THE NAZI PARTY’S STRATEGIC USE OF THE BAUHAUS

MARXIST ART HISTORY AND THE POLITICAL CONDITIONS OF ARTISTIC PRODUCTION

Paul B. Jaskot

In the popular imagination, the Bauhaus and National Socialism are still opposed terms, the former representing individuality, artistic freedom and modernist creativity, while the latter stands for kitsch, cruelty and humanity at its worst. Such a duality is indicated in the dramatic conclusion of a New York Times article that accompanied the most recent blockbuster exhibition on the Bauhaus at the Museum of Modern Art (2009). In this article, Nicholas Fox Weber indicated some of the many ways in which Bauhaus artists participated in the National Socialist agenda. In the last sentence, he neatly summarized the duality between the school’s scholarly and popular reception in relation to the Nazi past: ‘The thought that anyone connected to the Bauhaus could have helped promote Hitler’s regime or design its camps is distinctly painful to people who study and care about this extraordinary school, which may have something to do with why, more than 70 years later, it comes as news to many of us.’1 Certainly, his implicit assumption is dubious, that art is usually morally good and, in contrast, the scholar is ‘pained’ when she discovers any participation of artists in human degradation. Even without Benjamin’s dictum that ‘There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’, we have more than enough examples in human history of art’s role as the handmaiden to power and oppression to argue the exact opposite of Weber’s moralizing. But still, Weber did effectively point to the split in the academic and popular reception of the famous design school. On the one hand, the scholarly community has been studying the relationship of the Bauhaus to the Nazi past for some time; on the other, the public (and by extension the market) seems to be stubbornly unaware of and ‘surprised’ by these findings.

Indeed, while perhaps still an attention-grabbing headline for the public of the Times, scholars have for decades made the connection between the Bauhaus and Nazi Germany a major point of study and interest. Perhaps no other modernist subject in twentieth-century art history has been so consistently explored in terms of its relation to the Nazi state, with the possible exception of those artists pilloried at the so-called ‘Degenerate Art’ show that opened in Munich in 1937. Three now canonical positions can be exemplified by the important work of Barbara Miller Lane, Werner Durth and Winfried Nerdinger. Nerdinger showed in his 1993 essay on ‘Bauhaus Architecture in the Third Reich’ that many Bauhaus architects were actively involved in architecture during the Nazi period, and even Gropius expressed an equivocal attitude towards working with the state.2 Parallel to this biographical focus, Durth studied the architectural careers of key figures in Albert Speer’s staff for rebuilding German cities during the war. In his 1986 book, he pointed to some notable patterns of experience among mid-century architects. A sizable number were trained in the Weimar years (including at the Bauhaus), embraced Speer and Nazi practices through the war, and then continued their trade with seemingly untarnished reputations as suddenly ‘modernist’ architects in the Cold War context of postwar German cities.3 And, crucially, Miller Lane was the first to show in her 1968 text that, while we think of Nazi architecture as all monumental, neoclassical and of stone, actually a wide variety of styles were used by specific leaders and institutions in the period including the steel, glass and concrete functionalism popularized at the Bauhaus.4 To my mind, her work on the political function of German architecture is still the gold standard and is surprisingly undercited in the literature.

But whether we are talking about biographies of key figures or the continuity between Weimar and Nazi careers, scholars such as Durth and Nerdinger share a position that has been naturalized in art history: the history of the Bauhaus and National Socialism is written from the perspective of the architects and designers, not from that of the right-wing politicians and bureaucrats. Even Miller Lane’s dynamic account of the political function of architecture tends to focus on individual figures within the Party or useful formal and national trends in the architecture of the period. That is to say, we know how the Bauhaus was suppressed by the Nazi state, how some of its members worked under fascism, and how specific Nazi politicians targeted its architecture and design or modernism in general. What we do not know enough about, though, is why the Nazi leadership took a political interest in the school. How did the Party itself actually see the Bauhaus politically? What was its use, especially in the local struggles so necessary for its rise to power? Why did they care about this example in particular and, more importantly, when did they care? The Bauhaus was not a constant cipher for cultural debates within the Nazi state, in spite of the popular idea that it was a consistent focus of critique. Rather, it was a cluster of particular artists, stylistic gestures and institutional formations that could be referenced tactically and sporadically as the occasion demanded. The Nazi Party’s strategic use of the Bauhaus is more complex than scholars have assumed, and analysing this complexity helps us to gain a better understanding of why the relationship between architecture and politics became a central component of Hitler’s Germany.

In particular, this essay insists on the historicity of a political history of art. Such a project has been modelled as well as theoretically discussed in numerous venues by Andrew Hemingway. The following argument attempts to take up two related strands of Hemingway’s project. On the one hand, it forwards the model of the sober and hard-core insistence on a materialist political history, grounded in institutions, that rejects the abstraction of a murky projection of political ideology onto art.5 And on the other, it insists on a theoretically informed scholarship that situates itself in relation to a Marxist tradition in order to promote a collective social critique. Most notably, my work here and elsewhere demands that we as scholars take up the challenge of Marxist art history in Germany that arose from a confrontation with fascism beginning in the late 1960s. This moment of German art history formed one of the most active, productive and still critical strands of our shared project. Hemingway, particularly in the last decade, has frequently invoked this tradition and individuals such as Jutta Held, Berthold Hinz and Otto Karl Werckmeister, among others, as scholars who have focused on the crucial Marxist concepts of struggle.6 This historiographic approach arose in the late 1960s in tandem with a political challenge to postwar German institutions, educational and otherwise. While building for some years, an important public shot across the bow occurred in 1970 when Martin Warnke organized a session at the Cologne meeting of German art historians, pointing out all too clearly how establishment scholars masked their clear debt to and use of sources from the Nazi period.7 Political debate about the recent past weighed heavily and hotly in postwar Germany, in art history as elsewhere, and the question of fascism exploded in new ways across disciplines with the political rise of the left in the late 1960s.8 As a result, to this day, the question of the Nazi past maintains for some scholars a point of both art-historical interest but also, and more importantly, institutional and ideological critique that lays claim to the fact that art history still has work to do, especially in exposing its unrelenting role in affirming cultures of domination.9 Hemingway’s insistence on a historicist and scientific Marxism acknowledges and deepens that agenda. This article is indebted to and attempts to give further weight to that project.

In the following pages, I will focus on one key and fateful moment in which the relationship of the Nazi Party (NSDAP) to the Bauhaus shifted, the crucial electoral year of 1930. Between the state elections in Thuringia in December 1929 and the national Reichstag elections in September 1930, the NSDAP became a much more prominent part of Weimar politics, after several years in which they attempted strenuously to attract electoral coalitions to support their candidates and their ideology. The rough and tumble of electoral politics have too often been flattened out in art history, so here the subtle dynamics of even monthly shifts in events and tactics form an important component of the argument. Perhaps such dynamics were of little interest to Mies van der Rohe, who led the Bauhaus after 1930, but they were central to the Nazi strategy to gain power. In this sense, analysing the Bauhaus from the perspective of electoral struggles highlights surprising ways in which the institution became of use (or not) to the most extreme right-wing parties. This will require some attention to the particularities of Nazi politics and Hitler’s priorities, not often a topic of much study in art history. But taking us into the weeds of some of the most brutal moments of this rise to power will give us a more sober assessment of the political function of art. In this sense, I am arguing for a kind of historicity at the centre of the most critical strands of Marxist art-historical analysis.10

The Bauhaus and the Nazi Party came to the fateful year of 1930 from two very different political trajectories. As is well known and best documented by Miller Lane, the Bauhaus as a state-sponsored institution was often subject to the vicissitudes of local or national political battles between the ever-competing factions of Weimar democracy. Already by the public 1923 Bauhaus exhibition in the city of Weimar, the school was having problems maintaining an apolitical identity, as the local Social Democratic Party (SPD) proclaimed its products and innovative pedagogy as an accomplishment of socialist cultural policy in the Thuringian state. Given the occasional grudging praise of aspects of the school by the local Communist Party (KPD), as well as its anti-traditional academic focus, these associations soon meant that the Bauhaus was an easy right-wing target as a leftist institution of ill repute. This position became evident in the state elections of February 1924, which ushered in a conservative coalition led by the German People’s Party (DVP). Considerable pressure was then put on the new government to close the school. By December, Gropius began dialogues with officials in the city of Dessau within the small state to the north, Anhalt, and in April 1925 he moved the school to its new home, name intact. The school’s political support remained relatively stable from this time on, through Gropius’s resignation in 1928 and Hannes Meyer’s initial year as the new director. In spite of the latter’s clear interest in a more leftist and proactive agenda for the school – exemplified in the commission to build the Bundesschule des Allgemeinen Deutschen Gewerkschaftsbundes (Federal School of the German Trade Union Federation) – Meyer’s ideological convictions and general political conflicts were avoided until the pressures of the Great Depression and his communist sympathies became a more overt presence in 1930. Notably, even after his resignation, Meyer, in a public letter to Mayor Fritz Hesse of 16 August 1930, denied like Gropius before him any politicization of the Bauhaus, especially communist, during his leadership.11 Of note, here, is the absence of any interest by the Bauhaus leadership in the Nazi Party, or fear of the propaganda against the school coming from that source.

But why should they have been concerned? The NSDAP had made relatively few inroads into the state of Anhalt by this time, and after all, educational institutions were state concerns. Even during the Bauhaus’s pre-1925 years in Weimar, where there were many völkisch and some Nazi-affiliated politicians, the Party was not as yet seriously focused on institutional politics. Instead, its followers were committed to violent overthrow of the government, such as had been attempted by Hitler on 9 November 1923 in the Beer-Hall Putsch in Munich (Bavaria). In these early years, the Party agitated against the very notion of a Weimar Republic democracy, so members had little need for elections other than as moments to undermine the system. For most of 1924, Hitler was in prison writing Mein Kampf, and in the December national elections the Nazi Party garnered a mere three per cent of the vote. Hence, while in his book Hitler could generally discuss his belief that powerful political regimes produce good architecture (as in the Rome of the Emperors) and rail against Jewish department store buildings in Berlin, the particularities of the Bauhaus or most cultural matters were of no concern. Notably, in the thousands of pages from the Nazi agitator Joseph Goebbels’s diary covering the entire Weimar years, the Bauhaus does not show up, perhaps surprisingly given his acute attention to culture. Particularly in the mid-1920s, Nazi leaders had other priorities.12

This situation would dramatically change beginning with the refounding of the Party on 27 February 1925 after Hitler’s release from prison. He began at this point to push the Party to engage more tactically in electoral politics, albeit initially with little success (as late as the May 1928 Reichstag elections, the Party achieved only 2.6 per cent of the vote). Following this change in its approach to the national elections came the Party’s first interest in developing cultural goals, including a gradual but growing interest in criticizing the Bauhaus, particularly after the 1929 electoral victories in Thuringia and the installation in January 1930 of a Party member, Wilhelm Frick, as that state’s minister of the interior and education.13 We can chart these changing positions in the major voice of the Nazi Party, its official newspaper the Völkischer Beobachter (People’s observer [VB]), a source that has been of surprisingly little interest to art historians.

Under the editorship of Alfred Rosenberg, Party demagogue and close associate of Hitler, the VB in general adapted its profile to the developing tactics and demographic variability of the Party. So, certainly, its early focus on virulent racist attacks against German Jews and communists continued; however, added to this after 1927 were sections on contemporary literature, sports, women’s issues and even a monthly horoscope. Cultural policy was part of this general trend to create a broader base for the Party beyond the hard-core believers. While earlier scholars often characterized the Party as a lower-middle-class entity, more recent research has confirmed that it was more accurately a Volkspartei, that is, a people’s party that strove for a broad constituency of supporters across class, geographic, age and gender lines.14 The Party’s cultural agenda was thus calculated to deepen its influence with one component of this more expansive electoral strategy, the urban middle- and upper-middle-class constituencies. The panache of literary discussions, music reviews and art criticism legitimated the Party and balanced its more virulent racist and anti-communist agenda.15

All of these manoeuvres were part of a broader field of electoral politics in the Weimar Republic, for the NSDAP was not the only party that took engaging with culture seriously as a means of increasing its appeal. At the same time that Hitler was calling for an expansion of Nazi Party efforts in cultural politics in order to extend his influence beyond the base of Party membership, the KPD was retreating from exactly this tactic. Its leadership favoured instead the establishment of left-wing artistic organizations independent of other Weimar-era constituencies. Previously, and since 1924 in particular, the KPD had attempted to place communists in Weimar cultural institutions as a way of consolidating its influence. Reviews in the KPD daily Die Rote Fahne (The red flag) and Party politics had affirmed an alignment with art, such as the promotion of George Grosz’s cause in his state trials and the establishment of an artist society within the Party in 1924, the Red Group. At this moment when the KPD was expanding its influence in German society, it embraced a cultural policy meant to appeal both to Party members and workers as well as the general artistic public. With Stalin’s ascension to the leadership of the International, however, attitudes began to change in the late 1920s. In particular, in 1928, the year Hitler overtly called for a cultural policy of the Nazi Party, the KPD followed Moscow’s command and reversed its interest in using cultural agents to link to existing German institutions to form a broader coalition, corresponding to the defensive but militant mode of Stalin’s Moscow bureaucracy. For the German KPD and its cultural reporting in the pages of the Die Rote Fahne, this meant a withdrawal from a more proactive interest in using art as part of a coalition politics in favour of an assertion of a clearer hard-line communist position that could be critical of such seemingly cross-over artists as Grosz. This sharpening of position would have some success with drawing supporters, especially as the economic crash set in and the stark choices drove more voters to the KPD. At the same time, though, the NSDAP would take up the slack in the electoral dynamics by attempting to represent itself as a Party of broad interest to the German public.16

Important to emphasize here is the fact that the Nazi Party did not have a coherent cultural ideology, but it did have a consistent agenda that addressed culture within the tactical context of electoral politics. So, for example, in the summer of 1928, the VB could run a scathing set of reviews of El Lissitzky’s installation at the Pressa exhibition in Cologne that emphasized the internationalist agenda of the show as well as the prominence of the Soviet exhibition, mocking its particularly innovative design. This, however, could be followed by surprisingly positive reviews of functionalist housing in Ernst May’s Frankfurt, the importance to Germany of industrial materials in architecture, or even mass-production techniques promoted by the Bauhaus [1]. As Miller Lane has argued, when the Party reached out for national legitimacy, the Bauhaus could be occasionally incorporated as part of the agenda, while only Jewish artists like Max Liebermann or those associated with the Communist Party, like Grosz, came in for consistently negative critical assessments.17

A dramatic shift occurred in the Party press and cultural policy with the success of the Nazi Party in the December 1929 state elections in Thuringia. Thuringia was not a random place for an important NSDAP victory. Unlike Anhalt, the state had long been a stronghold of völkisch groups, and, while there were important pockets of industrialization, it remained an area mostly of small towns where such groups prospered. Hitler thought it important enough to make his first visit in March 1925, and the city of Weimar was the only location other than Nuremberg (Bavaria) to host one of the all-important annual Party rallies (in July 1926). Through the 1920s, Hitler consolidated both the organization of the NSDAP in Thuringia as well as his own leadership role over the other völkisch groups. The results of these efforts were at first minimal; for example, in the January 1927 Landtag elections, the Nazi Party achieved only 3.4 per cent of the vote. At this point, Hitler was still manoeuvring to gain leadership of the right. With the economic crisis and the rise in unemployment in 1929, however, the time came for a stronger role for the Party. In the new elections for 29 December, the Nazi Party received 11.3 per cent of the vote, the first time over 10 per cent anywhere, which allowed them 6 out of 53 seats. This was just enough to make them a swing Party that could ask concessions from the conservative-right coalition.18

With six seats in the state parliament, they were able to name one cabinet minister in the conservative coalition government. Hitler did not select one of the more high-profile positions such as minister of economics but instead chose the minister of the interior and education. He demanded this position for a non-Thuringian, his loyal Bavarian follower, Wilhelm Frick, who was named to the post on 23 January. Crucial for explaining this choice was the fact that the ministries of the interior and education had the least interaction with and interference from federal agencies and also controlled the state police. Hence, more could be accomplished to highlight the Nazi agenda, and the compromises necessary with federal agendas in the other ministries could be avoided. Frick set about immediately consolidating control over educational and policing institutions, including the Weimar Academy of Art. Here he put in as head the noted racist architect, Paul Schultze-Naumburg, who had long argued against the new architecture in Frankfurt, Berlin and, of course, Dessau. The critique of the Bauhaus could be easily linked with the Nazi success story of Schultze-Naumburg, who was also by that time a major player in the Party’s cultural wing, the Fighting League of German Culture (Kampfbund für Deutsche Kultur). With the success in Thuringia, cultural policy could take an important position on the central stage of the Party platform, legitimating its aspirational interests, broadening its base and consolidating its attacks on its perceived enemies.19

What is most revealing, however, is how attacks on the Bauhaus were focused less on the stylistic or pedagogic goals of the organization and increasingly on its leadership. Of even more interest in the regular articles on the topic that showed up in the Party press in 1930 was the constant drumbeat against Gropius. The current director Mies van der Rohe and the left-wing former director Hannes Meyer were rarely mentioned, all the more surprising for the latter, who in the fall of 1930 had moved to the Soviet Union with several Bauhaus students, providing a seemingly obvious target. Instead, Gropius became the main symbol of the institution, its drift into internationalism, and its connection to a vast communist and Jewish conspiracy. For example, the most sustained analysis of modernist architecture including the Bauhaus came with three articles in the VB from October and November 1930, authored by Alexander von Senger, a Swiss architect who joined the Rosenberg and Schultze-Naumburg circle.20 In the first article on ‘Der Bolschewismus im Bauwesen’ (‘Bolshevism in the building industry’), Senger argued from the opening lines that architecture was not merely a luxury or an expression of the spirit, but also a means of instantiating political power. For Senger, Bolshevism was well aware of this and used the seemingly harmless sobriquet of ‘Neues Bauen’ to pursue its agenda by collapsing art and propaganda, all the more reason for the Nazi Party to defend the ‘political and biological significance of art’ to the people.21 Gropius was the first architect identified in the argument, initially named for working with the ‘communist propaganda journal’ L’Esprit Nouveau. Senger warned of the communist plot to destroy or ban all-important works of the past, from Michelangelo to Kant, and ‘already villages and cities have been torn down to be rebuilt with the formula of the Bauhaus in Dessau’.22 In the midst of further racist interpretations of the fall of culture under a communist agenda, Gropius was variously figured and connected to the Bauhaus, ‘Weimar-Dessau’. Well into the article, Senger also briefly mentioned Meyer’s ouster from the school, only to be replaced by Mies; he reminded readers that the latter created the Berlin monument to Liebknecht and Luxemburg. Having covered these figures in two short paragraphs, he turned back to Gropius and discussed the Sarraz declaration of the International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM) signed in 1928. The point of the article, naturally, was not the stylistic or philosophical commitments of the artists, but their international connections, their favourable reception to the radical politics of the Soviet Union, and their implicit agenda of destroying a racially strong German art and people. He ended the article warning that the Bauhaus itself had this agenda at the core of its interests.

The second and third article were, on the whole, less specific in naming names except for the appearance of Le Corbusier. Part two in the series focused on Neues Bauen’s ostensible intensive propaganda efforts in the last six years to influence public opinion through the press and other venues. Here, Le Corbusier and Senger’s fellow Swiss were the primary enemies, and he cited various quotations from Le Corbusier from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. He argued that the new building attempted to rid architecture of spirit in order to promote the industrialization of human society. Against this, Senger asserted that real architecture will survive as ‘Architecture is building brought to life.’23 The Bauhaus once again threatened this supposedly natural order by turning the building from a spiritual expression of humanity to a profit centre of capital, as its building methods of mass production were literally dehumanizing. People and construction would be poorer, but the Neues Bauen architects would be richer with all the state-sponsored work. In the concluding article of the series, the ‘communist’ Le Corbusier again played the lead role, for he served the role of mammon, the collection of profit that was the ultimate goal of Bolshevism. To further emphasize the international agenda, Senger briefly brought in building in the Soviet Union, especially by architects associated with the ABC group, including Hans Schmidt and Ernst May. For him, this was additional evidence of the link between capitalist patrons (for instance, in Frankfurt) and communist plots in the Soviet Union. The series ended with a reassertion of the human and cultural bankruptcy of the nefarious link between Marxism and Neues Bauen, in general.24

It is clear that, on the whole, Senger’s main professional and aesthetic targets were fellow Swiss architects, especially Le Corbusier. But why so much prominence to Gropius particularly in leading the series off?25 Certainly he was well known and well connected, but so were other members of the Bauhaus such as Hannes Meyer who was after all a founding member of CIAM, unlike Gropius. Given the scandal of 1930 around Meyer, it is surprising that he was thrown off with so little emphasis, here or in other articles in the VB. However, seen from the context of the strategic interests of the Nazi Party at this moment and in this geography, the focus on Gropius and not on the aesthetic innovations of the Bauhaus or the politics of Meyer made perfect sense. After all, the school continued to survive but in the state of Anhalt, not in the state of Thuringia. Mayor Hesse in Dessau led a broad centre-left coalition, including members of the German Democratic Party (DDP). The DDP, like the SPD and the Centre Party, was one of the three parties of the Weimar Republic most strongly committed to defending democracy.26 Thuringia, on the other hand, was the main symbol of success for the Party, and its history and politics needed to be highlighted in the Party newspaper. In this moment, the local political need was to create controversy and scandal around institutions known by these voters, to secure and expand their electoral support. In addition, while Frick and the Party could build local constituencies, at the same time they could use this very local process to attract national attention, especially through the inflamed but broad propaganda of the Party newspaper. While the Dessau school could be mentioned, its earlier incarnation in Weimar as well as the 1923 political struggle that drove it out of that state and ultimately secured Hitler’s leadership of the völkisch right were a much more important political touchstone, more convenient for building the base in Thuringia while legitimizing the Party’s national cultural agenda. Tactical references to Gropius and the ‘Weimar-Dessau’ Bauhaus (glued as he was by Nazi authors to a communist agenda that he never espoused) would serve this purpose much better than a discussion of flat roofs or even the current director, Mies van der Rohe.

My example here of the dynamic between the local consolidation of the Nazi Party and its national aspirations draws attention to how its variable use of the Bauhaus can help us explain aspects of the Party’s political character. In this sense, the VB articles on modernist architecture do not come together as a coherent late-Weimar cultural policy, as Miller Lane rightly observed; but they do coalesce as a coherent strategy for targeting specific electoral geographies in need of shoring up as well as reflecting the constant tactical changes of a Party seeking national influence. That is to say, these articles tell us less about how the Bauhaus was subject to Nazi slander, a pattern that we already knew. But they do show how focusing on the Bauhaus unmasks something about the political dynamics of the Party. The art-historical question is directed outwards to the political struggle of which culture was a part.

Such a strategic need for the Bauhaus evaporated as Hitler’s electoral successes mounted and there were other targets and interests. In October 1931, the NSDAP received 39 per cent of the popular vote in state elections in Anhalt, and it strengthened its hold with the April 1932 election, after which it formed a conservative-right coalition led by the first Nazi minister president, Alfred Freyberg. By 1932, the Dessau city council was made up of a fractious mix of forty members including representatives from the DDP, NSDAP, SPD, KPD, and five others from small right-wing groups. Hesse was still the mayor, but his hold was slim in the face of the fifteen seats of the NSDAP along with the five other right-wing party members. By August 1932, the NSDAP had succeeded in passing a resolution to close the school the following October with a vote of twenty to five (the SPD abstained, while the mayor and four other councilmen voted against). For the Nazi Party, the point here seemed again to be strengthening its local authority, not coordinating with a national ideological campaign against modernism.27

The subsequent history is well known. Mies moved the school to Berlin, where it survived for less than a year. The fact that the Nazi leadership saw the school in strategic terms also explains the almost complete disappearance of the Bauhaus from Nazi propaganda and state policy after Hitler was named chancellor in January 1933. The National Socialist agenda shifted immediately from electoral politics to consolidating total power in the state. Notably, when the school finally closed in July 1933, the Gestapo letter that sealed its fate emphasized the dismissal of unreliable faculty like Kandinsky and Hilbersheimer. By then, Mies and the faculty had already voted to close.28 This moment, though, reveals again the perspective of the Nazi leadership as it changed over time. In 1933, they focused on getting rid of the political parties or dissident unions that had plagued them in the Weimar Republic; but at the state level of institutions like the Bauhaus, there was not a significant need to dissolve the institution, only to purge unreliable members. Such a move was consolidated in the April 1933 Law to Restore the Civil Service, which allowed for the removal of any state official deemed suspect, a tool the Party could use also to replace them with its own members. For the Party, this law proved helpful to deprive Bauhaus professors and former professors of key positions or commissions. Hence, for example, Paul Klee was ousted from his professorship at the Düsseldorf Academy and replaced with Party member Franz Radziwill.29 The infamous 1937 ‘Degenerate Art’ show further exemplified this emphasis on individuals designated as ideological enemies. Of the hundreds of works on display, Schlemmer, Klee and Kandinsky among others connected with the Bauhaus were particularly well represented. Nevertheless, in all the wall texts and in the exhibition catalogue, the Bauhaus is mentioned only once, on a single label for a Kandinsky work that associated him with the ‘communist Bauhaus in Dessau’.30 Post-1933 political attitudes towards the Bauhaus focused on individuals and their ostensible status as ‘Jew’ or ‘communist’, not on the institution as a whole. With the war years and with a few exceptions of the most prominent representatives of the school, one’s prior connection to the institution proved to be a relatively irrelevant feature of an artist or architect’s biography in the face of the fanatic demands of the military and genocidal agenda.31

Too often, the literature on the Bauhaus characterizes the historical relationship between the school and National Socialism in parallel and symmetric terms. That is to say, one reads regularly of ‘the Bauhaus’ and ‘National Socialist Germany’ as though the two were equivalents. But culture was always a strategic chip in the Nazi game that, while absolutely central and of great importance, never set the rules of the Party’s leadership to the same degree that the political agenda did. Certainly at crucial times and in specific ways, the role of culture should never be underestimated in its importance to the racist and oppressive goals of the state. But, we need to see the cultural role of the Bauhaus as a variable factor whose strategic use could be of immense value at the particular moment when the Party focused on its drive to power, especially in Thuringia. In this sense, the Bauhaus was of much less concern in general to the Nazi elite at other moments of their domination than it perhaps retrospectively appears.

For Hitler, the Bauhaus was one part of the general cultural problem, and he was not interested so much in the specific enemy as he was in the larger ideological divisions that he kept firmly in his sights. This became murderously clear to any Jew, communist, gay man, Jehovah Witness, and the many other categories of large groups of people that the state rendered ‘enemies’ following Hitler’s world view. When push came to brutal shove and with the war as a driving force, he approved of his underlings developing the legal, institutional and practical means to put these general goals into action. By 1939, the particularities of the Bauhaus (long dissolved) or its artists (either in exile, consolidated or imprisoned) need not bother him or other Party leaders. Many of the ideas that these artists worked on could be easily used to further the war effort and genocidal project. Giving up on our heroic and, indeed, Romantic notion that the Bauhaus and its artists were a cultural bulwark of equal authority or of equal interest to the powerful within the Nazi Party perhaps diminishes their role in one of the great ideological battles of the twentieth century. But it most certainly makes their political function and instrumentalization much clearer.

I have argued that, while the outlines of the national relationship of the Bauhaus to the Nazi Party have long been known, the specific character of that relationship at the local level reveals a central dynamic of the Party during its electoral struggles previously outside of the cultural historical literature. In spite of this argument that goes back to fundamental German Marxist critiques of fascism from the late 1960s, the Bauhaus as a victim of the Nazi Party has had a tenacious hold on the popular and museological imagination. Let us revisit the Weber article in the Times with which I started and the Museum of Modern Art exhibition that it highlighted [2]. A version of my article was first given as a talk at a symposium to go along with MoMA’s show. I was asked to speak on a topic related to the Bauhaus and the Nazi Party. Apparently, though, the talk I gave was not the talk that was wanted. At the beginning of the question-and-answer period that came after our morning session, another scholar was asked to give an impromptu ten-minute lecture on the 1932–3 history of the Bauhaus, emphasizing for example the persecution the school faced at the hands of the growing faction of Nazi Party members in the Dessau city council. Now one could imagine that, for a general audience, the curators Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman could very well have wanted the more traditional part of the narrative also to be told, however unusual and singular it was to have another impromptu lecture added to a conference. As my article makes clear, I, too, find the historical circumstances of Nazi oppressive tactics, cultural and otherwise, important. But recentring the narrative only around the suffering and ultimate cultural triumph of the Bauhaus is the mythologizing work of ideology, and does no service to the historicity of a materialist analysis. Complicating the relationship of the Bauhaus to the Nazi Party means critiquing its continued isolation from the complex political history of which it was a part. It means showing in major exhibitions and their catalogues not only the work of Klee and Moholy-Nagy, but also of Fritz Ertl, the well-known Bauhaus graduate and architect of the plan of Auschwitz-Birkenau [3]. MoMA continues to insist only on the history of the former, not the latter, a position that of course follows its ‘civilizing’ role in affirming the values assigned to art but also the market, the political economy and thus the systems of domination in which we currently operate.32

2 Exhibition catalogue cover, Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity (Museum of Modern Art: New York, 2009). Photo: copyright © 2013 Museum of Modern Art, licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.

3 Fritz Ertl, Plan of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp (aerial reconnaissance view), 21 December 1944. Photo: courtesy of US National Archives (RG 263: Auschwitz, fldr. 19, CIA Ann. Negs., #15).

The art history of our time continues the centuries-old cultural work of commenting on the present without threatening to change it. As Hemingway and others have pointed out, this can include the Marxist ‘perspective’, which has been reduced at times to another -ism within a department, a museum or a discipline.33 MoMA can invite a Marxist art historian who emphasizes in his talk questions of minimal institutional interest without worrying that a revolution will break out any time soon. But then, if cultural institutions can be so expansive and, indeed, so seemingly inured to materialist analyses that question grand artistic values, why is there a continued need to reassert the heroic narrative of the Bauhaus?34 One of Marx’s great contributions was to show that the goal of changing the world was also still predicated on a rigorously materialist understanding of that world. The millions of small and seemingly harmless ideological assertions that surround us in our cultural institutions and in art history create a veneer of normalcy in constant need of critique to reveal that supposedly ‘invisible hands’ represent actually real institutional, classed and political economic interests. The hammer of historicity puts the critique of political economic power at the centre of its inquiry, not as one historical condition among many but as a fundamental concern. With the ongoing and obvious use of art to prop up elite systems and values, that critique also remains a necessary and constant process. Putting the Nazi Party in the middle of a story of the Bauhaus continues that vital collective goal that extends a Marxist art-historical project.

My thanks to Frederic J. Schwartz for his critical editorial comments.

1 Nicholas Fox Weber, ‘Deadly Style: Bauhaus’s Nazi Connection,’ New York Times, Arts Section, 27 December 2009, p. 24.

2 Winfried Nerdinger, ‘Bauhaus Architecture in the Third Reich,’ in Kathleen James-Chakraborty (ed.), Bauhaus Culture: From Weimar to the Cold War (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2006), pp. 139–51. Note that, while the original German was written in 1993, Nerdinger’s text ignores important earlier work in the English-speaking world, such as the compelling essay by Richard Pommer, ‘Mies van der Rohe and the Political Ideology of the Modern Movement,’ in Franz Schulze (ed.), Mies van der Rohe: Critical Essays (Museum of Modern Art: New York City, 1989), pp. 96–145. While I disagree with key aspects of Pommer’s argument (above all, his refusal to deal with class struggle so apparent in the Weimar period), he has given by far the most nuanced account of the variable relationship of Modernist architects to Nazi politics.

3 Werner Durth, Deutsche Architekten: Biographische Verflechtungen, 1900–1970 (Vieweg: Wiesbaden, 1987).

4 Barbara Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics in Germany, 1918–1945 (Harvard University Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1968).

5 Perhaps the most extended version of this critical project is clear from Andrew Hemingway, Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement, 1926–1956 (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2002).

6 See, for example, both his introduction and his analysis of the New Left in Andrew Hemingway (ed.), Marxism and the History of Art: From William Morris to the New Left (Pluto Press: London, 2006).

7 Martin Warnke (ed.), Das Kunstwerk zwischen Wissenschaft und Weltanschauung (Bertelsmann: Gütersloh, 1970). For the broader context of this moment in German Marxist art history, see Jutta Held, ‘New Left Art History and Fascism in Germany,’ in Hemingway (ed.), Marxism and the History of Art, op. cit., pp. 196–212; and Otto Karl Werckmeister, ‘Radical Art History’, Art Journal, vol. 42, no. 4 (1982), pp. 284–91.

8 See my discussion of the shifting interpretations of the Nazi past in Paul B. Jaskot, The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right (University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2012).

9 A post-1968 generation of scholars has done significant work on exposing the institutional relationship of art history to the politics of the Nazi era, as well as its postwar impact on the discipline. While these are not always Marxist in their critical import, most continue to cite and extend that earlier work. See, for instance, the exemplary volume, Nikola Doll, Christian Fuhrmeister and Michael H. Sprenger (eds.), Kunstgeschichte im Nationalsozialismus: Beiträge zur Geschichte einer Wissenschaft zwischen 1930 und 1950 (VDG: Weimar, 2005).

10 Note I first developed the argument about the Nazi Party’s strategic use of culture in Jaskot, The Nazi Perpetrator, op. cit., esp. pp. 16–37. This article draws from that analysis but focuses here and expands on the particular case of the Bauhaus.

11 See the institutional analysis of this period in Éva Forgács, The Bauhaus Idea and Bauhaus Politics (Central European University Press: Budapest, 1995), pp. 118–81. Notably, in the substantive essays in MoMA’s Bauhaus catalogue, there is little discussion of the move from Weimar to Dessau, and none of the political context for this move or other moments in the Bauhaus’ history. Adrian Sudhalter’s chronology in the back of the book, however, does give better texture to these events. Adrian Sudhalter, ‘14 Years Bauhaus: A Chronicle’, in Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman (eds.), Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity (Museum of Modern Art: New York, 2009), pp. 327–9. There are many documentary collections and histories of the Bauhaus to consult. In particular, see the now classic Hans M. Wingler, Bauhaus: Weimar Dessau Berlin Chicago (MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1969). For Meyer’s letter, published in Das Tagebuch, see the translation in Wingler, pp. 163–5.

12 The diaries of Goebbels are now available in a digital format as a searchable resource in key depositories such as the library of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. More generally, see the multiple edited volumes in Elke Fröhlich (ed.), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Sämtliche Fragmente, 19 vols (Institut für Zeitgeschichte: Munich, 1987–2008). For the early years of the Party, see the summation in Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1889–1936: Hubris (Penguin: London, 1998).

13 Kershaw, Hitler, pp. 257–9, 318–20; Donald R. Tracey, ‘The Development of the National Socialist Party in Thuringia, 1924–30,’ Central European History, vol. 8, no. 1 (March 1975), p. 30. Notably, Hitler’s move away from revolutionary politics began to put him in conflict with the left wing of the Party influenced by Gregor and Otto Strasser, in particular.

14 See the excellent overview of the developing scholarly understanding of the demographic character of the NSDAP in Paul Madden and Detlef Mühlberger, The Nazi Party: The Anatomy of a People’s Party, 1919–1933 (Peter Lang: Oxford, 2007), pp. 23–51.

15 Surprisingly, the only systematic study of the Völkischer Beobachter remains the relatively recently published Detlef Mühlberger, Hitler’s Voice: The Völkischer Beobachter, 1920–1933 (Peter Lang: Oxford, 2004). Miller Lane showed early on what use it could be, in her analysis of how the newspaper dealt variably with modernism. My own account extends Miller Lane’s, but from the local perspective of Party tactics and their significance.

16 For the KPD shifts in art policy in these years, see Barbara McCloskey, George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918 to 1936 (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1997), pp. 104–47.

17 See for exemplary articles Jaromir, ‘Fahrt zur “Pressa”’, Völkischer Beobachter, 10 July 1928, p. 3, or the coverage of the Grosz trial for blasphemy (and the second time he was sentenced) in (Anonymous), ‘“Maulhalten, weiterdienen!”’, Völkischer Beobachter, 6 December 1930, p. 1. The first major article on culture to appear on the front page of the newspaper that I found was (Anonymous) ‘Nationalsozialismus und Kunstpolitik’, Völkischer Beobachter, 28 January 1928, pp. 1–2. See, also, Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics, op. cit., p. 148, in which she states it was Rosenberg not Hitler who played the key role to use the VB in a ‘conscious effort to broaden appeal’.

18 For an extraordinary microhistory of the development of the Nazi Party in Thuringia to which my essay is indebted, see Tracey, ‘The National Socialist Party in Thuringia’, pp. 23–50.

19 Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics, op. cit., pp. 148–58.

20 Senger was a confirmed racist, as evidenced by his publications such as Alexander von Senger, ‘Rasse und Baukunst’ (Gässler: Munich, 1935). He would become a professor at the Technische Hochschule in Munich during the Nazi period. See, also, Miller Lane’s discussion of Senger’s anti-Bolshevist stance that complemented Schultze-Naumburg in Miller Lane, Architecture and Politics, op. cit., pp. 140–5.

21 Alexander von Senger, ‘Der Bolschewismus im Bauwesen,’ Völkischer Beobachter, part 1, 22 October 1930, Beiblatt, p. 1.

22 Ibid.

23 Alexander von Senger, ‘Der Bolschewismus im Bauwesen’, part 2, 5 November 1930, Beiblatt p. 1.

24 Alexander von Senger, ‘Der Bolschewismus im Bauwesen,’ part 3, 7 November 1930, Beiblatt p. 1. See, also, Jean-Louis Cohen, Le Corbusier and the Mystique of the USSR: Theories and Projects for Moscow, 1928–1936 (Princeton University Press: Princeton, 1991); and Sima Ingberman, ABC: International Constructivist Architecture 1922–1939 (MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1994).

25 Note as well that other Gropius-era professors were cited, including Moholy-Nagy, in Senger, ‘Bolschewismus,’ part 1, 22 October 1930, p. 1.

26 See Pommer’s subtle parsing of the relationship of modernist architects to a variety of different political strains and, especially, his discussion of Mies’s relationship to the DDP in Pommer, ‘Mies van der Rohe,’ pp. 108–9.

27 Wingler, Bauhaus, op. cit., pp. 175–7.

28 Sudhalter, ‘14 Years Bauhaus’, pp. 236–7. See, also, Kershaw, Hitler, op. cit., pp. 379–495.

29 James van Dyke has captured how artists weathered and negotiated this systemic Nazi focus on individuals; see James A. van Dyke, Franz Radziwill and the Contradictions of German Art History, 1919–45 (University of Michigan Press: Ann Arbor, 2011), esp. pp. 70–114.

30 Stephanie Barron (ed.), ‘Degenerate Art’: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (Harry N. Abrams: New York, 1991), p. 61.

31 See, for example, the discussion of former Bauhaus students as designers on both sides of the brutal Nazi war and genocide in Jean-Louis Cohen, Architects in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War (Yale University Press: New Haven, 2011), esp. pp. 290–9.

32 I follow here the classic argument in Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (Routledge: New York, 1995). See, in particular, her analysis of MoMA. For Ertl, see Cohen, Architects in Uniform, op. cit., pp. 291–3.

33 Andrew Hemingway, ‘New Left Art History’s International,’ in Hemingway (ed.), Marxism and the History of Art, op. cit., p. 194.

34 While this article was being completed, the MoMA held a monumental show on ‘Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925’, which surveyed a wide variety of examples of abstraction from many different countries. The narrative ends triumphantly in the last room with examples of artists from, of course, the Bauhaus, and a few others.