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Gropius next went home in March. He wrote his mother about his five- month-old daughter: “I am totally in love with her. … She is lying next to me and sings endless songs, like a twittering machine. She is a cheerful child and full of vivacity. And very pretty though she looks so very much like me. Alma nurses her almost completely and performs amazingly well, taking care of the child without any help and at the same time finding occasion for music and social life. I felt I was in paradise.”⁸⁵

Such domestic bliss was the ideal of the architect who would devise the Bauhaus curriculum and design its residences. His goal was to improve everyday surroundings, and his starting point was the wonder of life itself. The greatest artist he would lure to the Bauhaus, Paul Klee, would make a marvelous painting there titled Twittering Machine, of a device that could be cranked to make mechanical birds sing. Sheer joyfulness was at the core of the Bauhaus mentality.

WHATEVER GROPIUS DID, he was consumed by passion. In every realm—architecture, fatherhood, womanizing, his military service—he sought the pinnacle. He was stationed in Belgium, where he taught military communications in an abandoned castle; its gardens and terraces were set into the landscape so as to form “the most beautiful and grandest sight I have ever beheld.”⁸⁶ When he was transferred to a peasant’s house to direct activities related to military communications—including the training of dogs, signal throwers, and homing pigeons—he delighted in his clean room, however modest, and his independence from the usual army routine. Gropius felt that given the difficulties others faced at that time, he had no right to complain about anything. He attributed the dreadful food—”turnips and so-called liverwurst”—to “the indolence of the gentlemen around here and I shall change all that.”⁸⁷ That will to eradicate the harm caused by the combination of laziness and excess in the past would peak when he created the Bauhaus.

For now, Gropius was running a school with a very specific purpose: teaching communications. The entire army was counting on him. From his mental darkness of the previous year, he was beginning to soar with faith in his own abilities and effectiveness. He was sent to Italy to instruct Austrian soldiers in the use of dogs to carry messages through crossfire. Gropius’s success at that mission would win him, at the start of 1918, the Austrian King’s and Queen’s Military Merit Medal 3rd Class with War Decoration.

Meanwhile, by the end of 1917, in the cafés of Vienna and Berlin everyone was beginning to talk about Alma’s romance with another cultural celebrity whose name was almost as glamorous as Gustav Mahler’s. Only Alma’s husband, living on turnips and training messenger dogs for the military, remained ignorant. Gropius spent another Christmas leave in Vienna thinking that his life was perfect, that relations with his wife and daughter and stepdaughter were flawless, and that Alma’s sole wish was to move to Baden-Baden to be closer to him. He still had a couple of months of blissful ignorance ahead before he figured out what was going on between Alma and Franz Werfel. It was a piercing wound to his ego from which he would never fully recover.

Werfel had an allure with which Gropius could not compete. The Czech Jewish novelist and poet came from a rich family—his father was a successful glove merchant—and he was a close friend of Franz Kafka, with whom he had attended high school. Werfel, who spoke and wrote in German, had published his first book of poems in 1911, when he was twenty-one; his verse had instantly created a sensation, making him a major figure in the movement of poetic expressionism. Werfel’s line “My only wish is to be related to you, O Man!” was on everyone’s tongue. It had the intensity Alma found irresistible.

The higher the emotional pitch, the more enchanted Alma became. At the start of the war, Werfel had joined Martin Buber in a movement endorsing pacifism, and in 1915 he adapted Euripides’s play The Trojan Women to emphasize the merits of peace and love in those treacherous times.

The intense cigar-smoking rebel pacifist who wrote that he wanted to be “dissolved by feeling,” and who made Gropius seem laconic by comparison, was able to turn Alma’s head and heart from her husband.

Werfel had none of Gropius’s good looks. His irregular features, contorted in a downtrodden expression under a furrowed brow, defined angst. He was not as dashing and was from a less socially acceptable family; even if the Werfels had money and were assimilated, they would always be thought of as Jews. He was so outspoken in his pacifism that after the war he would be tried for high treason. All this only enhanced his allure for the volatile, capricious Alma.

Even before he knew about his wife’s new liaison, Walter Gropius was descending into another period of emotional darkness, from which he would emerge only when he devoted his energies to the Bauhaus. Exhausted by a war that was heading toward a bitter defeat for Germany, he was longing to return to architecture, and to be recognized. He wrote Osthaus, “I’m crumbling inside. … I don’t want to be buried alive and must therefore get mightily busy so that people see that I’m still here.”⁸⁸ At the start of 1918, he sent his mother a letter from the war zone saying that his life had become “unbearable. I feel that I am mentally reduced and my nerves are getting worse.”⁸⁹

Like so many Germans at that time, Gropius latched on to a scapegoat for all that had befallen his nation: “The Jews, this poison which I begin to hate more and more, are destroying us. Social democracy, materialism, capitalism, profiteering—everything is their work and we are guilty that we have let them so dominate our world. They are the devil, the negative element.”⁹⁰ In the same letter he told his mother that he had just learned that Alma was again pregnant. He did not yet know that his wife’s Jewish lover was the father of the baby.

IN MAY, Gropius briefly cheered up: he believed that the Germans might prevail against the French after all. But then he was wounded in combat. Hospitalized, he again crashed from ebullience to bitterness. Now he deemed the war “insane … What a gloomy fate to have to sacrifice everything that makes life worthwhile for an ever more doubtful patriotic ideal!” His financial situation had become so dire as the result of years without any income beyond his meager military stipend that once he was released from the hospital he could not afford to buy a loaf of bread for his meager meals. The little he earned from the army he sent home to Alma, for he was determined that she not depend only on money inherited from Mahler to bring up their daughter. “My pride does not permit that my child be raised by money that another man has made,” he wrote his mother. Nothing was going his way: his mother, contrary to his instructions, had given one of his suits to the janitor, although it might have been worth as much as four hundred marks. Alma’s “touching noblesse” was the only thing that made his situation bearable.⁹¹ He still had no clue about the truth of her pregnancy.

Then Gropius was recalled to the front lines. Between Soissons and Rheims, he fought a battle in which a building collapsed on top of him, along with everyone else in his contingent. Miraculously, a flue penetrated the rubble near his head, allowing oxygen in; for three days, crushed by debris, he cried out, his voice weakening by the hour. Finally, some passing troops heard him. They pulled off the stones, chunks of plaster, and wood under which Gropius was pinned and took him to a field hospital. Of the many men who were buried alive, Gropius was the sole survivor.

While in the hospital, Gropius received a letter from the School of Arts and Crafts in Hamburg, asking him to teach there. He declined the invitation by making clear his greater intentions: “I cannot decide to say yes. I cannot imagine myself fitting into the existing curriculum. I am too self-willed for that and have had my own very definite ideas for a long time, very different from the existing ways, as to how architecture is to be taught. On this one cannot compromise and I see no other way but to continue my efforts to found a school program of my own.”⁹²

Lying in that makeshift hospital on the front, absorbing the shock that he was the only one still alive when so many friends and comrades had died at his side only days before, Walter Gropius now knew without a doubt what he had to do in Weimar.