Gropius’s first faculty appointment was Lyonel Feininger, an American artist who had been living in Weimar. Feininger made a woodcut for the cover of a four-page leaflet that explained the aims of the new school. The image was an abstracted Gothic cathedral, its steeple a soaring triangle. The amorphous structure was surrounded by a flurry of lines and flashing stars that impart radiant energy. Gropius wrote a brief manifesto that was the sole text for the leaflet. Summarizing the ideals he had initially formulated in his military tent, he declared, “There is no essential difference between the artist and the craftsman.” In writing as in speaking, Gropius exuded confidence. “When young people who take a joy in artistic creations once more begin their life’s work by learning a trade, then the unproductive ‘artist’ will no longer be condemned to deficient artistry, for their skill will now be preserved for the crafts, in which they will be able to achieve artistic excellence.”103 Emphasizing the importance of technical capability, Gropius demystified what it meant to be a painter or a sculptor.
Nonetheless, Gropius voiced great faith in the potential achievement of artists once they had the necessary know-how. “In rare moments of inspiration, transcending the consciousness of his will, the grace of heaven may cause his work to blossom into art. But proficiency of craft is essential to every artist.”104
To achieve that expertise, students would be offered instruction in a range of fields. Whether they were trained as apprentices, journeymen, or junior masters, they would pay 180 marks per year—double for foreign students. The assumption, however, was that the Bauhaus would soon earn enough money for its designs to be able to waive these fees.
Students immediately flocked to Gropius’s Berlin office. He decided to start classes as soon as possible. By the end of April, the school was up and running.
Lyonel Feininger, cover of the program for the Staatlichen Bauhaus Weimar, 1919. This modernized Gothic cathedral became a summons for students from all over.
OTHER THAN ONE QUICK TRIP to Vienna Gropius had made early that spring before moving to Weimar, he saw nothing of his wife and the girls; he settled into his role as director of the Bauhaus in solitude. In spite of Alma’s earlier enthusiasm for the idea of moving to Weimar, every time she planned a trip there from Vienna she subsequently canceled it. After exploding to a friend, “What! Vegetate in Weimar with Walter Gropius for the rest of my days?” she let her passport expire.105
Alma decided that she wanted neither Werfel nor Gropius, but Kokoschka.
She nevertheless went through the motions of renewing her passport so that, in theory, she could go to Weimar, and was glad to have done so when her financial situation changed dramatically after the American government seized Gustav Mahler’s royalties in this postwar period because of his status as an alien. The loss of that income was so significant that Alma had to consider the possibility of living with her husband. In mid-May, she and Manon and Gucki finally made the journey to the Bauhaus. Taking the train from Vienna, they crossed the recently created Czechoslovakia before reaching Berlin and continuing on to Weimar.
SHORTLY AFTER ALMA ARRIVED in Weimar, the baby Martin died in the Vienna clinic where he had been placed three months earlier. Gropius, who was legally Martin’s father, received the telegram announcing the baby’s death. Spontaneously, he turned to Alma and burst out, “If only I had died instead.”106 He then sent a telegram to inform Franz Werfel of his son’s death.
Few people at the Bauhaus had any inkling of the tortures that their founding director, always upbeat in public, was suffering in private. On the surface, it was as if nothing had happened. For Alma it was the same. She was a hit in Weimar—at least with those people who did not find her too much to take. One of the professors at the former academy, Richard Klemm, gave a tea to present the Bauhaus director and his wife to the city’s old guard, and also to welcome the new faculty. The renowned enchantress from Vienna offered a sharp contrast to the more traditional Weimar types. “All who saw Alma were charmed by her beauty and superior bearing,” according to Lothar Schreyer, a painter from Dresden whose work mainly consisted of human figures reduced to abstract elements, with circles and crosses and stripes taking on the roles of body parts, and who was among the first people Gropius invited to teach.107 Following the reception at Klemm’s, Lyonel Feininger wrote his wife, Julia, his impressions of the Gropiuses as a couple: “In him and her we are facing two completely free, honest, exceptionally broad-minded human beings who don’t accept inhibitions, characteristics of great rarity in this country.”108
That, at least, is how the situation was represented by Reginald Isaacs, Gropius’s late-life biographer, who was a friend of Gropius’s at Harvard, where the Bauhaus director ended up after World War II. But there is another version to this history. Lyonel Feininger wrote Julia, who was in Berlin, on almost a daily basis that May. Unpublished letters in the Feininger Archive give a very different impression of Alma’s impact. On May 20, Julia wrote Lyonel: “Say hi to Gropius and his dear, fat wife. Has the püppchen [a derogatory German term that translates to ‘little doll’—said as if with a sneer] in the meantime given you her hand?” That same day, Lyonel wrote to Julia: “She [Mrs. Gropius] is visibly bored and is a very lively and spoiled Cosmopolitan who won’t be able to navigate Weimar for long.”109
On May 22, Julia referred to “Madame Gropius—always for herself!” She wrote Lyonel four days later: “But oh, if all men there have such beautiful wives, so big and impressive, and so whatever, how will I, a poor little plant, feel among them all? I’m really dreading that, I don’t even dare. And you of all people, the most important and first one of all, will then have such a wallflower for a wife!”110
For Lyonel Feininger, the greatest hazard in Weimar was the cost of living. He wrote his wife, “I’m totally beside myself over my expenses for a tiny amount of food. … Life here really costs a lot of money. Just for myself I need more money than usually all of us together. … Food itself costs between 12 and 20 marks per day!”111 In light of those hardships, Alma’s worldliness was all the more grating. Julia understood his complaints, replying, “I think you’re completely right in your judgment about the Gropiuses. You know how much I admire and like him. Regarding her, I have the impression that she has too much of an aura and is too much of a Grande Dame to hold out in small Weimar for long. She needs more of a current around her. After our one meeting—please bear that in mind—I have the impression that she needs more width and breadth around her than depth. But she is generous and has a big heart, that I know for sure.”112
THOSE RESIDENTS OF WEIMAR who were mired in tradition disapproved of Alma’s scandalous love life the way that Gropius’s mother did. And even though many of the Bauhaus students admired the licentiousness the townspeople deplored, like the Feiningers, they were put off by Alma’s apparent sophistication. But in spite of the reactions she engendered in people and her initial reluctance to go to Weimar, once she was there, Alma’s enthusiasm was palpable. Later she recalled her first impression of the Bauhaus: “There was a new artistic courage abroad in those days, a soaring, passionate faith.”113
Whether people liked or disliked Alma, being married to the Madame Pompadour of the twentieth century heightened Gropius’s stature. His wife contributed to the daunting reputation of the man who, with the courage that had recently won him military medals, was now attracting brilliant faculty members and capable, enthusiastic students to the school he had organized so rapidly. That he was married to a vixen of fantastic sexual capabilities, one who had famously used them on some of the great creative geniuses of the time, added to his luster. And Alma’s renown was such that it immediately conferred a certain international importance on the Bauhaus.
AT THE START OF JUNE, there was a second party to welcome the Gropiuses. It was the first of many amusing festivities that would become an essential part of Bauhaus life. More relaxed than Richard Klemm’s tea, this party took place in a large reception hall, decorated for the event in cubist designs. An imaginative covering over the chandelier, made of wire and paper, added dazzle and an exciting hint of danger, although the paper was a safe distance from the heat. The large central space was adorned in yellow and black, the alcove in gray, and the small stage in light blue. Most of the students wore costumes, and, as Lyonel Feininger wrote Julia, “there was a fantastic master of ceremonies …so innocent and nice and trusting.”114
In spite of the high jinks, while Alma had coaxed her husband to move to Weimar by implying that she would happily settle there, she probably never actually believed she could flourish anywhere other than Vienna. Even Berlin had seemed like a backwater to her. Weimar, small and remote, was a nice place to visit, but only that.
Moreover, while Gropius was an idealist, Alma had little interest in theoretical issues or society at large. And to Alma, the unabashed romanticism of Mahler’s music and the rigor of Gropius’s architecture and theories paled before the dizzying force of Werfel and his poetry. Besides, Werfel was younger, and more totally devoted to her, than was Gropius.
Alma arrived in Weimar at the start of May, when the Bauhaus was a month old. She lasted only six weeks. In the middle of June, she told her husband that she was heading off to Franzenbad for a cure. Wherever she went, Manon and Gucki went, too. Rather than going to a spa, however, they returned to Vienna and an eagerly awaiting Franz Werfel.
After the “beautiful” weeks he had “savored” with his wife, daughter, and stepdaughter, Gropius felt “great emptiness” when they left. So he wrote his mother, whom he remained determined to prove wrong for her distrust of Alma.115 He did, nonetheless, allow to his opinionated parent that his wife was mentally unstable. But rather than acknowledge a personality disorder, Gropius attributed Alma’s problems to the conditions of life in postwar Germany and then the illness and death of her baby boy.
The architect’s mother knew better. She warned her son in no uncertain terms that Alma, in spite of her promises to be back in Weimar at the end of July, would never set up house with her daughters at the Bauhaus.
For once, Gropius heeded his mother’s advice. On July 12, he sent Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius a legal document enabling her to divorce him.
ALMA, OF COURSE, had to be the one to call the shots. She replied that she would give up neither her marriage nor her presence at the Bauhaus. In response to her letter, Gropius wrote his “Beloved” to say not only that their marriage must end but that there was no point in her continuing to make promises she would not keep. The cause for her lying was clear to him: “Your splendid nature has been made to disintegrate under Jewish persuasion which overestimates the word and its momentary truth. But you will return to your Aryan origin and then you will understand me and you will search for me in your memory.”116
Organizing the Bauhaus, Gropius was calm and resolute, negotiating complex issues without ever seeming perturbed; in private, he unleashed his furies. He chastised his wife as if she were a nymphomaniac, for allowing each new passion to rule her because her “sexual fervor” made her blind to everything else. She had, he told her, no recognition that such feelings are short-lived. Moreover, she was a liar whose promises were “just words.” All of this was part of her ultimate betrayal of Christian values with the Jewish Werfel: “Our bond has come to an end, and there is now only the bitter solution of divorce—because you cannot mock God.”117
His riposte renewed Alma’s desire for him. She responded by proposing that they could “live a life full of love and beauty” with her spending half of every year with him and half with Werfel. In the summer of 1919, just as he was gearing up the Bauhaus for its first full year, Gropius wrestled with her proposal. He weighed its value primarily for his daughter and stepdaughter, and then for himself. None of the colleagues with whom he was developing the various workshops, or the prospective teachers and students he was interviewing as the school began to grow, had a clue about his marital preoccupations.
After reflecting on his wife’s proposition, Gropius became enraged. Proud as he was of his own rejection of tradition, he wrote “Almschi” to say, “I am hurt … don’t do this to me, my beloved, to offer something that is a half measure.”118
Divorce was the only option. He saw it as a clean break, a separation from the evils of the past, much as the Bauhaus was an answer to the decadence of existing German society. Gropius begged Alma to sign the necessary document. It was, he wrote, imperative “to clarify everything now; the sickness of our marriage demands an operation.”119
The confidence that came with his new role as head of an institution that embodied everything he believed in gave him a courage he had previously lacked. He now declared, “Our marriage was never a real marriage; the woman was missing in it. For a short time you were a splendid lover for me, then you went away without being able to outlast and heal my war impairments with love and tenderness and trust. That would have been a marriage.”120 The blindness and illusions that had lingered in him only a couple of months earlier, before his mother set him straight, now gave way to perceptivity. Seeing the truth, he told the truth.
Gropius went on to inform his wife that he was not bitter and would never forget her kindness and brilliance. But the Bauhaus had made it possible for him to envision a new life. Besides, when he wrote Alma that “I long for a companion who loves me and my work,” he already had someone in mind.121
ADDRESSING THE BAUHAUS STUDENT BODY in July 1919, Gropius referred to “these turbulent times.” This moment, “a colossal catastrophe of world history,” required “a transformation of the whole of life and the whole of inner man.” Ostensibly, he was referring to the crisis of postwar Germany—inflation, and the changes within the national government—but in his thoughts he could have been focused equally on the issues revolving around Alma, their child, her other lovers, his other lovers, even the roles of their parents. The point was, as Gropius told the students, that “what we need is the courage to accept inner experience, then suddenly a new path will open for the artist.”122
To lend harmony to human existence, Gropius envisioned aesthetic and technical perfection on every level, from drinking glasses to public buildings. These advances, to be achieved by a community of artists working together, would have far-reaching benefits. “This great total work of art, this cathedral of the future, will then shine with its abundance of light into the smallest objects of everyday life,” Gropius declared of the Bauhaus. It was essential for people to cooperate with one another and combine their energies, enjoying mutual support rather than depleting their force through the sort of rifts that were plaguing him in private. “We artists therefore need the community of spirit as much as we need bread.”123
Struggling to resolve his relationship with his only child and with the woman who had dominated his thoughts, Gropius instructed the students about the need to overcome “the scattered isolation of the individual.” Artistic integrity and faith in the power of honest design could provide a true sense of community and a rich stability. Gropius’s agenda was to demonstrate, through the Bauhaus, “that for us artists the crafts will be our salvation.”124