From Heidelberg, we catch the Inter-City Express (ICE) fast train out of Mannheim Hauptbanhof. It’s bound for Berlin, but we’ll debark in Leipzig for another train change, to Dessau. We’re going to visit the city where the Bauhaus school, that icon of Modernism, changed the terms of architecture, and much more, back in the 1920s.
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A Train Story
We boarded the ICE train leaving Mannheim, among a throng of fellow travelers bound easterly, and looked for seats. Carolyn found one while I maneuvered our bags out of an endless file of folks dragging their own bags down the aisle and waited to see if other seats might open up. Soon a lady came to say Carolyn was in her seat and showed her ticket. We took a closer look at our own ticket and found we had seats in ‘Wagen’ no. 2 – and we were in Wagen no. 5. We dragged our bags through three packed cars and luggage to our cabin, but saw no empty seats. When we showed our ticket to claim seats 81 and 82, a young couple left to find something empty elsewhere.
We recalled the time in 1986 when we left Paris’ Gare du Lyon on an overnight train for Nice:
There were train strikes in Europe and confusion at the station. A friendly ticket agent said our train was on track ‘E.’ When I started for track E, he yelled out “Non Monsieur. That ees ‘E,’ as een Etaly!” And he pointed in the other direction.
When we found our overnight cabin, a wagonlit, with fold-down bed racks, the cabin was full. A young man was adamant that we had the wrong cabin, while his young female companion looked alarmed. We went to check the next voiture and there were no more cars on the train. A conductor came and found that the young couple had no tickets, so he told them to vacate the train. The young man stuffed both their bags through the window, tumbling onto the platform outside, and they headed for the exit. Another traveler said they were just married and heading south for their honeymoon. The last we saw of them, she was sitting on her toppled bag crying as the train left the station. We felt very sad for them, but there was nothing we could do.
The aisles of the train were filled with young men sleeping on the floor. We had to step over them to use the restroom. In the morning, we stopped at a station near Lyon and all the young men filed off the train. Outside the window I noticed a drill instructor in his distinctive campaign hat, like the ones I remembered from my own youth. These young guys had just arrived at boot camp.
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We settled into comfortable seats on the ICE train to watch the landscape go by just outside our large picture windows, as we passed charming rural hamlets and small towns. Towering wind generators and solar panel installations along the way illustrated Germany’s commitment to move away from polluting power sources of the past and toward a ‘greener’ future.
Before we get to Leipzig, passengers are into relaxation mode, and some are fully reclined on the floor. Travel in Europe these days is not nearly as formal as some folks may still imagine.
Somewhere about halfway from Mannheim to Leipzig our train passed over the old East German border. I’m not sure what we expected but we saw no old barriers, no barbed wire, no real difference in the small towns and verdant German countryside passing by our window.
Leipzig’s massive station has a train set for kids to play with, and a Starbucks, of course. The main entry hall is hung with banners promoting the up-coming Bachfest Leipzig, a nice reminder that Germany has produced more in history than just the WW2 insanity of jack-booted Nazis.
A short ride on a local train, along with several bicycles, takes us past more wind farms and green countryside. A smiling girl on a poster bids us a ‘Warm Welcome on Board!’ the S-Bahn Mitteldeutschland (Railroad of Middle Germany).
At Dessau, in the state of Saxony-Anhalt southeast of Berlin, we were picked up at the train station (an unexpected benefit!) by our affable Airb&b ’Super Host’ named Daniel. He whisked us off to the apartment we’d rented, a spacious garret on the upper floor of his home on a quiet residential street, with a nice view to a verdant backyard, and just half a block from a good grocery store. We’re within walking distance along tree-shaded streets in this small town to most of what we came to see here, and with easy bus access to the rest.
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A ’Trabi’ moment
We were now in the former East Germany, so let’s get the Trabant jokes out of the way (The Trabant was a small and simple car manufactured in East Germany. Over 3 million were produced from 1957 to 1991.):
• How do you catch a Trabant?
Stick a piece of gum to the highway. (It had an under-powered
2-stroke engine with 2 cylinders.)
• A Trabant can go from 0 to 60 in only two or three days.
Downhill.
• What does the Model 601 stand for?
Holds 6 people crammed in + zero comfort for all + 1 person
to push.
• It’s said the Trabant had a rear heater
– to keep your hands warm in winter, as you push.
• It’s a 10 minute walk from here to the train station
– or 30 minutes by Trabant.
But actually the Trabant, also known as the ‘Trabi,’ was an advanced design when it first came out in 1957, with front wheel drive, unitary construction, and independent suspension, and it served a critical need for transportation in devastated post-war East Germany while producing much-needed jobs. It was also simple and easy to repair, with ‘peasant tuning’ capability. But it suffered from a lack of R&D in subsequent years, as other cars made greater technological changes. And its smokey two-cycle engine could never pass modern European emissions standards, although the last models featured a better Volkswagen engine.
Even so, the Trabant remains much-loved by hobbyists as a cheap collectible car. And some have even been ‘customized’ by people with too much time on their hands.
For more Trabi info:
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trabant
• Want your own ‘Trabi?’ Check out “Honest John” in the UK:
https://classics.honestjohn.co.uk/cars-for-sale/search/Trabant/
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Our stay in Dessau begins with a nice evening’s walk down cobbled sidewalks along Elballee toward the Kornhaus designed by Carl Fieger, a protege of Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius. It’s on the banks of the Elbe River, the same river where US and Soviet troops would later meet on April 25 in 1945, at Torgau, southeast of Dessau, cutting the remains of Nazi Germany in half.
In its day, the Kornhaus was a controversial, unadorned, and daring design. But today it looks somewhat uninspired and ordinary, its windows having that modern frame-less pasted-on look. But the terrace restaurant overlooks a quiet meander of the river.
We enjoy a fine and well-presented dinner, rich in delicious vegetables (an important standard for us), as the sun sets slowly over the quiet river just below us. It’s not such a bad way to begin our visit.
In the morning, I walk to the store for fresh bagels, spreads and other delights while Carolyn makes coffee. And we enjoy a quiet breakfast, looking out at the verdant backyard below us. We save money making our own breakfasts whenever there’s a store nearby – which is often, throughout Europe.
On a fine warm day we take a good long walk through the quiet and unassuming streets of Dessau to the Bauhaus. As in other German cities we’ve visited, there’s little evidence of damage from a war that ended more than 70 years ago – Europe has centuries of experience at rebuilding after major conflicts. But we came to see everyday German life in this town that dates from at least 1213 AD – a dress shop, an old car, postal workers riding bright yellow bicycles.
Frequent street signs point us toward what Dessau is most famous for these days: the Bauhaus, and the fraught design conversation it started back in 1919, while they were still in Weimar. The school moved here in 1925 to escape Weimar’s newly elected Nazi government. The school later moved to Berlin, and lasted until the Nazis closed it in 1933. In that brief time it became an important piece of the modernist art & architectural movement, one that figured in our own educations.
We find plenty of worthy distractions along the way to the Bauhaus, including a ’short cut’ through a pleasant park, passing classical monuments, families on bicycles, and a playful squirrel hiding in a tree. There’s a remnant fire-damaged monument that’s a possible casualty of WWII bombing, but no signage to explain it. Taking the most direct route becomes less important than experiencing this community. In the end, it’s all interconnected.
We pass an ominous-looking warning sign, but don’t figure it out until later. When I run it through Google Translate (which sometimes gives hilariously inaccurate results) I get:
Infested by oak procession spinner. Touching or inhaling the caterpillar hairs or the nests can trigger allergic reactions
Lucky we didn't snort caterpillar hairs or nests while in the park!
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Dessau is such a tranquil and peaceful place that it’s hard to imagine it was almost completely destroyed in an Allied bombing raid in 1945, shortly before occupation by the US Army. Today, it’s a modest city of about 80,000 residents with numerous large parks and is thought of as one of Germany’s ‘greenest cities.’ It’s easy to imagine lazy summers for a young kid in Dessau as a German version of Waukegan, Illinois, as described in Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine – a place where kids can ride bikes and swim in the river, while Mama makes a brilliant yellow wine from dandelions to cure colds in the winter, because it’s ‘bottled summer.’
A few German flags hang from windows and car side mirrors because the mighty German football team is returning to the World Cup after winning the Championship in 2014. Hopes are still high this early in the event.
Dessau today shows little evidence of the War, with restored buildings and palaces, plus a vibrant downtown area. And the Junkers Museum, located at the airport, tells the story of Hugo Junkers, the pioneering designer who built the world’s first practical all-metal aircraft and whose planes were among the first to provide viable air transport and passenger service in Europe. Junkers aircraft were also flown by the German Luftwaffe in the Second World War, although Hugo Junkers, the founder and a Socialist Pacifist, had been forced out by the Nazis in 1934, and placed under house arrest.
We emerge from the park at a sign reading “Gropiusallee” and soon arrive at the Bauhaus precinct, that sacred ground upon which walked 'giants' of the modernist movement – there’s a tendency among purists to worship the founders as god-like figures. There’s no question that Walter Gropius assembled some of the leading Modernist thinkers of the era who would later make their marks individually as artistic leaders.
Europe has long had major disruptions, from the Industrial Revolution when peasants left stoop-work in the fields for factory jobs in the growing cities, to social upheavals of the mid-1800s that triggered mass migrations to the New World. The Vienna Secession and other artistic rebellions broke with old Romantic traditions, creating Cubism, Expressionism, Dadaism, and other radical forms of art. The First World War caused the collapse of old empires: the Russian, the Austro-Hungarian, the Ottoman, and the emerging German Empire. But this time the world was ready for radical new ideas. Enter the Bauhaus.
Walter Gropius was an Architect who served as an artillery officer in the German army during the First world War, which he viewed as a catastrophe. Gropius had worked with innovators such as Peter Behrens and Henry van de Velde before the war, and he became the Director of the Bauhaus when it first opened in Weimar, and later moved to Dessau. He gathered an impressive cadre of teachers that included Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Joseph and Annie Albers, and László Moholy-Nagy with his talented photographer wife, Lucia Schulz, who documented their work. They, along with later-Director Ludwig Mies van de Rohe, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier, would become the core of a movement that would change modern architecture.
Oddly, given the radical and egalitarian nature of the Bauhaus, bright young men in the program went straight into the Architecture curriculum while young women were shunted off to the Crafts side.
We had come to Dessau to see where it all began.
The dictum, “Less is more,” is often attributed to Mies van der Rohe in 1947, but dates at least to Robert Browning’s 1855 ‘blank verse’ poem “Andrea del Sarto.” It has been used to summarize Modern Architecture, and was quickly adopted by developers who saw that ‘less’ could also mean ‘cheaper’ – with no more of that bric-a-brac and those decorative encrustations of the Greek Revival and the Baroque. A buck saved is a buck earned.
Also, cheap housing was a critical need in the years after World War II. Europe faced a massive housing crisis, as thousands of dwellings had been destroyed by bombing and artillery. Millions of displaced refugees – Germans, Poles, Ukrainians and others – were on the roads, expelled from various newly created countries and shifted to ‘ethnic homelands’ where they had never lived before. And they needed housing. Smug Americans can denigrate the admittedly ugly ’Soviet-style’ housing blocks created, but the US has never faced such a massive crisis in its history.
A few classical touches can save a mundane design, but good minimalism is not easy to achieve. And a masterpiece of modern architecture requires a special hand. There aren’t enough masters of the form to go around, so today’s modern cities have many imposing and uninspiring glass-walled buildings, and very little that’s artful and beautiful, balanced and memorable.
While I appreciate examples of good modernism as a dramatic form of urban sculpture, I can’t think of a modernist streetscape to love – unlike the streets of so many older cities in the world, cities that were designed and built at a scale to be appreciated on foot, to really see the small details an architect, or just a craftsman, thought to include.
The debate over the Bauhaus is endless: here’s a link to the post-war controversy in Dessau, and a few comments that follow:
- A renaissance of the Bauhaus is the last thing we need, we have been living with its teachings and philosophy (Rem Koolhaas being a direct descendent) for the last 50 years. Enough of the Bauhaus already, the only person that managed to put a modern spin onto it was Le Corbusier.
- Bauhaus is as crucial a part of the legacy of Western art as Sistine Chapel or Stonehenge. The teachings and philosophy behind it will remain relevant forever, in one way or another.
- Well, Germans do love that box style, look at most houses in Germany, very Bauhaus. And the house as machine for living has gone out of fashion, in the sense Le Corb meant it.
- FORM FOLLOWS FUNCTION. That is one of the things they gave us.
- Aren't you being a bit harsh dude?
- But these are 'playful ... artistic interpretations' not functioning houses. Which surely is a travesty and mockery of the Bauhaus philosophy.
After being (quite unexpectedly, I must admit) astounded by the Mies pavilion in Barcelona, I'd be keen to visit meticulous reconstructions of seminal Bauhaus works to see what they are really like. But this is something else entirely. - Form follows function has nothing to do with the Bauhaus (where they spoke German) and predates its foundation by more than 20 years. It's by Louis Sullivan, and is from his 1896 essay The Tall Building Artistically Considered
After a long walk through the Bauhaus district, we come across a Greek restaurant (!) called El Greco, and settle in for some very good food. We’ll get back to the Bauhaus on another day.
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The Masters Houses are where the luminaries of the school actually lived in the products of their brave new ideas. The Houses are clean and bold white cubes, set in a copse of pines standing straight and tall and spare against the whiteness.
The attention to detail in the concrete work is exemplary, some of it done to rebuild damage after WWII, although the Houses seem colder and more museum-like than actually ‘livable.’ Could I really live in one of these minimalist cubes? Would I actually enjoy it? And if this is such a great idea, why do most people still want to live in something more ‘traditional?’
The tragedies of war give opportunities to rebuild using better ideas and techniques. It’s been pointed out that the Thirty Years War was far more destructive to Europe than World War II, but they rebuilt during the fabulous Baroque era. How can today’s drab post-war Modernist buildings possibly measure up to that standard, despite all the high rhetoric? Look to the disasters of Urban Renewal that replaced so many beautiful older buildings in the US, and led immediately to depopulated and failed inner cities.
And all this brings up another question which must be asked – it also applies to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesen West school at Scottsdale AZ – given all the brilliant artist-teachers involved, have there been any brilliant graduates? Or does the process of disciple-ism require the loss of personal radical ideas?
The strong-arm tactics of the anti-intellectual Nazis closing the Bauhaus school in 1933 had the result of spreading their radical ideas widely across the thinking world, much as water tossed into a hot skillet splatters the walls. Gropius moved to Harvard; Mies van de Rohe taught at Chicago, Joseph and Annie Albers critiqued some of Carolyn’s earliest color experiments when she was a student at Southern Illinois University (SIU) in Carbondale in the late 1950s.
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The legacy of the Bauhaus was, indeed, the foundation of the design program at SIU, and I was lucky enough to have fallen into it without really understanding what it was all about. I was just looking for a place to study "commercial art," as my high school art teacher had recommended; and I ended up in a revolutionary design education program based on the Bauhaus tradition and dedicated to turning out, in the words of SIU Research Professor Buckminster Fuller, "comprehensive, anticipatory design scientists."
So, in response to Perry's question about "disciple-ism," I must say that at SIU, while the the Bauhaus "gods" and their work were studied — and some of them even came through the program to hold seminars or do short-term teaching stints — it was more the Bauhaus philosophy of inquiry and critical thinking that was emphasized. We were surrounded by images of the art and architecture that came out of the Bauhaus; but we were taught to question and create, not imitate — analyze and innovate, not replicate. That was surely because of the remarkable innovative design educators, Harold Cohen and Davis Pratt, who left the Institute of Design in Chicago to found the SIU program.
So, as I walked the present-day campus of the Bauhaus in Dessau, I was curious, too, which tradition is being carried on there. What is emphasized — the process or the form? The models and drawings certainly seemed to indicate a continuing focus on modernism and minimalism, but images do not always reveal the thinking behind them. It would have been fun to sit in on some classes and try to answer that question. In any case, I was energized by roaming the studios, walking through the spaces, and seeing student work on walls and desks. It reminded me just how much I loved being a student, then later a teacher. — Carolyn
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It’s an endless conversation…..
We end our stay with dinner at a place called Taffelspitz. The World Cup games are showing in the back courtyard, with blankets draped on the chairs so the folks of Dessau can stay warm as they get a long-awaited start on summer under open skies.
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Next, we’ll travel to the city of Dresden, made famous by a devastating British and US air raid and firestorm in 1945. Stay with us for that one. — PRW