Ines Weizman interview

The Bauhaus cen­te­nary gives cause for cel­e­bra­tion but also for crit­i­cal re­search. Ines Weizman lec­tures at the Bauhaus Uni­ver­sity in Weimar. This year she is con­fer­ence di­rec­tor of the XIV In­ter­na­tional Bauhaus Col­lo­quium and is cur­rently com­plet­ing the pub­li­ca­tion “Dust & Data. Traces of the Bauhaus across 100 years”. In her in­ter­view with FSB she speaks about the con­tra­dic­tions in­form­ing the world’s most famous art school.

The Bauhaus was set up in Weimar a century ago this year. The cen­te­nary year has only just got going but in Germany we are already being in­un­dated with pub­li­ca­tions, ex­hi­bi­tion an­nounce­ments and events. You lecture in Weimar and live in London. Is the cen­te­nary year getting any at­ten­tion at all across the Channel?

Ines Weizman: You say in­un­dated, but I think it is really rather special for a school of thought to receive such treat­ment in­ter­na­tion­ally. We are ex­pe­ri­enc­ing a ver­i­ta­ble re­nais­sance. Archives have been opened up, new doc­u­ments found, texts trans­lated and yes, any number of books pub­lished.

It is, after all, also a ques­tion of re­flect­ing upon the mi­gra­tory history of people and ideas and asking oneself what has hap­pened in the mean­time, in a century of living with the Bauhaus. Maybe the Bauhaus theme was ex­hausted some­what in London with a major ex­hi­bi­tion back in 2012 at the Bar­bi­can that really at­tracted a lot of public in­ter­est. An ex­hi­bi­tion on Anni Albers cur­rently running at Tate Modern is re­ceiv­ing a rap­tur­ous re­sponse in part, cer­tainly, because Albers epit­o­mises the giant leap from Weimar to Black Moun­tain College.

London was also a staging post for exiles who had to leave Germany in 1933.

Ines Weizman: Exactly. Several key Bauhaus ex­po­nents stopped off here in London. Com­par­a­tively little is known in Great Britain about just how big an impact the Bauhaus made on the history of design and ar­chi­tec­ture there. People in Britain still have some dif­fi­culty with this today, and it is not always easy, more­over, to de­ter­mine exactly what impact the exiles ac­tu­ally did make. A lit­tle-known fact is that Walter Gropius was invited to con­tinue the Bauhaus in London in 1935. But nothing became of the idea because the Bauhaus was per­ceived as being too weird and un-Eng­lish. Though the likes of Gropius or Marcel Breuer did, of course, design Mod­ernist build­ings for London, many other ar­chi­tects exiled or simply coming from Germany were force to adapt to British hybrid forms of red-brick and tra­di­tional Mod­ernism.

What’s the picture in Weimar? One does slightly get the feeling that the clas­si­cal her­itage eclipses every­thing else there.

Ines Weizman: The Bauhaus really is evident at every turn, and the people of Weimar are very fa­mil­iar with it. Heike Hanada’s new Bauhaus Museum is, of course, ex­cit­ing. This new-build venture so close to the Gau­fo­rum will lend shape to a museum dis­trict devoted to the topog­ra­phy of Mod­ernism. And that may dispel the naivety that still holds sway with regard to Mod­ernism. On the one hand, we have the beauty of Mod­ernism, its en­light­en­ing, in­quis­i­tive, avant­garde facets – but there are also the darker sides in­volv­ing ab­strac­tion, du­pli­ca­tion and a face­less society. This site will doc­u­ment both the sense of a fresh de­par­ture and the horrors as­so­ci­ated with the city’s history. When you leave the museum, you are di­rectly con­fronted with a quite dif­fer­ent Mod­ernist reality.

The Bauhaus is one of those his­tor­i­cal phe­nom­ena every­thing was thought to be already known about. For you as a re­searcher, what are the de­ci­sive factors when ad­dress­ing the Bauhaus?

Ines Weizman: Every­one has some­thing to say about the Bauhaus, but from wildly dif­fer­ing stand­points. The Bauhaus leads us through a hundred years of history – and it’s a bumpy ride. It does not just cover the period from 1919-33 but also the in­sti­tu­tion’s sub­se­quent impact. It is pos­si­ble, on the one hand, to give de­tailed at­ten­tion to those orig­i­nally in­volved in Weimar, Dessau and Berlin, but there are also stories to be told about the move­ment’s ex­po­nents who went out into the world, took the Bauhaus with them and ne­go­ti­ated the various po­lit­i­cal systems. Some were per­se­cuted, whilst others managed to put their ideas into prac­tice. In some cases, the Bauhaus was allowed to man­i­fest itself, in others it was not suf­fered gladly – and at times it was dan­ger­ous having any­thing at all to do with it either ar­tis­ti­cally or as a scholar. 1976 was an ex­tremely im­por­tant turning point in this respect, the year the Bauhaus build­ing in Dessau was ren­o­vated. That was a signal in the then GDR that it was once again pos­si­ble to openly address oneself to the Bauhaus.

Nev­er­the­less, no one was ever quite sure which aspects of the Bauhaus it was per­mis­si­ble to ap­pre­ci­ate. At­ten­tion in the GDR was, for in­stance, focused on res­i­den­tial con­struc­tion and in­dus­trial pre-fab­ri­ca­tion. The avant­garde element was of less in­ter­est. And on no account was too much to be made of Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe, who were active in the USA after the war. It was like­wise long im­pos­si­ble to openly discuss Hannes Meyer, the second Bauhaus di­rec­tor, a man whose ac­tiv­i­ties in the Soviet Union and Mexico were taboo on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

What sig­nif­i­cance does the Bauhaus have for a company like FSB today?
Ines Weizman: To return to the subject of Hannes Meyer, this is someone who does not feature in most nar­ra­tives on the Bauhaus. Maybe that’s also – fig­u­ra­tively speak­ing – on account of his never having de­signed a door handle. Perhaps it’s also because he was re­cep­tive to major social issues of the age such as hous­ing-es­tate con­struc­tion or the problem of en­sur­ing good quality for the masses. A company such as FSB might also be able to think along such lines.

The three di­rec­tors Gropius, Meyer and van der Rohe re­peat­edly share the lime­light. Meyer has been the subject of schol­arly reap­praisal re­cently. Two of the three door levers FSB has issued as re­designs in its “Bauhaus Trilogy” were orig­i­nated by Bauhaus di­rec­tors. The world-fa­mous Gropius handle is strik­ing for the way it marries a right-an­gled bar of square cross-sec­tion to a rolling cylin­dri­cal grip. Mies opted for an organic shape and a char­ac­ter­is­tic “fore­fin­ger furrow”. How would a lever handle by Hannes Meyer have looked?

Ines Weizman: We are fa­mil­iar with Meyer’s frugal in­te­ri­ors, notably his Co-op in­te­rior pub­lished in 1926: an utterly frugal space ap­pointed with a gramo­phone, camp bed and shelves on which nothing can be ac­com­mo­dated. I think Meyer might have made a lever handle out of a single casting so as to fa­cil­i­tate mass pro­duc­tion. Or maybe he would have simply de­signed a knob, a straight­for­ward ro­tat­able knob that speaks for itself. It wouldn’t have been very con­ve­nient to use – in keeping with the Co-op in­te­rior. Maybe he would have ques­tioned the need for any means of keeping doors closed. (laughs)