For Walter Gropius’s wife, however, celebrity was an essential issue—even as she tried to escape it. In February 1916, Alma was pregnant—this time for sure. Yet since most people did not know that she was married, she was unwilling to reveal that she was expecting a child.
Alma and Walter were both thrilled by the prospect of a baby, but her insistence on secrecy, along with the discomforts of pregnancy, made the expectant mother extremely tense. For that reason, Gropius did not tell her that he had been in a plane that crashed on an observation mission. The pilot was killed, and although Gropius managed to limp away from the scene, it had been a close call.
Since it was not in his nature to ask for sympathy, his reticence came naturally; even if he had wanted it, he probably would have received little comfort from the volatile Alma. When Gropius wrote to inquire about progress on a porch he had designed for her house, she replied furiously. She blasted him for his failure to grasp the impossibility of getting workmen during wartime: “This thoughtlessness makes me wonder. Such inconsiderateness!”70 Did he not realize how tiring anything to do with a construction project would be for her while she was pregnant? Was he that ignorant of her reality while he was out there on the front?
Alma scolded mercilessly. “And you want to carry out a practical profession while you have no idea how much you can demand of a person! And you want to be my support while you burden me carelessly with unnecessary tasks! … This has shocked me … because consideration is what I demand of you.”71 She snapped that perhaps he also wanted her to make alterations to the janitor’s house.
Then the monstrous Alma made herself irresistible. In midsummer, she wrote Gropius the sort of thing that could not fail to fire up a man confined to a military camp. “I am very sensual, long always for unheard of things. Want to suck you in from all sides like a polyp. Stay true to me! … Pour your sweet stream into me, I am starving.”72
Alma’s physical appearance had evolved. A decade earlier, as Mahler’s wife, she had been a bewitching young flirt whose unruly looks were part of what made her so compelling; now the vixen had become a refined goddess. A photograph of her in profile shows a visage that, firmed up with age, conformed to the rules of classical proportion, where forehead, nose, and the line from the bottom of the nose to the point of the chin are all equal, each a third of the total. Her nose was as straight as if it had been precisely drawn on a Greek vase, and her lips were perfectly proportioned. Alma’s slightly bulbous jutting chin and sharply angled jaw might have been considered her one facial flaw, but they resembled the idealized types painted by the neoclassicists. Her long and narrow neck and her porcelain-like skin were in the same tradition. Her well-coiffed, thick, dark, wavy hair, turned and pinned in a soft chignon, was a crowning glory.
To be in love with this tantalizing woman while dealing with the horrors of the battlefield and dreaming of an art institution that would transform civilization was more than Walter Gropius could bear. German war casualties mounted, and prospects for victory diminished as the British and French broke through along the Somme. Alma, meanwhile, kept taunting him, and she continued to bicker with his mother; the two women complained about one another to him, and he could do nothing about their problems. Walter Gropius began to descend into personal darkness.
DURING THE SAME SUMMER as the German defeat at Verdun, Gropius wrote his mother: “I am livid with rage, sitting here in chains through this mad war which kills any meaning of life. … My nerves are shattered and my mind darkened.”73 Such despair would be shared by many of the most creative people he would summon to the Bauhaus. Wassily Kandinsky and some of the others turned to visual experience as a lifeline in part because they felt that the outside world was beyond their control, incomprehensible, and deeply upsetting. The balance lacking in their surroundings, in their own minds and personal connections, had to be found elsewhere. The making of buildings and art could help them restore that lost sense of meaning.
For the architects and painters at the Bauhaus, cerebral doubt and uncertainty could be counteracted by the reassuring resistance of steel, the clarity of large sheer planes of glass. The muddiness created by governments could be tempered by the luster of polished chrome. The emotional anxieties generated by militarism and inflation formed a compost that nourished a passion for a stability derived from visual harmony. As Gropius’s problems with one of the most tyrannical women of the twentieth century became insurmountable, his resolve to realize marvels in the aesthetic realm would only intensify.
During that gruesome August of 1916, while Gropius went back and forth between the battlefront and his field headquarters in the Vosges, Alma let him know that a married man was making her loneliness bearable. “His wife is in no way disturbing,” she informed her husband, while explaining that “I must surround myself with serenity.”74 It was her pregnancy, she told Gropius, that justified her need for a man at her side. She relished every kick of their baby inside her and could not endure such a rich experience in solitude.
AT HOME, with her activities limited by her pregnancy, Alma was, in spite of her own peccadillos, jealous of her husband at the front. Gropius had a gig he loved to drive on his rare day off, and Alma often envied him galloping along in it. That he was in danger most of the rest of the time had no bearing for her. She thought he was using the gig to search for women. Then one day Gropius went out driving and the gig turned over just after he left the stables. Gropius was injured and the carriage shattered to bits; the horse ran away. This time Gropius did not keep his injury from Alma. When she heard the news, she blamed herself for being a wicked sorceress.
Alma’s impact on her lovers was certainly beyond the norm. Around this time, Oskar Kokoschka, who had been injured by a bayonet when serving with the Austrian army in Russia, returned from the front and learned of her marriage to Gropius. Shortly thereafter, Kokoschka commissioned a Munich dollmaker, Hermine Moos, to make a life-size doll of Alma. Kokoschka provided a drawing, also life-size, of his former mistress, and instructed Moos:
I ask you to copy this most carefully and to transform it into reality. Pay special attention to the dimension of the head and neck, to the ribcage, the rump and the limbs. … Please permit my sense of touch to take pleasure in those places where layers of fat or muscle suddenly give way to a sinewy covering of skin. For the first layer (inside) please use fine, curly horsehair; you must buy an old sofa or something similar; have the horsehair disinfected. Then, over that, a layer of pouches stuffed with down, cottonwool for the seat and breasts. The point of all this for me is an experience which I must be able to embrace! Can the mouth be opened? Are there teeth and a tongue inside? I hope so.75
During the six months it took to make the doll, Kokoschka bought Parisian undergarments and clothing for it. Once it was completed, he painted it just as he had painted Alma’s portrait, traveled in an open carriage with it, and bought opera tickets that allowed the doll to have the seat next to his. Finally, he gave a party at which the doll, exquisitely dressed by his maid, was present. “When dawn broke—I was quite drunk, as was everyone else—I beheaded it out in the garden and broke a bottle of red wine over its head.”76
IN SEPTEMBER, Gropius was granted a furlough to coincide with Alma’s due date. The baby, however, failed to appear during the seventeen days allotted. On October 6, he was back in the Vosges when he received a terse telegram announcing that a daughter had been born the previous day.
Gropius was devastated to be so far away. “My child has entered this world. I don’t see it, I don’t hear it,” he lamented to his mother. He had no idea, either, that after ten months of pregnancy Alma had deliberately injured herself to make it appear that she was hemorrhaging so that the doctor would be willing to perform the delivery surgically. It was nonetheless an excruciatingly painful labor, following which Alma, upon learning she had given birth to a healthy girl, immediately cried out, “Now, I also want to have a boy.”77
A week after the birth, a desperate Gropius still had no information about how Alma and the baby were doing. On October 16, he wrote his mother, for whom the little girl had been named, “I wait with chattering teeth for what fate has in store for me, who is so miserably helpless.”78
Alma did one of her turnarounds. She overcame her resentment at the infant’s being female, and began to adore her and to experience great joy when nursing her. She also started to think favorably of her absent husband. Alma felt that Gropius was “immensely generous” when from the front he arranged for her to receive, as a gift in honor of their baby’s birth, Edvard Munch’s Midnight Sun, a picture she had long adored in the collection of a wealthy Viennese, Karl Reininghaus. But when Gropius was finally granted two days’ leave to go to Vienna to see his baby for the first time, Alma greeted him with hostility. The excited father had taken an overnight train from France where the only available space for him was in the locomotive. He rushed home eagerly, only to have Alma recoil from “him, grimy, unshaven, his uniform and face blackened with railroad soot.” That description is her own; she felt no need to mask her disgust. Deciding that her husband looked like “a murderer,” Alma blocked his way to the swaddling table and prevented him from touching their baby; she only let him “glance at his child from a distance”—this is her proud account of the event—after he pleaded with her. When Gropius accused her of being “like a tigress,” she acknowledged that “there was more to it than notions of hygiene.”79 The real problem was that their relationship was waning.
What Alma had wanted above all from the marriage was a child. Now that she had achieved her goal, and had come to accept the baby’s not being a boy, she had little use for her husband. “I am no longer interested in his existence,” she wrote in her diary. “And yet, I loved him once!” The soot was only one of many things that bothered her. Gropius had been given to fits of jealousy during his brief leaves; recalling how he hurled a fan by Kokoschka into the fireplace, Alma found his rage unforgivable. While she was pleased that Gucki, now thirteen, “loved Walter Gropius,” Alma felt her own relationship with him was comparable to her older daughter’s.80 She was, she decided, like an adolescent who saw the man she loved only on rare occasions; the relationship was not that of a wife who lived with her husband. The reason for Gropius’s absence was irrelevant.
Alma wrote of Gucki, “With Gropius she was really infatuated. What seemed to attract her in particular was his mustache; when he shaved that off he was suddenly much less beautiful in Gucki’s eyes, and her romantic interest diminished.”81 Contemplating her loneliness with her husband off in the army, Alma realized that she felt just as fickle.
ALMA CONSIDERED their Christmas that year a disaster. Gropius jealously insisted that she give away Kokoschka’s portrait of her as well as Kokoschka’s drawings and fans. By Gropius’s account, on the other hand, he was welcomed warmly upon his return for the holidays and their daughter’s christening. He was pleased at how well Alma had managed their separation with a frenzy of shopping, playing the piano, seeing friends, and going to the opera, and he passed a vacation of “the greatest inner harmony” with his wife, baby, and the stepdaughter who continued to adore him.
A similar approach to unpleasantness would mark his tenure at the Bauhaus. He was not naïve, but he deliberately dealt with conflict by acting as if things were better than they actually were and intentionally blinding himself to problems. He was conducting his marriage in the same way that he would direct the art school: by minimizing the impact of controversy.
ON THE MORNING that Gropius left to rejoin his regiment, when he and Alma said good-bye on the staircase outside the apartment that Alma had had with Mahler and still considered her home, she affected her “brightest smile to help him over the sad departure.” But what was really on her mind was a concert that afternoon at which the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra was going to perform Mahler’s Song of the Earth. When Gropius missed his train and rushed home, Alma was appalled when he rang the bell “violently” and “burst in.” Her response was that “coming back is always a mistake.”82
Later that afternoon, the architect walked in the deep snow alongside the carriage in which Alma and Gucki were being driven to the concert. As he plodded in sequence with the horses, he begged his wife to let him join them. Alma had no ticket for him, which was a convenient excuse, since she was adamant that Gropius not attend. A friend had introduced her to Franz Werfel, the poet whose work she had read when Gropius selected boot leather, and she knew he would be at the concert.
Franz Werfel, photographed by Carl Van Vechten in 1940. Alma was rarely content to have only one man at a time.
Gropius departed again that evening. When he reached the border, he sent Alma a telegram instructing her to “splinter the ice in your features.” By Alma’s account, the words, ironically, came from a poem by Werfel.
Werfel called on Alma in her box at the concert, and then accompanied her and Gucki home. Alma wrote in her diary, “It had to happen. It was inevitable … that our lips would find each other and he would stammer words without rhyme or reason. … I can repent nothing. … I am out of my mind. And so is Werfel.”83
In February, Gustav Klimt died, making Alma realize that she “had never stopped loving him” either.84 Everything was happening at once. She would periodically take the baby Manon to Berlin, the nearest safe point to Gropius’s encampment, so they could meet whenever he was granted leaves of two or three days, but she remained preoccupied by thoughts of Klimt and, again, Kokoschka. Franz Werfel, meanwhile, had her periodically visit him in Vienna at the Hotel Bristol, where he was correcting the proofs of Day of Judgment.
And, although she did not tell anyone, Alma was again pregnant.