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  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.

  10

  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.

  11

  Gropius’s optimism and tenacity, and his powers of persuasion, made the Bauhaus a magnet for eager students and brilliant faculty members. At the same time that he was overcoming fierce opposition and a very tough financial situation nationwide, he was luring every great artist he wanted into the fold.

  One of the first of the fine and original modern painters he pursued and conquered was Oskar Schlemmer. Schlemmer had invented a unique form of geometric figurative painting, and was an innovative ballet and theater designer. Gropius offered him an academic chair that had recently been vacated by one of the old art school professors who was unable to tolerate the onslaught of modernism at his institution. These high-echelon positions brought with them an annual salary of sixteen thousand marks. It was an irresistible offer to Schlemmer, who was further attracted because he knew that Gropius was making the same offer to Paul Klee.

  By the end of November 1920, Schlemmer was at the Hotel Zum Elephanten; Gropius rightly figured that a hotel that met his wife’s standards would be an effective lure. Schlemmer would soon become, with his diaries and letters, the secret historian of the Bauhaus. One of his first observations was that what counted for Gropius about the people he attracted to the school was that they be first-rate artists more than devoted teachers.139

  Gropius made Schlemmer feel that his coming to Weimar was so inevitable that once he was there he could not imagine ha
ving done otherwise. The energetic Bauhaus director organized Schlemmer’s new existence the way he handled a military campaign: picking out a handsome quiet studio for him, advising that he should stay for a month and then come permanently in the spring of the upcoming year.

  Still, Schlemmer had his doubts. He was about to be married, and was concerned about how his future bride would fare in Weimar. Schlemmer, while happy about his recent success with the dynamic and inventive Triadic Ballet, was trying to figure out his domestic arrangements. He craved privacy and isolation; indeed, one of the conditions on which Helena Tutein—always called Tut—had agreed to marry him was that they would live in the countryside.

  Nonetheless, by March 1921, the recently married Schlemmers were living in a former courtier’s house at the Belvedere Palace in Weimar. Oskar Schlemmer had decided to go to the Bauhaus after Gropius, at the end of 1920, had succeeded in negotiating for one of the most original and brilliant painters of the modern era, Paul Klee, to join the school’s faculty. This was no small accomplishment—Klee was as obsessed with financial details as he was gifted artistically—but Gropius had found the means, on a shoestring budget, to get the forty-one-year-old Swiss, and his wife and young son, to Weimar.

  NOT EVERYONE RESPONDED TO Gropius as positively as Schlemmer and Klee did. Shortly after its creation, the Bauhaus divided into two opposing camps.

  While Gropius was emphatic about the impact of the school’s program on society at large, Johannes Itten and his followers were more focused on the development of the individual and on creativity regardless of its broader impact. In addition, most of this faction of students and faculty led by Itten adhered to the practice of Mazdaism—a way of life in accord with the teaching of Zoroaster, a Persian prophet born in 628 B.C. who viewed the universe as the cosmic struggle between aša (truth) and druj (lie). The goal of life was to sustain aša through good thoughts, words, and proscribed activities. Mazdaism required head shaving, the wearing of costumes, ritual baths, a vegetarian diet, and a range of other strictly regulated practices. Its adherents not only followed their many rules rigorously, but disapproved of anyone who did not.

  Johannes Itten, 1921. With his unusual clothing and practice of Mazdaist rituals, Itten had a very different persona from Gropius and Klee.

  Initially, Gropius extolled the health benefits of the new regime, while Alma was appalled. She had a sensitive gallbladder, and would not dare try “the obligatory diet of uncooked mush smothered in garlic” for fear of a bilious attack. Recoiling at the way “Bauhaus disciples [were] recognizable at a distance, by the garlic smell,”140 she was also aware that when she first got to Weimar, Itten himself was suffering a bilious attack.

  Alma felt that Itten—who was there, after all, because of her—had lost his flair. His current wife, the sister of his first (who had died), was “an utterly inhuman creature, who styled herself to resemble the Negro sculptures that were the rage at the Bauhaus in those days.”141 Gropius, however, unlike Alma, put aside his personal reactions to people and did his best to manage the conflict between Itten’s followers and foes.

  Nonetheless, the school developed an atmosphere of civil war. And Gropius was under attack because, while the Bauhaus was supposed to treat architecture as the ultimate art form, there was no architecture course. The only architect on the faculty was Gropius himself—and he was too preoccupied with administrative matters, fund-raising, and his own work to teach.

  Again sporting a bushy mustache, always impeccably dressed, Gropius was spending a lot of time on the road, giving lectures to explain and defend the school, and his travel schedule made it impossible to offer regular classes. Gropius also continued to practice architecture, and his client base was still in Berlin. With some of the new students serving as his apprentices, he designed a house for the lumber merchant Adolf Sommerfeld in Berlin-Steglitz in 1920–21. Surprisingly like a rustic country house, it would be faced with timbers from an old warship and utilize the boat’s teak panels inside. The Bauhauslers made its windows, lighting fixtures, and furniture, giving hope to the idea that their work would be known well beyond the confines of Weimar. That house, in one of Berlin’s finest residential neighborhoods, was a major step in spreading the gospel.

  NO LONGER A VULNERABLE youth or volatile young man, at the Bauhaus Gropius faced issues head-on, appearing unfazed and resolute; he became disarmingly candid in his personal life as well. In the spring of 1921, he wrote Lily: “I wish I could feel just as passionately about you as I did a year ago and I am striving for it; one cannot force flames to rise out of oneself, but I know that it may happen again suddenly.”142 By then he had met Hans Hildebrandt, and the two men got along well. Lily had become active in the Circle of Friends of Bauhaus; the fiery love affair had now evolved into a professional relationship. In his role as school director, Gropius increasingly relegated all other issues to a secondary tier of importance.

  Gropius needed that network of allies in which the Hildebrandts were key players, for he and Itten were increasingly at odds. A further wrinkle occurred when Theo van Doesburg—an innovative Dutch artist who had developed a rich and original form of abstract painting and, with Piet Mondrian and others, co-founded the movement they called “De Stijl”—moved to Weimar in 1921. Gropius liked Van Doesburg and his work sufficiently to invite him to his house, but not enough to ask him to join the faculty. Some of the Bauhaus students defected from the school to study with the De Stijl master, thus creating the feeling of yet another opposition force.

  Gropius offered a dependability that was vital for many people. That same year, his stepdaughter, Gucki, left the man she had recently married. Rather than turn to her volatile mother, she fled to the stepfather she had adored ever since he had entered her life. For Gustav Mahler’s daughter, Walter Gropius was the one person who offered hope, and Weimar, as it would for many other young people, became her refuge.

  This was at just about the same time that another of the greatest painters of the era arrived at the fragile paradise Gropius had created. The Russian Wassily Kandinsky, who had advanced abstract art to new heights, was at loose ends after returning to Germany, where he had previously lived, following exile in Moscow during the war. Kandinsky was in close touch with Klee, an old friend. By the start of 1921, Gropius had made arrangements for this pioneer of abstract art and his new young wife to come to Weimar Bauhaus.

  IN FEBRUARY 1922, Gropius wrote an eight-page document about the problem of Itten’s adherence to the idea of art for art’s sake, and circulated it among the Bauhaus masters. Gropius blamed Itten’s approach for the continuation of old-fashioned handwork and the production of one-of-a-kind pieces in the Bauhaus workshops. This contradicted his goal of working with industry. “The Bauhaus could become a haven for eccentrics if it were to lose contact with the work and working methods of the outside world. Its responsibility consists in educating people to recognize the basic nature of the world in which they live … to combine the creative activity of the individual with the broad practical work of the world!” Gropius did not mince words. He called the architecture and “arts and crafts” of the previous generation “a lie,” a byproduct of “the false and spastic effort ‘to make Art.’ ”143 He found these buildings and paintings disgusting for their lack of truthfulness.

  The issues went even deeper, as most readers of the manifesto knew. Gropius’s and Itten’s personas corresponded to their beliefs. With his military bearing, immaculate grooming, and impeccable clothes, Gropius fit in perfectly with any group of distinguished people. Itten deliberately presented himself as a bohemian; his eccentric appearance was a declaration that artists were different from other people, and he delighted in shocking the bourgeoisie.

  The issue would loom large for almost everyone at the Bauhaus, not only during its existence but afterward. The relation to the mainstream, the definition of one’s self with regard to the rest of society, and the question of whether art should be consciously individualistic or have u
niversal implications (these options were not necessarily contradictory), were matters everyone addressed. With Gropius and Itten as polar opposites, most of the faculty and students clearly identified with one or the other.

  WHETHER OR NOT GROPIUS realized it, one of his truest allies in this time of internecine bitterness was his ex-wife. Alma had stayed in close touch with a number of the people she met in Weimar. She kept up those relationships on the rare occasions when she returned with Mutzi, as Manon was called, even if she did not stay with Gropius, and she assumed a major role behind the scenes. On July 3, she wrote a letter to Lyonel and Julia Feininger. It was not the normal missive of the period. Others would have addressed even close acquaintances as “Herr” and “Frau;” Alma wrote to “Dear Beloved Friends.” She used purple ink for her sprawling script, with the uppercase letters two centimeters high and the text more than a centimeter. Underlining certain points for emphasis, she gave the Feiningers vital advice:

  I haven’t heard anything from you—not a thing—not even if you received my goodbye letter. But that’s unimportant. Important is for me to know what you’ll be doing during the summer and whether you’ll be staying in Weimar. I have to know that!!! It’s so reassuring to know that you’re here in Weimar, at the Bauhaus, with Gropius. You can’t, you can’t leave him! Persevere. Take a long vacation, but stay with a cause that you helped establish. I’d be so happy if you came over to see me sometime!!! I send a thousand greetings to you both, your friend Alma Marie.144

  Alma’s warmth and her ability to connect with people had a powerful impact. And she knew how much Gropius needed her in this period when others treated him as a dangerous radical. In the fall of 1922, Carl Schlemmer—Oskar’s brother and a master in the wall-painting workshop—a rumor campaign about Gropius. Lily Hildebrandt had warned Gropius that Carl was against him, but it was Oskar Schlemmer who actually reported the extent of his brother’s antipathy. Carl, Oskar told Gropius, had gathered every bit of gossip there was about the director and then gone on a campaign to spread it. Given Gropius’s love life, there was no shortage of material.