ALL THIS AND WORLD WAR II: The real story of Bauhaus and the Nazis.
This confluence of competing styles was reflected most of all in architecture. The architecture of the Third Reich is generally regarded as reactionary, but the reality is more complex, and Weimar provides one of the best examples. The city’s monumental Gauforum (which now houses governmental offices, and a sombre museum about slave labour in the Third Reich) is one of the largest surviving buildings of the Nazi era. Its style is traditional but streamlined, a blend of old and new. We’re generally inclined to regard Nazi buildings as ugly because the tyranny which made them was ugly. If only life – and art – were so simple. In fact, a lot of Nazi architecture wasn’t so far removed from modernist styles like Art Deco. Hardly surprising really, when so many Bauhaus architects ended up working for the Nazis.
The work of Bauhaus alumni during the Third Reich demonstrates that a lot of artists, then as now, were actually pretty apolitical, happy to focus on the job in hand rather than fretting about the morals of their paymasters. Yet a good many actively embraced the new regime: 188 joined the Nazi party, 15 joined the SA and 14 joined the SS. One SS man, Bauhaus graduate Fritz Ertl, was one of the designers of the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Most Bauhaus biographies are more nuanced. Herbert Bayer, a student and then a teacher at the Bauhaus, designed jolly brochures for the 1936 Berlin Olympics, celebrating the achievements of Hitler’s Reich (he called himself ‘the anonymous favourite of the propaganda minister’). He left Germany in 1937, after his work featured in the Nazis’ infamous ‘Degenerate Art’ show (a crude propagandist display designed to denigrate modern art).
The case of Bauhaus graduate Franz Ehrlich is even more complex. Imprisoned in Buchenwald concentration camp (a few miles from Weimar) after he was caught producing pamphlets for the Communist underground, he was put to work inside the camp, furnishing the commandant’s office and designing the creepy motto on the camp gates. Inmates did what they had to do to survive and only a fool would dare to judge them, but Ehrlich continued working for the SS at Buchenwald even after he was released.
In his 2015 book, Artists Under Hitler: Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany, Jonathan Petropoulos wrote that Bauhauslers far higher up on the school’s food chain than Ehrlich were “unexpectedly” more than a little eager to work with the post-Weimar socialists. and very likely they would have, if only the former art student leading the regime hadn’t so hated modernist aesthetics.