaus potters: Friedl€ander artist and the craftsman. In rare moments asserts that “…against the outside world, beyond the control of his will, the grace of we were as one … we became a real heaven may cause his work to blossom community.”38 The experience that into art. But proficiency in his craft is Friedl€ander, Driesch-Foucar, and other mem- essential to every artist. Therein lies the bers of the Dornburg ceramics workshop source of creative imagination.40 describe is in many ways Gropius’s Bauh€utte, realized in the gritty and sometimes dire Feininger’s cathedral, erecting itself scratch terms of communal, subsistence living. Here, by scratch before her eyes (just as it had ori- participation in what he had envisioned as a ginally emerged from a solid block of wood), grand Gesamtkunstwerk was not a dilettantish represented for Friedl€ander both the physical whim – it was a matter of survival: you rolled process and material product of craft that up your sleeves, pitched in and got your bound its practitioners together in the con- hands dirty, or you starved. For the Bauhaus struction of the “great total work of art, this potters, however, this was a productive, fec- cathedral of the future,” destined to shine und kind of dirtiness. Mud was at once with “abundance of light into the smallest Mother Earth, medium, and muse. The local objects of everyday life …”41

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strikingly, by virtue of its intricate structure and its refined white clay body. The Light Temple, its pure whiteness rendering it already somehow lighter – less assertively material – than the rich, muddy, grainy pots thrown by Lindig’s colleagues around the same time, undergoes a transformation – a further dematerialization – when illuminated from within. Rather like the contrast between a photographic print and its negative, the illu- minated object seems to dissolve, its once- solid body now serving only as the aperture for light itself. ’s ceramic Temple inhabited the liminal territory between materiality and immateriality – that limbo between heaven and earth: the “abundance of light” that it was designed to emit trans- formed it from an embodied thing into the bodiless, spiritual “symbol of a new faith.”

Fig 6 Marguerite Friedlaender-Wildenhain, Painted ’ Pitcher with Handle, 1922–23. Earthenware with The Emperor s New Clothes: The salt glaze over clay slip. # Charles Friedlaender, Politics of Emptiness New York. Courtesy Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. But a faith in what, exactly? In response to Photo: Gunter Lepkowski. ideological shifts within the Bauhaus itself, as well as financial pressure applied by its spon- sor, the local state government in Weimar, Gropius began in 1923 a systematic reorien- One of Friedl€ander’s fellow apprentices, tation of the Bauhaus – theoretically and the native Thuringian Otto Lindig, seems to practically – towards industrial production, have translated Feininger’s woodcut into clay, under the slogan: “art and technology – a while at the same time interpreting Gropius’s new unity.”42 In a letter to Marcks on April 5, verbal image most literally. Lindig’s thrown 1923, Gropius expressed his concerns about and hand-built Temple of Light (1921) might the handcrafted singularity of Dornburg’s ver- be understood variously as a small-scale nacular-inspired pottery: “Yesterday I had a sculpture, an expressionist architectural look at your many new pots. Almost all of model, or an elaborate lantern (Figure 7). them are unique, unrepeatable; it would be Period photographs testify to its distinction positively wrong not to look for ways of mak- from the more rustic, intentionally rough and ing the hard work that has gone into them earthy pots of Friedl€ander, Krehan, and accessible to large numbers of people … Marcks not only in terms of its multi- (or We must find ways of duplicating some of non-) functionality, but, perhaps more the articles with the help of machines.”43

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Fig 7 Otto Lindig, Light Temple, 1920–1921. Earthenware. # Maria Hokema, Schw€abisch-Gm€und. Courtesy Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.

Although the vision of clay as deriving a cul- Marcks, for his part, was deeply skeptical tural richness and rootedness from its history of the broader implications contained in of handcraft was one that many of the Gropius’s critical assessment of Dornburg’s Bauhaus potters shared with the artists and production. Much later, recalling his time in technicians who had helped to revive the Weimar, Marcks writes: “The year 1923 flagging German stoneware industry two dec- marked a change: the poster at the train sta- ades before, the Bauh€ausler, their utopian col- tion, Art and Technology – A New Unity, lectivism notwithstanding, had developed no was the signal. ‘Exactly what we didn’t want,’ strategy for disseminating or democratizing Feininger said to me.”44 The Formmeister saw either their products or their values, while Gropius’s shift towards industry, expressed in strategies for the promotion of both had his new conviction that “crafts and industry been central to the successful modernization are today steadily approaching one another of stoneware. Indeed, some of the Bauhaus and are destined eventually to merge into potters were strongly opposed to production one,”45 as a betrayal of and a threat to what in multiples, as this seemed to fly in the face he, Marcks, termed his “sole artistic purpose of the art-craft ideal that Gropius had estab- of uniting handicrafts with art as much as lished in his 1919 manifesto, which had possible.”46 Gropius’s radically altered pos- served for many as a lure – or a catalyst. ition that “the teaching of craft is meant to

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prepare for designing for mass-production”47 earliest of these was Bogler’s earthenware did not sit well with Krehan, either.48 The Mocha Machine, assembled from both goal of the Werkmeister’s instruction was to thrown and cast modular components build skill in his apprentices, to train them to (Figure 8). Bogler’s interlocking geometry of produce almost identical forms one after the warmer, water tank, pot, filter fitting and other by hand, without any technological aid strainer reflected his aspirations towards beyond the wheel. If apprentices were now industry. Even the term “machine” bespoke to be encouraged to replicate their forms the transformation of the modern kitchen indefinitely through molds and modules, this from a multipurpose living space to an would significantly devalue Krehan’s training “industrial-age” workplace.52 in the precision and efficiency of the hand – if But Bogler’s high-fired earthenware not render it altogether obsolete. prototype, while intended for industrial pro- But not all of the Bauhaus potters duction, still spoke, through its rough, brown opposed the rapprochement of craft and body and dirty, slip-smeared surface, to craft’s industry. The Ceramics Workshop, in spite of intimacy of process and material: the physical the resistance of its masters, as well as its contact embedded in and embodied by material and ideological bases in regional Friedl€ander’s cow and Feininger’s cathedral. craft, was the first of the Bauhaus divisions to Bogler’s attempt to transcend clay’s earthi- form links with industry.49 Design historian ness through a collaboration with the Alteste€ Robin Schuldenfrei has characterized Volkstedter Porzellanfabrik, a local porcelain Gropius’s 1923 proclamation, “art and tech- manufactory, reveals a gap between the nology – a new unity,” as advancing not sim- Bauhaus’s industrial intentions and the real- ply an agenda of industrial collaboration, but ities of Dornburg’s design process. Though a prescription for Bauhaus objects them- the Mocha Machine was briefly manufactured selves, involving “the use of new materials, in Volkstedter porcelain, the multipart design more stripped-down forms, and a spare, proved too complicated – and thus too functional aesthetic.”50 Lindig and his fellow costly – to mass produce in the long term, apprentice, Theodor Bogler, had since 1922 and was dropped from production by 1924 been handcrafting forms composed of geo- (Figure 9).53 Its industrial unwieldiness not- metric components potentially suitable to withstanding, however, Bogler’s Mocha mass production, and glazed in dark, metallic Machine was indeed transfigured in its new colors evocative of the aesthetics of heavy porcelain body. With its complex, puzzle-like machinery. Together they also developed a construction – like a utilitarian translation of new clay body that was more plastic and Lindig’s expressionist Light Temple – it higher-firing than its predecessor, and so bet- approached transparency (while remaining ter adapted to the industrial process of plas- opaque) through its clinical whiteness and ter casting, as well as more hygienic for highly reflective surface. Was Bogler’s modern use. After visiting area ceramics man- blanched Mocha Machine the new “cathedral ufactories, the two men set up a series design of socialism”–the new “cathedral of the “laboratory” at the rustic Bauhaus pottery, future”? Might it symbolize, in spite of its where they developed modular prototypes technical failure, Gropius’s re-vision of a social for industrial production.51 One of the equality forged not in the sacred flames of

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Fig 8 Theodor Bogler, Mocha Machine (five-part), 1923. High-fired earthenware painted with iron-oxide slip, free-thrown and assembled. # Maria Laach Monastery. Courtesy Klassik Stiftung Weimar. Top photo: Renno. Bottom photo: Roland Dressler. mystic brotherhood, but in the purifying fire appears to make good on that promise.54 of industry? With its cool, resistant, and (sometimes) The cathedral’s metamorphosis – from transparent materials, the “Wagenfeld lamp” Taut’s multicolored mysticism of the 1910s, was an aura-less object upon which, like the to Feininger’s scratched sign for a socialist Bauhaus rooms Benjamin described in 1933, future, to Lindig’s luminous lantern, and finally it was “hard to leave traces.” to Bogler’s porcelain “machine”–traces a But “the dark secret of this bright light,” shift not simply through a set of beliefs or as design theorist Frederic Schwartz has put meanings, but across an array of materials: it, was that, for all its visual, material signifiers glass, paper (its cousin, wood), and various of rationalized industry, it was never put into types of clay. A further work – Wilhelm mass production.55 Years later, Wagenfeld Wagenfeld’s now iconic table lamp (Figure himself recalled that “these designs which 10), which he designed in conjunction with looked as though they could be made inex- Carl Jucker at the Bauhaus Metal Workshop pensively by machine techniques were, in between 1923 and 1924 – marks an even fact, extremely costly craft designs.”56 more significant step in this modern evolu- Despite its utilitarian intentions, Wagenfeld’s tion, as the lamp reunites the Gothic image lamp remained – like its crystalline predeces- with its ur-material, glass, while simultaneously sors – a miniature monument to a future transforming it from a utopian prototype (a where Gropius’s “abundance of light” would beacon or promise of future realization) to a no longer shine “into the smallest objects of humble, utilitarian object that, through its everyday life,” but, instead, where clean, cool, simple, everyday function of shining light, transparent objects themselves would shine

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Fig 9 Theodor Bogler, Mocha Machine, 1923. Slip-cast porcelain, for Alteste€ Volkstedter Porzellanfabrik. # Maria Laach Monastery. Courtesy Klassik Stiftung Weimar. Photos: Roland Dressler. forth their own transformative light, revolu- produced, and as a result, would never be tionizing modern life from the inside out. disseminated to the masses. As such, its “The transparent glass of the base and shaft socialism was passive, symbolic – what in the version we most often see transmits Schwartz has called “a socialism of vision.”59 the light;” Schwartz writes, “the milky glass of “Impractical but nonetheless compelling,” the shade diffuses it; the chrome steel in the Schwartz writes, “a vision of the future that center reflects it back.”57 The complex design still had to be crafted by hand, the Bauhaus for the transmission and emission of light via lamp serves as a symbol for a moment when this visually simplified object conveys, as politics retreated into visual form …”60 Schwartz argues, a very different socialism Bauhaus objects that, like Lindig’s Light from the embracing anarchism cast through Temple, Bogler’s Mocha Machine, and Taut’s warm colored glass, or from Wagenfeld’s lamp, struggle to shake them- Feininger’s and Lindig’s collaborative, crystal- selves from the visible “dirt” of handcraft, but line collectivism: “The white light of are yet incapable of dispensing with its trad- Wagenfeld and Jucker … is even, objective, itional processes, betray a rhetorical shift in diffuse, everywhere the same. It won’t des- the politics of modern design away from the troy hatred, but it will show it clearly; it won’t ideological opacity or “fullness” of specific pierce the consciousness with any sort of craft traditions – B€urgel’s earthy, slip-painted revelation, but will simply expose the world pottery, for instance, or the kaleidoscopic to the power of the mind.”58 ecstasy of the Gothic window – towards the As an “everyday” object, then, the lamp impartial reflectivity of chrome, and the failed: like Bogler’s Mocha Machine with its “empty” transparency of glass.61 Did modern- mechanistic, industrially suggestive design, the ism’s retreat from expressionist warmth and Wagenfeld lamp could not be mass- anarchist action into a cooler, more removed

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enduring links with industry) did not join them. It was this new Bauhaus that was closed in 1932 due to withdrawal of govern- ment support. Historian Paul Betts has argued that, in light of the Nazis’ persecution of the subsequent Berlin Bauhaus as an “unwanted scourge of cultural bolshevism,” and in conjunction with their populist, agrar- ian, rhetoric of “blood and soil,” it has long been taken for granted that the Bauhaus’s ultimate demise in 1933 signaled a reinvest- ment in – even a deification of – vernacular handcraft within the vocabulary of Third Reich design.62 And this is not entirely untrue – the values associated with indigenous hand- craft certainly resonated with fascist ideolo- gies. However, the Nazi image of craft was systematically sanitized: traces of the gritty vernacular that clung, for instance, to Fig 10 Wilhelm Wagenfeld and Carl Jakob Jucker, Riemerschmid’s serially produced stonewares Table Lamp (Glass version MT 9/ ME 1), designed and to Friedl€ander’s “muddy” slip-painted c.1923–1924, executed 1927. Glass, chrome, steel. pottery (though both of these examples # 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / were actually far from “authentic”) had been VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy Bauhaus-Archiv carefully erased. This politically engineered, Berlin. Photo: Gunter Lepkowski. generic German craft was sterile, not simply in a hygienic, utilitarian sense; it was aesthetic- and observant “socialism of vision” mark a ally infertile (Figure 11). kind of political withdrawal? What sort of While purging the Bauhaus cathedral of its vessel did the ostensibly progressive objectiv- socialist “contents”–its workshops and work- ity and aesthetic passivity of modern design – ers – effectively crushed the progressive, social its openness, emptiness, and transparency – agenda of modern design in 1933, Betts con- furnish those who recognized the aesthetics tends that designed objects themselves of the everyday as a powerful instrument of remained “pro-modern, in both rhetoric and political propaganda? style” during the Nazi era.63 The Nazis recog- In 1925, the Bauhaus workshops relo- nized the cultural currency of stylistically cated from romantic, sleepy Weimar to the “modern” objects – aura-less objects like industrial city of Dessau, where they were those pioneered at the Bauhaus – and capital- installed in Gropius’s full-scale, modernist ized on the political promise of allegiance to a cathedral: his steel-and-glass temple to the modern style. Ironically, it was the Nazi sub- ideal of mass-design. The ceramics workshop, sidization of modern design originally devel- anchored to Weimar’s local craft tradition oped during the years of the Weimar (and having failed, ultimately, to create Republic, including designs by former Bauhaus

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Fig 11 “Bauerlich gleich deutsch gleich gut [Rustic ¼ German ¼ Good].” Reichsstand des Deutschen Handwerks, Handwerkliches Bilderbuch 5 (1939), 15. artists like Lindig and Wagenfeld, that made it order, but with its very lack of specific generally affordable, enabling it to achieve that regional or historical style: a stylelessness that status of true “mass design” for the first the Nazis apprehended, popularized and time.64 And since metal, concrete, and wood propagandized as ewige,or“eternal” form, were increasingly requisitioned for weapons acting as material evidence of “timeless production, ceramic and glass commodities German greatness.”66 Over the twenty years became important sources of revenue for the between one world war and the next, the Nazi economy. These commodities, Betts mobile, multicolored, anti-utilitarian and writes, “quite unchanging in actual design – anarchist glass of expressionism had gradually became a favorite repository of Nazi myths been blanched and frozen by a cold, rational and fantasies.”65 In other words, the Nazis “socialism of vision,” in which, according to took modern design hostage, forcing it to play Wilhelm Wagenfeld, utility itself was beauty. host to their parasitic populism. Motionless and mute, modernism’s defense- Modernist emptiness beckoned the Nazis less “eternal forms” passed into not simply with its dispassionate, clinical enemy hands.

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Years later in the 1980s, after both wars celebrated at a 1938 rally as built “for the were long over, Wagenfeld reminisced about broad masses … to answer their transporta- his Kubus storage vessels, designed in 1938 tion needs, and … intended to give them and produced during his years at the joy.”69 But why (and how) did Wagenfeld Lausitzer Glassworks, in the late 1930s and imagine his “people’s containers”–eminently early 40s: useful, but also intentionally passive and empty forms – as immediately filled with fas- Some people came to visit us [at the cist aggression? Glassworks] once and said that, just like Industrial modernism’s snowy porcelains the Volkswagen factory [newly constructed and icy glass cubes were objects on which it and opened in 1938], a new refrigerator was “hard to leave traces.” Their designs had factory would be built, and for this they evolved through the desire for both material needed our set of refrigerator storage and conceptual cleanliness. Taking modern containers, measured it, and declared it design’s complex and ambivalent history wonderful. We sold the sets in huge quan- within the context of interwar politics into tities. Some were shipped to , and account, then, the notion of Bauhaus mod- some to Le Havre [both port cities]. I was ernism as simply and invitingly “empty” tricked into believing they were for export, becomes problematic, because despite its but it turned out they were for the consciously evacuated design, it was never German navy.67 truly emptied of meaning. On the contrary, this very stylistic vacuity itself meant some- While Wagenfeld believed this subterfuge thing unique, irreplaceable. Betts writes that to have taken place in 1938, the historical the progressive, modernist design object, record does little to support his suspicions: understood as an active subject, or agent, in there is no hard evidence that the Kubus Nazi cultural politics, became a “living witness blocks were delivered to or used by the of cultural rebirth, social reconstruction, racial German Navy during World War II.68 victory, and private pleasure.”70 In other Though Wagenfeld recalls that the Kubus words, it meant something, in the way that blocks were widely popular as “civilian an important hostage, held because of a spe- wares,” it was the ghost of this possible cific, provocative cause or set of values, “swindle” that seems to have haunted his means something. And the modernist object mind despite the lapse of almost 50 years. – designed to be transparent, empty, and But whatever their motives, the visitors to free – was an easy hostage to apprehend. It Wagenfeld’s Glassworks apprehended the was, in fact, more like a host – a vessel, mass-produced Kubus containers as funda- which, though originally invested with socialist mentally populist objects, capable, certainly, objectivity, became quickly infested with of serving a direct, functional purpose within national socialist hypocrisy. Wagenfeld felt the complex machinations of the approaching swindled in 1938 – and, apparently, still in war, but, perhaps even more importantly (if 1980. But, like modern industrial design itself, less pointedly) of bringing simple “joy” to the Wagenfeld had, on the eve of World War II, German people – akin to the Volkswagen or already retreated, ceded the public field. His “people’s car,” which had just bright “socialism of vision” had faded to

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political blindness. Why did the Nazis fear de Rohe: A Critical Biography (Chicago: University the glass Bauhaus, while desiring the glass of Chicago Press, 1985), 186. 9 Paul Betts, The Authority of Everyday Objects: A blocks by a Bauhaus designer? Was it because Cultural History of West German Industrial Design the first was so difficult to empty, while the (Berkeley: University of California Press, last were all too easy to fill? 2004), 63. 10 The assumption that handcraft and industrial technology stand as polar opposites is based Disclosure Statement largely upon nineteenth-century British Arts and No potential conflict of interest was reported Crafts rhetoric and its idealization of the by the authors. medieval craftsman. Peter Dormer challenges this perception of technology as antithetical to craft by demonstrating the interdependent Notes nature of the two, and their organic development as part of the process of making, 1 For further discussion of this phenomenon see in The Culture of Craft: Status and Future Freyja Hartzell, “A Renovated Renaissance: (Manchester: Manchester University Press, Richard Riemerschmid’s Interiors for the Thieme 1997), 8. House in Munich,” Interiors: Design/Architecture/ 11 For detailed and comprehensive accounts of the Culture 5, no. 1 (March 2014): 5–35. history and theory of the Werkbund, see Joan 2 I will discuss this process in further detail below. Campbell, The German Werkbund: The Politics of See also Freyja Hartzell, “A Ghost in the Reform in the Applied Arts (Princeton, NJ: Machine Age: The Westerwald Stoneware Princeton University Press, 1978) and Frederic J. ” Industry and German Design Reform, The Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory & Mass Journal of Modern Craft 2, no. 3 (November Culture before the First World War (New Haven – 2009): 251 77. and London: Yale University Press, 1996). “ ” 3 Walter Benjamin, Experience and Poverty, in 12 Modern reforms of the Westerwald stoneware Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, volume 2, industry were underway at the turn of the – part 2, 1931 34, ed. Michael W. Jennings, twentieth century, several years before the Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge, founding of the in the – MA: Bellknap Press, 1999), 733 4. autumn of 1907. However, the artists, “ € 4 Bertolt Brecht, Aus dem Lesebuch fur manufacturers and government officials € ” – Stadtebewohner (1926 27), in Bertolt Brecht instrumental in the rehabilitation of the German € Hundert Gedichte: Ausgewahlt von Siegfried Unseld stoneware industry soon became influential ( am Main: Suhrkamp, 2013), 42. Werkbund members. For a thorough treatment “ ” 5 Benjamin, Experience and Poverty, 734. of the topic, see Hartzell, “A Ghost in the 6 Ibid. Machine Age,” 251–77. 7 Ibid. See also Paul Scheerbart, Glass Architecture 13 See a description of stoneware by Gustav E. (1914), translated by James Palmes and Pazaurek, director of the Konigliches€ reprinted in Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! A Landesgewerbemuseum in in “Neues Paul Scheerbart Reader, ed. Josiah McElheny and Steinzeug von Albin M€uller,” Die Kunst 24 Christine Burgin (Chicago: University of Chicago (1910/11): 178. Press, 2014), 90. 14 H. H., “Die keramische Ausstellung im Berliner 8 For more on Mies’s relationship to Nazi politics, Kunstgewerbemuseum,” Keramische Monatshefte and the closing of the Dessau and Berlin 7 (1907): 148. Bauhaus, see Celina R. Welch, “Mies van de 15 See Hartzell, “Ghost in the Machine Rohe’s Compromise with the Nazis,” Wiss. Z. Age,” 263–65. Hochsch. Archit. Bauwes. – A. – Weimar 39 16 See Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of (1993) 1/2: 103–14; and Franz Schulze, Mies van its Technological Reproducibility” (1936), in

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Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 3, ed. 31 Jeannine Fiedler and Peter Feierabend, eds., Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA and Bauhaus (Koln:€ Konenmann,€ 1999), 440–2. London: Bellknap Press, 2002), 101–33. 32 Quoted in Klaus Weber, “Zwischen Tradition 17 See Rosemarie Haag Bletter, “The Interpretation und Avantgarde. am Bauhaus,” of the Glass Dream – Expressionist Architecture in Keramik und Bauhaus, 37. and the History of the Crystal Metaphor,” 33 Wildenhain, Invisible Core, 25. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 34 Ibid., 23. Upon her marriage to Hans 40, no. 1 (March 1981): 20–43. Wildenhain in , Friedl€ander took her 18 Bletter, “Glass Dream,” 32. husband’s surname and was known during her 19 Bruno Taut, Alpine Architektur (: Folkwang- career in the United States as Verlag, 1919). An original edition of this five- . volume publication, including 30 original 35 Ibid., 23–24. drawings, is available in the archive of the 36 Driesch-Foucar, “Erinnerungen,” 76. Driesch- Akademie der K€unste, Berlin. Foucar admits that cooking for the community, 20 See Bletter’s translation of the text from plate 16 which she undertook single-handedly at first, of Taut’s Alpine Architektur in “Glass Dream,” 35. proved to be such an overwhelming task that 21 Ibid., 35. she eventually felt compelled to stop making 22 Walter Gropius, “Program of the Staatliches pottery and become Dornburg’s resident chef Bauhaus in Weimar,” in Weimar Republic after her marriage to in 1922. Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Despite its indisputably progressive admission of Edward Dimendberg (Los Angeles: University of women students from the time of its founding, California Press, 1995), 435. the Bauhaus has accrued a reputation in 23 Walter Gropius, “Address to the Students,” in scholarship for its frequently traditional – and The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, ed. sometimes even dismissive or repressive – Hans Maria Wingler (Cambridge: MIT Press, approach to the question of gender equality 1969), 36. within its workshops; however, women like 24 Each Bauhaus workshop was co-led by a Marianne Brandt in the Metal Workshop and Werkmeister (master of work, or craft), Gunta Stolzl€ in the Weaving Workshop, albeit responsible for developing the apprentices’ in the face of genuine adversity, were also technical skills, and a Formmeister (master of recognized and even promoted as important, form), responsible for guiding the students’ innovative designers central to the institution’s artistic vision. mission and success as both school and 25 Hans-Peter Jakobson, Otto Lindig – der T€opfer, design laboratory. 1895-1966 (Karlsruhe: Museen der Stadt , 37 Wildenhain, Invisible Core,28–29. 1990), 11. 38 Ibid., 28. 26 David Gaimster, German Stoneware, 1200-1900: 39 Juliet Kinchin also remarks on the ways in which Archaeology and Cultural History (London: British the “materiality of the clay bodies and irregularly Museum Press, 1997), 276. pitted glazes (from matte black-brown to pale 27 See ibid., 282, and Marguerite Wildenhain, The white-buff, from translucent to viscous) Invisible Core: A Potter’s Life and Thoughts (Palo references an essentially Romantic exploration Alto: Pacific Books, 1973), 24. of inanimate matter through the art of the 28 Lydia Driesch-Foucar, “Erinnerungen an die individual potter.” See Kinchin, “Theodor Bogler Anf€ange der Donburger Topferwerkstatt€ des Teapots. 1923,” in Bauhaus 1919-1933: Staatlichen Bauhauses Weimar, 1920-1923,” in Workshops for Modernity (MoMA: 2009), 110–3. Keramik und Bauhaus, ed. Klaus Weber (Berlin: 40 Gropius’s “Program for the Staatliches Bauhaus in Bauhaus-Archiv, 1989), 71–81. Weimar,” as quoted in Wildenhain, Invisible Core,22. 29 Wildenhain, Invisible Core, 24. 41 Gropius, “Address to the Students,” 36. 30 Walter Gropius, “Program of the Staatliches 42 See Walter Gropius, The New Architecture of the Bauhaus in Weimar,” 435. Bauhaus (London: Faber and Faber, 1935),

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55–6, and introduction to Neue Arbeiten der sketches, as has been the procedure of the Bauhauswerkst€atten, Bauhaus Book, 1925 (Mainz: Bauhaus Archive in Berlin. Florian Kupferberg Verlag, 1981). For a 55 Frederic J. Schwartz, “Wilhelm Wagenfeld and comprehensive historical discussion of the Carl Jakob Jucker Table Lamp. 1923-24,” in Bauhaus’s ideological and practical shifts see Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity, Gillian Naylor, The Bauhaus Reassessed (New ed. Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman York: E.P. Dutton, 1985), 83–102; 124–45. (Museum of Modern Art: 2009), 138. 43 Magdalena Droste, Bauhaus 1919-1933 (Berlin: 56 Ibid. Schwartz employs Gillian Naylor’s citation Bauhaus-Archiv Museum f€ur Gestaltung, of Wagenfeld in The Bauhaus Reassessed, 112. 1998), 70. 57 Schwartz, “Wilhelm Wagenfeld and Carl Jakob 44 From Gerhard Marcks, “My Short Stay in Weimar,” Jucker Table Lamp,” 138. in Bauhaus and Bauhaus People,ed.Eckhard 58 Ibid., 138–40. Neumann, trans. Eva Richter, and Alba Lorman 59 Ibid., 140. (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970), 30. 60 Ibid. 45 Walter Gropius, “Theory and Organization of 61 Ibid. the Bauhaus,” in Bauhaus 1919-1928, ed. 62 Betts, Authority of Everyday Objects, 23–72. , Walter Gropius, and Ise Gropius 63 Ibid., 24. (Boston: Charles T. Branford Company, 64 Ibid., 68. 1959), 25. 65 Ibid., 49. 46 Marcks, “My Short Stay,” 30. 66 Ibid., 67. 47 Gropius, “Theory and Organization of the 67 Wagenfeld executed other commissions for Bauhaus,” 25. Nazi organizations, including the KdF (Kraft 48 Droste, Bauhaus, 70. durch Friede, or “Strength through Joy”); in the 49 Jakobson, Otto Lindig, 17. same interview he describes a special 50 Robin Schuldenfrei, “The Irreproducibility of the commission of burgundy glasses for Goring€ ’s Bauhaus Object,” in Bauhaus Construct: Lufftwaffe ministry. Wilhelm Wagenfeld quoted Fashioning Identity, Discourse and Modernism, ed. in interviews with Walter Scheiffele during the Jeffrey Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei (London 1980s in Walter Scheiffele, Wilhelm Wagenfeld and New York: Routledge, 2009), 37. und die moderne Glasindustrie: Eine Geschichte 51 Michael Siebenbrodt, ed. Bauhaus Weimar: der deutschen Glasgestaltung von Bruno Mauder, Designs for the Future (Ostfildern-Ruit: Hatje Richard S€ußmuth, Heinrich Fuchs und Wilhelm Cantz, 2000), 15. Wagenfeld bis Heinrich L€offelhardt (Stuttgart: 52 Ibid. Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1994), 221. 53 Klaus Weber, “’Weimarer Dinge’. Die Veltener 68 Wagenfeld’s interview statement did of course Keramik und Das Bauhaus,” Berlin und produce a powerful response, and the question Brandenburg: Keramik der 20er und 30er Jahre, of whether his Kubus designs were “enlisted” by ed. Hans-Joachim Theis (Stuttgart: Edition Cantz, the Navy has colored the Wagenfeld literature 1992), 26. since the late 1970s. Beate Manske lists a series 54 This lamp has been generally attributed in of reasons why it is highly unlikely that the scholarship to Bauhaus apprentices Wilhelm Kubus-Geschirr were used by the German Navy Wagenfeld and Carl Jucker (see, e.g. Frederic in “Wilhelm Wagenfelds Rautenglas – Aufbau Schwartz’s reference in note 55, below). und Vermarktung des Sortiments,” in Zeitgem€aß However, as has recently been brought to my und Zeitbest€andig. Industrieformen von Wilhelm attention by Dr. Julia Bulk of Wilhelm Wagenfeld (: Wilhelm Wagenfeld Wagenfeld Fondation in Bremen, a 1999 court Stiftung, 2012), 172. ruling by the Hanseatisches Oberlandesgericht in 69 Hitler’s speech is quoted in Steven Parissien, The established Wagenfeld as the single Life of the Automobile: The Complete History of the author/creator of the lamp. It is still possible, Motor-Car (Thomas Dunne Books, 2014), 119. though, to credit Jucker with preliminary studies/ 70 Ibid., 72.

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