UB art history professor reflects on historic exhibition she co-curated that tells the story of the Bauhaus and the Nazis

BUFFALO, N.Y. – “Bauhaus and National Socialism,” an historic exhibition in Weimer, Germany, co-curated by a University at Buffalo professor of art history, will close next week after a five-month run that attracted tens of thousands of visitors and plenty of news coverage across Europe.

The Bauhaus was an innovative art school in Germany that opened in 1919, with the start of Germany’s first democracy, and was shut down 14 years later by the Nazi party in the spring of 1933.

Presented in three museums by the Weimer Classic Foundation, the umbrella organization of the 27 museums, historic houses and parks in the city, the exhibition brought together 450 art and design objects held in private collections and other museums and galleries in the U.S. and Europe. It is the first exhibition to illustrate the diverse ways in which Bauhaus artists navigated the Nazi system of totalitarian rule.

Elizabeth Otto, PhD, a professor of art history in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies in the UB College of Arts and Sciences, co-curated all three of the exhibitions at the host museums:

• “The Bauhaus as a Site of Political Contest, 1919-1933,” at the Museum Neues Weimar, which illuminated artistic and political conflicts at the Bauhaus.
• “Removed – Confiscated – Assimilated, 1930/1937,” at the Bauhaus Museum, focused on Bauhaus artists in propaganda exhibitions.
• “Living in Dictatorship, 1933-1945,” at the Schiller-Museum, which addressed how Bauhaus members continued working in the new political circumstances after 1933.

The three-part exhibit represented a turn in Otto’s work to focus on what happened to the Bauhaus movement after the start of National Socialism, one that shows a new perspective of the school and its members and details an uncomfortable aspect of that history.

Otto, an expert in European and American visual art and culture, is also the author of “Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics,” “Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt,” and the co-author of “Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective.”

As she was concluding the research for “Haunted Bauhaus,” Otto noticed that there is seeming agreement on both sides of the Atlantic that, after 1933, the Bauhaus was exclusively a movement in exile. But as her work continued and she got deeper in the archive, she realized that conclusion was not true, and this became the topic of her next book.

“People love the idea that, even in the midst of the Nazi period, there is something they call ‘the good Germany’ and that there were ‘good Germans’ that had nothing to do with the hatred and ugliness,” she says. “But of course with such a large and sprawling movement, that couldn’t be the whole truth.”

It’s rare for a researcher to have an opportunity to change the collective understanding of a major modern art movement’s history and a time period so profoundly, but according to the extensive reviews in European newspapers and television, that’s just what the exhibit accomplished.

Dozens of news outlets including The Guardian, El País, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Air Mail, wrote about the exhibit.

“The exhibition shows the close entwinement between Bauhaus design and Nazism that reaches all the way to Auschwitz, where a Bauhaus architect and SS member, Fritz Ertl, was in charge of gas chamber and crematorium construction,” says Otto. “Eight Bauhaus members were murdered at Auschwitz, and Ertl was among those directly responsible.”

Otto says her research on the forthcoming book led her to conversations with German colleagues Anke Blümm and Patrick Rössler who, like her, had a deep knowledge in the area she was exploring. They pooled their resources and sent a proposal to Ulrike Bestgen, the head of the Bauhaus Museum,  who decided to support the project. In addition to their work curating the show, the trio co-edited both a scholarly volume and the exhibition’s catalogue.

“I’m still working on my own book, and I’ve had time to really dig into the archives, thanks to fellowships at the National Gallery of Art, the Getty Research Institute, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, as well as from the Gerda Henkel Foundation,” says Otto. “I have a massive amount of knowledge now as I return to this work of rewriting history,” she says.