"Painters, Architects, Sculptors, you whom the bourgeoisie pays with high rewards for your work — out of vanity, snobbery, and boredom — Hear! To this money there clings the sweat and blood and nervous energy of thousands of poor hounded human beings — Hear! It is an unclean profit. . . . we must be true socialists — we must kindle the highest socialist virtue: the brotherhood of man."

So ran a manifesto of the Novembergruppe, which included [Lázló] Moholy-Nagy and other designers, who would later join [Walter] Gropius at the Bauhaus. Gropius was chairman of the Novembergruppe's Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Working Council for Art), which sought to bring all the arts together "under the wing of a great architecture," which would be "the business of the entire people." As everyone understood in 1919, the entire people was synonymous with the workers. "The intellectual bourgeois . . . has proved himself unfit to be the bearer of a German culture," said Gropius. "New, intellectually undeveloped levels of our people are rising from the depths. They are our chief hope."

Gropius' interest in "the proletariat" or "socialism" turned out to be no more than aesthetic and fashionable, somewhat like the interest of President Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic or Chairman Mao of the People's Republic of China in republicanism. Nevertheless, as Dostoevsky said, ideas have consequences; the Bauhaus style proceeded from certain firm assumptions. First, the new architecture was being created for the workers. The holiest of all goals: perfect worker housing. Second, the new architecture was to reject all things bourgeois. Since just about everyone involved, the architects as well as the Social Democratic bureaucrats, was himself bourgeois in the literal, social sense of the word, "bourgeois" became an epithet that meant whatever you wanted it to mean. It referred to whatever you didn't like in the lives of people above the level of hod carrier. The main thing was not to be caught designing something someone could point to and say of, with a devastating sneer: "How very bourgeois."

Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House
Copyright © 1981 by Tom Wolfe. All rights reserved.

Posted 8 February 1998

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