IN the catalog preface for “Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity,” a comprehensive survey now up at the Museum of Modern Art, the curators write about the museum’s — and America’s — last major exhibition on the subject, in 1938. That show, they maintain, offered a scattershot presentation of the Bauhaus, complety ignoring its last five years, after Walter Gropius, the school’s larger-than-life founding director, had resigned. Not coincidentally, they suggest, most Americans have a limited understanding even now of what the Bauhaus accomplished or how it fit into the history of its time.
An SS officer's living room, designed by the former Bauhaus student Franz Ehrlich.
We think of the word Bauhaus as shorthand for “an international modern style unmoored from any particular moment,” the curators write, and their show, on view through Jan. 25, does a lot to counter this impression. It connects the evolution of Bauhaus art and design — painting, furniture, glass constructions, metalwork, photography, textiles and theater design — with the extreme social and political changes that roiled Germany during the Weimar Republic. More than 400 works by artists and designers including Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Marcel Breuer, Marianne Brandt, Anni Albers, Josef Albers and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy testify to the wealth of visions and the shifting social contexts that shaped the school up to its tragic end in 1933, when its remaining faculty members shut it down rather than work with the Nazis.
Of course when an institution is as influential as the Bauhaus, even the most repressive totalitarian regime cannot totally defeat it. Leah Dickerman, the curator of the MoMA show with the museum’s curator of architecture and design, Barry Bergdoll, points out that the Bauhaus left a particularly important “divided legacy” on its own home turf after the war, from the International Style towers and high-end consumer products of West Germany’s economic miracle to the endless rows of workers’ housing that came to define the East.
Until recently, however, few who have studied the school’s history, including me — I run the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and wrote a book called “The Bauhaus Group” — have been aware of how palpably its influence lived on in the Third Reich. The story of what happened after the Gestapo padlocked the last Bauhaus facility, in Berlin, has always been about flight and persecution. Most of the school’s artists and artisans left the country, many for America; the few who remained, it has been thought, were Jews who did not get out in time.
But this summer and fall at the Neue Museum in Weimar, the city where the school got its start, another exhibition told a different story, of a Bauhaus-trained painter and architect who applied the school’s aesthetic advances to concentration camp design. Franz Ehrlich, who had studied with Moholy-Nagy, Klee, Kandinsky and Josef Albers, began working for the Nazis as a prisoner at Buchenwald, then continued long after his release.
It is impossible to determine to what extent Ehrlich was a collaborator, a victim and resistance worker, or something in between. His story is not unlike that of many Germans of the time. But that may be what is most unsettling about him for those of us used to thinking of the Bauhaus — that wellspring of idealistism and innovation — as a world apart in prewar German culture, untainted by Hitler’s regime.
And Ehrlich was not alone, as a Weimar-based Bauhaus scholar who helped organize the show pointed out as I stood with her at the wrought-iron gates of Buchenwald on the city’s outskirts, shuddering to realize that the lettering on them was pure Bauhaus. Ehrlich, their designer, was not the only Bauhausler to put his progressive training to work for the Third Reich, she said, just one about whom a great deal has lately been learned — including his connection to this particularly chilling symbol of the Nazi era.
Ehrlich, who was arrested as a Communist in 1935, arrived at Buchenwald two years later, when the camp was still new and had only a few temporary structures. Like all prisoners there he was immediately forced into hard labor, but after two weeks he walked into the joinery workshop, declared himself an architect — he had worked in Gropius’s Berlin office — and began to draw at a drafting table. Rather than report him to the SS, the prisoner in charge assigned him to design and build the entrance gates.
From then on, the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and others who were brought to Buchenwald to be worked to death entered on foot under Ehrilich’s elegant rendereding of the words “Jedem das Seine”: “To each his own.” It was a translation of a Roman legal maxim invoking the individual’s right to enjoy what is his, but — like the recently stolen “Work makes you free” sign at Auschwitz — recast with a sneer, in this case as a sort of cynical “Everyone gets his just deserts.” The stylish sans-serif lettering reflected Ehrlich’s training under the Bauhaus typography master Joost Schmidt.
Soon the camp commandant was asking Ehrlich to decorate and furnish his house, and the head of the Buchenwald construction office had made him its main designer. He was released in 1939 but was asked to stay on in the office. Besides being a concentration camp Buchenwald was an SS training facility and the site of a large munitions factory, and there was a lot to build. Knowing he would be paid, Ehrlich accepted.
Later in life he would claim that this enabled him to help the secret resistance network in the camp, but this is impossible to corroborate beyond the testimony of a resistance member and fellow prisoner, Fritz Männchen, who, in an interview after the war, said that in 1941 Ehrlich provided details of SS construction management in the east— meaning Auschwitz. In any case, his new position and salary clearly made life easier, enabling him to marry the woman he had been engaged to before he went to Buchenwald.
Ehrlich was not allowed to work on structures where high security was required — the bunker where inmates were tortured and killed, the crematorium, the room for medical “experiments,” the cellar where corpses were dumped through a chute — but he applied his skills to many housing and recreation facilities for the SS. In 1940 he created a zoological garden for forest animals, separated from the camp by barbed wire; the SS officers who enjoyed it were under strict orders “to refrain from anything that might not be good for the animals,” and prisoners could stare at the well-protected creatures through the wire barrier.
Ehrlich also made a master plan for the enlargement of Buchenwald, with structures ranging from prisoners’ housing, barracks and the weapons factory to a falconry and a casino for the SS. In 1941 he was transferred to Berlin, where he designed a scheme for the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen and continued his projects for Buchenwald, including the interior of a guest house for Hermann Goering.
Ehrlich’s drawings show that much of his work was in an old-fashioned German folk idiom — the lavish interior he made for the director of Buchenwald, for example, was straight out of the 19th century, except for the enormous swastika over the fireplace. But elsewhere the Bauhaus influence was strong, as in the side chairs, desks, wardrobes, bathrooms and a wall clock for the SS that could all have come from the Bauhaus furniture workshop. His simple, handsome vases in the style of the Bauhaus ceramic workshop became everyday accouterments in the homes of SS officers.
After the war Ehrlich worked for the department of reconstruction in Dresden and spent the rest of his life, until his death in 1984, practicing architecture in East Germany. To the extent that he ever talked about his privileged position working for the SS during those years, he maintained that it had enabled him, in some unspecified way, to help the victims of Nazism. “I still had the same ties to the prisoners as before,” he told an East German newspaper “and I helped many of them.”
“But given the overall situation,” he added, “it could never have come to subversive activity.”
Scholars have made little effort to find others like Ehrlich among the more than 1,300 people who passed through the Bauhaus, but a few are known to history, if not to most people familiar with the school. Fritz Ertl, for example, was a former student there who became a Waffen SS officer and designed gas chambers and crematoriums at Auschwitz; he and another architect, Walter Dejaco, were tried in Vienna in 1972 on charges of abetting mass murder. They denied having known the purpose of their buildings, were acquitted and have been largely forgotten.
Herbert Bayer, the brilliant graphic designer whose posters and signs helped give the Bauhaus its identity, worked for the Nazis in the mid-’30s. A brochure he designed was distributed internationally and meant to lure people from all over the world to see the Führer’s achievements. Later in life, when Bayer was known for ski posters generated from his office in Aspen, Colo., he would comment only on the use of duotone technique and other formal elements of his work celebrating life under the Nazis.
Of the Bauhaus students and teachers who did not emigrate, those who are best remembered — like the textile artist Otti Berger, the painter and bookbinder Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, the weaver Hedwig Dûlberg-Arnheim and the metalworker Lotte Mentzel — perished at Auschwitz. But it seems inevitable that with further historical research there will be more stories about Bauhauslers on the other side of the divide. The thought that anyone connected to the Bauhaus could have helped promote Hitler’s regime or design its camps is distinctly painful to people who study and care about this extraordinary school, which may have something to do with why, more than 70 years later, it comes as news to many of us.
A version of this article appeared in print on December 27, 2009, on page AR23 of the New York edition.
