The closure of the Bauhaus in Dessau was not an administrative decision reached through dispassionate deliberation about educational policy. It was a political act, carried out by a city council that had been captured by the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, directed at an institution that the Nazis had targeted for destruction since before they held the votes to accomplish it.
The groundwork was laid on 25 October 1931, when municipal elections in Dessau made the NSDAP the strongest party on the city council. The party had campaigned explicitly against the Bauhaus, calling for an end to municipal subsidies and — in the most aggressive formulations — for the demolition of its buildings. The rhetoric combined economic grievance with ideological hostility: the school was denounced as a waste of public funds during a depression, as an outpost of “cultural Bolshevism,” and as an institution whose internationalist character and association with left-wing politics made it incompatible with the national renewal the Nazis claimed to represent. That the Bauhaus had already dismissed its most politically engaged director — Hannes Meyer, removed on 1 August 1930 for communist sympathies — did nothing to diminish the attacks. The appointment of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe as a stabilising, ostensibly apolitical successor had been intended to defuse the political opposition. It had not.
On 22 August 1932, with thirty-seven members present, the Dessau city council voted on an NSDAP motion to end all teaching activities at the Bauhaus effective 1 October 1932. The vote was twenty to five in favour of closure. Mayor Fritz Hesse — the same Fritz Hesse who had invited the Bauhaus to Dessau in 1925, who had secured the municipal support that made Gropius’s campus possible, and who had presided over the school’s most productive years — voted against the motion. The Communist faction voted against it as well. The Social Democrats, the party that had most consistently supported the Bauhaus throughout its Dessau existence, abstained. The abstention is one of the more quietly devastating details in the institutional record: the party that should have defended the school chose, in the moment of decision, not to cast a vote.
The closure ended the Dessau phase of the Bauhaus — seven years during which the school had occupied its purpose-built campus, produced its most widely recognised workshop objects, trained the students who would carry its methods across the world, and operated under three directors whose competing visions had demonstrated that the Bauhaus was not a fixed ideology but an institution capable of radical self-redirection. The Dessau buildings were not demolished, as the most extreme NSDAP proposals had demanded. They were repurposed — an outcome that preserved the structures but erased their institutional function.
Mies van der Rohe refused to accept the closure as the end of the Bauhaus. Within weeks he had secured a lease on a former telephone factory at Birkbuschstraße 49 in Berlin-Steglitz and reopened the school as a private institution — a “Freies Lehr- und Forschungsinstitut,” a free institute for teaching and research, operating without municipal or state funding. The faculty who made the move included Wassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Lilly Reich, and Walter Peterhans. Approximately 114 students enrolled. The Berlin Bauhaus was a diminished institution by every quantitative measure — smaller, poorer, more precarious, stripped of the workshop infrastructure and institutional support that had sustained the Dessau school. But it existed, and for nine months its existence represented the refusal of the school’s remaining participants to concede that a municipal council vote could extinguish what the Bauhaus had become.
The refusal would prove insufficient. The Berlin phase lasted from October 1932 to July 1933 — long enough to demonstrate the school’s resilience and short enough to confirm that resilience alone could not survive what was coming.