Haunted Bauhaus

Bauhaus history has been the subject of popular and scholarly fascination since its founding in 1919 in Weimar, Germany. Over the decades, commentators have painstakingly added new material about and interpretations of its meteoric if doomed career in the Weimar Republic, as well as chronicling the colourful diaspora of its design philosophy and leading lights across the world. Last year, there was a good deal of anticipation about the centenary celebrations in Germany, the USA and elsewhere, with the hope that it would occasion fresh reflection on the relevance of Bauhaus history and its legacy one hundred years on. But as it turned out, most of the exhibitions and new books were pretty disappointing on the whole, serving up predictable ‘best of’ retrospectives and rehashed biographies of the long-lionized central figures. Some of the new publications really did bring something new, however. Among the most important is Elizabeth Otto’s Haunted Bauhaus. In this elegantly written and beautifully illustrated book, Otto offers an alternative view of life at the Bauhaus, one that challenges its long-conventional reputation as an earnest and buttoned-up harbinger of Machine Age functionalism, an image peddled for decades by the school’s directors (above all, Walter Gropius) and commentators alike. Instead, Otto sets out to recall how playful experimentation with the occult, spirituality, fluid gender politics and aesthetic and social conventions characterized much of the school’s ethos and output. Interest in the occult was very common at the Bauhaus, and went far beyond Johannes Itten’s well-documented Mazdaznan cultic practices in the early years of the art school. Séances and ‘spirit photographs’ were part of the era’s search for spiritual experience, and the affiliation of abstraction, expressionism and mysticism was registered in artwork by Gertrud Grunow, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Xanti Schawinsky, Ré Soupault and László Moholy-Nagy. In this sense, Bauhaus sensibility was a kind of post-war continuation of Germany’s spirited Lebensreform movements from the late 19th century, which set their sights on redesigning the self through diet, clothes, objects, lifestyle and the built environment.

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Ethos · Exhibition · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Weimar Republic · Art, Politics, and Modernism · History · Law

• The Interwar Period

  Melanie Hawthorne•Oxford Handbook of Decadence•2021

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