“All artists interlock!”
How Bauhäuslers created the “New Germany” and promoted the national economy

The Third Reich was in ruins, the surrender not yet signed. An architect painstakingly working his way through the debris to the Schöneberg town hall found a sign on the door of the building authority with his name. Appointed to office by the German Communist Party (KPD), city counselor Hans Scharoun immediately looked around for his people: “I’ve looked everywhere for you, where are you? Here we go!”

Scharoun immediately brought two men who once had been close to Walter Gropius and Ludwig Hilberseimer into official positions—Wils Ebert and Selman Selmanagić, two former students of the Bauhaus, which under Hannes Meyer had become pronouncedly proletarian. Together with Albert Buske, Max Gebhardt, and Waldemar Alder, Ebert and Selmanagić—a trained locksmith and social democrat and a carpenter and communist respectively—immediately began to establish strategic collectives in all the design and rebuilding fields, looking forty years into the future—a trade fair collective, a furniture collective, a collective for industrial construction, a collective for the reform of art academies, and a planning collective that would for the next five years organize the reconstruction of Germany’s capital.

In this, one easily recognizes the co-op principle of the Meyer era, discovering a resemblance to co-op 2 via Hajo Rose and his advertising agency in Amsterdam, which was linked to the Dutch resistance. Bauhaus affiliation and/or contact to the ABC Group Basel, experience of resistance and many years of membership in one or another of the various Marxist parties, whether KPD, KPO, or SAP, were the basis for the extremely effective network structures to which Mart Stam, Ida Falkenberg-Liefrinck, and Hajo Rose belonged. In addition to Stam, Falkenberg-Liefrinck, and Rose, other Bauhäuslers who gathered after the war in the soon-to-be GDR were Franz Ehrlich and Kurt Junghanns—one liberated from the concentration camp Buchenwald and the other from Sachsenhausen—the whole circle of friends from the German city of Hagen (Albert Buske, Max Gebhard, Waldemar Alder, Heinrich Brocksieper), as well as Hubert Hoffmann and Kurt Kranz, Herbert Hirche, Joost Schmidt, Alfred Arndt, Klaus Wittkugel, Theo Balden, Gustav Hassenpflug, Peter Keler, and Marianne Brandt—who all hailed from different parts of Germany.

They all became linked together through quasi-institutional cooperative Bauhaus structures—the Hellerau Workshops, the Leipzig Trade Fair Office, various reconstruction collectives in Dresden, Dessau, Thuringia, as well as the various postwar attempts to reestablish the Bauhaus. Many had been members of the Rote Zelle, the KOSTUFRA (Kommunistische Studentenfraktion) and, especially during the Bauhaus period in Berlin, the Kollektiv für sozialistisches Bauen (Collective for Socialist Architecture), located near the MASCH (Marxist Workers’ School). Since Mies van der Rohe also arranged for his students to audit the classes of Heinrich Tessenow and Hans Poelzig, they met students of the TU Charlottenburg, who, in addition to their studies, worked mainly for GEHAG (Gemeinnützige Heimstätten-, Spar-, und Bau-Aktiengesellschaft). Therefore, in addition to the rapidly established networks of a party/political nature, connections with industry, foreign trade, and the development of practical link with the municipal housing industry loomed large in these associations.

Selman Selmanagić commented on this as follows: “Urban planning, trade fair construction, advertising, that was political work for us.”^[1] Archived correspondence and minutes of meetings from the estate give evidence of how one player took over from the other in these activities: Albert Buske set up the trade fair office, Selmanagić negotiated, Wils Ebert represented him, Kurt Kranz or Hajo Rose produced graphic illustrations for the joint work. Services offered encompassed the full range of Bauhaus know-how: architecture, interior design, ceramics, color design, signets, letterheads, and, above all, innovative trade fair designs. In addition, factories and printshops were rebuilt, and exhibitions for China, Romania, and Bulgaria were staged. More than two dozen collective exhibitions, four of them for the People’s Republic of China, were the sole responsibility of Selmanagić, who in this way carried the reputation of the Bauhaus to Beijing, and also Cairo.^[2]

Of all these co-op-like collectives, the Berliner Planungskollektiv (Berlin Planning Collective) is the most thoroughly researched. However, the planning work it produced has never been regarded as derivative of the Bauhaus, and certainly not programmatically communistic.^[3] This is due to the fact that the well-known Berliner Kollektivplan (Berlin Collective Plan) of 1946 is most commonly, albeit wrongly, referred to as the Scharounplan. As with all the other Bauhäusler collectives of the time, a handshake was enough to decide on a collaboration. For example, designs for the participatory exhibition Berlin plant. Erster Bericht and Berlin baut auf—as with the extensive exhibition planning itself—were based on a detailed analysis of its Bauhaus origins.^[4]

My central thesis is that immediately after the war a group of designers took up the legacy of Meyer’s Bauhaus by performing fundamental work in the fields of advertising, exhibition design, furniture production, and urban planning for Berlin, Dessau, and Dresden—all projects undertaken on behalf of a society based on a planned economy that was, in addition, comprehensively cooperative. This vision for the planning and construction of a socialist society, last prevalent at the Bauhaus in 1930, was presented in an aesthetically adept manner. The small Bauhaus groups operated through established political and ecclesiastical resistance structures and networks, and, like the Berlin Planning Collective, had at their disposal a well-developed set of spatial planning instruments and a differentiated visual system of “popular” signs, whose tonality and meaning could be objectively and hermeneutically filtered out from the different objects and material produced—furniture, elaborately designed advertising brochures, spatial images, and speech acts. The following characteristics catch the eye in such an analysis: the idea of non-profit collective work and socialized production, the concept of Volksbedarf (popular demand) based on “brotherhood” (Mart Stam), a special interest in the spatiality of organized leisure inspired by promenades, sports facilities, and clubs, and, last but not least, a pronounced preference for employing a surrealistic visual language.

All this can be seen as a reflection of the Bauhaus era, when the most innovative philosophers, psychologists, and art theorists of the time visited the school as guest lecturers. For example, in addition to Karel Teige, the teacher of “literature, advertising, typography,” instructors in logical empiricism and practitioners of Gestalt psychology also presented talks. One learns from the recollections of Bauhaus students of the period that these guest teachers confronted them as veritable therapists, poets, and magicians, recommending the “logical structure of the world” (Rudolf Carnap), the emancipatory thought of Karl Marx (“disposable time”), and the “complex qualities of Gestalt” (Felix Krueger).^[5] The “activists of the first hour”—that circle of friends who had gathered around Hajo Rose, Umbo, and Fritz Kuhr^[6]—listened enthusiastically to Teige and Carnap, as well as Karlfried Graf Dürckheim, Otto Neurath, and Karl Duncker, and and in the moment of institutional crisis cleaved, as Selmanagić affirmed, “fanatically” to their charismatic teacher Hannes Meyer.^[7] Above all, with his co-op idea Meyer set an effective precedent during his Dessau directorate, but Mies van der Rohe and Richard Neutra left equally clear traces with their generous manner and through the transcendent equanimity of their architecture: “Building and the world of the senses”^[8] was the silent code of the last generation of Bauhaus students to be trained simultaneously in Gestalt psychology, Marxism and surrealism. It seems to have been Neutra’s summer course of 1930, which synthesized these various biological, therapeutic, and sociological approaches, that mediated the transition from Meyer to Mies.

Bauhäuslers fill the control centers of the economy

Before the filling of professorships and the training of architects could be considered, at war’s end networks of Bauhäuslers and former MASCH auditors filled the control centers of the economy. Planning groups were successfully formed in Saxony and Brandenburg, and, in particular, members of the Dessau Ausbauwerkstatt (finishing workshop) grouped around the Hellerau workshops in Dresden. They promoted socialist ideas at trade fairs, using surrealistic floating assemblages of products, and at the same time anticipated the socio-spatial distribution of productive forces in regionally complex, networked structural plans conceived with a 40-year timeframe.

The Bauhäuslers Franz Ehrlich, Selman Selmanagić, and Herbert Hirche, together with the interior architect and furniture designer Liv Falkenberg-Liefrinck of the Rotterdam De Opbouw, were all involved in designing the Leipzig trade fairs, the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany) party school at Kleinmachnow, the business school in Plessow, and the administration academy Forst Zinna at the Hellerauer Werkstätten. In addition, they designed furniture for artists returning from emigration, including the painter Max Lingner and the writer Friedrich Wolf. With their ongoing production for central offices, party schools, and trade associations (such as Konsum, a cooperative retail chain founded by the Soviet Military Administration (SMAD) in 1945), the Deutsche Werkstätten Hellerau of the VVB Sachsenholz shaped the appearance of newly created institutions for eight years.^[9] From the visitors’ room of President Wilhelm Pieck to the first postwar foreign trade fair appearances, the Soviet-occupied zone and the young GDR aspired to be extremely modern. As exclusive as individual government commissions may be, Hellerau’s prototypes and sample books also had a broader impact: more than a million copies of Selmanagić’s bentwood seminar chairs would come to furnish universities and colleges over the years. Until the GDR’s end, many scientific institutes maintained a professor’s room, outfitted with a desk for writing and meetings, as a greeting from the Bauhaus and a great honor.

Especially in Dresden, where the communist group around the Buchenwald-Kapo and Franz Ehrlich’s friends Robert Siewert and Otto Falkenberg (husband of Liv Falkenberg) led economic reorganization efforts, it was clear from the outset that the desired re-socialization of war-damaged Germany must be based on functionalism and new building projects. Ehrlich, Kurt Junghanns, and, from 1948, Mart Stam led the reconstruction. Edmund Collein cleared the Berlin Friedrichshain district of debris, and in Potsdam another Bauhäusler collective worked together with the “red gardeners” from landscape architect Herta Hammerbach’s area.

With regards to postwar reconstruction, everyone looked to the example Rotterdam. Warsaw, Dresden, and Berlin were still busy clearing the debris as they planned to compete with this model city of reconstruction. Hans Schmidt-Basel had been promoting the “Lex Bernoulli”^[10] in lectures everywhere after 1945, a plan that involved the communalization of land and soil, and uniform design emanating from a single source: Hans Scharoun’s term for this project was the “Recultivation of the burnt-out cultural steppe.” Thanks to the gardeners, the project was conducted under a decidedly “green” sign. Who would prepare the succeeding generation for this task? The was Bauhaus dead and its authority figures scattered in all directions—Hannes Meyer in Mexico, Richard Paulick in China, Martin Wagner in the United States.

Fighting for the school

In the search for suitable university professors for the rebuilding of architectural education, those in immediate reach were the first to attain posts: Otto Haesler, Edvard Heiberg, and Mart Stam. Due to his suitability as a lecturer and probably also on account of his prior pedagogical experience, the efforts of the responsible state authorities to find a figurenhead for this project concentrated on Stam, then head of the Amsterdam School of Arts and Crafts. Parallel to Hubert Hoffmann in Dessau, as the offical SED party organ, Neues Deutschland, was already announcing, it was thought Stam could ensure that there would be a new Bauhaus.^[11]

When Stam moved to the Soviet zone of occupation at the end of 1948, the small Bauhaus community left in Germany were not the only group hoping for a systematic new beginning for German art education and design theory. After all, Stam arrived with the imprimatur of the Soviet Military Administration, had long been expected by the mayor of Dresden, and acted with the highest political protection: the responsible cultural officer in Saxony was Alfred Schnittke, a member of the Moscow CIAM group, while in Berlin Gerhard Strauss held his protective hands over the attempt to reorganize the two Dresden training centers within the State Art Commission. Although there has been no further architectural training there, Stam wished to unite the Academy of Fine Arts and the Hochschule für Werkkunst under the primacy of architecture, with a focus on promoting industrial and everyday culture.

In view of the situation in traditionalist-oriented Dresden, with its strong artistic personalities from the ASSO circle (Association of Proletarian Revolutionary Artists), naming Stam as successor to Hans Grundig, who was seriously ill with tuberculosis, was a risky act. Doing so made later conflicts regarding the concept of art inevitable. But the Staatliche Kommission für Kunstangelegenheiten (State Commission for Art Matters) and the Saxon Ministry of Economics wanted a new Bauhaus^[12] and a close link between design and production, which Stam ensured by submitting an impressive concept where this linkage was foregrounded, “according to the Czech model.”^[13] Neues Deutschland had already reported positively on Hubert Hoffmann’s Anhalt initiative in a 6 February 1948 article, which ran under the headline, “The Bauhaus in Dessau is coming back”:

 

“The art of yesterday’s confession of art and the related study of nature consisted of an embarrassingly differentiated exploration of the phenomenon ... By contrast, the art of viewing and making visible unoptischer impressions and ideas was neglected. The Bauhaus masters bequeathed a ‘second face’ to their students: they awakened in them the sense of digging for the core of things.”^[14]

 

As a former teacher at the Bauhaus, a favored candidate to succeed Gropius and a well-known architectural wonder,^[15] Stam was the first choice to advance the Bauhaus reorganization in university politics. After Hermann Henselmann had proved himself unsuitable in Weimar—being that he could not secure the support of the communist Bauhäuslers, nor win Walter Gropius’s^[16] approval for his attempt to found a new Bauhaus based on too many politically compromised employees—Stam moved to the center of communist cadre politics, supported by his Dresden circles of friends. A name for the new school that included “bauschule” and could not be challenged by Gropius was quickly and prudently found, as were suitable premises—outside of Dresden in the former Dalcroze School, later the Hellerau Festspielhaus: “for the time being,” wrote Hubert Hoffmann, “this school building can be regarded as ideal for the new academy of arts in dresden—a proper school building with the possibility of a boarding school, working according to nature and practical work in and with the german workshops, which are located close to the tessenow school.”^[17] Hellerau, the settlement with the furniture factory where Lotte Beese was employed as a secretary before her Bauhaus days and where Ida Falkenberg had learned the carpentry trade, now became a standard-bearing school.^[18]

Mart Stam’s “bauschule” in Dresden

Stam’s activities were embedded within the communist leadership’s overall reorganization of art and architectural education. He met regularly at conferences with other university heads to coordinate and exchange experiences. The minutes of these meetings show that Stam was not only concerned with the usual programmatic cleaning up of the schools but also with methodological questions of creativity, training, and personality development. While uncompromisingly distancing himself from teachers who had accepted NSDAP commissions, in 1949 he showed no hesitation in appointing Marianne Brandt, who herself drew his attention to her prior membership in the Reich Chamber of Culture. A flawless background of revolutionary activity or resistance participation on the part of professorial appointments appeared of less importance to Stam than didactic experience and a common avant-garde conception of art, design, and architecture. On 4 October 1949, he wrote to John Heartfield, whom he wanted to appoint to the graphic arts department: “About a year ago, we also wanted to abandon our field of work in the west (Holland) in order to devote ourselves here to the great tasks of democratic reconstruction. we are fully in the process of reshaping the education of up-and-coming artists and believe that they too can make a major contribution to this.”^[19]

Stam’s cast list indicates the direction he wished the school to follow: Fritz Koelle (sculpture), Heinz Lohmar (drawing and painting), Lex Metz, Hajo Rose (color, form, font), Guido Reiff (literary history), Helmuth Prange (stage design), Erich Nicola, Günther Strupp, Otto Winkele (stone, wood, sculpture), Marianne Brandt (metal, ceramics, wood), Hans Christoph (advertising), Stephan Hirzel (industrial science), and Rudi Högner (textile). He also tried to import the Berlin artists Arno Mohr, Horst Strempel, René Graetz, and Rudolf Bergander as a group from Weißensee. For the school’s social science faculty, Stam won the philosopher Hermann Ley, the writer Ludwig Renn (art history), Rudolf Neubert (anthropology and sexual sciences) as well as Will Grohmann (art criticism). The attempt to establish an offshoot of the Frankfurt School in Dresden and to conduct social science research within the environment of the school is of particular interest. The “New Dresden” was obviously supposed to be a bit of a “New Frankfurt School” and, even more, a “Prague School” of functionalism.^[20]

Stam did not only begin to break open encrusted academy structures, he also aimed to develop a completely new functionality for art, reconceived not only as a way of life but as an industrial/material culture developed within the context of the planned economy. He contrasted the cult of the individual artist and panel painting for bourgeois interiors with the painter collectives then working on large murals for public space. In an effort to gradually replace the old teaching staff with new blood, he developed an activist, life-reform university pedagogy with a markedly physical component, taking up the Dalcroze concept—the learning and experiencing of music through rhythmic movement (named after its founder, the Swiss composer and educator Émile Jacques-Dalcroze)—by interrupting lessons with cyclic rhythmic exercises. While he actively supported the university jazz band through personal donations, he made himself deeply unpopular with the bibulous Bohème by enforcing strict abstinence at parties. This asceticism, his extremely noble furnishings for the Second German Art Exhibition (designed in collaboration with Hans Kinder), and his contacts among Dresden anthroposophists—who at the time operated the most progressive school in the city—soon qualified him as a “Salon Communist” in the eyes of his vigilant competition. He made himself particularly vulnerable—and ridiculous among his male contemporaries—by dint of the feminism adopted by his politically committed mother and his devotion to and dependence on his wife Olga Stam-Heller.

The Dresden painters in particular saw Stam’s concept as a frontal attack on the academy principle and the master studio structure. For their part, they took up the fight “to prove to the fuckers what a rake is.”^[21] The dispute intensified and became personal when Stam rejected the artistic position of graphic artist Lea Grundig, recently returned from exile in Palestine. This was understandable for aesthetic reasons, but this beautiful Jewish woman had Dresden’s Bohemians at her feet. Her rejection was perceived as further proof of Stam’s strangeness and coldheartedness.

 

“It is the eternal struggle between the so-called intellectuals, the cold beauty spirits, Winkelarchitekten (angle architects) and the creative forces, the artistic people. ... As much as possible we must try to preserve the essence of the Academy; i.e., do everything we can to ensure the next generation is secured who will take as their mission the preservation of art—the art of artistic creation—for the future, where it has a great social task to fulfil. Stam, in my opinion—Bill (Lachnit), Theo (Richter) and Josef (Hegenbarth) are of the same opinion—is not the man who is fertilizing and pointing forward, not in this field ... The old guard lives, despite all that. On us the world directs its divine eyes. In reality we alone have the real proof ... that socialism does not remain a utopia ...”^[22]

 

In this pointed conflict, at first only the old guard actually expressed itself. It was a revival of a twenty-year-old conflict among left-wing artists over the role and function of art within class struggle. True to the writings of Georg Lukács, the mimetic principle of representation, reflection, and figurative representation was positioned politically against all forms of modern abstraction, expressionism, constructivism, materialist aesthetics, and Dadaism. Above all, the “exploration of unoptical impressions,” which Hubert Hoffmann had emphasized as part of the lasting legacy of the Bauhaus, naturally failed under the “divine eyes of the world.” In Czecho-slovakia, this harsh art/political confrontation—culminating in Karel Teige’s “Liquidation of Art”^[23]—had been termed by 1930 a “generational debate.” There, unique in the communist movement, the poetism of the younger artists and architects ultimately enabled the avant-garde line to prevail over the older generation of proletarian-revolutionary writers.

Stam in Berlin-Weißensee between the fronts of the Cold War

The debate about which art was the way for socialism to come to reality—or, rather, the question of whether the cold Winkelarchitekten from the constructivist ABC group^[24] would take part in it—was revived at a moment when the West desired abstraction as an expression of freedom for itself and, via the two superpowers of the Cold War, was engaged in a battle of weaponized aesthetic totalities.^[25] One skirmish in this battle was Stam’s appointment as director of the Kunsthochschule in Berlin-Weißensee, effective 1 May 1950, after being expelled from his prior post in view of the difficulties he had encountered in Dresden. Here, he could expect a greater level of accommodation from the painting collectives around Horst Strempel and the Berlin Planning Collective. Selmanagić, in fact, was planning the transformation of Berlin’s center into a “folk education city,” with a series of new university buildings and a separate complex for Stam and his university. However, while concrete construction tasks awaited Stam, a fundamental change of direction was taking place behind the scenes at the same time. In Moscow, his reconstruction plans for Dresden and Selmanagić’s projects for Berlin were being inspected. A report requested by the SED Party Control Commission also indicates that Stam himself was being reviewed. While his professional and pedagogical work were judged positively, his political qualities were found wanting: “In contrast to these very positive successes of Comrade Stam stands his position towards the party, which is individualistic ... The terms ‘party discipline’ and ‘party affiliation’ are not so strong in Comrade Stam that he would implement decisions with which he disagrees ...”^[26]

This was a political verdict, not yet a judegment on his artistic worth. At first it only indicated that Stam could not follow the progressive Stalinization of the SED. When an assessment of his successor in Dresden was requested a year later, there was now normative talk regarding Stam’s technical deficiencies, indicating that the ideological premises of SED art policy had in the meantime changed:

 

“The consequence, that he showed when following the wrong path, once taken, allows for the conclusion that, guided by a superior technical knowledge coming, however, from his bourgeois origin, he regards the new paths taken today (of “socialist realism”—Author’s note) as technically inadequate, and actually regards it as a mission to preserve culture according to his perspective, a short circuit that again makes his ideological ambiguities obvious. Support for the statement that Prof. Stam can decide for the new way of art development after serious discussion do not exist, because his current statement is so anchored in his nature that a departure from this point of view is not possible without giving himself up. His special technical side, seen from the scholastic point of view, is so specifically reformist Bauhaus-like that it can no longer be regarded as acceptable by us today. With this specifically intellectual and modernist attitude, he brought himself into contradiction with our democratic reconstruction and, of course, he came into conflict with the part of the teaching profession that worked its way towards carrying out our current tasks from other artistic perspectives.”^[27]

 

Although Stam had been active as rector in Berlin-Weißensee for more than a year, with far greater success than in Dresden and broad support from his colleagues (while at the same time heading the Institute for Industrial Design), this party assessment signaled the likelihood of his being sent back to where cosmopolitan modernism had been demonstratively appropriated as an expression of freedom in the Cold War—to the West. The question of “instrument or monument,”^[28] or the architectural concept or art, were by this time no longer an intramural dispute among left-wing artists but now were being carried out globally, part of a confrontation between Eastern and Western “blocks.” Along this essential question of the functionality of art, the Cold War broke out between the systems.

In spite of this personally fatal outcome for Stam, the institute he founded—later known as the Office for Industrial Design—whose mission he defined, would persist until the GDR’s end:

 

“The Institute will largely collect documents and material; it will compile sample collections and systematically entrust research tasks to specialists in a wide variety of fields. Gradually, the Institute will be able to help more and more businesses, advising them on how to improve their existing and most viable products. The Institute will provide companies with new models and new samples on a case-by-case basis, always in close contact with the production department.”^[29]

 

Here, too, one can see a continuation of the Bauhaus, which in the Meyer era had turned into the economic Bauhaus. By pursuing his diverse tasks in the industry-related advisory boards for product design at the Ministry of Light Industry and in the various commissions for the selection of models to be included at the Leipzig Sample Fair, Stam continued a trend that began with Meyer, who worked for the sustainable economic institutionalization of industry. As a committed and critical expert, Stam not only worked for individual industrial sectors, he also joined committees charged with guideline competence associated with the Central Office for Research and Technology of the State Planning Commission, as well as the German Office for Metrology and Product Testing. Stam’s programming process went far beyond the elementary socialization of design at the Bauhaus, with its focus on “people’s needs,” and, as the ABC Group also strived to achieve, he developed a non-profit social, cultural and economic policy that focused on the production of goods by workers, envisioning them at the same time as responsible consumers.

Stam wanted to infuse the entire process of economic reproduction with a design sensibility. With his design theory, and without fully suspecting it, the artist, acting here as a producer, disputed the competence of the political cadres of the SED, oriented as they were on Marx’s concept of work. When the cabinetmaker Walter Ulbricht then cut short his program, it was far more than a purely personal conflict or a superficial matter of taste; it was, rather, an epistemological problem originating in the realm of terminology. The advanced design concept of the late Bauhaus—Meyer’s “hohe Schule der Gestaltung”—which worked towards comprehensive socialization and encompassed the common economy, reached the limits of the political apparatus’s receptivity but not the economy itself. However much he was supported by technologists, engineers, accountants, and company collectives, Stam could not assert himself against a backward Marxist doctrine. Thus, approaches for a total, mass-effective, and resource-saving product design implemented in a planned economy were finally driven underground, a matter for people who nevertheless continued until their cause finally prevailed with regards to the economy’s course, even without direct agitation. It seemed, as Bertolt Brecht contemporaneously admitted, to be a question of the maturity of a legal process that had yet to gather momentum.

For Stam, however, there would be no opportunity to wait for the socialist economy’s maturation. As an overly exposed agitator, in 1951 he and his University found themselves at the center of the so-called “formalism debate.” Although it had long since moved away from the universalism of Constructivist modernism and generated an extremely binding quality of expression in relation to time and people, the School, located in a converted factory, continued to present itself as a stronghold of the cosmopolitan Bauhaus idea during this period of party control over everything from painting to architecture. According to Stam’s understanding, this departure from purely iconic evidence of modernity via abstraction to an adaptation process based on the reception habits of post-fascist Germans was “realistic.”^[30] However, despite ostensibly proving its flexibility, the faculty in Weißensee did not avoid being subjected to art-theoretical brainwashing. On 2 May 1951, representatives of the Economic, Propaganda and Cultural Department of the Central Committee of the SED were on hand at a specially scheduled conference on questions of architecture. Rejecting the new architectural doctrine of “national traditions,” both professors and students of Weißensee refused to embellish buildings with artistically designed ornaments, even glorifying American architecture, which they saw embodied in the buildings of Richard Neutra and Mies van der Rohe.

This was the crucial point of the whole discussion, because in the meantime the art debate had become a weapon in the world system conflict, and Stam and the Weißensee school were caught inadvertently between the opposing fronts of the Cold War.^[31] Beginning in 1950, the CIA had begun financing a broad intellectual and, above all, journalistic network centered around the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF),^[32] including—as far as is known—Walter Gropius with his Bauhaus copyright, and Marshall Plan and Ford Foundation funds (the latter having been specifically founded for purposes of anticommunist subversivion). The Americans did not fear Stalinist cultural production but were alarmed by the possibility of the cultural vanguard and communism uniting, as was obviously happening in the strongholds of European thought—Paris, London, and Berlin. As a result of this global confrontation, Germany was in principle colonized by the two superpowers in a cultural-political and contradictory way.^[33] Almost at the same time as the 1950 “Journey to Moscow” was being organized in the GDR—with only Edmund Collein and Waldemar Alder of the Bauhäuslers participating—an architectural study trip to the United States was being organized in West Germany. Before being allowed to enter the country, participants had first to complete several weeks of political training on Ellis Island. The CIA then financed the group’s excursion through America’s cities, which included consultations at American universities. The clever West German architects returned to Europe with patents for car-friendly infrastructure. Henry Ford was also responsible for the CIA exporting similarly car-friendly urban planning templates to the Third World. Cities such as Baghdad and Accra were modernized by introducing structuralist American grids and highways. The architect and city planner C.A. Doxiades worked vehemently on behalf of the “Company” to Americanize the world.^[34] The role of the Ford Foundation in the background must have been a sharp thorn in the side of the Soviets’ urban interests, especially the development of the auto-mobile-oriented city. A sign of his political unreliability: comrade Stam had even suggested a forward-looking drive-in solution for his cultural centre in Böhlen.

As a particularly exposed foreigner—an expert who had long been fixated on automotive forms of transport and vehicle-friendly space, and a verified salon-communist freethinker— Mart Stam became a target for attack in the debate over which political camp the modernist project should systematically belong to. It would take a very long time before form+zweck, the magazine Stam initiated, would in 1983 place Karl Marx on the iconic Stamschen Freischwinger chair, thus reclaiming functionalism as the aesthetic leitmotif for communism. And only then would the West, in its paradigmatic turn to postmodernism, finally drop Gropius and the Bauhaus.^[35]

Selman Selmanagić Holds Course

When Selman Selmanagić was called to Weißensee in 1950 by Mart Stam to become the head of architectural training, the spiritus rector of the Berlin Collective Plan had just completed work on the Berlin Stadium for World Youth. In its synthesis of architecture, art, design, and landscape design, the Stadium constituted an example of complex environmental design realized according to Bauhaus standards—not just through the stones used but also atmospherically, as it bore a slight resemblance to his buildings in Jerusalem. The pictures of the young sportsmen also remind us—a very typical visual motif for the time—of youthful Israeli faces from the kibbutz. The “Buildings of Youth”, one of the reformist institutional structures that originally inspired the postwar Bauhäusler planning network, clearly refer to agricultural-socialist traditions of land reform. Selmanagić had worked in Jerusalem with Erich Kaufmann, the leading architect of the Aliyah, not by chance but out of a lively interest. By 1937 he had distanced himself from Zionism, having come to regard it as a fascist ideology. The same critical turn against Stalinism had cost Karel Teige his prominent position in Czechoslovakia, and his expulsion from the Levá fronta^[36] in 1938. With the great sifting out in 1950 of critical and liberal positions in Moscow, the Collective Plan of Berlin, having been further developed into a green general reconstruction plan for the region, fell victim to this fundamental revision, with allegations raised that it was grossly hostile to the city and, moreover, “pure Abercrombie.”^[37] Similary, Walter Ulbricht had described the new stadium, which had been dedicated at the Second Party Congress of 1947—as well as the first houses on Stalinallee—as foreign to the city and, an allusion to Selmanagić’s countries of exile, “African”^[38] in appearance.

When Selmanagić became a university lecturer at Stam’s side in 1950, measured against his immense range of activities at the Berlin magistrate’s office this appointment led to a career slump: a steadfast Bauhäusler, he would remain banished to the university for life. Prohibited from pursuing an architectural career due to these Bauhaus connections, one can still measure the thoroughness with which he based his teaching as perfectly as possible on his experience there. Alongside Kibbutznik Arieh Sharon, the Bosnian Muslim can probably be regarded as the second model pupil of the Meyer era, even though his time there overlapped with Meyer for only one year and, as a student of Ludwig Hilberseimer, he encountered Meyer only in the carpentry workshop rather than in the architecture program itself. While Sharon carefully documented Meyer’s teachings in his archived course notes, Selmanagić profited above all from the Bauhaus’s roster of guest teachers, above all Karel Teige. From Teige he adopted his poetic conception of the arts as a modus vivendi; a communicative tonality, a sensual world orchestrated jointly by all artistic genres. Teige seems to have promoted his view of a “world that smells”^[39] at the Bauhaus, above all through Joseph Delteil’s hypotheses justifying a lust for life as resulting from chemical processes. Selmanagić often referred to Teige’s olfactory fascination, as did Umbo, who after Gropius’s retirement regularly took part in Bauhaus life. And it was not only Umbo’s culinary interests and his frivolous (from a career perspective) way of giving himself away that points to the model of art conveyed by Teige (and also lived by him): he considered art, as Teige did, simply as an elementary expression of life; as food for oneself which is not to be presented in galleries as a fetish object. Many Bauhäuslers of that period—whom, art historically speaking, one seldoms hears much about—mixed concrete, grew hops, or photographed wedding parties, and were firm in their resolve that such prosaic activities were essential to their artistic process. Teige brought something to the Bauhaus that Delteil perceived as proto-situationist: the real “Neolithic” bohemian, going back to the roots. A great number of Bauhäuslers became authentically happy there in the wrong life or in the wrong present. They didn’t have to sell their art. Nor did Teige sell his collages, which only surfaced long after his death.

For Selmanagić, the model pupil of Teige, the path to hedonistic internalization was only conditionally acceptable. He was an architect and as such was addressed by Teige’s oversized idea of a plan for the new earth in a way that immediately turned his religious desires into this world. Teige’s flesh-and-blood art concept has a counterpart anchored in the intelligent areas of the brain. “Building and Poem”^[40] are two sides of creative human activity conditioned by each other. And building meant, following Teige, to give structure to the world.

“Plans for a New Globe”

Selmanagić, who completed his Bauhaus diploma (No. 100) with Mies van der Rohe in 1932 and subsequently prepared the Berlin report for the 4th CIAM Congress for Walter Gropius in collaboration with Wils Ebert, adopted an ethic of planning from Meyer, from Teige, and also, very probably, from Mies that prohibited him from becoming self-sufficient. In a 1965 letter to Walter Gropius he summarized this condition as follows:

 

“By chance, after 1950, I had to make do almost exclusively with the teaching profession, so that I could necessarily penetrate many pedagogical and architectural problems with leisure and from many sides. I didn’t know anything about pedagogy at the beginning, nor did I know how to teach architecture, because I hadn’t paid any attention to how my teachers had developed me into an architect ... I naively assumed that I could tell every student, just like an employee, how to do architecture, because I know how to do it, both individually and collectively. And with great astonishment and disappointment and despair, I realized that it was not possible. It was only then that I thought to myself: How did the Bauhaus masters train me? I was shocked by the new, completely unknown situation in which I was placed and by the responsibility, on the one hand, for the development of the students and, on the other hand, for architecture. To be honest: I was at a loss. Every day I spent at least eight hours at school, and I couldn’t sleep at night. So, like the world’s first teacher of architecture, the curriculum came into being step by step. Only then did I gradually begin to understand the Bauhaus idea with increasing admiration. A new light came on for me. A teaching of ‘total architecture’ ... When I first wrote down our study plan, I was surprised by the large number of subjects, even though I had arranged all the lessons individually myself.”^[41]

 

Through extremely intensive instruction, about 30 students of architecture at the Berlin-Weißensee School of Art and Design were trained in artistic and scientific methods by five architects, according to a uniform basic teaching of one year for all disciplines, supported by additional lecturers in specialist technical subjects. A two-year aspirant’s degree could thus be used to deepen the knowledge of a special task beyond the normal course of study. Particular emphasis was placed on the artistic analysis of many kinds of architectural objects—in their developmental phase and with respect to constitutive mutual dependencies, conditioned by function, representation, material, technology, construction, economy, and so on. Each task was planned by the students themselves according to three basic questions: who to build for? what to build? how to build? (with the cooperation of the responsible institutions of the GDR being assumed). This threefold question is of interest; obviously in its own right, and as a corrected variant of Mies van der Rohe’s guiding principle, which sought to clarify the relationship between the “what” and the “how.” Selmanagić added “for whom,” demanding that students first examine the life of people in society before translating human activity into spatially static and dynamic functional areas. Moreover, collaborative work—the interdisciplinary “interlocking” of the arts (a word also used by Hannes Meyer)—and collective exchange were also highly valued.

If one takes a closer look at how Selmanagić planned a new city like Schwedt together with his students, it becomes clear that the students were not learning any “profession” specialized in particular aesthetic questions. Rather, they were training a behavior, practicing a demand— regardless of how their practice was structured. Following Mart Stam, Hans Schmidt, and Hannes Meyer, it was intended that graduates become social trustees for all upcoming design questions—just as a typographer should understand as much as an actor. The scale of cooperation and co-determination thus ranged from shoes to waste management. Moreover, Selmanagić, the author of the Weißensee study program, was of the opinion that his students should dedicate four weeks a year to working on an agricultural holding. And so, the circle closes with a reminiscence of the Bosnian fields and the kibbutzim of Palestine. According to Selmanagić, in the foreseeable future people would be freed by machines from heavy work, and this, to their great joy, would enable them to deal with plants and animals, tend their gardens, and engage in the manual production of objects and interior spaces. While teaching at the Bauhaus, Karel Teige had also explained the meaning of modern design in this way: as a kind of falling back into one’s creaturely being; the abolition of alienation from nature; an existential becoming one with the planet. “A world that laughs. A world that smells.”^[42] The temporally relieved person, thought Selmanagić, will not always only want to play, but would settle, plant, breed black roses, be idle in an Oriental way. These totalities, visualized in sleepless Weißensee nights as the embodiment of the Bauhaus idea—“as with the world’s first architecture teacher” and their perspective on returning home—appear to me more exciting with each passing day. “All artists interlock” was the mantra of the restless seeker. But art alone will not suffice.