Hannes Meyer regarded the building as being "… like any object in nature, uninhibited and with no stylistic or aesthetic demands … !" He emphasized that it was a "…building of life and not of art". Through these qualities, the The Bernau Trades Union College (Allgemeiner Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, ADGB) in Bernau near Berlin, built in 1929, was to become one of the most significant buildings by the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer, who was then Director of the Bauhaus in Dessau.
Meyer completed the extensive and demanding project north-east of Berlin in collaboration with Hans Wittwer, with whom he had already collaborated before his time at the Bauhaus, and who was to succeed him as head of the department of architecture there. In addition to Hannes Meyer, the architects Max Taut, Erich Mendelssohn and Aloys Klement, among others, were invited by the ADGB to propose designs for the building. Hannes Meyer was the only one who satisfactorily met the requirements, which involved translating the ADGB’s social-education approach into an architectural solution while at the same time adapting the new building harmoniously into the idyllic natural scenery on the site. He received the commission and began work on the project in close collaboration with the various departments at the Bauhaus, where he had succeeded Walter Gropius as Director in 1928. In addition to Wittwer’s collaboration, he also received support with the planning work from Lotte Beese, Hermann Bunzel and Arieh Sharon, who were then still students at the Bauhaus and were later to become architects. For the fixtures and equipment, right down to the curtains, ideas and ways of implementing them were provided by the carpentry and weaving workshops at the Dessau Bauhaus. The architectural ensemble was praised in the press, alongside many criticisms, as "the first work by the Bauhaus for the labour movement". Further education courses allowing trades union members a respite from everyday working life in natural scenery were held at the college after its opening.
When the Nazis took power, free trades unions were banned and the The Bernau Trades Union College was closed on 2 May 1933. It was confiscated and run as a "Nazi College" up to the end of the Second World War – although Hitler personally disliked the building’s flat-roofed structure. In 1945, the Soviet occupying forces took the college over and established a barracks and military hospital in it for a short time. In 1946, the facilities were restored to the trades unions, and extensive renovation work started following the plundering and damage that the building had suffered. The college received university status in January 1952 and arranged its curriculum accordingly. In 1977, the building was declared a protected monument. The college was closed after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism.
In May 1990, an association called "baudenkmal bundesschule bernau" [Bernau National College Architectural Monument] was founded, and it still has its offices in one of the former teachers’ houses in the college complex. Peter Steininger and Günter Thoms, the authors of a 48-page brochure, "Die ADGB-Bundesschule Bernau bei Berlin",The Bernau Trades Union College outline the whole history of the 1933, from the original idea to today’s architectural monument – providing a glimpse behind the walls of the yellow clinker-built structure, which is often unjustly overlooked alongside the Bauhaus sites in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin.
Bibliography
Peter Steininger & Günter Thoms, Die ADGB-Bundesschule bei Berli, Leipzig 2013.
EUR [ D ] 9.95
ISBN 978-3-86502-313-1