The Final Phase
The Bauhaus came to Berlin not by choice but by exhaustion of alternatives. On August 22, 1932, the Nazi-controlled city council of Dessau voted twenty to five to close the school, effective October 1. Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who had directed the Bauhaus since 1930 and who had already spent two years attempting to shield it from political interference, faced a decision: accept the closure or attempt to continue the school outside municipal sponsorship. He chose the latter. Mies relocated the institution to Berlin, reconstituting it as a private venture — a “Freies Lehr- und Forschungsinstitut,” a free institute for teaching and research — financed by student fees and whatever remaining resources the faculty could marshal.
The decision was courageous, but it was also a measure of how far the school had fallen from the civic partnership it had enjoyed in Dessau under Mayor Fritz Hesse. The Bauhaus had begun as a state institution in Weimar, had flourished as a municipally supported school in Dessau, and now found itself reduced to the status of a private enterprise, dependent on tuition income, stripped of public funding, and operating without the political protection that had sustained it, however imperfectly, for thirteen years.
Nine Months in Steglitz
The building Mies secured was a former telephone factory at Birkbuschstrasse 49 in Berlin-Steglitz, a residential district in the southwestern part of the city. The space was functional but architecturally undistinguished — a stark contrast to the purpose-built Gropius complex in Dessau that had expressed the school’s pedagogical philosophy in every detail of its design. In Steglitz, the Bauhaus occupied rented industrial space, and the building itself communicated nothing about the institution housed within it.
One hundred fourteen students enrolled for the winter semester of 1932 to 1933. The teaching staff was sharply reduced: Mies himself, Lilly Reich, Wassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers, Ludwig Hilberseimer, and Walter Peterhans constituted the core faculty. The curriculum had been restructured under Mies’s direction to emphasize architecture far more heavily than it had under either Gropius or Meyer. The workshop system, which had been the pedagogical foundation of the school since its founding in 1919, was substantially merged and consolidated. There was no preliminary course — the Vorkurs that Itten and then Moholy-Nagy had made central to the Bauhaus experience was absent from the Berlin program. Student fees were raised, reflecting both the institution’s financial precariousness and Mies’s desire to attract committed, professionally oriented students rather than the broader and more socially diverse intake that had characterized the earlier phases.
The Berlin Bauhaus was, in almost every structural respect, a different institution from the one Gropius had founded fourteen years earlier. It was smaller, more architecturally focused, less communal, more expensive, and entirely without the public institutional framework that had given the school its civic identity in Weimar and Dessau. What it retained was the name, the faculty continuity, and the determination — Mies’s determination, above all — to keep the pedagogical enterprise alive.
The Raid and Dissolution
On April 11, 1933, less than three months after Adolf Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, police and SA troops raided the Bauhaus building in Steglitz. The building was sealed, and thirty-two students were detained and questioned before being released. The raid was part of the broader Nazi campaign to suppress institutions associated with modernism, internationalism, and political liberalism — categories into which the Bauhaus fell by reputation, if not always by its own self-description.
For the next three months, Mies attempted to negotiate the reopening of the school. The Gestapo eventually issued conditions under which the Bauhaus might be permitted to resume operations, but the terms were unacceptable to the faculty. On July 20, 1933, the masters’ council met and voted to dissolve the Bauhaus. The formal announcement followed on July 21. The school that had opened in Weimar on April 1, 1919, ceased to exist fourteen years, three months, and twenty days later.
The dissolution triggered a wave of emigration that would carry the Bauhaus pedagogical tradition across the Atlantic and beyond. Josef and Anni Albers left for the United States in 1933, accepting positions at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Kandinsky departed for Paris in the same year. Gropius left Germany in 1934, eventually reaching England and then the United States, where he joined the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1937. Mies himself emigrated to the United States in 1937, settling in Chicago, where he would direct the architecture program at the Armour Institute, later the Illinois Institute of Technology. These departures did not simply scatter individual talents; they transplanted an entire pedagogical culture — workshop methods, preliminary course structures, integrated design thinking — into new institutional contexts, where it would shape art and design education for the remainder of the twentieth century.
The Bauhaus-Archiv
Berlin’s relationship to the Bauhaus did not end with the dissolution. In the decades that followed, the city became the principal site for the institutional preservation of the school’s documentary legacy. The Bauhaus-Archiv was founded in the 1960s in Darmstadt by the art historian Hans Maria Wingler, who recognized that the dispersal of Bauhaus materials — drawings, photographs, correspondence, workshop products, pedagogical documents — across private collections, emigre estates, and scattered institutional holdings threatened to make the school’s history inaccessible to future scholarship.
Gropius, though by then long established in the United States, was involved in the project and designed the building that would eventually house the archive. The institution moved from Darmstadt to Berlin in 1971, and the Gropius-designed building on Klingelhöferstrasse opened in 1979, giving the archive a permanent home in the city where the Bauhaus had ended. The building itself — white, angular, with saw-tooth roof profiles — is a late work by Gropius, completed after his death in 1969 by his associate Alex Cvijanovic, and it stands as a final architectural gesture by the school’s founder toward the institution he had created six decades earlier.
The Bauhaus-Archiv today holds the largest collection of Bauhaus-related materials in the world: student work, faculty correspondence, photographs, workshop products, pedagogical documents, and administrative records that together constitute the primary documentary basis for Bauhaus scholarship. Its presence in Berlin closes a peculiar circle. The city where the school was destroyed became, within a few decades, the city where its memory was most systematically preserved — a transition from suppression to stewardship that says as much about the postwar Federal Republic’s relationship to modernist culture as it does about the Bauhaus itself.