Bauhaus Emigration

The Bauhaus was a German art and crafts school, founded in 1919 in Weimar. There, it was taught that furniture, houses and everyday objects should be simple, functional and affordable for many people. In 1933, the National Socialists forced the school to close because it was politically and artistically suspect to them. Many teachers and former students subsequently left Germany, often because they were Jewish, politically persecuted, or simply unemployed. This wave of emigration is called the Bauhaus Emigration. It led to a German idea of design living on worldwide, of all things after it had been banned in Germany.

How a closed school became a global style

Normally, an idea ends when the institution behind it is dismantled. With the Bauhaus, the opposite happened. Those who were expelled took their teaching methods with them and rebuilt them elsewhere. A school with a few hundred graduates thus became an international design approach.

This is especially visible in architecture. Smooth facades, large window surfaces, flat roofs and the absence of ornamentation still characterize office buildings and residential blocks around the world today. In the USA, this gave rise to what is known as the International Style, a building style without national characteristics. For decades, it became the standard language of modern cities.

The Bauhaus Emigration is also a prime example of a larger process: Germany’s loss of knowledge in the 1930s. Similar things happened in physics, medicine and the film industry. Anyone discussing innovation and location policy still draws on this example today.

The paths of those who were expelled

The emigration did not proceed in an orderly fashion, but in stages and via detours. Walter Gropius, the founder of the Bauhaus, first went to England and then on to the USA in 1937. There he headed the architecture department at Harvard University. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the last director, became a university professor in Chicago and built high-rise buildings there out of steel and glass.

It was decisive that the emigrants mostly found positions at universities. In this way, they passed on not just individual designs, but the entire educational approach. The painter László Moholy-Nagy founded the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937. Josef and Anni Albers taught at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Their students later became teachers themselves, and thus the approach multiplied across generations.

Not everyone went to America. About a dozen Bauhaus members emigrated to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. In Tel Aviv, thousands of buildings arose in the simple white style of modernism. Others went to the Soviet Union, to Great Britain or to Latin America. Some returned after 1945, but many remained abroad forever.

Where the legacy can be seen today

The most striking place is the so-called White City in Tel Aviv. It comprises more than 4,000 buildings from the 1930s and 1940s and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2003. Tours there regularly explain the German backstory of these buildings. In the USA, meanwhile, Mies van der Rohe’s high-rise buildings in Chicago and New York stand as landmarks of the International Style.

In everyday life, one encounters the Bauhaus Emigration more indirectly, through products. Tubular steel chairs, clean-lined lamps and unadorned shelving units go back to designs that were spread further through exile. Furniture stores still advertise using the word Bauhaus today, even though the term legally belongs to no one alone. Much of this is marketing and has little to do with the historical school.

In the news, the term mainly appears in connection with anniversaries, exhibitions and restoration projects. A common misconception here: the Bauhaus was not a uniform style, but a school with very diverse positions. It was only emigration and marketing abroad that, in retrospect, turned it into a clear brand.