The German Genius

these was the establishment of some very prestigious academic institutions, some of which are still centers of excellence even today. These included the Berliner Psychoanalytisches Institut—home to Franz Alexander, Karen Horney, Otto Fenichel, Melanie Klein, and Wilhelm Reich—and the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik (the German Institute for Politics), which had more than 2,000 students by the last year of the republic—its teachers included Sigmund Neumann, Franz Neumann, and Hajo Holborn. There was also the Warburg Institute of Art History, in Hamburg, with its impressive library. This library was the fantastic fruit of a lifetime’s collecting by Aby Warburg, a rich, scholarly, and “intermittently psychotic individual” who shared Winckelmann’s obsession with classical antiquity and the extent to which its ideas and values could be perpetuated in the modern world. The charm and value of the library was not just that Warburg had been able to afford thousands of rare volumes on many recondite topics, but the careful way he had put them together to illuminate one another: art, religion, and philosophy were mixed in with history, mathematics, and anthropology. The Warburg Institute would become the home of many important art historical studies throughout the twentieth century. In particular, Erwin Panofsky’s way of reading paintings, his “iconological method,” as it was called, would prove hugely influential after World War II.
    Europeans had been fascinated by the rise of the skyscraper in America, but it was difficult to adapt on the eastern side of the Atlantic: the old cities of France, Italy, and Germany were all in place and were too beautiful to allow the distortion that very tall buildings threatened. But the new materials of the twentieth century, which helped the birth of the skyscraper, were very seductive and proved very popular in Europe, especially steel, reinforced concrete, and sheet glass. In the end, glass and steel had a bigger effect on European architects than concrete did, and especially on three architects who worked together with the leading industrial designer in Germany, Peter Behrens (see Chapter 27). These men were Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and the Frenchman Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, better known as Le Corbusier. Each would make his mark but the first was Gropius. It was Gropius who founded the Bauhaus.
    Influenced by Marx and William Morris, Gropius always believed, contrary to Adolf Loos, that craftsmanship was as important as “higher” art. Therefore, when the Grand Ducal Academy of Art, which had been founded in the mid-eighteenth century, was merged with the Weimar Arts and Crafts School, which had been established in 1902, Gropius was an obvious choice as director. The fused structure was given the name Das Staatliche Bauhaus Weimar, with Bauhaus chosen because it echoed the Bauhütten , medieval lodges where those constructing the great cathedrals were housed. 5
    The early years of the Bauhaus, in Weimar, were troubled and it was forced to move to Dessau, which had a more congenial administration. This seems to have brought about a change in Gropius himself. 6 He now announced that the school would concern itself with practical questions of the modern world—mass housing, industrial design, typography, and “the development of prototypes.” 7
    After a lost war and an enormous rise in inflation, there was no social priority of greater importance in Weimar Germany than mass housing. And so Bauhaus architects were among those who developed what became a familiar form of social housing, the Siedlung or “settlement.” Although the Siedlungen were undoubtedly better than the nineteenth-century slums they were intended to replace, the lasting influence of the Bauhaus has been more in the area of applied design. The Bauhaus philosophy, “that it is far harder to design a first-rate teapot than paint a second-rate picture,” has found wide acceptance—folding beds, built-in cupboards, stackable chairs and tables, designed with mass-production in mind and with an understanding of the buildings these objects were to be used in. Bauhaus designers like László Moholy-Nagy never lost their utopian ideals. 8
    T HE M ARRIAGE OF F REUD AND M ARX
     
    The catastrophe of World War I, followed by the famine, unemployment, and inflation of the postwar years, confirmed for many people Marx’s theory that capitalism would eventually collapse under the weight