Back in Vienna, Alma Gropius now periodically walked out on Franz Werfel, who desperately searched the city’s streets for her. Alma was preoccupied with Gucki, who was anorexic—although the term was not yet in use—and bounced from romance to romance until she married at sixteen. Alma despaired of the match.
In March 1920, the troubled mother took Manon to Weimar, fulfilling an obligation to have her younger daughter near her father. Werfel’s Trojan Women was opening in Vienna, and she would have liked to be there. Instead, she, Gropius, and Manon settled in at the Hotel Zum Elephanten. A short walk from the Bauhaus, it was the best hotel in the region. Arriving at the gracious hostelry on the largest cobblestoned square in the old part of town, the setting of Weimar’s open-air markets, Mahler’s widow must have been delighted to realize that Johann Sebastian Bach had lived next door for a decade slightly more than two centuries earlier, and that two of Bach’s gifted sons had been born there. But living conditions were difficult even with Weimar exuding its charms. On March 13, there was a nationwide general strike; workers flooded the local streets, spitting at the government troops who tried to maintain order. Riots ensued, and many workers were killed; afterward, the corpses were dumped outside the walls of the local cemetery, where they festered for days since there was no one to bury them.
In the midst of this, Alma, Manon, and Gropius moved to Gropius’s new apartment. Many of the details fell to Alma, since Gropius was busy with the school. One of his main objectives was to launch a range of disciplines with dynamic, talented artists at the helm. He invited the sculptor Gerhard Marcks to start a pottery workshop, and asked Johannes Itten, the painter he had met at Alma’s in Vienna, to teach a preliminary course, the “Vorkurs,” in which students would explore the nature of form and experiment with paper, glass, and wood in order to acquire an understanding of the possibilities and limitations of each. This requisite foundation course in which every student learned about materials and techniques on a practical level in advance of attempting creative work was a cornerstone of Bauhaus education. Teaching it with flair and passion, Itten quickly became the most important member of the faculty other than Gropius himself.
Gropius also created workshops in carpentry, metalwork, ceramics, weaving, wall painting, and graphic art. Every student took the Vorkurs, but he or she also joined a workshop.
During this first growth spurt, Alma played a significant role at the Bauhaus. She admired the rapid progress her husband had made with the school; the vehement scorn heaped on him and the Bauhaus only added to their luster. She began to ingratiate herself with the school community.
In late spring, however, Alma again insisted the marriage was over. She and Manon returned to Berlin and Werfel. But Gropius now said he did not want a divorce after all, and went so far as to maintain that his wife was wrong to claim he ever had. Alma, too, changed her story. At times she insisted she wanted to leave Gropius and claimed that the marriage had ended long ago. But then she would declare that she could not be without him.
Gropius was anguished. He wrote his mother, “I cannot live without her. … Since she has decided to leave me with the child I shall carry the sign of disgrace with me forever and cannot look anybody freely in the eye.” Yet there was still another woman in his life. While Gropius was bemoaning the end of things with Alma and relishing the start with Lily, he also had an affair with “an attractive young widow.” We do not know her name; writing about the liaison in 1983, more than sixty years after the fact, Reginald Isaacs still felt an obligation to protect the woman’s reputation. While quoting letters Gropius sent to her, Isaacs concealed the widow’s identity.
But we know what Gropius wrote her: “I am a wandering star. … I know no anchors no chains. … I am bound nowhere and to no one. Wherever I go I make others feel good and by doing this, I create life. I am a sting, and a dangerous instrument! I love LOVE, without any objective, its great everlasting intenseness. You wanted me and I gave myself to you and it was wonderful and pure, two stars put together their sea of flames but: ask for nothing, do not expect anything!”136
After one Bauhaus evening when he feigned indifference to the “young widow” in public, Gropius wrote her explaining the need for secrecy. But their passion was too great to be abandoned. He concluded the letter, “I just drink your warmth and one day the sword will drive out of me again,” and signed off as “Your shooting star.”137
IN MAY, in the midst of Gropius’s juggling act, Alma and Manon came back to the Bauhaus. Afterward, Gropius wrote Lily that Alma now knew about them. But the state of the marriage was such that this no longer posed a problem. “I would like to have you in my arms again to drink Lethe’s oblivion. … Try to understand the earthquakes that shake my soul and be good and tender with me. … How is your husband? … Let me know it, tell me everything; be close to me and kiss me. I kiss your sanctuaries.”138
In July 1920, those earthquakes intensified. Gropius had to defend the Bauhaus at government hearings and demonstrate the same resilience required by his love life. The school’s finances were a shambles. The workshops still lacked the most rudimentary equipment. The effects of inflation were catastrophic; a copperplate printing press that would have cost four hundred marks before the war now would cost between thirty-four and thirty-eight thousand. Gropius proposed a budget that, given the budgets of other art schools, was more than reasonable. To convince the skeptical authorities that this was warranted, he stressed that internationally respected architects, as well as more than two hundred newspapers, had already voiced admiration for the new school.
Concurrently, he was negotiating his divorce from Alma. To effect it, he had to plead guilty to the charge of adultery. A scene was arranged in a hotel room. Witnesses were organized; detectives appeared. Everyone gave the necessary depositions. The process took a while, but on October 11, 1920, as the Bauhaus started its second full academic year, the marriage of Walter and Alma Gropius officially ended.