bauhaus faces

• Paul Klee / Fabienne Eggelhöfer

  In this episode you will hear the first result of my tour to Switzerland back in May. One of my stops was at Zentrum Paul Klee in Berne to interview Fabienne Eggelhöfer, chief curator of the ZPK. Paul Klee created so much art during his lifetime – in his last year of life alone 1.253 works. Exhibitions of his work are still a huge audience magnet. He is today one of the best-known artists of the Bauhaus. But his career had started much earlier than with his appointment as Bauhaus master; he had lived a full life before. In the beginning, becoming a musician (like his parents and his wife Lily) was even in the cards. But Klee decided that all good music had already been written, and so he chose to become a painter, but music would always be a big part of his art and private life.   While studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich Klee felt that he would never be able to learn painting. Travelling to Tunisia in 1914 would become pivotal for Klee’s paintings – that’s at least what he wrote. In Tunis, he discovered the color, he said, and thus now finally IS a painter.   When Gropius asked Paul Klee to come teach at the Bauhaus in 1920 the school was still very young and struggling to become what it is known for today. Wassily Kandinsky, with whom Klee had earlier been part of the „Blaue Reiter“ art group, was also appointed and the two of them were the real magnets to attract young students to the Bauhaus. Paul Klee, though, was unexperienced as a teacher and had to find his own ways – and never had enough time for his own art – a crucial point in deciding to leave the Bauhaus after 10 years. In the writings of many Bauhauslers Klee is often portrayed as a mentor, capable of painting with both hands at the same time. But also, as someone, who’s teaching the students only understood much later – after their time at the Bauhaus.

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• PART 3 Hannes Meyer / Raquel Franklin

  We have ended part 2 with Hannes Meyer leaving the Soviet Union to go and help build a socialist republic in Spain which was interrupted by the Franco coup and left Meyer in limbo in his home country, Switzerland. Here, he married Lena Bergner in 1937 – they already had a daughter, Lilo, back then. In 1938 to 1939 Hannes Meyer built the orphanage Mümliswil, which I have discussed more extensively at the end of part 2. In this new episode I have invited the Mexican art-historian Raquel Franklin to talk about Meyer’s next and last emigration to Mexico between 1938 and 1949, about which she wrote her PhD thesis. What were his goals and opportunities? Was Meyer really a spy for the Soviets? What was the Black book of Nazi terror and Meyer’s role in it? And why did he leave Mexico, too, ending up again in Switzerland and not in another socialist country like the GDR? As in parts 1 and 2 I will bring in former Berlin Senator for Culture Thomas Flierl to share his research results and expertise, too.

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• PART 2 Hannes Meyer / Tatiana Efrussi

  In August 1930, Hannes Meyer was dismissed from the Bauhaus amid rising communist activism and his inability to control it. A 1931 caricature by Adolf Hofmeister humorously captures Meyer clutching the hammer and sickle, symbolizing his unwavering commitment to socialism. Despite his departure, Meyer’s Bauhaus legacy endures in photographs and memories, but his true passion was always for the revolutionary proletariat cause. Shortly after leaving Germany, Meyer declared in a 1930 Pravda interview his conviction that architecture must serve socialism, prompting his move to the Soviet Union. There, from 1930 to 1936, he immersed himself in numerous projects that embodied his vision of a socialist culture in the making—a period so rich it inspired an entire book by Tatiana Efrussi. In this episode, she will talk about her research results. This episode of _bauhaus faces_ explores Meyer’s Soviet years and his subsequent attempt to support the socialist revolution in Spain. But Meyer’s story doesn’t end there. In the final part, Mexican art historian Raquel Franklin will reveal his later work in Mexico and his final years in Switzerland. Join us as we continue to unravel the complex life and enduring impact of one of the Bauhaus’s most politically charged figures.

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• PART 1 Hannes Meyer / Dara Kiese & Thomas Flierl

  In this new episode of “bauhaus faces” we talk about Hannes Meyer, the second Bauhaus director. PART 1 concentrates on Hannes Meyer’s formative years and his involvement in cooperativism and collectivism, his first steps as architect and artist, and then on to his pivotal role at the Bauhaus in Dessau. What was new when he became second director of the Bauhaus? And why did he have to leave the Bauhaus all at once after two successful years? The US-American art-historian Dara Kiese, who wrote her PhD thesis about Hannes Meyer’s holistic education at the Bauhaus, and former Senator for Culture in Berlin and art-historian Thomas Flierl help tell the story of Hannes Meyer in this 1st part. The Meyer era of the Bauhaus ended in summer of 1930 when he is dismissed by the Dessau magistrate in absence from the school. The political tensions between the far left and the far right now became palpable. A communist cell had emerged at the Bauhaus, for which Meyer was blamed responsible. His peak in Germany was now beginning to decline and Meyer decided that it was time to try and establish himself in the Soviet Union – in a country from which he expected freedom of thought and a fulfilment of his architectural visions. Little did he know …

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• PART 2 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe / Aya Soika

  This is PART 2 of the Podcast episode about Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. It puts a magnifying glass over a specific period of time in Mies’s life: his commissions for the Nazis after the Bauhaus had closed in July 1933 and his final emigration to the US in 1938. For this episode, the art-historian Aya Soika shares her expertise. She published a book about this time of Mies’s life with the title „Mies van der Rohe in the Third Reich. The Brussels Project, 1934" (link in the show notes). Aya Soika doesn’t denounce Mies van der Rohe for his commissions for the Nazis but emphasizes the circumstances in which Mies found himself as a modern architect and as a person that didn’t necessarily want to leave his home. But she also underlines his naivety in thinking that as an architect he could be apolitical. Although Mies never won the competition and the pavilion was never even built due to a financial lack of Nazi Germany to come up with enough foreign currency, this project – and some others – that Mies van der Rohe accepted to plan for the Nazis, those projects were, of course, hotly disputed by architecture historians. And what did Mies himself say about this after the end of the Second World War? Well, that’s what you will find out in the 2nd part of my podcast about Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

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