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  IN WEIMAR, where Ise and Walter lived on Kaiserin Augustastrasse, they adhered to that goal of good design in every object within their sight. They had one particular possession that especially pleased them in its appearance and capability: a gramophone. They were the first Bauhauslers to own one. Guests would often listen with rapt attention, with Klee picking up a baton and conducting. Sometimes Klee would show up with his violin so that he could play alongside the machine that emitted recorded music.

  The new Mrs. Gropius opened the house to the younger people at the Bauhaus as well as to the faculty. “The students had felt rebuffed by Alma, but were immensely attracted to the gracious Ise”—at least according to Gropius’s biographer Reginald Isaacs, who was writing when Ise was still alive. She was, he says, as warm as her husband was optimistic, multiplying the effects of his positive energy. Ise delighted in quoting Gropius saying, “I am totally immune to disappointment because I do not see people and situations for what they are at the moment but for what they might become.”160

  There is, of course, no knowing what anyone was “really like,” since a portrait always depends on the person giving it. Yet Anni Albers, my main living source for most of these people, while she could be a master of negative memory, also was incredibly perceptive. She saw Ise as a form of relief for Gropius, stable but slightly dull after Alma and his other women. Ise wasn’t without her fire, however. What Isaacs leaves out of his book, and is not written in the many histories of the Bauhaus, is that when Gropius eventually resigned as director, one of his main motives was to get his wife away from Herbert Bayer, with whom she was having an affair.

  Bayer was probably the Bauhaus’s leading playboy. A photo Josef Albers took of him shirtless makes clear that he was dashing, and whenever Anni thought back on him at the Bauhaus, she would roll her eyes and say, “Oh zatt Hehrbert,” maintaining that he was irresistible. Ise, on the other hand, was not, in Anni’s eyes, a very nice person. When they were all living in the United States after World War II, the Alberses visited the Gropiuses at their house in Lincoln, Massachusetts. On one occasion, they were sitting in the living room when Ise’s strand of pearls broke. Anni immediately got down on her knees and began to pick up individual pearls as they rolled away. Ise kept on talking as if nothing had happened. Finally, Anni looked up from the floor and asked, “Do you know how many pearls there were on the strand?” Ise replied that she had no idea, because these were not her good pearls. In the most condescending of voices, she informed Anni that if pearls are of true value, like the better strand she was not wearing that day, they have tiny knots between them so that this sort of spill would not happen.

  The incident may seem trivial, but to Anni Albers it was immensely significant. As someone who had grown up wealthy, with more jewelry than she wanted, she knew about pearls, and as a textile artist, her understanding of knotting was better than Ise’s. For Anni, the Bauhaus was the place where the most elemental aspect of putting beads or precious stones on a string, a practice almost as old as humankind, could be appreciated and understood for its true significance: the juxtaposition of the solid and the flexible, the wish for women of whatever financial circumstances to embellish themselves with something sparkling against the skin. When nothing else was available during World War II, Anni had made jewelry by stringing bobby pins, small metal washers, and grommets from a hardware store, and she had crafted clay beads by hand. By the time Ise derided her attempted helpfulness in the 1950s, thirty years after the two women first met, she at that moment represented the snobbery Anni associated with German class attitudes—precisely what the Bauhaus was meant to overturn. And she showed a lack of kindness, a will to make someone else feel bad: immensely significant for any human being, but especially for the wife of the director of the Bauhaus.

  Nonetheless, it is probably true that Ise bolstered Gropius’s optimism. The remarried Gropius was both happier and more settled than he had been before, and while he stayed friendly with Lily Hildebrandt, they ceased being lovers. For a brief period, Gropius confined himself to one woman only.

  HE DID WELL TO concentrate his energies. The forces that had already begun to converge against the Bauhaus became even more ferocious when the Ordnungsbund (Coalition for Law and Order) came to power in 1923. This new regime was hostile to the ideas of the Bauhaus and resented the incursion of nonconformists in the capital of the new republic. They quickly reduced government funding for the school, and high-ranking officials issued statements that the Bauhaus was riddled with Communists and that its students and faculty lived immorally. Some Bauhaus foes also charged that the school’s precepts were destroying private enterprise.

  On November 23, 1923, a Reichswehr soldier stormed into Gropius’s office. He demanded to be taken immediately to Gropius and Ise’s house on Kaiserin Augustastrasse. A search warrant had been issued, although the soldier did not have a clue about what they were hoping to find. Gropius looked on while seven men rifled through his belongings.

  The following day, Gropius wrote a letter to the local military commandant. “I am ashamed of my country, Your Excellency,” he declared. He insisted on an immediate inquiry and said he would report the incident to the minister of defense.161 But he never received a satisfactory response and never knew what they were looking for.

  While the Bauhaus workshops thrived—and Klee and Kandinsky, among the greatest painters in the world, worked peacefully in their studios—Gropius continued to have to do battle on a daily basis. By 1924, he was up against the German Volkische party after an election in the Thuringian parliament, the government body that had jurisdiction over Weimar and the Bauhaus, made these right-wing opponents of the school the majority.162

  On March 24, while Ise was in a sanatorium because of an unidentifiable stomach ailment, Gropius wrote her that the newspapers in Jena and Berlin were reporting that this new government would not extend his teaching contract. This was a way of firing him, and the Bauhaus masters were going to meet to decide whether they would stay if it really happened. They were aware, however, that it was possibly a moot point; rumors were flying that the authorities hoped to dissolve the Bauhaus completely.

  Gropius met with a government minister whom he described to Ise as resembling “a long dead clerk of the court … a dry bureaucrat without a personal opinion,”163 but he could not get further information. Then some of the masters at the school, Klee and Kandinsky among them, wrote a letter to the minister of state to voice their unequivocal support of Gropius and also to say they would resign if he was no longer director.

  The letter succeeded for a while in keeping the authorities from making Gropius the scapegoat for their general opposition to the Bauhaus. The Ministry of Culture, however, continued to campaign against the school. To fight for the preservation of his institution, Gropius wrote an article that appeared in the Weimar newspaper Deutschland on April 24, 1924. He responded specifically to statements from Volkische party officials challenging government support of the Bauhaus and questioning “the moral qualities of the Director.”164 Gropius enumerated the school’s achievements. Of the 129 current Bauhaus students and the 526 who had been at the school since it opened in October 1919, a number had become apprentices in industry. While many students had had to leave for financial reasons, even the Bauhaus dropouts had become employed by German industry specifically because of the training they had received at the school. The director outlined the tremendous achievements that had been made in the realms of artistic development and education. He also defended the Bauhaus against attacks that pointed out that some of the other masters were not German. Gropius declared that this xenophobia was disgraceful and argued that the foreigners on the faculty did nothing but enrich German culture.

  As for the critique concerning his own character: here Gropius said that these libelous attacks were the result of specious accusations made by disgruntled former employees of the school. He had, he wrote, initiated an official investigation into such attacks, with the Min
istry of Education concluding that they were “unfounded” and “irresponsible … Retribution for these insults through public legal action is about to be concluded.” Similarly, when his character was attacked the previous year, all accusations had been dismissed as unwarranted. This “ignorance and malicious slander of the most humiliating kind”165 had to come to an end, the beleaguered director declared.

  Few of the people around him were aware of it, but at this same time Gropius was again battling Alma. They had agreed that Mutzi would visit Weimar twice a year, but Alma was not keeping up her end of the deal. When Gropius wanted to see his child, he had to go to Vienna. This was problematic not only because the long journey kept him away from the Bauhaus for more time than he could afford, but also because Ise was unwilling to go there with him. Gropius’s new wife was still insecure about his infamous ex.

  When Gropius finally succeeded in getting a lecture invitation that covered the cost and justified the time of a trip to Vienna, he tried mightily to convince Ise to join him, but she refused, and he went alone. Ise’s reluctance was well-founded: she would have been miserable to see the grip that Alma still had on her former husband. Gropius was overjoyed to be with the eight-year-old Mutzi, but Alma was determined to keep them from getting too close. Although Alma was completely committed to Franz Werfel, she was upset that Gropius had remarried. She hovered over the reunion in a way that made Gropius feel as if an evil spirit were present with him and his daughter.

  Shortly after Gropius returned to Weimar, the “Yellow Brochure” appeared. It repeated the accusations that the Bauhaus was politically based, essentially Bolshevist and anti-German. The authors of the popular document were all former Bauhauslers who had been dismissed, Carl Schlemmer among them. To counter the fervent anti-Bauhaus sentiment in Weimar, the students papered the town with posters supporting their school, and the masters rallied against the “Yellow Brochure” specifically. Gropius survived this latest attack, but the city that had provided such a fertile environment for the Bauhaus at its start was becoming so inhospitable to the school that the future was bleak.

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  Alma was making it hard for him to be with their daughter; the school he had conceived and nurtured was at risk of annihilation; his enemies were eager to give him the boot even if the institution survived. Although all of this was happening at the same time, Walter Gropius celebrated his forty-first birthday with élan. Ise wrote his mother about the festivities, which began on Sunday, May 18, and lasted eight days. He was “feted gloriously, spontaneously, radiantly,” with the Bauhaus band playing jubilantly on several occasions.166 The masters commemorated the birthday with a special portfolio, and the students showered him with gifts.

  The hysteria outside was mounting, however. Militants wanted the Bauhaus shut down as if it were a den of vice. The rumors only grew nastier. At this time, a Circle of Friends was organized to help support the Bauhaus. The exhibition the previous year and Bauhaus Week had had an impact. The school’s champions from the outside world included Albert Einstein, Igor Stravinsky, Marc Chagall, Oskar Kokoschka, Arnold Schoenberg, the architect Hendrik Berlage, Gropius’s former boss Peter Behrens, and even his rival in love, Franz Werfel.

  Alma promised that Mutzi could spend the summer in Weimar. But just before the scheduled trip, she reneged. Ise was furious that Gropius might make the trip to Vienna again. Wanting desperately to see his daughter, yet determined not to imperil his new marriage, he was torn. Gropius told Ise that he and Alma had never spent more than two weeks together and were “never really married.” He assured Ise in a letter, “You are my first and only wife and I shall never want anyone else.”167

  Usually Gropius’s persuasive powers triumphed, but not this time. Ise forbade the trip. Unlike Alma, she wanted all his energies focused on the Bauhaus, and she insisted that he could not be away at such a crucial time.

  While an outpatient at a sanatorium in Cologne where she was in treatment for her stomach problems, she took it upon herself to advocate for the school. One of her converts was the city’s mayor, Konrad Adenauer. Ise spent an hour and a half with him. By the end of their meeting, Adenauer had not only joined the Circle of Friends, but had also raised the idea of the school moving to his city, with Gropius assuming the role of city architect.

  For the time being, the move didn’t seem necessary, but Gropius was pleased when his wife found new donors and persuaded bankers to extend credit to the school. She also secured clients for the weaving workshop. Gropius not only declared her “a veritable magician” and “my good star,” but began to address her as “My dearest Mrs. Bauhaus.”168

  THEN, IN SEPTEMBER 1924, the government of Thuringia decided to terminate the employment of all the Bauhaus masters. The reason given was that the Thuringian State Treasury had determined in an audit that the school was financially unstable. The government demanded that the school close its doors by April 1925.

  Gropius argued before the Landtag. He gave the history of the embattled institution, pointing out that “the Bauhaus had to produce … everything from nothing.” The workshops had to buy materials in uneconomically small quantities. Having started without capital, they lacked the competitive advantage of industries because they could not afford machines and tools essential for the manufacturing process. “The open hostility against the Bauhaus for political reasons, because of artistic intolerance or because of lack of understanding” had made it particularly difficult to develop the sort of ties necessary for a “solid business enterprise.”169

  His appeal fell on deaf ears. The new president of the Landtag, Richard Leutheusser, who was also the leader of the Volkische party in Thuringia, had no sympathy whatsoever for the Bauhaus. In September, Gropius and the other masters received notice that their employment was being terminated. With no one to pay faculty salaries, the school could not go on.

  ISE 3GROPIUS REFUSED to accept the idea that the Bauhaus was closing. She continued to advocate for the school with her new friend Adenauer. This future world leader, known to be “incredibly rude and unpleasant if something did not interest him,” was graciousness itself to “Mrs. Bauhaus.”170 Adenauer gave Ise introductions to well-known writers and prominent businesspeople in Dusseldorf. Those connections enabled her to drum up favorable publicity and lucrative outlets for Bauhaus products. Ise campaigned with influential people in the arts, both within and beyond Germany’s borders, who responded by writing the Landtag in support of the school. Sympathetic industrialists, some of whom had been brought into the fold by Ise, proposed turning the Bauhaus into a production company in order to keep it going.

  The students also petitioned the government, but no amount of effort was sufficient to overcome right-wing opposition to the Bauhaus. German nationalism was beginning to steamroll, with more and more people insisting that the Bauhaus was too hospitable to individuals and trends from outside the country. This was not the first time that Walter Gropius had had to accept defeat after a long battle, and on December 29, he—along with eight other signatories, including Klee, Kandinsky, and Schlemmer—officially dissolved the Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar.

  15

  In spite of all the internecine battles that had occurred in the five years of the Bauhaus’s existence, a few individuals were determined to keep the school going. The benefits to a community of people with similar goals were vast.

  The perspicacious Ludwig Grote, director of the Gemaldegalerie in Dessau, informed Fritz Hesse, Dessau’s mayor, of the immeasurable significance of the Bauhaus, and suggested it might relocate there. The lively modern art school in Frankfurt am Main took a strong interest in incorporating the Bauhaus into its existing structure.

  In the midst of all this turmoil, in late January 1925, Gropius took off with Ise for a four-week vacation. No one could even reach him. The isolation and complete change after years of struggle gave him the perspective he needed. By March, Gropius was among those investigating conditions in Dessau. In a short time “Das Bauhaus i
n Dessau” was official, with “direction: Walter Gropius” underneath the new name.

  Located at the junction of the Elbe and Mulde rivers in the duchy of Anhal, Dessau was a small city surrounded by arid land. It lacked the charms and auspicious history of Weimar, but it did have an important theater built in the eighteenth century, and Wagner, Paganini, and Liszt had all performed there. The city had thrived during the industrial revolution and had a feeling of energy without being especially cosmopolitan. Now, by appointing Walter Gropius director of the existing School of Arts and Crafts and trade school, and folding the entire Bauhaus staff into those institutions, the Municipal Council was taking major steps to give Dessau a different aura. What they did out of civic loyalty saved the Bauhaus. The great enterprise that had been stopped in its tracks in Weimar would be able to continue to provide innovative experiential education and to be a haven for some of the world’s leading creative geniuses.

  As usual, Gropius’s iron will made all the difference. The Municipal Council had envisioned the Bauhaus in an ancillary role to the School of Arts and Crafts and the trade school already in operation. But, as his lovers and students knew, with Gropius it was all or nothing. He quickly persuaded council members to let him design new buildings for the Bauhaus, on a splendid site about two kilometers from the city center. As soon as he had their consent, Gropius opened a new architectural office in Dessau and began.