The meeting that Alma wanted occurred in January 1916. The Grand Duke and Grand Duchess of Saxe-Weimar summoned Walter Gropius to Weimar from the Vosges, where he was billeted with his regiment that winter. The encounter that led to the creation of the Bauhaus could not have occurred in a setting less like the Bauhaus in style. Gropius was greeted at the gatehouse of the grand schloss, a spectacular baroque structure built in the seventeenth century. He was taken through vast galleries, up the magnificent and imposing grand staircase, and through one opulent salon after another before arriving in the grand duke’s private chambers. The subsequent conversation went perfectly, and Gropius left feeling confident that he would be able to develop a teaching program with far-reaching ramifications. He had to return immediately to his battalion, but he wired Alma, ecstatic about all that would occur once the war was over.
Alma now loved the idea. “Your telegram of today puts a ray of happiness in my heart! Weimar! I would like that best! A small house there to begin, away from relatives and friends. … My God, that would be lovely. See that it gets done!”59 She had little interest in the agenda of the school or of its possible global significance, but thrilled to the prospect of domestic life in the picturesque city where Goethe and Schiller had lived.
In his encampment on the western front, Gropius began to imagine his new institution. The grand duke’s chief of staff, Freiherr von Fritsch, had asked him to identify the changes he would make to the Academy of Fine Art once it took over some of the functions of the former School of Arts and Crafts. Gropius’s thinking on the subject reflected his circumstances of the moment. While formulating his program, he was dealing on a daily basis with the tools of warfare—guns, cannons, the straightforward architecture of military camps—and with a cross-section of German society. The army was still a hierarchy, but every level of citizenry was present in it, and necessity ruled. Gropius wrote out for von Fritsch his guidelines for a collaboration of artist and craftsman that blurred the distinction between the two. He conjured an atmosphere of teamwork in which hardworking individuals with different areas of expertise would come up with effective as well as pleasing designs for objects and buildings, and in which mechanical methods would replace dependence on handwork. The latest technology would be applied to the realm of everyday living. In turn, Gropius envisioned that hard-nosed businessmen would be persuaded to endorse artistic creations. Worlds that had previously been considered separate—industry and artistic creativity—would be joined.
Gropius was promulgating the modernism he had discovered in Peter Behrens’s office and advanced with his own Fagus factory and the Werkbund machine hall, in conjunction with the spirit of cooperation and mutual dependence he had acquired in the army. And he was applying to other realms the qualities of design and meticulous execution he experienced every time he cocked his rifle or loaded a bullet.
WALTER GROPIUS DID NOT EXPECT the grand duke to favor all of his ideas. The young architect knew it would require a lot of cajoling to get his patron, who viewed the world from an ornate desk and grand canopied bed in a palace, to do away with notions of traditional handwork. The idea of merging art and industry in the institution that bore the grand-ducal crest would not be readily accepted. But as he had demonstrated with Alma, Gropius knew when to be ardent and when to be reticent. A tactician par excellence, he recognized the language and tempo required to deal with officialdom if he was going to nurture the seeds of such a revolutionary institution in territory ruled by nostalgia for the golden days of the nineteenth century. Van de Velde and Mackensen had both known what they were doing when they tapped the courtly lieutenant to advance their cause.
When plans for the new art school were tabled while Gropius returned to the front lines and the grand duke and Von Fritsch devoted themselves to their work on behalf of the military effort, Gropius needed to apply his tactics in a different realm. Manon Gropius was irate when she learned of her son’s clandestine marriage. Walter tried to make her understand that because Alma loathed being in the public eye, which it was no easy task for Gustav Mahler’s widow to escape, the secrecy had been essential. Beyond that, as the lieutenant wrote his mother from the front, he and his wife both considered “conventions a … great evil.”60
Manon Gropius finally bowed to her son’s request that she accept the match and reach out to his wife. Alma, however, was less agreeable. She wrote Gropius, “This is the first letter from your mother which comes from the heart, though from a narrow-minded one. … She is very greedy for power. … You go ahead writing her your good, brave letters. … Be all son!! As before, without telling her about your real life’s aims. She is not capable of understanding any of them.” Alma was determined, however, that Manon grasp what a step up Walter had made by marrying her: “Tell her that the doors of the whole world, which are open to the name Mahler, will fly shut to the totally unknown name, Gropius.” After reminding her husband that Manon’s own husband, Walter’s father, had never advanced in his work beyond the level of thousands of other people, she boasted: “There was only one Gustav Mahler, and there is only one Alma.”61
Even if the grand duke was unaware that she and Gropius were husband and wife, Alma knew that their love affair had long been the subject of gossip. She was proud that his involvement with her enhanced the image of Gropius’s forcefulness. And she was determined that Gropius recognize the ordinariness of his own family compared to the aura he had gained by being linked to her. She goaded him not to “fall back into the Philistine allee,” while letting him know that she admired his ability to rise above the level of his uninspired, uninspiring family.
Her taunts goaded him all the more to try to combat the old order. In the school he was imagining, he would meet the challenge of changing the daily details of millions of people.
WHILE GROPIUS DEVELOPED his ideas for the Bauhaus in an army camp, Alma went to Berlin. She refused to get in touch with her mother-in-law, but flew into a rage when Manon did not call on her at her hotel. The new Mrs. Gropius then insisted that her husband take a furlough to compensate her for her suffering by escorting her to an important party in Vienna.
He could not get permission; effective as Alma Mahler usually was, her demands had no impact on his commanding officers. But when Gropius was able to obtain leave to spend Christmas of 1915 with Alma in Vienna, their relationship was again idyllic. Alma and Gustav’s daughter, Gucki, now adored Walter as if he were the father of her dreams. Afterward, once he was back at the front, he wrote his mother, “I don’t know how I deserve so much love and joy.” All that was still needed was for Manon to “feel what great soul lives in my beloved wife.”62
What Walter Gropius next said to his mother about Alma revealed some of the same motives that prompted his creation of the Bauhaus: “I have only one great wish: that I may be able to live up to her expectations. …She will make of me everything possible with her steady longing for perfection.”63 He craved improvement of himself and the world.
The woman who longed for perfection was a torturer. Following their marvelous holiday together, she began writing him at field headquarters with descriptions of various men who found her irresistible. “That my beauty makes such an impression on him, I didn’t know,” she reported about one admirer.64 She played music for a second suitor, and welcomed visits from a third. Of course, she assured Gropius, she was faithful to him—though the others were trying hard to win her over.
WHILE DECLARING THAT HIS “one great wish” was to meet Alma’s standards, Gropius had another burning desire as well. In his tent, he typed eight pages of ideas for the new educational institution that would work in tandem with German industry. He sent the report to the Grand-Ducal Saxon State Ministry. It warned that with machine production having substantially replaced handwork, the new mechanization brought with it “the threatening danger of superficiality.” Gropius considered such inferior design an ominous threat to human well-being. The school he proposed would realize “technical and economic perfection” in tandem with “beauty of external form.”65
Business leaders needed to listen to artists, Gropius advised the ministry. “For the artist possesses the ability to breathe soul into the lifeless product of the machine, and his creative powers continue to live within it as a living ferment. His collaboration is not a luxury, not a pleasing adjunct; it must become an indispensable component in the total output of modern industry.”66
Through art publications and the occasional exhibitions he had seen in Berlin, Munich, and Vienna, Gropius had become alert to a handful of artists who had those “creative powers” in abundance. Besides pulsing with the “ability to breathe soul” that Gropius considered vital, the paintings of the Swiss artist Paul Klee were possessed of the purity and integrity Gropius craved in the realm of design. Gropius did not yet have the idea of summoning people of Klee’s caliber to his proposed school, but at least he felt he was not alone in desiring a very different approach to visual experience.
Gropius recognized that the gap between technology and the artistic realms would not be easily bridged. What was required was a state-backed educational institution where students would be carefully selected according to “their previous training and their natural capabilities.” These gifted individuals would then be guided by competent teachers in design studios. First they would receive practical training. They would then learn “organic design” (the italics were Gropius’s way of emphasizing the idea) in lieu of “the old, discredited method, which was to stick unrelated frills on the existing forms of trade and industrial products.”67
Gropius came from a world in which the esteem for decorum struck him as inherently false. He also felt buffeted around by his personal relations. In his educational program, he had jumped to surer territory. His ideals offered a transparency and truthfulness that were otherwise lacking in his life.
Gropius’s imagined prototype for a great teacher at the new school would have the power to guide the pupils to clarity and effectiveness: “False historical nostalgia can only blur modern artistic creation and impede artistic originality. He has to direct the students to look ahead and strengthen their confidence in their own nature and in the power of time, but without neglecting the legacy of the art of past ages with false pretentiousness.”68 That respect for the artistic wonders of the past was not to be confused with a weak attachment to outmoded form. But what mattered most of all, whether for students or teachers, was faith in oneself.
WALTER GROPIUS WAS IMAGINING a time when the everyday objects of human existence would be clearly conceived, ornament-free, clean, and functional. The most suitable substances would be employed; new manufacturing methods would be put to work. Efficient and pleasing household objects would bestow emotional benefits on their users. Convinced that design rooted in ingenuity and clear thinking benefits all who encounter it, while pretentious or illogically conceived objects do harm, he intended to replace human confusion with satisfaction and a sense of rightness.
Pounding out his manifesto as cannons blasted within earshot, Gropius concluded: “A school led in the above way could bring real support to the trades and industry and would be able …to stimulate the industrial arts in their entire scope, more so than their own production of exemplary pieces would.” As an exemplar of the noble collaboration he envisioned, he cited the Bauhütte, medieval lodges in which people from every artistic discipline—”architects, sculptors, and craftsmen of all grades—came together in a homogeneous spirit and humbly contributed their independent work to the common tasks resting upon them.”69
That ideal of anonymity, of working toward a higher goal, would be shared by all the true giants of the institution whose name would simply replace “hütte” (huts) with “haus” (house). It is no wonder that those of the true Bauhauslers who lived long enough would loathe with such vehemence the careerism, and the confusion of celebrity with more important values, that have come to dominate the art world.