On August 2, before dawn, Alma Mahler Gropius went into labor in her house in the countryside. The infant was going to be dangerously premature, and her own health was in danger.
Alma summoned Gropius, who had managed to get himself transferred to a military hospital near her. He rushed from his bed and fetched a gynecologist and a midwife. When they arrived at Alma’s bedside, the doctor ascertained that the baby was in breech position and the delivery could not be performed at home. When Alma left the house, she had to be transported head down and bundled against an icy wind, while little Manon stood there as if to say good-bye forever. Gropius led his miserable wife and the doctor and midwife by carriage, cattle wagon, and train to a sanatorium.
A baby boy was born. But, as feared, there were complications. The baby had convulsions on his third day of life, and was too weak to nurse. Several days later, Gropius was awarded the Iron Cross 1st class, and with it came the exciting news that if he returned to the front he would have his own horse. To abandon Alma and the children was, however, out of the question. He let his superiors know he could not leave Vienna.
Two weeks after the birth, Gropius wrote his mother that throughout the long ordeal “I stood with admiration before Alma’s bed. This control, this standing above it all, always thinking of others, not of herself. She has a great magnificent heart and it is no accident that people love her so much. She deserves it.”93
Lieutenant Gropius had no idea that three days after the baby was born Franz Werfel had asked Alma, “Is it my child?” The following day, when Werfel saw the baby for the first time, he wrote in his diary, “I felt at once and distinctly that it belongs to my race. … The rhythm of its substance seems strongly Semitic.”94 He set to work on some verses he called “The Birth of the Son.”
Then, on August 26, Gropius, who had managed to extend his leave, overheard a phone call. Alma was talking with Werfel in an endearing voice, addressing him with the familiar “Du,” discussing what name should be given to the baby, and agreeing on Martin. This was the name of Gropius’s famous great-uncle, but that was a red herring. Without letting Alma know he had heard anything, Gropius went to see Werfel later that same day.
Werfel was napping and did not hear the knock on the door. Gropius left his card and attached a note to it. He followed Mahler’s example of a betrayed husband acting with dignity. He wrote Werfel, “I am here to love you with all the strength at my command. For the love of God, be careful with Alma. A disaster could happen. The excitement, the milk—suppose we lost the child.”95
Werfel was unnerved by Gropius’s generosity. He thought he might faint out of guilt at inflicting pain on someone of such noble feelings. He wrote Gropius to convey his deep thanks and admiration. Alma was overcome with remorse, especially when she considered how Gropius had taken care of her throughout the difficult delivery and its aftermath.
Shortly after Gropius wrote Werfel, his furlough came to an abrupt end. Germany’s military situation had suddenly taken a turn for the worse. He immediately returned to the front, near the Marne. He was not there for long, however. At the end of September, Hindenburg and Ludendorff requested an armistice and accepted the defeat of Germany.
WALTER GROPIUS RETURNED to Berlin. From there he went to Vienna and proposed to Alma that they divorce—with the condition that he have custody of their daughter. He anticipated that he would be released from the military on November 18, 1918, the day he would be thirty-five and a half years old. Then he would be in a position to care for Manon. Alma could remain with Werfel to bring up Gucki and the infant Martin.
When Alma refused, Gropius tried a different tactic. On November 4, he went to Werfel’s hotel and persuaded the poet to go with him to call on Alma.
Facing her husband and her lover, Alma announced that they both had to leave her. Her plan was to go off alone with the children. Gropius “threw himself at his wife’s feet, beat his breast, implored her to forgive him. … All he wanted was to keep her, nothing else.”96
Alma then decided that she would break with Werfel and resume married life. Yet when Gropius returned to Berlin, she began to see Werfel every day, in spite of her repeated promises that she would not do so. Meanwhile, it was becoming clear that baby Martin’s head was growing disproportionately fast and that he was showing early signs of mental retardation.
Martin’s condition worsened. In January he had a cranial puncture, the prescribed treatment of the era, but it didn’t help. The outside world was no less confusing than the child’s health and Gropius’s marriage. A leftist-backed revolution swept Berlin; a state of anarchy ensued when two of its leaders, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were murdered. On January 19, a prime minister and a temporary president were elected, but control of the government was up for grabs.
In March, little Martin, no longer able to live at home, was put into a clinic so that he could receive medical treatment full-time. Alma blamed herself for his illness, as if it had resulted directly from her personal conduct. Nevertheless, when Gropius went to Vienna a month later to see his wife and try to sort things out, she was too busy going to and giving soirées to engage in a serious discussion with him. He spent time with his daughter, who was now three years old, and his stepdaughter, and attended Alma’s parties—at one of them, he met Johannes Itten, an eccentric painter who would become one of the key figures at the Bauhaus—but he did not settle any of the major issues confronting him.
After being gone for more than four years, it was nearly impossible for Gropius to rekindle his architectural practice in Berlin. Trying to find design projects, he imagined “something entirely different now, which I’ve been turning over in my head for many years—a Bauhütte!” Again he used the word for a medieval masons’ lodge and imagined a similar idea of living and working communally “with a few like-minded artists.”97 The person to whom he breathed this was Karl Ernst Osthaus, one of the few people he knew who could be counted on to help in his effort to replace uncertainty with hope and clarity.
The milieu in which Gropius had been raised seemed increasingly alien. When his uncle Erich died around the same time that Luxemburg and Liebknecht were killed and Martin showed the first signs of illness, the war-shattered soldier felt completely estranged from his relatives at the funeral. He wrote his mother: “I was totally alone among them. They are … obstinately prejudiced and full of arrogant political megalomania, without ever looking at their own faults. They see only what is coming down, but not what is growing up. They know nothing about the mental processes of humanity.”98 Gropius distinguished himself from what he considered the loathsome mentality of Germany’s class of wealthy landowners: they were attached to an obsolete way of life, but he was different—interested in progress and determined to focus on what was good for the masses.
Appalled by the brutal killing of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, whom he considered rare for their idealism and tenacity, Gropius identified with their support of revolutionary goals—even if his were in the realm of building rather than politics. He became all the more fervent once he was elected chairman of the Arbeitsrat für Kunst, a group of artists and architects committed to “a total revolution of the spirit;” they sought to create “large People’s Houses,” high-rise housing structures in which it would be evident, in Gropius’s words, that “the building is the immediate bearer of spiritual powers, creator of sensations.”99
THE TIME HAD COME for Gropius to pursue the directorship in Weimar he had discussed before the war intervened. The grand duke had been deposed, but Freiherr von Fritsch had become Oberhofmarschall of the new government. On January 31, Gropius wrote him that he, too, was starting afresh. Using the oldest ploy in the book, even if it was true—that he had been offered another job but would rather take this one—he stated his case that the arts “must be freed from their isolation,” and that, perhaps contradictorily, “a small town” with “the remains of an old tradition” was the place for an approach that would infiltrate all of society in a completely modern way.100 Gropius assured von Fritsch that he was prepared to dedicate his life to this project.
Von Fritsch agreed to a meeting on February 28. Gropius used the occasion to propose combining the two Grand-Ducal Saxon institutions—the Academy of Fine Art and the School of Arts and Crafts—and making them into a single entity that would be “a working community of the collective artistic disciplines, which … should eventually be capable of producing everything related to building: architecture, sculpture, painting, furnishings, and handicrafts.” New workshops would function alongside the existing master studios, and the school would be “in closest contact with the existing crafts and industries of the state.”101
Von Fritsch fully supported Gropius’s vision. Within a few weeks, he had secured official approval. On hearing that the authorities had agreed to his proposal, Gropius suggested that it be called the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar.
Plans zoomed along. The former School of Arts and Crafts, which had served as a hospital during the war, would house the new institution. Henry van de Velde’s handsome building would clearly make a splendid setting for the school. The north façade had floor-to-ceiling windows that allowed copious daylight to pour into the workshops and studios; what was almost a wall of glass wrapped around the roof cornice so that the top floor had skylights as well. The inside was generous in scale, and, while nothing in it was as streamlined or pure as Gropius’s own architecture, every door pull and hinge betrayed an impressive eye for detail and a gracefulness.
Gropius was hired to start work as director on April 1, at a salary of ten thousand marks a year. Declining the title of professor—”I have decided to keep free of these ridiculous external things which no longer belong in our time,” he wrote his mother—the architect set out to find other radical thinkers to join the old guard from the Academy of Fine Art as faculty members.102