It was in Gropius’s nature to leap into treacherous territory with giant steps. In 1914, the Deutscher Werkbund—an organization of independent artists and craftspeople “determined to combat conservative trends in design, and to grapple with the impact of mechanical production on the arts”46—was staging a major exhibition in Cologne. Gropius, who was developing a knack for befriending influential people, prevailed upon the Werkbund secretary to persuade the exhibition planner to hire him to design several of its structures. For what he rightly sensed would be a turning point in the history of design, he moved to Cologne. The luxurious cabin he created for a train sleeping car was a highlight of the Werkbund show; it summed up the notion of stylish, up-to-date travel and delighted the public. The journey from Munich to Paris with Alma was probably in his thoughts as he conceived it.
The ambitious young architect made an even greater impact with a pavilion for displaying machines. Revolutionary in its mix of simplicity and bravado, this structure, one of the largest at the exhibition, had a façade that was like a perfectly drawn thick bracket encasing a wall of glass with the bracket’s arms supporting an overarching roof, the profile of which was articulated in pure and simple white brick. A well-lit, unfettered, generous space, the building had both esprit and efficacy.
Alma Mahler heard about the Werkbund from Berta Zuckerkandl, the friend at whose house she had first met Gustav Mahler. Zuckerkandl had become a prominent journalist whom Alma considered an insider on the latest artistic developments. That May, telling Alma about the groundbreaking presentation of modernism, Zuckerkandl began to enthuse wildly about a young architect named Walter Gropius, saying he was the talk of the show. Zuckerkandl had no idea that the name would mean a thing to Alma. It was more than Alma could bear.
She sent Gropius a letter, which she signed “Alma Mahler (and nothing else anymore in this life).” She made no mention of Kokoschka. “I have a great desire to speak to you,” Alma wrote Gropius. “Your image is dear and pure in me and people who have gone through so many beautiful and strange experiences should not lose each other.”47
Alma beckoned her former lover to Vienna with an entreaty few men could have resisted: “I long for a will that would wisely guide me away from what I’ve acquired, back to what is inborn. I know I could get there by myself, too, but I would so much like to thank someone for it!”48
THERE IS NO KNOWING whether Gropius was tempted to take the bait. The military conflagration that would soon evolve into a world war had begun. On August 5, Gropius reported to his regiment with the rank of sergeant major.
Within days, he was fighting against the French in the Vosges. He quickly demonstrated his leadership qualities, and in November he was promoted to lieutenant. Then, characteristically, Gropius plunged from intrepidness to anguish. In mid-December, a grenade exploded right in front of him. Although he was not injured, he fainted from shock. Shortly thereafter, his captain was killed before his eyes by a shot in the heart. By New Year’s Day, nearly half of Gropius’s regiment of 250 men had been lost. He was emotionally shattered.
“At night I got the screaming jeebies,” he wrote his mother.49 A military doctor sent him back from the front lines to a secure camp in the hope that he would begin to heal. But Gropius’s insomnia became so debilitating that he had to be hospitalized in Strasbourg. Afterward, he required a convalescent leave back in Berlin.
A letter from Alma awaited him. The German newspapers had written about Gropius as a military hero, and she was desperate to see him. From his sickbed in Berlin, Gropius allowed that he might agree to meet up with her again. In February, she made the journey from Vienna to Berlin. Following their meeting, she wrote in her diary that he was “one of the most civilized men I knew, besides being one of the handsomest.”50
The reunion lasted two weeks, best described by Alma: “Days were spent in tearful questions, nights in tearful answers.”51 Gropius hammered away about her betrayal of him for Kokoschka, but, finally, at their farewell dinner at Borchardt’s Restaurant, the evening before he was to take a train to Hannover to return to the front, Alma knew she again had him in her clutches.
At the train station, during their final embrace, he pulled her onto the moving train. When Alma returned to Berlin the next day, after an unanticipated night in Hannover, it was clear that the woman who had signed her letters “Your wife” would get what she wanted.
GROPIUS’S COURAGE WAS RESTORED. That March, he again acquitted himself with valor on the battlefield by deliberately attracting fire from the French troops in order to determine their precise location. One bullet penetrated his fur cap, another the sole of his shoe; a third went through the right side of his coat, a fourth through the left. His bravery won him the Bavarian Military Medal 3rd class with swords.
In spite of the heat of combat, he was writing to Alma every day, as she was to him. Again Alma thought she might be pregnant. Having said a year earlier she was and would always remain “Alma Mahler,” she now signed a letter “Alma Gropius! Alma Gropius!” with the instruction “Do write this name in one of your letters.” Alma proposed that he take a furlough so they could marry, while initially keeping it a secret. The prospect excited her unbearably: “I am glowing and cannot sleep.”52
One reason to conceal the marriage was that Gropius’s mother objected strenuously to the love affair. Having been essentially on her own in the world since the death of Walter Gropius, Sr., in 1911, Manon Gropius threatened that she would leave Berlin if her son did not put a halt to his relationship with a woman she considered tainted by scandal. Gropius would not be cowed, however. He had not acceded to Alma’s wish for a secret marriage, but now he and Alma met with his mother and told her that they intended to wed.
His mother embodied the attitudes that he would devote his life to changing. Arguing with her, he demonstrated the iron will with which he would start the Bauhaus. Gropius explained to Manon that he had always challenged convention, while she embraced tradition. With her, he was not merely confronting conservatism and old-fashionedness, but also dealing with extreme belligerence and a lack of compassion he found intolerable. Walter Gropius relished the path to rightness, and nothing would stop him once he had made up his mind; he had the confidence that his viewpoint was the correct and humane one.
Gropius advised his mother to write the woman he intended to marry. That will to broker peace was one of the architect’s most powerful traits, and he had what it took to get difficult people to comply. Manon sent a conciliatory letter. Still, Gropius and Alma married in a secret ceremony in Berlin on August 18, 1915, without telling his mother.
By now, Gropius was addressing Alma by her middle name, Maria. Supposedly this was because he wanted to differentiate himself from the men who called her Alma. But Maria, of course, was what Mahler had called her—the habit to which Freud had attached such significance. Gropius’s real reason was very likely to identify himself further with the brilliant composer who had preceded him in Alma’s bed.
The day after the clandestine wedding, the rich young widow wrote of her marriage to the handsome lieutenant: “My objective is clear—simply to make this man happy. I am unshakeable, calm, stimulated as never before.” But Alma almost immediately became annoyed with him. She blamed Gropius when he was forced to return to the front soon after their wedding; she saw no justification for his abandoning her to his family and the city of Berlin, both of which she disdained.
Even though Alma regarded her husband’s military obligations as a personal insult, she dutifully accompanied him to a military equipment store on an exceptionally hot summer day so he could choose the leather for his riding boots. When he deliberated too long over the selection, however, Alma lost patience. Unable to tolerate the strong smell of the Russian leather in the heat, she rushed outside. She complained that “Gropius took his time,” while she always bought things “quickly, unthinkingly, and not always wisely.”53 Waiting in the fresh air and contemplating this difference from her meticulous, design-obsessed husband, Alma bought a magazine from a peddler. In it was a poem by Franz Werfel, “Man Aware.” It made an indelible impression on the woman who was anticipating her husband going off to war, and she noted the poet’s name.
ONCE BACK AT THE FRONT, Gropius had even more on his plate than his marriage and his obligations as a soldier. That April, Henry van de Velde, the innovative architect who had created the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar, a small and picturesque city in the bucolic region of Thuringia, had been forced to resign from his position as its director because he was Belgian. He asked Gropius to assume the post, writing, “You are, dear Herr Gropius, among those people whom I have always wished well and hoped the world would remember.”54 Initially, Gropius did not take the offer seriously. Then the grand duke shut down the school, not merely halting activities because of wartime, but decreeing, as van de Velde wrote Gropius in July, “that the Grand-Ducal School of Arts and Crafts cease to exist as of October I.” Van de Velde was shattered by the closing of this institution that had provided free design advice to industry and craftspeople. “Everything is so pitiful and sad that one could weep,” the Belgian lamented.55
Gropius did not receive this letter until after he had returned to his military encampment following his wedding. By the time he read it, he had also heard from Fritz Mackensen, the director of the Grand-Ducal Saxon Academy of Fine Art in Weimar—a completely separate institution in the city that was a bastion of German culture. Mackensen asked Gropius to head an architecture program there. Mackensen believed that the demise of van de Velde’s School of Arts and Crafts was not a bad thing. It had, Mackensen complained, a “feminine character,” evident in its failure to advance the applied arts and its neglect of architecture.56
Gropius was captivated by Mackensen’s proposition. He responded from his field headquarters that he would entertain the idea if he could dictate the terms. Architecture had to be a core subject, not a peripheral one, for it was “all-encompassing. … I would be able to work well only according to my own ideas. The absence of restrictions must be an explicit condition.”57
As soon as she got wind of this proposal, which would change her new husband’s home base, Alma wrote Gropius that Mackensen was a liar and should not be trusted: “This position is not so grand. You should enter into it only if they give you all the authority you ask for in writing.”58 She advised Gropius to speak to the grand duke himself. The word “Bauhaus” did not yet exist, but the institution was under way.