The Bauhaus that operated in Berlin-Steglitz from October 1932 was already a school in extremis. It occupied a former telephone factory at Birkbuschstraße 49, leased by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe after the Nazi-controlled Dessau city council had voted the institution out of existence in August 1932. It functioned as a private institute — a “Freies Lehr- und Forschungsinstitut” — without municipal or state support, sustained by tuition fees and whatever resources its director and remaining faculty could assemble. Approximately 114 students had enrolled. The teaching staff included Wassily Kandinsky, Josef Albers, Ludwig Hilberseimer, Lilly Reich, and Walter Peterhans. The school was smaller, narrower, and more precarious than it had been at any point in its fourteen-year history, but it was functioning. Classes were held. Work was produced. The Bauhaus, in diminished form, continued.
The political environment in which it continued was the Germany of early 1933. Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor on 30 January. The Reichstag fire on 27 February provided the pretext for the suspension of civil liberties under the Reichstag Fire Decree. In March 1933, SA units conducted raids on the Bauhaus premises in Berlin-Steglitz — the first direct physical intrusion of the new regime into the school’s operations. These were preliminary actions, but they signalled what was to come.
On 11 April 1933, at the start of what would have been the summer semester, police and SA forces conducted a full-scale raid on the Birkbuschstraße building. The premises were sealed. Thirty-two students were detained. Regular teaching ceased and did not resume. The building that had housed the Bauhaus for six months was now closed by state force, its students in custody, its faculty unable to enter.
What followed was not an immediate dissolution but a period of negotiation — or what passed for negotiation under a totalitarian regime. Mies van der Rohe attempted to secure the reopening of the school, engaging with the Gestapo and the Prussian Ministry of Culture in an effort to find terms under which the institution could continue to operate. The effort was characteristic of Mies’s temperament throughout his directorship: pragmatic, persistent, willing to engage with authority in the hope of extracting concessions. Whether this pragmatism represented institutional courage or political naivety is a question that has divided historians of the period.
The Gestapo’s response, delivered in a letter dated 21 July 1933, made the terms explicit. The school could reopen if it met certain conditions: faculty members deemed politically or racially unacceptable — Kandinsky and Hilberseimer were specifically named — must be dismissed and replaced with instructors approved by the regime. The curriculum must be revised to align with the cultural and ideological requirements of the new state. Compliance with National Socialist organisational expectations, including party membership requirements, was implied if not explicitly mandated.
The conditions were, by design, impossible to meet without destroying the institution they purported to preserve. A Bauhaus that dismissed its remaining distinguished faculty, adopted a curriculum dictated by Nazi ideology, and submitted its pedagogical direction to party oversight would not be the Bauhaus in any meaningful sense. It would be a different institution wearing the same name — a prospect that the conditions’ authors may well have understood and intended.
On 20 July 1933 — one day before the Gestapo letter was formally dated, suggesting that its contents were already known or anticipated — Mies van der Rohe convened a conference of the teaching staff. The masters acknowledged that the conditions for reopening could not be met. The decision was taken to dissolve the Bauhaus. The institution that Walter Gropius had founded in Weimar in 1919, that had survived political hostility in Thuringia, relocation to Dessau, three changes of directorship, and the ideological convulsions of the Weimar Republic, ended in a meeting room in Berlin-Steglitz with a vote to close rather than capitulate.
The institutional Bauhaus was finished. What was not finished — what the closure could not reach — was the network of people, methods, and ideas that the school had produced over fourteen years. Josef Albers emigrated to the United States in 1933, taking up a position at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Kandinsky left for France the same year. Gropius would reach the United States in 1937, eventually leading the architecture department at Harvard. Mies would follow in 1938, assuming the directorship of the architecture school at what became the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Moholy-Nagy, who had left the Bauhaus in 1928, would found the New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1937. The school’s closure scattered its participants across the world, and the scattering became, paradoxically, the mechanism of its global influence — an influence that the institution itself, confined to three German cities over fourteen years, could never have achieved on its own.