“Captured by the Time” was the title of an exhibition devoted to Bauhaus member Erich Borchert that was held in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow from December 2012 to January 2013. The exhibition commemorated a gifted artist who, as a convinced Communist, moved to Russia in 1930 along with his teacher, Hinnerk Scheper. Borchert received Russian nationality in 1939 but was nevertheless arrested in 1942 and died in a Kazakh penal camp in 1944, at the age of 37. Erich Borchert is thus one of the Bauhaus graduates who have previously been little studied and who is only now, just under 70 years after his death, receiving belated attention and recognition.[1]
This is the starting-point for a new German Research Association (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG) project, “Bewegte Netzte” (Moving Networks) based at the Brandenburg Technical University in Cottbus and at the University of Erfurt. The project’s specific focus is on the networks built up by Bauhaus members particularly after the closure of the college in 1933. To what extent were the links formed in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin sufficiently distinctive and the individuals’ identification with the institution sufficiently strong that an informal “Bauhaus community” was – or was not – able to sustain the individual members through difficult times?[2] For example, there has been hardly any scholarly study of the lives of the 30–40 Bauhaus students and teachers who followed the second Director of the Bauhaus, Hannes Meyer, to Russia in 1930 – and not merely due to the language barrier. The reasons for this stretch far back into post-1945 history, when the reception of the Bauhaus was mainly determined by figures who had emigrated to the USA, such as Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and Herbert Bayer. In his account of the Bauhaus, Gropius in particular liked to omit any mention of his successor Meyer, whom he regarded as being responsible for the politicization of the Bauhaus – a picture that has been gradually corrected since the end of the 1980s.[3]
Another neglected topic that has only received greater attention during the last 20 years is the role of women at the Bauhaus.[4] They were marginalized by their male colleagues despite – or precisely because of – their success in the weaving and metalworking workshops at that time, and there is still a lack of a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the achievements of women in the Weimar Republic’s avant-garde institution. The same also applies to discussions of the Bauhaus in the United States, dominated by Gropius. It was only in early 2000s that this field was opened up by a comprehensive description of the female and male members of the Bauhaus in North America.[5]
Most recently, the Bauhaus anniversary year in 2009, with its wealth of different exhibitions and accompanying publications, critically questioned the view of the “Bauhaus myth”[6] and substantially broadened it.[7] This may have made the existing gaps all the more clearly visible, particularly since research studies had primarily focused on the period in which the Bauhaus existed as an institution. Research on exiles, although not focusing purely on the Bauhaus, had already made major contributions here.[8] But the descriptions often end in the fateful year of 1933, in which the Nazi seizure of power dramatically determined the careers of many Bauhaus members.[9] A recent publication on the lives of Bauhaus women under Nazism has provided an impressive account of this.[10]
The DFG project, planned for three and a half years, aims to fill these gaps. The three Bauhaus successor institutions – the Bauhaus Archive in Berlin, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation and the Weimar Classics Foundation – are intensively involved in the project as collaborative partners.
The group of Bauhaus members who emigrated to Russia is only one of the six networks that are being more precisely investigated in Cottbus and Erfurt. The previously little-known Bauhaus graduates who remained in Germany after 1933 and tried to come to terms with the system in various ways will also be examined.[11] In addition, the students who moved to the Netherlands during the 1930s for a mixture of economic, political and personal reasons will also be investigated. Another group that needs to be studied is that of the photographers and commercial graphic artists associated with the artistic figures of Herbert Bayer and László Moholy-Nagy. A fifth network that will be examined consists of the students and artist friends of the sculptor Gerhard Marcks. Last but not least, the sixth group, featuring Walter Gropius and his lasting relationships with important Bauhaus members, will also undergo intensive analysis.
The choice of these highly varied networks is by no means arbitrary. The project is characterized by close collaboration between the two specialist disciplines of art history (BTU Cottbus, Prof. Magdalena Droste) and communications studies (University of Erfurt, Prof. Patrick Rössler). The art historians are summing up the existing biographical research and expanding it through extensive archival research, and the findings obtained are being entered into a database managed by the communications studies specialists. The database will provide a new type of visual access to the historical information by means of a graphic analysis. It is to be managed by the media designers and doctoral students Jens Weber and Andreas Wolter. This methodological access route will make the networks’ differences and common features, their formation, development and dissolution tangible in graphic form and will in turn allow conclusions to be drawn regarding the influence of the Bauhaus as a whole. The approach will thus continue a series of recent efforts to make network analysis, with its origins in the social sciences, fruitful for historical studies.[12] The discovery and description of several Bauhaus networks existing in parallel with one another after 1933 will at the same time help to relativize the predominant pattern of interpretation featuring a single transatlantic success story.
The results are to be published on a digital research platform when the project is completed. There is thus still a little time left before the next anniversary year in 2019 to examine the Bauhaus in a fresh way as a network history, bringing lesser-known names out of oblivion and revealing the Bauhaus members’ intricate balance between artistic independence and the limitations of existence in politically difficult conditions.
Dr. Anke Blümm, BTU Cottbus
[1]"In der Zeit gefangen". Erich Borchert (1907-1944). Graphics from the artist’s family, 6 Dec., 2012 – 17 Febr., 2013, Puschkin-Museum, Moscow.
[2] Patrick Rössler et al., Von der Institution als Community: Das Bauhaus als kommunikatives Netzwerk, in Medien Journal, 2, 2011, pp. 16-32.
[3] Cf. Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, hannes meyer 1889-1954. architekt urbanist lehrer, Berlin 1989.
[4] Anja Baumhoff, The gendered world of the Bauhaus, Frankfurt/Main 2001.
[5] Gabriele Grawe, Call for action. Mitglieder des Bauhauses in Nordamerika, Weimar 2002.
[6] Anja Baumhoff & Magdalena Droste (eds.), Mythos Bauhaus. Zwischen Selbsterfindung und Enthistorisierung, Berlin 2009.
[7] Ulrike Bestgen & Ute Ackermann (eds.), Das Bauhaus kommt aus Weimar, Berlin 2009; Leah Dickerman & Barry Bergdoll (eds.), Bauhaus 1919–1933 – workshops for modernity, New York 2009; Annika Strupkus (ed.), Bauhaus global, Berlin 2010; Ute Ackermann et al. (eds.), Streit ums Bauhaus, Erfurt 2009; Patrick Rössler (ed.), Bauhauskommunikation - innovative Strategien im Umgang mit Medien, interner und externer Öffentlichkeit, Berlin 2009.
[8] Hartmut Krug & Michael Nungesser (eds.), Kunst im Exil in Großbritannien 1933–1945, Berlin 1986; Burcu Dogramaci & Karin Wimmer (eds.), Netzwerke des Exils. Künstlerische Verflechtungen, Austausch und Patronage nach 1933, Berlin 2011.
[9] Volkhard Knigge & Harry Stein (eds.), Franz Ehrlich. Ein Bauhäusler in Widerstand und Konzentrationslager, Weimar 2009.
[10] Inge Hansen-Schaberg et al., Entfernt. Frauen des Bauhauses während der NS-Zeit – Verfolgung und Exil, München 2012.
[11] Cf. Winfried Nerdinger (ed.), Bauhaus-Moderne im Nationalsozialismus. Zwischen Anbiederung und Verfolgung, München 1993.
[12] Cf. For example the website http://www.historicalnetworkresearch.org/