Bauhaus in Weimar (1919–1925)
The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar in 1919 and voted out by 1925 — time enough to change what a design school is, and not enough for the town that made it to keep it.
April 1919: two schools, one name
On 1 April 1919 Walter Gropius became director of the Grand Ducal Saxon School of Fine Arts, and on 12 April he merged it with the arts and crafts school Henry van de Velde had built up before the war.[1] The new institution was called Staatliches Bauhaus and it worked in van de Velde's buildings, which is why the Bauhaus's founding address is a piece of Art Nouveau architecture.
The training was the point, 1919–1922
Students worked under a craftsman and an artist at once, with the workshop at the centre instead of the drawing class, on the argument that painting, weaving, metalwork, furniture and building are one problem. The masters of the Weimar years included Lyonel Feininger and Johannes Itten from 1919, Georg Muche from 1920, Paul Klee from December 1920, Oskar Schlemmer from January 1921 and Wassily Kandinsky from June 1922.
The women in the register, 1919–1925
Gunta Stölzl learned to weave here and went on to run the weaving workshop in Dessau; Alma Siedhoff-Buscher designed the children's room of the Haus Am Horn; Marianne Brandt went into the metal workshop. Beyond those names the surviving traces thin fast, and not because there were few women. The Klassik Stiftung, exhibiting them under the title Forgotten Bauhaus Women, states the problem exactly: of around 460 recorded women students at the Bauhaus, the life dates of only two thirds are known.[2] The National Socialist takeover of 1933 fell on the school's women in particular; some, the foundation writes, were persecuted by the regime and died early in a concentration camp.
The first large public appearance, 1923
The school's first large account of itself was the exhibition of 15 August to 30 September 1923, whose centrepiece was the Haus Am Horn — designed by Muche, built by Gropius's office in four months and furnished by every workshop in the school. It is the only Bauhaus building in Weimar, and it was put up as an exhibit.
Voted out, 1924–1925
In 1924 the right-wing Ordnungsbund took the Thuringian parliament, the budget was halved at once and the teachers' contracts were cancelled to 31 March 1925.[1] Gropius and the masters resigned first and took the school to Dessau. What stayed behind are van de Velde's two school buildings and the Haus Am Horn, UNESCO World Heritage since 1996,[3] and the collection of workshop work Gropius had begun in the 1920s, which is now in the Bauhaus-Museum.
Questions visitors ask
- When and how was the Bauhaus founded?
- On 1 April 1919 Walter Gropius became director of the Grand Ducal Saxon School of Fine Arts, and on 12 April he merged it with Henry van de Velde's arts and crafts school to form the Staatliche Bauhaus, working in van de Velde's Art Nouveau buildings.
- How did teaching work at the Bauhaus?
- Students worked under a craftsman and an artist at once, with the workshop at the centre instead of the drawing class, on the argument that painting, weaving, metalwork, furniture and building are one problem. Masters of the Weimar years included Feininger and Itten from 1919, Klee from December 1920 and Kandinsky from June 1922.
- What is the only Bauhaus building in Weimar?
- The Haus Am Horn, the centrepiece of the school's first large exhibition of 15 August to 30 September 1923 — designed by Georg Muche, built by Gropius's office in four months and furnished by every workshop in the school.
- Why did the Bauhaus leave Weimar?
- In 1924 the right-wing Ordnungsbund took the Thuringian parliament, the budget was halved at once and the teachers' contracts were cancelled to 31 March 1925; Gropius and the masters resigned and took the school to Dessau.
- What did the Bauhaus leave behind in Weimar?
- Van de Velde's two school buildings and the Haus Am Horn, UNESCO World Heritage since 1996,[3] and the collection of workshop work now in the Bauhaus-Museum.
Sources
- Phasen: Weimar — Bauhaus Kooperation Dessau Weimar Berlin, retrieved 29 August 2026
- Vergessene Bauhaus-Frauen — Klassik Stiftung Weimar, retrieved 29 August 2026
- Hauptgebäude — Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, retrieved 29 August 2026
What happened
- 1902-10-15 – 1915-10-01Van de Velde's arts and crafts school, 1902–1915
The institution the Bauhaus was formed out of in April 1919.
- 1919The Bauhaus manifesto, April 1919
The founding document of the period.
- 1919-04-01The founding of the Bauhaus, April 1919
The day the period begins.
- 1922The De Stijl course, 1922
The school's own history calls van Doesburg a catalyst of the development these years took.
- 1923-08-15 – 1923-09-30The Bauhaus Exhibition of 1923
The Weimar school's first large public account of itself.
- 1925-03-31The end of the Weimar Bauhaus, 1924/25
The end of the period in Weimar.
- 1930The purge of the Weimar art schools, 1930
The school had been gone five years; what it had painted on the walls had not.
People of the period
Historical figures
1881–1929 • architect • master of architecture at the Bauhaus • teacher
At the school from its founding year to the day the Weimar chapter closed.
1899–1944 • designer • cabinetmaker • toy designer
At the school from 1922 to 1927, in the years when the workshops had to show what they could make.
• designer • typographer • architect • prisoner in Buchenwald
He studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau from 1927 to 1930, and it is Bauhaus typography that ended up on the Buchenwald gate.
1895–1987 • painter • Bauhaus master • head of the weaving workshop
Youngest master of the Weimar school, from 1920 to the move to Dessau.
1889–1981 • sculptor • Bauhaus master • head of the ceramic workshop
One of the first masters of 1919 and form master of the ceramic workshop until 1924.
1897–1983 • weaver • Bauhaus student, then head of the weaving workshop
One of the school's first students in 1919, and from 1926 the head of the workshop she had learned her trade in.
1863–1957 • architect • designer • founder of the Weimar arts and crafts school
The buildings, the school and the recommendation the Bauhaus inherited in 1919.
1900–1985 • typographer • graphic designer • photographer • architect
A student of the Weimar years who became a Jungmeister at Dessau in 1925.
1888–1967 • painter • art teacher • Bauhaus master
One of the first masters, from October 1919, and the author of the course every student began with.
1893–1948 • sculptor • typographer • Bauhaus master
A student of the whole Weimar period, in the sculpture workshop from 1919 to 1924/25.
1888–1976 • painter • designer • teacher
A Weimar student of 1920 who joined the teaching body in 1923 — the school teaching its own.
1890–1975 • painter • graphic artist • Bauhaus student
A student of the school's first years and the author of its first emblem.
Places of the period
Historic sites
Geschwister-Scholl-Straße 6a, 99423 Weimar
The school's canteen from 1919 to 1925 — a glass studio with a kitchen bolted on.
Max-Krehan-Straße 1, 07774 Dornburg-Camburg
The school's only ceramics workshop, and the only one it ran outside Weimar entirely.
Stéphane-Hessel-Platz 1, 99423 Weimar
The museum of the period: the workshop output of the Weimar Bauhaus, kept together since the 1920s.
Geschwister-Scholl-Straße 8, 99423 Weimar
The founding place of the school, and the buildings it used for its whole Weimar life.
Weimar's main cemetery (Hauptfriedhof), Berkaer Straße, 99425 Weimar
The school's director building for the town's labour movement: the period's clearest public commission.
Petersgasse 33, 99428 Gelmeroda
The subject a Bauhaus master returned to while he taught in Weimar.
Theaterplatz 2, 99423 Weimar
The school's director working for the government that would defund him three years later.
Am Horn 61, 99425 Weimar
The only realised architecture of the Weimar Bauhaus, and the period's clearest surviving argument.
Belvederer Allee 58, 99425 Weimar
The Weimar modernism that preceded the Bauhaus and handed it its buildings.
Jorge-Semprún-Platz 5, 99423 Weimar
Its permanent presentation, "Wege zum Bauhaus", traces what led to the school of 1919; in 1923 the building was one of the three venues of the first Bauhaus exhibition.
Park an der Ilm, 99423 Weimar
One of the city's Bauhaus sites: the preliminary course was taught here from 1923 to 1925.
Park an der Ilm, 99423 Weimar
One of the city's Bauhaus sites: a master's studio, in a building a century older than the school.
On stage today
On stage
Familie
The documents worked on are from the school's own years — letters and speeches, read for what a stage can do with them.
Schauspiel
A public reckoning with the school's founding and its aftermath, a hundred years on.
Schauspiel · Carolin Millner
Set in the school's Weimar years, and told for a themed year that looks at them from the women's side.
Kabarett
The evening is a cabaret about the school that was founded in Weimar in 1919 — the house's own line is "Form follows Fun(ction)".
Events
Two days a year — International Women's Day and the Buß- und Bettag
The other end: the programme runs from the classical period through to modernism.
A long run, into the new year
The subject is the school's whole life, 1919 to 1933, read politically rather than formally.
Spring into summer, at the Bauhaus Museum
The subject is the period's afterlife: thirty years of being World Heritage, and a century of being photographed.
One Saturday night in May, 18:00 to midnight
The Bauhaus Museum puts the other Weimar on the same ticket as the classical one.
One day in June
The second inscription is the Bauhaus's, which is why the day is not a purely classical one.
Historical periods
Historical periods
Founded in 1919 out of two schools this period built — the art school of 1860 and van de Velde's of 1907/08.
Goethe died in 1832, and Weimar had to work out what a town does after its golden age. It decided to keep going, and the answer took eighty-six years — the era the Klassik Stiftung Weimar calls the Silver Age. Music replaced literature as the thing Weimar was for, two royal patrons paid for it, and the schools they founded outlived the monarchy that funded them.