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Inside Weimar’s new politically charged Bauhaus museum

The Bauhaus design school, which transformed the way people around the world live, work and dream of the future, marks its centenary this week with the launch of a politically charged German museum.

Published: 4 April 2019 12:08 CEST
Inside Weimar's new politically charged Bauhaus museum
The new Bauhaus museum in Weimar. Photo: DPA

Founded on April 1st, 1919 during the rocky period between the world wars and finally driven out by the Nazis, Bauhaus still has the power to inspire and divide in today's own turbulent era.

The sprawling museum in Bauhaus's birthplace of Weimar, a small city 250 kilometres southwest of Berlin, will open to the public Saturday and display the classics of its less-is-more, form-follows-function aesthetic.

SEE ALSO: Iconic creations of Bauhaus designs, 100 years on

The inauguration of the minimalist temple housing the world's oldest Bauhaus collection comes just weeks ahead of European elections and six months before a key poll in Weimar's state of Thuringia.

The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) looks poised to make strong gains in each vote.

“Of course you can't see this opening separate from its political context,” Wolfgang Holler, director of Weimar's museums, told AFP.

Inside the new museum. Photo: DPA

“Bauhaus was, from the very beginning, intensely political. And so it's a perfect place to start a conversation, especially with young people.”

Faces of camp survivors

Weimar selected a highly symbolic design and location for the building.

German architect Heike Hanada placed her concrete cube just outside the picturesque old town where literary giants Goethe and Schiller cemented the small city's elevated place in Germany's cultural landscape.

The €22.6 million museum is framed on one side by a recreational space created under the inter-war Weimar Republic, Germany's ill-fated first experiment with democracy.

SEE ALSO: How Bauhaus designed the world as we know it

On another side is a model housing block built under East Germany's communists.

Crucially, the Bauhaus Museum Weimar stands opposite the former Gauforum, a U-shaped colossus built by the Nazis to house, among other things, administrative offices for their slave labour programme.

“I was able to achieve my main goal, which was for the museum to be able to stand up to the Nazi architecture in the neighbourhood,” Hanada told the daily Thüringer Allgemeine.

“It becomes plain here what happens when you heedlessly run after certain ideologies,” Holler said. “These fascinating juxtapositions say so much about how this country sees itself.”

This week, Weimar hung larger-than-life contemporary photographs of survivors of the Nazis' former Buchenwald concentration camp, whose memorial can be seen in the distance through a specially-placed picture window on the museum's top floor.

The haunting images of the now elderly faces line the road from the main train station to the museum.

The photographer Thomas Müller with a portrait of a survivor of Buchenwald concentration camp. Photo: DPA

Photographer Thomas Müller said they were also meant to challenge the AfD, whose co-leader Alexander Gauland has called the Nazi era a “speck of bird shit in more than 1,000 years of successful German history”.

“Especially in view of the Thuringia election, we have got to deal with our history responsibly,” Mueller told German radio.

'Ahead of their time'

The Bauhaus school, which counted Russian abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky and Swiss-born surrealist Paul Klee among its proponents, had at its core the idea of making beautiful, practical design accessible to the masses.

The museum traces how founder Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus, deemed subversive by the then ultra-right government in Weimar, were forced to move east to Dessau then to Berlin before the Nazis ran them out of Germany for good.

SEE ALSO: 'Rethinking the world': Bauhaus celebrates 100 years

Bauhaus's acolytes ended up sowing seeds wherever they landed, from Tel Aviv to Chicago. Today, everything from iPhones to Ikea furniture bear the mark of its keep-it-simple tenets.

Most observers have praised Hanada's boxy museum design as a worthy tribute to the Bauhaus look.

However some have criticized the elimination of a glass facade, which they say gives the building an unfortunate resemblance to a wartime bunker.

“Some have even compared it to the Wolf's Lair,” Hitler's Eastern Front headquarters, Holler admitted.

The museum is nearly ready to open to the public. Photo: DPA

“But we wanted something that would say, 'We aren't cowering away — we're making our presence felt'.”

The exhibition, expected to draw 100,000 visitors a year, includes icons such as Marcel Breuer's tubular steel and leather chairs, Marianne Brandt's whimsically angular teapots, and a multicoloured circles-and-triangles cradle by Peter Keller.

It ultimately aims to examine why Hitler saw such a dangerous enemy in Bauhaus, and how it became one of the few cherished German legacies from the early 20th century.

“You learn here how hard it can be for those who are ahead of their time,” Holler said.

By Deborah Cole

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ART

African-born director’s new vision for Berlin cultural magnet

One of the rare African-born figures to head a German cultural institution, Bonaventure Ndikung is aiming to highlight post-colonial multiculturalism at a Berlin arts centre with its roots in Western hegemony.

Published: 8 July 2023 10:13 CEST
African-born director's new vision for Berlin cultural magnet

The “Haus der Kulturen der Welt” (House of World Cultures), or HKW, was built by the Americans in 1956 during the Cold War for propaganda purposes, at a time when Germany was still divided.

New director Ndikung said it had been located “strategically” so that people on the other side of the Berlin Wall, in the then-communist East, could see it.

This was “representing freedom” but “from the Western perspective”, the 46-year-old told AFP.

Now Ndikung, born in Cameroon before coming to study in Germany 26 years ago, wants to transform it into a place filled with “different cultures of the world”.

The centre, by the river Spree, is known locally as the “pregnant oyster” due to its sweeping, curved roof. It does not have its own collections but is home to exhibition rooms and a 1,000-seat auditorium.

It reopened in June after renovations, and Ndikung’s first project “Quilombismo” fits in with his aims of expanding the centre’s offerings.

The exhibition takes its name from the Brazilian term “Quilombo”, referring to the communities formed in the 17th century by African slaves, who fled to remote parts of the South American country.

Throughout the summer, there will also be performances, concerts, films, discussions and an exhibition of contemporary art from post-colonial societies across Africa, the Americas, Asia and Oceania.

‘Rethink the space’

“We have been trying to… rethink the space. We invited artists to paint walls… even the floor,” Ndikung said.

And part of the “Quilombismo” exhibition can be found glued to the floor -African braids laced together, a symbol of liberation for black people, which was created by Zimbabwean artist Nontsikelelo Mutiti.

According to Ndikung, African slaves on plantations sometimes plaited their hair in certain ways as a kind of coded message to those seeking to escape, showing them which direction to head.

READ ALSO: Germany hands back looted artefacts to Nigeria

His quest for aestheticism is reflected in his appearance: with a colourful suit and headgear, as well as huge rings on his fingers, he rarely goes unnoticed.

During his interview with AFP, Ndikung was wearing a green scarf and cap, a blue-ish jacket and big, sky-blue shoes.

With a doctorate in medical biology, he used to work as an engineer before devoting himself to art.

In 2010, he founded the Savvy Gallery in Berlin, bringing together art from the West and elsewhere, and in 2017 was one of the curators of Documenta, a prestigious contemporary art event in the German city of Kassel.

Convinced of the belief that history “has been written by a particular type of people, mostly white and men,” Ndikung has had all the rooms in the HKW renamed after women.

These are figures who have “done something important in the advancement of the world” but were “erased” from history, he added. Among them is Frenchwoman Paulette Nardal, born in Martinique in 1896.

She helped inspire the creation of the “negritude” movement, which aimed to develop black literary consciousness, and was the first black woman to study at the Sorbonne in Paris.

Reassessing history

Ndikung’s appointment at the HKW comes as awareness grows in Germany about its colonial past, which has long been overshadowed by the atrocities committed during the era of Adolf Hitler’s Nazis.

Berlin has in recent years started returning looted objects to African countries which it occupied in the early 20th century — Burundi, Rwanda, Tanzania, Namibia and Cameroon.

“It’s long overdue,” said Ndikung.

He was born in Cameroon’s capital, Yaounde, into an anglophone family.

The country is majority francophone but also home to an anglophone minority and has faced deadly unrest in English-speaking areas, where armed insurgents are fighting to establish an independent homeland.

One of his dreams is to open a museum in Cameroon “bringing together historical and contemporary objects” from different countries, he said.

He would love to locate it in Bamenda, the capital of Cameroon’s restive Northwest region.

“But there is a war in Bamenda, so I can’t,” he says.

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