A new German constitution was drafted that summer, and in August the. … Weimar Republic was established. It gave the government a new seat, no longer Berlin but Weimar, which had been a pilgrimage site for the intelligentsia ever since Goethe moved there in the late eighteenth century. Lucas Cranach, Johann Sebastian Bach, Martin Luther, Friedrich Schiller, and Franz Liszt had all lived there. The great hope in a defeated and floundering Germany was that the wisdom and creativity of these geniuses would pervade the nation’s new incarnation.
The move of the governmental seat put the Bauhaus at the center of things. For Gropius, it was a great moment. But just when he would gladly have devoted all of his energies to the first full year of his increasingly important institution, an entreaty came from Franz Werfel. It was misguided, but Gropius still had to deal with it.
Having nearly died on the battlefield for Germany, Gropius was unlikely to respond favorably to a man who had recently been tried for treason and was his wife’s lover besides. But Werfel naively described two blissful weeks he had just spent with Alma and assured the man who, in spite of his request for a divorce, was still Alma’s husband that the idyll made him—Gropius!—”especially close to my heart and before my eyes.” He implored Gropius to join him in helping their poor Alma, who was “torn apart by the heavy conflict that tortures her.” Because of their mutual devotion to “this wonderful woman, who was born only for divine purposes,” Werfel maintained that no other man was as “dear and close” to him, and that they should go along with her idea of each spending six months of the year with her.125
Gropius did not answer the remarkable letter. Nor did he destroy it. Rather, he put it in a desk drawer.
WERFEL’S PROPOSITION came at the end of August, just as the Bauhaus’s first full academic year was about to get under way. Alma beseeched Gropius to think of their nearly three-year-old daughter. She wrote, “I am looking forward to the time when you will want to see her again. But when do you want to see her?” The child was only a ploy; Gropius, after all, had sought full custody of her. The issue was that Alma was again pining for her husband. She now insisted that she would jump at the chance to make another trip to Weimar, however rugged the travel. She found Gropius’s “dreadful silence” agonizing.126
Alma was suffering because this time the terms were his. She was jealous of Gropius’s devotion to the institution that had become his cause in life, and she also knew that his charisma, handsome face, and firm soldier’s body were irresistible to many women. By now she may also have suspected that he, too, had another lover.
Indeed, the tall, buxom Lily Hildebrandt—another dark-haired beauty, but one whose radiant calm and serenity made her Alma’s opposite—had become his latest obsession. Unlike Alma, she was younger than he—thirty-one to his thirty-six—and completely admiring of what he was trying to achieve in starting up the Bauhaus.
Lily was married to the established art historian Hans Hildebrandt, with whom she lived in Stuttgart. This was another point in her favor. It meant that she might help with the pressing task of raising some money for the school. The need was desperate: many of the young students were living in virtual poverty, and Lily was eager to help.
While Alma was bemoaning the absence of communication from Gropius and using their daughter as bait, he was sending letters to Lily about how much he longed for her. A letter Lily wrote from Stuttgart that October made him “wild, my senses in tumult.” He could resist his urge to rush to hold her only because their separation would be brief. He craved her unabashedly—and with an erotic intensity that made the missives Alma had once written him seem restrained by comparison. Illicitness again heightened the thrill. Gropius wrote her, “We shall both overcome this short period and kiss each other in our minds—and then—we shall rush into each other. Darling, my whole warmth will caress you. My hands search for the sweet naked skin, the ravishing young limbs which are longing for me! …I want to inhale your fragrance! Put a flower between your lovely thighs when you are hot from thoughts of me and send it to me in a letter.”127
The flower would not be necessary. The next day, he wrote again to say he had reserved rooms in two different hotels in Frankfurt for six days hence. In spite of the impecuniousness of the Bauhaus, these were establishments of the highest quality. The only thing Lily needed to do was to choose who would be booked in which one, since she knew the city better than he did.
In his office in Weimar, Gropius was pushing forward his agenda to forge ties between the Bauhaus workshops and German industry. He applied himself rigorously to the task of making the new school work on a shoestring budget. At the same time, he was organizing the details of his tryst. The latest issue was his new mistress’s proposal that they register as brother and sister in just one of the Frankfurt hotels. The idea, he let her know, “made me really laugh. Nobody will believe that your little nose belongs in the same family as my monster nose.”128
Lily wanted reassurance that, even if they cheated on their spouses, she and Gropius would remain loyal to each other. She had reason to worry: Gropius’s success as a Don Juan was growing. With his aristocratic good looks, he had more than the allure of being married to the infamous Alma. Adventurous and passionate, he was undaunted by anything, and as a result the school he had founded was achieving international renown.
WALTER GROPIUS DID NOT pretend to be unaware of his own appeal. But he reassured his mistress of his faithfulness to her, letting her know that three weeks after their Frankfurt idyll, at a big party at the Bauhaus, he had not even kissed anyone. For she had left him sexually exhausted. “It seems that I am at an age and in a state of mind which attract women. Many invite my advances. But that should not trouble you, on the contrary. After the deep saturation in Frankfurt, I am in an erotic-free phase and am completely absorbed by my mental work.”129
His language, however, did not remain “erotic-free” for long. On December 13, Gropius wrote Lily, “I would like to penetrate you with the sword of love.” His staying powers—or else his imagination—were impressive: with that “sword of love … enveloped by your sweet body …we would stay this way for hours not knowing where the I ceases and the you begins.”130
Gropius wrote this letter the day after a large public meeting at which authorities and prominent citizens in Weimar vehemently attacked the Bauhaus. He had, fortunately, felt equally potent as a speaker. He reported to Lily that he had been “sharp and witty” in a speech he gave responding to the diatribes that accused the school of violating Weimar’s classical tradition and personally demonized Gropius for his disregard of sacred artistic values. His discourse elicited “continuous endless applause. … I advance without compromise. … I had to summon all my strength and calmness to stop the assault of the howling mob.”131
Gropius elaborated on these harrowing events not only to Lily, but also to Alma and to his mother. To his mother, he wrote, “I am proud of this fight.” Having broken with the world of his childhood, he had “become a very primitive man.” He told Manon he now spent most of his time with the students, took his meals in the canteen with them, and preferred this new life of “less hustle and more inner intensity” to the one he had been leading before the war, when he was gallivanting from one family estate to another.132
Most of the former soldiers who had endured four years on the front lines in one of history’s most gruesome wars now craved only safety and calm. But it suited Walter Gropius to be at “the terrible vortex of dangers.” At the start of February 1920, he wrote Lily from Weimar, “The mob agitates against me.” He begged her to visit “so that I can feel again how it is to have a hot, loving heart beat against mine.”133 She had to do it immediately, since Alma was going to arrive some two weeks later.
At this tender moment in the Bauhaus’s history, a “Citizens’ Committee” published a pamphlet that exacerbated Gropius’s problems. The committee was made up mostly of members of the right-wing National People’s Party, backed by conservative landowners and industrialists who were against the new Weimar constitution and favored the restoration of monarchy. They commended Gropius’s original Bauhaus manifesto for representing ideals they respected, but said those worthy goals remained an unrealized promise. This publication attacking the school became immensely popular, for it represented mainstream opinion.
The opposition to the new school and to Gropius specifically was scurrilous and mocking, making no allowance that the great educational experiment was not yet a year old. According to the pamphlet, “The dithyrambic ending of the inspiring call for new action, which precedes the program, still reminds one, in thought and tone, of ‘Meister Heinrichs Wunderglockenspiel’ in Gerhart Hauptmann’s ‘Sunken Bell.’” As for the comparison Gropius made between the Bauhaus and the Gothic cathedral: “Parallels to past ages, much as they flatter the ear, always bear many a concealed flaw.” The Bauhaus was accused of being “an artistic dictatorship” linked inexorably to “the personality of its leader. … Such one-sidedness is a sin against the spirit of art.” The students, who were seen as outsiders to their historic milieu, showed “little gratitude. They consciously act as foreigners, deliberately display their contempt of the old Weimar, and by their conspicuous conduct provoke the opposition of the most patient citizen.”134
WHEN THE FURIOUS BURGHERS of Weimar were not at Gropius’s throat, Alma was. Gropius’s steely reserve, evinced in his ability to manage the difficult affairs of the Bauhaus and weather attacks others would have found insurmountable, was driving her off the deep end. She wrote him, “Your beautiful male hardness is a wall around you. I shall not let you know anything that may still interest you a little bit around me.”135 If he would love her, all would be different; otherwise, she would keep him ignorant of her and the children. She reiterated the threat time and again.
Gropius calmly urged her to stop the torture. His main concern was their child; he advised Alma to have the same priority. He had developed the persona that enabled him to nurture the Bauhaus in spite of a perpetual onslaught of problems. His unwavering resolve, the slight distance from which he governed, the tough shell he kept around himself—aided by his physical attractiveness—helped him to entice extraordinary faculty and students to the school, manage their many disputes, vanquish his enemies, and preserve financial stability and optimism. Most people would have buckled, their institutions going with them. The Bauhaus flourished.