reasons for such a vehement rejection were primarily in the programme of the institution, which had always been considered “left-wing” and thus not compatible with the reactionary nationalist and racist cultural policy of the Nazi regime. The questioning of traditional academic forms of education, the turning towards industrial production and thus turning away from the manual trades (on which the lower middle classes were dependent) were from the beginning a thorn in the side of conservative forces. On top of this came the international composition of the faculty and the student body, and finally the social claims which were associated with the Bauhaus programme.
Bauhaus Berlin in a former telephone factory, 1932, photograph: Howard Dearstyne
After the dissolution of the Bauhaus, Mies van der Rohe occasionally ran seminars on questions about the art of building with a small circle of former Bauhaus graduates in his private studio. Finally, in 1938, he became Director of the Architectural Department at the Amour Institute, which would become the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Several Bauhaus graduates followed him there. Walter Gropius had left Germany earlier for England, together with Marcel Breuer. From there, he transferred to the Harvard Graduate School of Design in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1937. Hannes Meyer, who had gone to the USSR after his discharge as Bauhaus director, later worked in Switzerland for some time, as well as in Mexico. Wassily Kandinsky emigrated to Paris as early as 1933. Paul Klee returned to his hometown of Berne the same year. Also in 1933, Josef Albers went to the USA and became one of the first Bauhaus teachers to teach at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. László Moholy-Nagy became head of the “New Bauhaus” in Chicago in 1937, where several Bauhaus graduates worked in the years following. Lyonel Feininger, too, emigrated in 1937 to the USA with Herbert Bayer, while Johannes Itten was drawn to Zurich in 1939.
Bauhaus teachers Oskar Schlemmer, Georg Muche and Gerhard Marcks, whose works had been categorised as “degenerate”, however, stayed in Germany. A large proportion of Bauhaus graduates and former students got by in the Third Reich in some form or other, often moving between conformity and resistance. Some of them were unable to find work in any architectural office or advertising company, while some made careers for themselves. Politically active opponents of the National Socialist system and Jewish students were forced into exile or subject to prosecution. Some lost their lives in prison or concentration camps, such as Susanne Banki, Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, Lotte Menzel and Hedwig Slutzki in Auschwitz, Willi Jungmittag in Brandenburg and Josef Knau on the concentration ship Thielbeck.
Moving into the Bauhaus Berlin, 1932
Article from a Berlin local newspaper on April 12, 1933 about the police search of the Bauhaus
Preparatory Course and Basic Design Education
The Preparatory Course
The preparatory course, also called the preliminary course or basic course, was among the most important pedagogic achievements of the Bauhaus, developed by Johannes Itten and continued by László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers. As an idea, the preparatory course was not a Bauhaus invention. The tradition of preparatory course teaching in artistic education goes back to the nineteenth century and is closely connected with the process of art school reform at the beginning of the twentieth century. As a trial or introductory semester, the preparatory course at the Bauhaus formed the basis for the introduction of young people of varied educational backgrounds to academic studies in the principles of design, and thus to break with all old educational privileges. The successful completion of the preparatory course was necessary for acceptance into one of the Bauhaus workshops. Those interested in the Bauhaus had the opportunity to test themselves in the preparatory course to see whether they had any aptitude as a designer. At the same time they had the opportunity – without the constraints of a regular course – to explore their leaning toward a certain field of studies or material in the different workshops. During this “self-finding course”, imagination and creativity were “tested” as well as sensitivity, diligence, stamina and team work.
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