The Bauhaus Shuts Down

The Dessau Bauhaus Stiftung memorialized the end of the Bauhaus 75 years before with a Tagung in the Oscar Schlemmer/George Muche Haus in Dessau (July 22, 2008). Dr. Peter Hahn, former director at the Berlin Bauhaus Archive, spoke about Mies’s last days as the Bauhaus’s third and final director. I added what I learned about those closing days when the Nazi propaganda chief Alfred Rosenberg maneuvered to shut down for good that “nest of Communists”.

It was my good fortune to meet the best student in that final 1933 class, the Chicago architectural genius Bertrand Goldberg—at an after party at Charles and Marjorie Benton’s during the Chicago Film Festival in 1977. In an ice-breaking joke, I told Goldberg I was giving up teaching film history to become a drug pusher in Chicago so I could afford living in his masterpiece on the Chicago River, Marina City.

His response to my joke was an invitation to join a group of out of town architects’ visit the next day to his Women’s Birthing Center at the Northwestern University Medical Center in downtown Chicago. It was a luminous experience: the architects were torn between praise for his genius revealed to them by Bertrand’s explication of the structures uniqueness (a central nursery was surrounded by a suite of private rooms for the new mothers) and their awareness that back home in Peoria that they would never ever play genius in their straitened circumstances!

That serendipitous encounter led to my habit of becoming his tutee every time I visited Chicago. It was a grand, if thoroughly ad hoc, curriculum—visit the latest Goldberg, followed by a lunch of explication. Only my parallel encounters with his Chicago pal Studs Terkel were as enlightening.

Sometimes we’d walk his Boxers, once encouraging them to pee on Cardinal Cody’s lawn, at a time when that Red Hat was scandalously in the News! We also gossiped about his teacher Mies as the best student (extrapolating from the excellence of his oeuvre) in that last class in Bauhaus Berlin. Our last meeting in 1995 (he died in 1997) was on the day that Timothy McVeigh destroyed the Federal Building in Oklahoma so we were in a very serious mood when we discussed Mies and his last days at the Bauhaus.

My companion, a social worker from Lubeck, on her first American visit, fidgeted nervously with me at the Chicago Hilton as we waited for our date with Goldberg. He picked us up at the nearby Institute of Art in his sleek sports car and whisked us to his private club in a skyscraper overlooking his Marina City masterpiece.

His Gropian idealism was still evident as he explained how hard he had worked to get Union financing for this building designed to reverse the creeping suburbanization of that era. Goldberg was very disappointed at the general abandonment of Gropius’s ideal of fusing art and technology to bring good design to “the working classes”. Philip C. Johnson wrote nasty private letters about how obsessed Pius was over the working classes in his lectures at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

As far as Mies was concerned, Goldberg said he was obsessed with living down in Alfred Rosenberg’s Nazi mind his pro-Communist Denkmal to Karl Liebknecht/Rosa Luxembourg (1926). Indeed Mies tried, unsuccessfully, to suck up to Albert Speer for almost five years—without success, Finally, Walter Gropius got him an assignment on Jackson Hole, Wyoming: a rich American’s summer home.

The Speer episodes recall just how groveling he was to Hitler. Arno Breker, Hitler’s Lieblingsbildauer, used to crash a Chancellery dinner whenever he had a former pal from his 1920’s in Paris to save from the Gestapo (Picasso and Jean Marais were two of his biggest “saves”. Speer on such occasions would chew Arno out for jeopardizing zheirclose associates. (Read “Speer”.)

But Breker always remembered the little informal lecture Hitler gave Breker secretly when Hitler, Speer, and Arno silently entered Paris after the defeat of France in 1940. Remembering, perhaps, his own sad days when he flunked out of Vienna Art School, Hitler told Breker not to worry about all the putdowns of the sculptor Hitler was fielding (think Speer!).

He realized that artists never understood politics, and that he didn’t want Breker to live in a garret: indeed the ranch he bequeathed to Arno was the envy of the entire Hitler cabinet—and the flight plan of most when Berlin was being bombed to dust at the end of World War II.

Those will remember how anxiety-ridden Mies was about being the poor Aachen mason’s son in Peter Behrens’ Berlin Office in 1910, flinching when he had to report to upper class Pius. It is rumored that Mies was Harvard’s first choice to head their Graduate School of Design in 1938, but that his English was so bad that Pius got the job, another bitter status pill he had to swallow. He was now in America, eager to change the Armour Institute of Technology into I.I.T. (Armour smelled too much of pig!)