The aftermath

One of the distinctive features of the Bauhaus is that it integrated a diverse range of international trends and was required to reinvent itself in consistently new contexts due to its forced relocation. Perhaps the most intensive communication and propagation of the ideas coming from the Bauhaus occurred through the work of former teachers and students both in Germany and internationally and through the maintenance and establishment of new networks, even before its closure in 1933.

With the emigration of many members of the Bauhaus, the Bauhaus idea was transplanted into other cultural circles and under the new conditions, the contents and forms of expression changed. Josef and Anni Albers, Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Marcel Breuer, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Walter Peterhans and Herbert Bayer emigrated to the USA. In 1937, the New Bauhaus was founded in Chicago by Lászlo Moholy-Nagy. Walter Gropius and above all Ludwig Mies van der Rohe became the most important and influential architects in the USA. Many ideas from America – Ford‘s rationalisation principles, the lifestyles associated with jazz, steel-frame constructions and the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright – had already been influential at the Bauhaus and beyond in the 1920s, under the title of ‘Americanism’. In view of the reception of the Bauhaus in the USA, it is therefore possible to speak in terms of an extensive merging of existing concepts and patterns.

In the Eastern Mediterranean countries, a fusion of Northern European ideas (of which some of the most essential came from the Bauhaus) with Mediterranean forms (Arieh Sharon in places such as Israel) occurred from the 1920s in the course of modernisation (Turkey under Atatürk) and the settlement movement (Palestine). A specific reception of the Bauhaus, which however rarely had an impact on architecture and design plans, appears in places like Japan (through Japanese Bauhaus students) and Mexico (the exile of Hannes Meyer in the 1940s).

The post-war period also initially made it possible to build on the Bauhaus concepts in the late GDR-era, even at the architecture and design academies where former Bauhaus members had influential positions. Following the debate on formalism that was directed against the Bauhaus from 1950, the Bauhaus once again became an important point of reference in the late-1960s. Among others, the Bauhaus members Peter Keler, Marianne Brandt, Richard Paulick, Hajo Rose and Walter Funkat lived and worked in the GDR.