Environmental Design.
This chapter looks at how Bauhaus ideas were selectively appropriated to serve the development towards a design oriented understanding of architecture and the built environment in which art was only to play a secondary role. The idea of art art as a
"subsystem" within the larger system of the designed environment was the basis of the development of complex environmental design. This did not relinquish art as an essential element of the built environment, as a carrier of ideal value, nor its
function as a complement to serially produced architecture. This continued
significance, albeit compromised, of art in the built environment, distinguishes GDR Modernism from other models, and which has been overlooked in the
historicisation of architecture and urbanism in the GDR. This chapter also challenges the simplified understanding that the Bauhaus legacy was belatedly adopted in the GDR as a matter of expediency, and presents a more nuanced understanding of why and how the Bauhaus legacy was appropriated.
The Bauhaus heritage: physical, archival and institutional
The Bauhaus heritage was particularly potent in East Germany not least because of the physical, archival and institutional heritage of the school’s sites in Weimar and Dessau, which offered focal points for developing Bauhaus thinking. The HAB, Hochschule für Architektur und Bauwesen, in Weimar (a follow-on institution to the
Bauhaus when it moved from Weimar to Dessau in 1926) was to become the most important centre for an expanded conception of urbanism and design in the mid 1960s1, and it was scholars here, such as Karl Heinz Hüter, Fred Staufenbiel,
Christian Schädlich and others that pushed forward the academic research around the Bauhaus, as well as by 1976 exploiting its institutional cudos to create a locus for progressive research.2
However, the architectural and institutional heritage of the Bauhaus located in East Germany was not the most important determinant in its eventual establishment within Party-sanctioned discourse. The Bauhaus, from its inception a site of conflict and difference, was able to serve cultural ideology on both sides of the Cold War divide, precisely because it was open to such diverse appropriations. Even for those in the GDR, who believed that art and architecture should serve and embody socialist society, it was characterised at one end of the spectrum as "technicism"
and as "aestheticism" at the other. Whilst the ideas propagated within the
patronage of CIAM or Neues Bauen were also contested, these did not achieve the same mainstream international cultural profile, and importantly, they paid very little attention to the social potential of the arts beyond architecture, which remained central to the GDR cultural model.3
1 Welsch Guerra
2 The 1976 Bauhaus conference, was an initiative of Bernd Grönwald together with Christian Schädlich as part of the HAB department for urban planning . The 1986 "Bauhaus Dessau – Zentrum für Gestaltung der DDR“, was also a project of Grönwald who pushed through his choice of Director, Rolf Kuhn, against the candidate proposed of the Housing Ministry. Kuhn belonged to the Weimar alumni and had also worked in close cooperation with Staufenbiel and Bernd Hunger on a sociological research approach to urban planning.
Guerra, Max Welch, "Räumliche Planung und Reformpolitik an der HAB Weimar", "Spatial Planning and Reform Policy at the HAB, Weimar". The version of this paper referred to is that of 8. March, 2011, as distributed at the 7th Hermann Henselmann Conference in Weimar: "City planning history as social history: the hidden reform discourse in the urbanism debates in the GDR. Institute for European Urbanism, Bauhaus University, 08. April 2011." (p 29) (already cited?)
3 Mumford, Erich, The Ciam Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960, MIT Press, 2002. In Erich Mumford's account of the topics discussed at CIAM, the question of the arts in the public environment was only occasionally touched upon after the war. At CIAM 7 in Bergamo, 1949, Polish architect, Helena Syrkus tried to put "The struggle for Socialist Realism" on the agenda but was limited to comments. There was also a commission on visual arts, chaired by Gideon at CIAM 8, 1951 at Hoddesdon, England: “The Heart of the City”, centered on the MARS group. P 222;
The Newspaper "Neues Frankfurt" the organ of the Neues Bauen movement, rarely discussed art as an environmental concern. In issue 4 of Das Neue Frankfurt, "Wie stehen Baukunst und Malerei zueinander", Amedee Ozenfant exceptionally argued for a better understanding between artists and architects. Ozenfant,
Historicisation of the reception of the Bauhaus in East Germany
The developing fortunes of Bauhaus heritage over four decades in the GDR is often presented as a dramaturgy in three acts, beginning with the early attempts during the Soviet administration to take up Bauhaus educational ideals, (Mart Stam in Dresden and Berlin-Weissensee4, Hubert Hoffmann in Dessau,5 Hans Hopp at Burg Giebichenstein in Halle6, and Hermann Henselmann in Weimar7 Horst Michel...), followed by the Bauhaus taboo after the 1950 anti-Formalism declaration8, then followed by re-appropriation and official endorsement of the institution with the introduction of the Bauhaus seminars in Weimar in 1976,9 and the re-opening of the
Amedee, DNF 4/1928. Following editions did include items on Avant Garde experiment in Photography (DNF 3/1929), Film (DNF 8/1930), Music (DNF 6/1926) and Theatre (DNF 10/1930), but these were not connected with architecture and public space. Reproduced in Neues Bauen, neues Gestalten : Das Neue Frankfurt / Die Neue Stadt ; eine Zeitschrift zwischen 1926 und 1933 / ausgew. u. eingel. von Heinz Hirdina. Hrsg. vom Amt für Industrielle Formgestaltung. - Dresden : Verl. der Kunst, 1984, p 312–313
4 See: Strauss, Gerhard, Mart Stam und sein früher Versuch, Traditionen des Bauhauses in der DDR schöpferisch anzunehmen, Wissenschaftliches Kolloquium vom 27. bis 29. Oktober 1976 in Weimar an der Hochschule für Architektur und Bauwesen zum Thema: '50 Jahre Bauhaus Dessau',1976; Hain, Simone, ABC und DDR, Drei Versuche, Avant Garde mit Sozialismus in Deutschland zu Verbinden in "Kunstdokumentation SBZ,DDR 1945 - 1990 : Aufsätze, Berichte, Materialien" Eds. Günter Feist, Eckhard Gillen und Beatrice Vierneisel (Köln : DuMont 1996) for a detailed account of Stam's four year career from (1948–52) in the SZO/GDR, pp 435–440; see also Drei Kapitel Weißensee : Dokumente zur Geschichte der Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee 1946 bis 1957 / Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee.] Ed. Hiltrud Ebert. Berlin, 1996; see also Castillo, Greg, The Bauhaus in Cold War Germany, in "Bauhaus Culture, From Weimar to the Cold War." Ed Chakraborty, Kathleen James pp 177-180
5 Hubert Hoffmann, Die Wiederbelebung des Bauhauses pp 369-375 gives his own account of his endevours. in Bauhaus und Bauhäusler : Erinnerungen und Bekenntnisse / hrsg. von Eckhard Neumann. - Erw. Neuausg.. - Köln : DuMont, 1985
6 See Hubert Hoffmann, Die Wiederbelebung des Bauhauses nach 1945 p. 371,
7 Hermann Henselmann, Peter Keler, and Gustav Hassenpflug were among those who tried to revive the Bauhaus idea at the Weimar Hochschule für Baukunst und bildende Künste
(today the Bauhaus University), see Thöner, p 117. They relinquished the idea on hearing of Hoffmann's plans in Dessau (Castillo, p.)
8 Walter Ulbricht The Five Year plan and the the perspective of the peoples economy. in Minutes of the IIIrd Party Congress of the SED, 20th-24th July, 1950. Band I Berlin (East) 1951, p. 67: Resolution of the Central Committee of the SED against Formalism, March 1951.
9 From 27th to 29th October, 1976, the first "Bauhaus Kolloquium" took place in Weimar. This academic conference, on the initiative of faculty members of the Weimar Hochschule für Architecture und Bauen (HAB), had the title, "The progressive ideas of the Dessau Bauhaus and their meaning for the socialist development of urbanism and architecture as well as for industrial design in the German Democratic Republic."
Wissenschaftliches Kolloquium vom 27. bis 29. Oktober 1976 in Weimar an der Hochschule für Architektur und Bauwesen zum Thema: '50 Jahre Bauhaus Dessau'
Bauhaus building in Dessau ten years later10. The motivations behind this late re-habilitation have been accounted for in terms of SED political maneuvering, from the desire to situate East Germany in a longer German heritage (Hoscislawski)11, to the economic imperatives of designing goods for export and producing cheap housing (Betts)12, and smoothed by the late 1960s "jettisoning the Bauhaus as 'mousetrap Modernism'" in the West.13 Castillo describes the 1960s as "aesthetic revisionism [which] opened the floodgates to a new appreciation for Bauhaus design."14
Bauhaus scholar, Rainer Wick, frames the late (from 1976) Bauhaus reception in the GDR as "the political instrumentalisation of history"15 and "historical justification of 'real socialism'"16. Whilst acknowledging the academic contributions of the 1970s and 1980s seminars,17 the themes were "forced in to the Procrustean bed of ideologically pre-punched dogma"18.
In the immediate post-war years, Germany's avant-garde heritage was hardly on the radar of the general population.19 Nonetheless an idea circulated in the years of
10 On the 60th Anniversary of the Dessau Bauhaus building, 6th December 1986, the ministerrat of the GDR reopened the Bauhaus. Minister of Construction Wolfgang Junker paid tribute to the progressive achievements of the Bauhaus and explained the future tasks that it would have as a centre for education and research.
11 Thomas Hoscislawski, Bauen zwischen Macht und Ohnmacht : Architektur und Städtebau in der DDR (Verlag für Bauwesen: Berlin, 1991) The gradual rehabilitation of the Bauhaus predated by about a decade the revision of the German cultural heritage, which did not begin until the Honecker era in the 1970s
12 Betts, Paul, The Bauhaus in the former German Democratic Republic – between Formalism and Pragmatism in Bauhaus, Bauhaus / ed. by Jeannine Fiedler (Könemann: Cologne, 2000)
13 Ibid p. 48
14 Castillo, Greg, p 190: "Aesthetic revisionism opened the floodgates to a new appreciation of Bauhaus design, the sensitive topic of the school's political and social history remained off limits until the mid 1970s when the Bauhaus was certified by common consensus in the Eastern Bloc as a "socially progressive" phenomenon."
15 Wick, Rainer, Notizen zur deutsch-deutschen Bauhaus-Rezeption nach 1945, Wissenschaftliches Kolloquium vom 18. bis 21. Juni 1992 in Weimar an der Hochschule für Architektur und Bauwesen "Architektur und Macht", Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift, Weimar, 1992, H. 5/6. Wick prefaces his paper with a promise not to indulge in the "superior attitudes" of Western commentators "who through no doing of their own had the luck not to live under the authoritarian force of a totalitarian system."
16 Wick, Rainer, Notizen zur deutsch-deutschen Bauhaus-Rezeption p.
17 notably, Karl Heinz Hüter, Kurt Junghanns, Klaus-Jürgen Winkler, Christian Schädlich, Gerhard Strauss sought to re-visit aspects of Bauhaus pedagogy, and in the case of Winkler, to re-assess the contribution of Hannes Meyer
18 Wick, Rainer, Notizen zur deutsch-deutschen Bauhaus-Rezeption p.
19 Neues Deutschland explained to its readers in 1947: "Bauhaus was the name of a group of architects which gathered around their spiritual leader Walter Gropius […] after 1920. Their aim was absolute neutrality and
the Soviet Occupation that a new Dessau Bauhaus would be "one of the first
socialist institutions of Germany."20 The subsequent demonisation in the early 1950s of the Bauhaus and associated interwar avant-garde traditions had the character of a strategy to mobilise popular sentiment in favour of the Socialist Realist cause, which was to stand as testimony of the ruling party's prioritisation of the working person over an intellectual or artistic elite. The potential GDR Bauhaus in Dessau had been conceived by Hoffmann in 1945 as "a centre for the design of our
environment."21 Hoffmann, in his own account, "did not want [the new institution]
to share the fate of the old Bauhaus, which was, with a few exceptions, to design some furniture, houses and products for snobs,"22 and yet its potential elitist
character (together with Hoffman's functions under the National Socialists) was the ostensible reason for canceling the plans.23
The Bauhaus as a model for the unity of the arts rather than functionalist architecture – the reception of Hannes Meyer
However, the development of the Bauhaus legacy in the GDR was not simply determined by larger political imperatives. The need to theoretically underpin the switch to serialised building and mass production of designed goods did open the way for re-assessments of socially oriented avant-garde movements of the 1920s.
But this was more than "aesthetic revisionism", to accommodate architecture and design production. Particular aspects of the avant-garde thinking were highly relevant for developing practices in the GDR, and they were developed and adapted for the new conception of the socialist urban environment which was to draw in engineers, planners, architects, artists, industrial and graphic designers and
utility in their designs, not only for buildings, but also for all the equipment of daily life. Today Gropius is the leader of the Academy of Building Planning at Harvard in the USA. His book, Rebuilding our Communities, […]
contains practical ideas for modern comprehensive planning and new ways of living." Neues Deutschland, 15.
Mai 1947
20 Neues Deutschland, 6. März 1947 Jahrgang 2 / Ausgabe 55 / Seite 3
21 Bauhaus und Bauhäusler P 370, Hoffmann is speaking retrospectively, though the date is not given.
22 Ibid
23 Ibid. Hoffmann's activities as a planner for a Nazi Lithuania (See Nerdinger, Winfried. "Bauhaus Architecture in the Third Reich" in Bauhaus Culture, pp139-152, here 146) also returned to haunt him and were a further disqualification. Castillo, The Bauhaus in Cold War Germany, pp 175-6
craftspeople, as well as social scientists. The Bauhaus offered a basis for a
conception of environmental design, but also for the Gropiusian ideal of a unity of the arts and technology. The continuing importance of works of art and ornament in the new socialist Modernist environments is generally overlooked by scholars, perhaps because these environments do not fit the familiar disciplinary paradigms.
The second director of the Bauhaus, the pronounced Marxist, Hannes Meyer, described by Walter Gropius in 1964 in terms of a chameleon who destroyed the institution24, appears to some scholars to offer the political link by which the Bauhaus could be integrated in to GDR discourse. Ulrike Goeschen suggests that there was an attempt to reduce the Bauhaus to the contribution of Hannes Meyer25 and his functionalist thinking. Rainer Wick greatly overstates the attention paid to Hannes Meyer in the GDR reception of the Bauhaus.26 This emphasis on Meyer and functionalism, however, does not correspond to the actual unfolding of the visual design of the environment as it emerged in the 1960s, nor to the position of Meyer's legacy within the GDR.
The following discussion on the reception of Hannes Meyer in the GDR is central to the discussion of the status of art within architecture in the GDR. By looking at Meyer's thinking on art, it becomes clear why Meyer was not in fact the ideal figure to link developments in GDR architecture with the avant-garde legacy. The
Bauhaus was a useful model for the "unity of the arts", rather than for a rejection of art in favour of a design approach to the built environment.
24 "I did not recognise the mask over his face…[he] purposely concealed his views and intentions", wrote Gropius of Meyer in a letter to Thomas Maldonaldo, Director at Ulm, reproduced in the as the publisher's Arthur Nigglis's Epiologue to Claus Schnaidt's monograph on Meyer. The letter is "the last known letter to
Macdonaldo" but is undated here. Éva Forgács describes the correspondance between the Maldonaldo and Gropius about Meyer in 1964. "The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics" Éva Forgács pp 176–177
25 Goeschen, p 174
26 Wick, Rainer, Notizen zur deutsch-deutschen….1992, p. 5 Wick claims that there were numerous works published on Meyer as an idealised Bauhaus figure. In fact, Meyer was only spradically represented in GDR Bauhaus scholarship, largely through the efforts of Klaus Jürgen Winkler, in the 1980s.
Meyer had been pilloried personally by Ulbricht,27 with the assistance of Hermann Henselman, a conscript to the anti Bauhaus cause in the early 1950s.28
Henselmann's 1951 attack on the Bauhaus in Neues Deutschland was specifically directed to Meyer's Bauhaus period, as "a systematic declaration of war against architecture as art, indeed of art itself."29 (Like Meyer, Hans Schmidt too came into personal conflict with Henselmann over their respective understandings and architectural achievements, Schmidt characterising Henselmann as a mediocre diletant and Henselmann Schmidt an "architectural policeman"30 ).
The critical assessments of the Bauhaus in the 1960s were cautious in their
assessment of the Meyer legacy. Under Flierl's editorship of Deutsche Architektur – possibly influenced by Hans Schmidt – there was an attempt in July 1964 to re-balance the negative reception in the early GDR of Meyer, who had already passed away through illness a decade earlier. Drawing attention to Meyer's focus on production for ordinary people, Kurt Junghanns31 was nonetheless critical of Meyer's scientific functionalist approach, and of the "exaggerations" and
"puritanical traits"32 for which he was known. Junghanns' assessment was followed by the reproduction of Meyer's 1940 assessment of the Bauhaus under his tenure, published in Mexico.33 Meyer's account emphasised the turn towards real
27 Walter Ulbricht singled out Meyer's architecture for the Trade Union Training School in Bernau
(Bundesschule des Allgemeinen Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes, to become the FDGB (Freier Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund) completed in 1930 in Bernau and expanded in 1951) for criticism and claimed that the Bauhaus "claims [note use of the present tense] that ideas cannot be given architectural form and that, in architecture, form, function, and construction take precedence; it went so far that Hannes Meyer, one of the last directors of the Bauhaus, claimed that we can no longer speak of building as an art, but only in general as construction.”Walter Ulbricht, Speech to the Volkskammer, October 31, 1951, cited in Schätzke, Zwischen Bauhaus und Stalinallee, p. 145.
28 For a detailed account of the motivations for and architectural materialisations of Hermann Henselmann's turn away and back towards a Modernist architecture, see Flierl, Bruno, Hermann Henselmann, Bauen mit Bildern und Worten. In Kunstdokumentation pp 386–412. "through all the transformations of forms and languages of architecture, Henselmann was consistent in his belief of architecture as the art of building." P 388.
29 Henselmann, Hermann, Der reaktionäre Charakter des Konstruktivismus, The reactionary character of Constructivism, Neues Deutschland, 4th December 1951 6 / 281 / p 3
30 Hain, Simone ABC-SBZ, p. 442
31 Junghanns, Kurt, "Hannes Meyer und das Bauhaus" (Hannes Meyer and the Bauhaus), DA 7/1964 pp 441–42 32 Ibid, p 42
33 Meyer, Hannes, "Erfahrung in der polytechnische Erziehung" (Experience in Polytechnical Education) published in DA 7/1964, pp 443–46, is a re-publication of Hannes Meyer's essay originally published in
"Edificacion", German version, Mexico, Juli-September, 1940, Issue 34.
production and systemitisation in all areas of workshop production, which in some respects correlated with developments in East German design and architecture in the 1960s: the research into serialised forms, the rejection of "meaningless"
abstraction, and the relevance of the range of forms of art and design for a larger societal-environmental purpose.
The August 1964 issue was the last issue of Deutsche Architektur edited by Bruno Flierl, before he was replaced by Gerhard Krenz. In interview with me, Flierl suggested he was dropped due to his references to the Bauhaus.34. Elsewhere, he gives the discussions on the frustrations of young architects35 in the controversial March 1963 issue as the reason for his dismissal36. Although this March 1963 issue was featured prominently in the criticisms made by the authorities at the June 1963
"7th Plenum" on ideological questions, at which Flierl and many other senior architects were forced to give self criticisms, it seems unlikely to have been the direct trigger for his losing the editorship as this did not occur until over a year after the 7th Plenum. At the same time, it is hard to know whether the Hannes Meyer piece, prefaced by the Junghanns' commentary, was significant in the decision to remove Flierl, given that a Bauhaus re-assessment from the Soviet
"7th Plenum" on ideological questions, at which Flierl and many other senior architects were forced to give self criticisms, it seems unlikely to have been the direct trigger for his losing the editorship as this did not occur until over a year after the 7th Plenum. At the same time, it is hard to know whether the Hannes Meyer piece, prefaced by the Junghanns' commentary, was significant in the decision to remove Flierl, given that a Bauhaus re-assessment from the Soviet