The purge of the Weimar art schools, 1930
Five years after the Bauhaus left, what it had painted on the walls of its workshop building was destroyed — by the school that took its place.
In 1930, with the NSDAP in the Thuringian government, the architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg was installed over Weimar's united art schools, and the wall works Oskar Schlemmer had made for the 1923 Bauhaus exhibition were destroyed.
A reformer turned inquisitor
The university's own history records that with the NSDAP's entry into the Thuringian government, Paul Schultze-Naumburg — it calls him the former reformer — was installed in 1930 as director of the united art institutions in Weimar.[1] The state's education portfolio had been in National Socialist hands since Wilhelm Frick took office in January of that year, and what a ministry can do to a school was demonstrated at once.
What was destroyed
The university writes that the "purge" preceding the opening of the Staatliche Hochschulen für Baukunst, bildende Künste und Handwerk in Weimar in 1930 also claimed Oskar Schlemmer's wall paintings in the Bauhaus's former workshop building.[2] They had been made seven years earlier for the exhibition with which the school first showed itself to the public; they were removed from the building where they had been painted, by its new administration.
Why the reconstructions matter
What visitors see in the Van-de-Velde-Bau today are reconstructions, one made by the sculptor Hubert Schiefelbein in 1979 and one by the painter Bruno Dolinski in 1980.[2] The originals were destroyed by a German art school under a National Socialist administration, three years before that administration held the country — the copies are the evidence of both facts at once.
Sources
- Geschichte — Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, retrieved 29 August 2026
- Van-de-Velde-Bau — Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, retrieved 29 August 2026
Historical figures
Historical figures
1888–1943 • painter • sculptor • choreographer • Bauhaus master
The works lost were his, made for the 1923 exhibition.
Historic sites
Historic sites
Geschwister-Scholl-Straße 8, 99423 Weimar
The building whose wall paintings were destroyed, and where the reconstructions hang today.
Period
1919–1925
The school had been gone five years; what it had painted on the walls had not.
1918–1933
A state ministry in National Socialist hands acting on an art school, three years before 1933.
In Weimar's history
In Weimar's history
The weeks in which the Bauhaus put itself in front of the public for the first time, in three buildings and one house it had to build first.
The wall works destroyed here were made for that exhibition, seven years earlier.
On 23 January 1930 Wilhelm Frick became Thuringia's minister of the interior and of public education — the first National Socialist anywhere in Germany to hold a government office. He lasted fourteen months.
The education portfolio had been in NSDAP hands since Frick took office that January.