[KS] Collaboration / BAUHAUS (1)

[Frank Hoffmann]

Dear List members:

Please allow me to share a few thoughts and a bit lengthy excerpt from an
unpublished manuscript with you. Since my arguments relate directly to the
contents of this manuscript, and since I take it as given that you are not
aware of these facts (it¹s all pretty new matrerial), I take the  freedom
to post the excerpt below.

***This posting is about resistance & collaboration re. the BAUHAUS -- I
will make my main argumant and the connection to Korea in my following
posting.***

Most of you will have seen a photo of the widely published 1932 ³Bauhaus
under Attack² collage by the Japanese architect, photographer and designer
Iwao Yamawaki, a disciple at the Bauhaus in Dessau from 1930-32, showing
Nazi troups marching diagonally through the picture space, across the two
main Bauhaus school buidings. In the lower right corner of the collage one
sees the famous BAUHAUS letters, designed by Herbert Bayer. -->
   http://www2.ucsc.edu/people/gflores/bauhaus/bgraphics/dessau1.jpg
During the late 1930s Iwao Yamawaki worked for the Japanese Ministry of
Defense; during the war he became one of the figureheads responsible for
Japanese war propaganda art -- 40 of the works for the Imperial Army are
presently online, see for yourself:
>>The Imperial Army will smash them no matter what.<<
  http://www.artn.nwu.edu/~janine/WWW/ASIA/IMPERIAL_ARMY.html
>>From our household comes the fighting power.<<
  http://www.artn.nwu.edu/~janine/WWW/ASIA/TWENTYSEVEN.html
etc. etc. etc.
        (You may click somewhere within the photo to see the whole series.)

Richard L. Sandor, a collector of Iwao's photographs, remarks on his Web
page (above) that >>[i]t's ironic that the Bauhaus in Germany produced the
leading propaganda for the Japanese war machine.<<  Well ... is it really
that ironic?

When the Bauhaus was closed by the Nazis it was recognized as the most
important modernist school in Europe. After WWII the Bauhaus became one of
the inter-war institutions to be celebrated in both parts of Germany. In
numerous exhibitions and publications (incl. textbooks for schools) one
would find images like Iwao's collage and generalizing statements that
pointed out how many former 'Bauhäusler' went into exile because they were
haunted by the Nazis. Post-war publications about Nazi art, both from
Germany and abroad, always quoted the fact that several Bauhaus artists
were represented in the infamous "Entartete Kunst" (Degenerate Art) exhibit
of 1937/38. My generation and that before grew up with the understanding
that modernity as embodied in the Bauhaus, both as a concept and
institutionalized, was in itself anti-fascist and democratic, and that many
Bauhaus teachers and students became the victims of Nazi terror because
they had been representatives of even this modernist anti-fascist school.
Both West and East Germany (the West more than the East) used Bauhaus
modernism as a cornerstone of their cultural legitimacy.

As you will see when reading on (if your time allows), I strongly like to
suggest that Bauhaus politics was confined to the politics of style, only
to the politics of style. Any other claim is a myth, similar to the one
Carl Saxer reported regarding the Danish King's regular horse rides through
Copenhagen -- just a myth. In case of the Bauhaus it is a carefully crafted
myth, but one that comes from a number of different sources. German society
as a whole was interested in its construction -- it served as a kind of
relief and white-washed intellectuals who had lived through the period.
Almost everyone involved in cultural production (including urban
developers) in post-war Germany profited from tis myth -- the construction
of the anti-fascist legitimacy did indeed serve the whole community -- yet,
it was a construct. As we can now able (and willing!) to prove, the only
Bauhäusler haunted by the Nazis were haunted because of their Jewish
background, not because their relationship to the Bauhaus. Until 1937, and
you are invited to follow my argument by going through Nazi fashion and
architecture magazines of the time, the Nazi leadership didn¹t had a
clearly defined art policy, and some important figures had an love affair
with modernism anyway (also look at Mussolini¹s Italy at the time).
Hundreds of Bauhäusler did actively work for the Nazis, and these who
emigrated did so because the Nazi administration finally would not feed
them anymore with important government commissions, not because they would
refuse to collaborate with Nazi authorities. Oskar Schlemmer, for example,
*in private* praised the speeches of Goebbels. Think of it when you next
time visit the MOMA in New York or the Staatsgallerie in Stuttgart -- gives
you quite some different taste.


   Here follows an excerpt from my manuscript. Most of this is based on
recent publications from Germany, and some parts are based on my own
research using sources in the Walter Gropius Archive (Harvard,
Busch-Reisinger Museum) -- Gropius taught at Harvard from 1937 to 1952 as a
professor of architecture and in 1938 also became the department¹s
chairman. Please be so kind *not* to quote this in any publication.

=================excerpt===========

	(...) The catalogue to another big Nazi propaganda show, entitled
³The Wonder of Life (Das Wunder des Lebens),² in 1935, has been designed by
the graphic designer, typographer, painter, and photographer, Herbert
Bayer, known to be the most talented Bauhaus designer. From 1921 to 1925 he
was a student at the Bauhaus, studying mural-painting under Schlemmer and
Kandinsky, and then joined the teaching stuff of the same institution as a
journeyman. Soon he became a teacher and then a Œyoung master¹ and finally
the head of the workshop for typography and advertisement design. Bayer
was, as he stated himself, fascinated by De Stijl, and feels to have
severely been influenced by van Doesburg. He had designed all the
publications, catalogues, letterheads, and posters of the Dessau Bauhaus ‹
and even the famous BAUHAUS letters on the main building of the Dessau
Bauhaus (see e.g. the collage by Iwao Yamawaki, fig. 15) was his design.
It is remarkable that Bayer had been entrusted to design this important
Nazi catalogue, a project that lied firmly in NS hands, and also that he
was allowed to design it in the best Bauhaus manner. Text blocks were
bordered by lines, full-page photographs were printed up to the edges, and
for script Bayer chose a classical Antiqua which he also used for his own
advertising agency. In a 1977 exhibition catalogue which Bayer himself
designed (in cooperation with Mark Friedman), he was not ashamed to
reproduce his work here and to present a Nazi propaganda show as ³das
wunder des lebens, an exhibition of popular biology and health.² Not only
did Bayer beautify the ³heroic SS troups,² for Hall No. IV, where the
section on ³race hygiene² (Rassenpflege) was housed, he also designed an
impressive collage that served as background for an explanation of Hitler¹s
race theory ‹ the ³eradication of antisocial elements and cripples² and the
(forceful) ³sterilization of those with mental deficiencies.² And on
another double-page, Bayer juxtaposed the medical drawing of the ³healthy²
human arterial system against Hitler Germany¹s new ³healthy² arteria-like
Autobahn-net (see fig. 16). While the Bayer catalog is very much National
Socialist in subject matter and in its message, Bayer¹s artistic means are
certainly not what has commonly been defined as Nazi art. In his then
typical style he mixed De Stijl and Bauhaus principles (e.g. for his design
of the script and the use of colors are concerned) with Surrealist
illusionistic techniques: clichés of empty deserts, larger-than-life
closeups of parts of the human body, bits of classical architecture, etc.
	From 1935 to 1937, Bayer was involved in several smaller exhibition
projects. In 1936 he designed a catalogue for the ³Deutschland² exhibition,
which was shown parallel to the Olympic Games. The photomontages (see fig.
17) he produced for this exhibition were were much less sophisticated than
his earlier works and are in full agreement with the bold ³blood and soil²
NS aesthetics. In addition to these government commissions, he was working
on a series of advertisements and title designs for magazines like die neue
linie. Only when one of his earlier paintings, ³Landscape in Ticino,² from
1924, was on display at the 1937 ³Entartete Kunst² exhibition, and only
after Gropius had mediated for him to direct the organization committee of
the American Bauhaus retrospective show in 1938 (together with himself and
his wife), did he emigrate to the USA. He then not only organized the
famous ³Bauhaus 1919-1928² exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New
York, and designed the accompaning catalogue, which should become the
cornerstone for the Bauhaus reception in the United States, but was also
engaged in similar activities after 1945 in West Germany. Interestingly
enough, nowhere in the 1938 catalogue is any mention about contemporary
political conditions in Germany or even about the fact that the Bauhaus had
been forced to close by the Nazi party.
	Not only Graeff and Bayer participated in Nazi propaganda
exhibitions: The former Bauhaus directors, Walter Gropius and Mies van der
Rohe, were both involved in leading positions in the already mentioned
³German People ‹ German Work² exhibition. Mies van der Rohe designed the
exhibt¹s mining section (see fig. 18) which served the Nazis as an example
for ³the need to create a healthy Aryan miner stem.² Walter Gropius, in
cooperation with Rudolf Hillebrecht, drafted in 1934 a plan for the ³Haus
der Arbeit² (House of Work), a newly established NS institution. He needly
decorated his draft with swastika flags (see fig. 19), but did not make any
compromise with the building construction itself. In another project, this
time in cooperation with two of his former Bauhaus colleagues (Walter
Funkat and Joost Schmidt), he designed the section on Nonferrous Metals
Industries of Germany (see fig. 20a, fig. 20b). In the copper and brass
section, he designed a huge structure with a kind of spiral staircase, of
which each step is made of a different metal. The spiral ‹ built in what
looks like a huge copper pipeline ‹ slowly revolves. The whole installation
resembles some of Oskar Schlemmer¹s models from his Bauhaus period.
Schlemmer, by the way, was as involved in Nazi propaganda projects as many
other former Bauhaus artists were. In a letter to Gunda Stölzl (of June 16,
1933), for example, he quotes and positively comments on a speech by
Goebbels. German publications reprinting this letter, regularly omit this
paragraph and generally portray Schlemmer as an anti-Nazi artist. While
there is no doubt that Schlemmer¹s situation worsened during the Third
Reich, this, it seems to me, is only due to the Nazi¹s cruel anti-modernist
policy which from the summer of 1937 became very intense, but is not
related to the artist¹s lack of will to collaborate with the brown regime.
Schlemmer tried, for example, to please the Nazis by using Nazi icons as
patterns for his compositions: For a mosaic contest for the Congress Hall
in the Deutsches Museum in Munich, he submitted a draft (see fig. 21)
showing a group of figures seemingly marching with increasing speed and
with a Hitler-salute from the left to the right, heading towards a luminous
Germanic sun god at the front of the 130 m long room. As late as 1937
Schlemmer, who by then was only allowed to paint kitchen doors or to design
patterns of camouflage paint for German tanks (see  fig. 22), still saw
clear parallels between the general rules of his art, ³principles, balance,
and order (Gesetz, Maß und Ordnung),² and Nazi politics: ³The virtues in
the arts find their parallels in national politics,² the painter argued,
thereby undoubtedly refering to his art and his government. East as well as
West German publications usually censored this quote in Schlemmer¹s letter
to Fritz Nemitz.
	 On December 12, 1933, Gropius became architect-engineer number 706
of the Reich Chamber of Culture (Reichskulturkammer). As a chamber member,
he did not have to follow any particular restrictions (like many of his
colleagues). His move to England in the fall of 1934 was, first of all,
motivated by financial considerations. While still in Germany he had
continued to participate in state competitions such as the Reichsbank
project in Berlin but the number of his commissions would decline. Shortly
before he emigrated to the United States in 1937, he traveled repeatedly
back to Germany. To speak of ³exile² or ³asylum,² as all post-1945
publications do, is therefore misleading. Until 1939 Gropius still hoped
for a return to Germany and intensely strove to keep away any political
complication from his person. Annually Gropius sent his (beautified!)
statements to the German tax office, signed important letters with the Nazi
phrase ³mit deutschem Gruß² ‹ quite to the contrary of what his Harvard
biographer Reginald Isaacs claims ‹ and from the Reich Chamber of Culture
he requested, as late as 1936, a confirmation that his activities in London
were in the interest of the German state, and when facing the English
press, repeatedly emphasized that he was still a German citizen. To be
allowed to bring his household effects from Berlin to the US, he used the
later West German president, Theodor Heuss, as a mediator to organize an
agreement with the Goebbels ministry: The German press should report as a
success, that a German would replace a distinguished Frenchman
(Jean-Jacques Haffner) at Harvard, and thus would serve the new German
regime well as an exemplary model for the German cultural and intellectual
superiority. Goebbels agreed and Gropius was allowed to ship all his
household effects to Boston. He also wrote to Hönig: ³Just like up to now,
I will also, in the future, behave loyally and understand my mission at
Harvard as one to serve the German culture.² Even after his emigration, he
continued to write similar letters to Hönig until the war interrupted
communications. Up to the outbreak of the war, when he had finally become
an American citizen and when public pressure was growing, he was cautious
to avoid any contact with political German refugees and their activities,
and he refused to make any public political comments.
	A group of young Bauhäusler, which openly declared their faith in
national socialism, followed the suggestion of Kandinsky and Lilly Reich
and applied for the reopening of the Bauhaus under the name ³German
Bauhaus². And in Italy, with Gropius agreement, Xanti Schawinski tried over
Mussolini to open an Italian Bauhaus with a politically changed conception.
Schawinski, former Bauhaus master and lover of Walter Gropius¹ wife Ise
(with her husband¹s knowledge), easily transferred Bauhaus typographie to
fascist Italian posters. The designer, who later emigrated to the United
States, was as practical as he was shameless: For an air show poster of
Mussolini¹s army in 1934 and a war time US Air Forces poster in America
from 1941, he used the very same Bauhaus-like draft.
	Mies van der Rohe, who, only a few years earlier, had constructed
the mentioned memorial monument for Liebknecht and Luxemburg (see fig. 3),
tried to work as closely together with Nazi officials as he could. From his
own perspective this meant to be ³unpolitical.² By the summer of 1935 the
rapidly rising office buildings, sports and party arenas, factories,
government buildings, public housing, renovations, airfields, barracks,
laboratories, industrial buildings, and autobahnen had turned Germany into
one vast construction site. Nowhere were the building priorities of the
Nazi regime more apparent than in Berlin. For several years Mies saw this
as a great fortune for himself.
	In 1934 Mies was appointed to be the overall architectural director
of the upcoming exhibition ³German People ‹ German Work.² But Hitler, who
hated modernist art and architecture in general and Mies van der Rohe in
special, categorically rejected Mies¹ appointment and later ordered his
dismissal. However, in June 1934 the former Bauhaus director had received
two other invitations to participate in important state-sponsored
competitions. Mies was more than willing to accept them. To the Propaganda
Ministry he submitted plans for the German Pavilion that should be build
for the 1935 World¹s Fair in Brussels, and the other plan was a prototype
design for service stations along Hitler¹s new Autobahn. Despite his
removal as director of the ³German People ‹ German Work² exhibition
committee, he and Lilly Reich ‹ the first female member of the ŒWerkbund,¹
and later the head of the interior design workshop at the Bauhaus, and the
closest collaborator of Mies ‹ as well as several of his former students at
the Bauhaus did much work for this exhibition. Some parts of his original
commission, the hall of the ŒHistory of the German Reich¹ and that of the
ŒHistory of the German People,¹ both of which were highly sensitive to the
Nazis in that they functioned as the visual showcase for Hitler¹s race
theory, where still designed personally by Mies but were credited to his
young associates Sergius Ruegenberg and Erni Walther (whose names were not
known to Hitler or Goebbels). The modernist design of these two halls went
hand in hand with the pseudo-scientific explanations and genetical charts
that explained NS race theory. Mies also designed the booth for the German
Mining Exhibit in hall II.  One could very well argue, as ironical as it
might sound, that this mining booth was in many respects one of the
highlights of Mies¹ Bauhaus style works. The centerpiece of the display
area was composed of three towering walls, one of rock salt and two of coal
(see fig. 18). The smallest of the three walls was the wall of rock salt;
its rusticated face of pale stone contrasted with the precision of its
horizontal coursework. Behind it we see a very tall wall, a painstakingly
hewn structure of the blackest imagianable anthracite coal. The intense
black and the wall¹s jewellike precision of its alternately polished and
unpolished surfaces created a strong polarity with the striated pale pink
and the beige tones of the rock-salt wall in front of it. Opposite of these
two walls stood a brownish-black, less intensive and less consistent
colored wall of bituminous coal. The rough treatment of its square-cut
blocks of coal very well contrasted with the salt wall. Mies had treated so
common materials like rock salt and coal just like precious marbles would
have been treated as building materials. In the presentation of such common
materials, following all the Bauhaus rules of design, he demonstrated the
new potentials of these old materials. While Mies had no problems to
incorporate his design and architectural skills with the Nazi government,
he seemingly did not make any compromise in style.
	In August 1934 Hitler prepared the final step to secure his
absolute power in announcing a national referendum in which he hoped to
receive the peoples goodwill for his usurpation of total power. One day
before the referendum, in which 95% of those registered went to the polls
and 90% of them voted for Hitler, the Völkischer Beobachter (of August 18,
1934) published a ³A Call by Cultural Leaders² in which 37 artists and
architects ‹ mostly Nazis like composer Richard Strauß, but among them also
artists like the sculptorer Ernst Barlach ‹ declared that ³we [the artists]
thus belong to the Führer¹s followers.² Mies van der Rohe, who was at that
time working on two government commissions, was one of the signers. His
name appeared just beside that of Paul Schultze-Naumburg, the leading
National Socialist art ideologue and the author of such works as Kunst und
Rasse (Art and race) who had actively been involved in the closure of the
Dessau Bauhaus. Mies¹ signature very much irritated and disappointed many
of his friends and former colleagues. László Moholy-Nagy¹s wife should
later interprete this as Mies¹ ³desperate attempts to play up to National
Socialism² ‹ attempts that in the end obviously failed.
	Mies had received several offers from the US: the first promising
offer came from Mills College. He declined this offer in January 1936. In
March of the same year he had received another offer from the Armour
Institute of Technology in Chicago to become the head of its architecture
school. For a rather long time Mies did not even reply to this invitation,
and when he finally did so, he included a long list of demands. When the
institute¹s president responded in writing that a final offer to him could
only be made by the Board of Trustees (an usual procedure), Mies felt
offended. At the same time the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Harvard
University contacted him ‹ the museum on search for an architect to design
its new building complex, and Harvard for the professorship that Gropius
finally got. The three candidates for the job as head of Harvard¹s new
Graduate School of Design were the former Stijl architect J.J.P. Oud,
Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe. But Mies felt again offended to be just a
³candidate² (a familiar story!) and to compete with Gropius, whom he
thought to be far less qualified than himself, and resigned from this
unwanted competition. This haughty attitude becomes more understandable, if
we know that in summer of 1936 Mies was evidently the city of Berlin¹s
number one candidate for a commission for the city¹s largest urban renewal
project of the century. Hitler¹s interest in architecture was immense; he
actually saw himself as a great architect and had already planned the
outline for the redesign of his new Thousand-Years Reich capital. City
development, however, lied still in the jurisdiction of the Berlin city
government, and the city (without Hitler¹s knowledge) had appearently
chosen Mies to head this project, who would have been more than happy to
accept it had he officially been asked. Mies tried therefore to protract
his American colleagues until he would have been offered the official
invitation to lead this project from the city government. Unpredictably, in
June 1936 Hitler was seemingly fed up with the city¹s slow organizational
skills, removed the plans from municipal authority into his own hands and
appointed the young Albert Speer with this unbelievable huge project. Mies
was most upset, but still not willing to leave Germany. As Elaine Hochman
so delightful describes:
Lazy by instinct, with a massive frame that seemed to impede rapid thought,
gesture, and movement, Mies naturally tended toward immobility. A man who
drew well, but preferred to let others do his drafting; who kept his bed in
his bathroom to avoid traveling too far for his morning bath; who did not
dress until two o¹clock in the afternoon, having spent the entire morning
drinking countless cups of coffee and thinking, could not be expected to
view such physical and emotional upheaval [emigration] with favor.
And in more general terms about the attitudes of German intellectuals
towards emigration Hochman rightly points out that
[l]ike most cultured Europeans of the day, Mies entertained a rather
fanciful image of America as a freewheeling place, where ŒKultur¹ ‹ in the
refined European sense ‹ did not exist, and the Œquick buck¹ and glitzy,
meaningless pleasures obscured more profound aspirations. He could not
imagine himself living among cowboys and Al Capone, Hollywood and Benny
Goodman. (...) While in Germany he was recognized and enjoyed the prestige
and social status of a ŒHerr Professor,¹ in America he was nobody.
	As late as 1937 Lilly Reich and Mies van the Rohe received the
commission for the design of the Reich Exhibition of the German Textile and
Clothes Industry in Berlin (see figs. 23), which was later in the same year
also sent to the German Pavilion on the Paris World Fair (as the section
³Textile Industry²). Only after Göring, of course without any legal means,
forced him to resign from the organization of the Textile Exhibition, to be
held in March and April 1937, and after he was finally urged to withdraw
from the Prussian Academy of Arts, did Mies consider to emigrating. Still,
he did so with legal permission and once in the United States was most
careful not to become involved into exile politics.
 	Many staff members from the office of Mies van der Rohe received NS
commissions: Sergius Ruegenberg and Ernst Walther designed in 1934 the
interior design of the large ³Ehrenhalle² (hall of honor) and several show
rooms of the exhibition ³German People ‹ German Work,² and Eduard Ludwig
created the platform for the wood industry, while and Siegfried
Giesenschlag did the one for the hardware industry. The latter worked later
as an architect at the air force ministry, while Karl Otto became the
air-raid protection expert of the Göring ministry. In the course of the
following years numerous former Bauhaus students became members of the
NSDAP and/or SS.
	In 1936 the Bauhaus graduate Emil Fahrenkamp organized the
³Deutschland² exhibition, an exhibit that opened parallel to the Olympic
Games, according to stylistic concepts of space and color that were
unaltered Bauhaus conceptions. At several spots he even placed chairs
designed by Marcel Breuer (fig.  24) ‹ who, after all, was Jewish and had
already left the country. Goebbels was so delighted that he exclaimed:
³This exhibition with its powerful photo installations [which where also
arranged by Fahrenkamp, see fig.  25] is born out of the spirit of our new
Germany.²
	In toto, the cooperation of artists and architects like Gropius,
Mies, Bayer, Fahrenkamp, and other modernists with Nazi officials on
important propaganda exhibitions like the ³German People ‹ German Work²
exhibition must be regarded as very important for the ³success² of these
exhibitions. It cannot be denied that their cooperation at these important
Nazi propaganda shows has influenced each show¹s aesthetic concept most
effectively. Bayer, for example, worked to the full satisfaction of his
Nazi clients, and the catalogues created by him left indeed nothing open on
racist definiteness.
(...)								(c) F. Hoffmann
=============END of excerpt============


         ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Frank Hoffmann * 1961 Columbia Pike #42 * Arlington, VA 22204 * USA
E-MAIL:  hoffmann at fas.harvard.edu
W W W :  http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hoffmann/




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