cleanliness, clarity – and craft: material politics in

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found athttps://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rfmc20

The Journal of Modern Craft

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfmc20

Cleanliness, Clarity – and Craft: Material Politics inGerman Design, 1919–1939

Freyja Hartzell

To cite this article: Freyja Hartzell (2020) Cleanliness, Clarity – and Craft: MaterialPolitics in German Design, 1919–1939, The Journal of Modern Craft, 13:3, 247-269, DOI:10.1080/17496772.2020.1843787

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17496772.2020.1843787

Published online: 25 Dec 2020.

Submit your article to this journal

View related articles

View Crossmark data

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rfmc20

https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfmc20

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080/17496772.2020.1843787

https://doi.org/10.1080/17496772.2020.1843787

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=rfmc20&show=instructions

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=rfmc20&show=instructions

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/10.1080/17496772.2020.1843787

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/10.1080/17496772.2020.1843787

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1080/17496772.2020.1843787&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2020-12-25

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1080/17496772.2020.1843787&domain=pdf&date_stamp=2020-12-25

Cleanliness, Clarity –and Craft: MaterialPolitics in GermanDesign, 1919–1939Freyja Hartzell

Freyja Hartzell is Assistant Professor of Modern Design,Architecture, and Art at Bard Graduate Center in New York City.She received her PhD in the History of Art from Yale University andher MA in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culturefrom Bard Graduate Center. She is currently completing her firstbook, Living Things: Richard Riemerschmid and the Modernist Object,and is engaged in research for a second book on glass, transparency,and modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

AbstractThis essay juxtaposes modern German design with culturalpolitics from 1919 to 1939, demonstrating the interlockingrelationship of craft and industry during this pivotal period.Rejecting conventionally opposing categories of “hand” and“machine,” it reveals instead how material properties andtechnical processes became charged with political meaning.While the Nazis exploited modern handcraft (like theearly, earthy ceramics from the Weimar Bauhaus) inservice of their populist nationalism, they also deployed“clean,” progressive, industrial design (like Bauhaus-trainedWilhelm Wagenfeld’s sleek, transparent glassware) asvisual and material propaganda, creating the illusion of amodern regime deeply invested in providing Germancitizens with cutting-edge conveniences in the latest style.Why did the Nazis appropriate an aesthetic rhetoric oftransparency for their political agenda, which was sodependent on secrecy, hypocrisy, and opacity? The pagesthat follow explore how and why modern German design– and transparent glass objects in particular – slipped soeasily into enemy hands.

The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 13—Issue 3—November 2020, pp. 247–269

The Journal ofModern Craft

Volume 13—Issue 3November 2020pp. 247–269DOI:10.1080/17496772.2020.1843787

Reprints available directlyfrom the publishers

Photocopying permitted bylicense only

© 2020 Informa UK Limited,

trading as Taylor & FrancisGroup

Keywords: Bauhaus, German design,glass, modernism, national socialism,transparency, Weimar,Wilhelm Wagenfeld

During the first years of the twentieth cen-tury, German design reformers struggled toperpetuate a sense of handcrafted qualitywithin increasingly industrialized practices ofmodern design. While the modern woodenchair, for example, became simpler overall –cheaper to fabricate thanks to powered tools,quicker to assemble by virtue of standardizeddesigns, and stripped of what reformersunderstood as “applied ornament” – the pat-tern and strokable texture of woodgrainbegan to stand in for what had been strippedaway, and offered a visible, tangible link tovernacular traditions of craft.1 In the case ofanother material – clay – this industrial sleightof hand was perhaps even more deft: at theturn of the century and with the help ofprogressive, modern designers, the Germanstoneware industry found a way both toincorporate and to disseminate the singular,indelible touch of the potter’s fingers throughtechnologically advanced, serially producedtablewares.2 Despite their production inalmost identical multiples, each ceramic vesselstill delivered an experience of uniqueness,conveyed directly through the sensation oftouch: a permanent imprint on the clay sur-face, connecting the user not merely to anindividual (if nameless) craftsman, but to anow inaccessible past. Modern techniques ofindustrial replication, while generally threaten-ing to sever connections with historical peri-ods and cultural epochs, actually enabled –

for German salt-glazed stoneware – thetransfer of history’s traces to the modernhousehold. A human hand reached through

the mists of the past and the mechanisms oftechnological reproduction to touch anotherhuman hand, their fingers meeting in indexicalcomradeship on the vessel’s gritty skin.

If ambivalence towards the touch and thetrace characterized the development of mod-ern design in Germany before the FirstWorld War, it is the material of clay thatmost completely embodies this ambivalencethrough the complexities of its design andmanufacture. But after the Great War,ambivalence towards the vestiges of humanpresence in design shifted gradually, but con-sistently, towards outright rejection. By the1930s, this new resistance to touch and dis-dain for its evidence – traces – was mountedby another material: glass. In his 1933 article,“Experience and Poverty,” German culturalcritic Walter Benjamin writes, “[i]t is no coin-cidence that glass is such a hard, smoothmaterial to which nothing can be fixed. Acold and sober material into the bargain.Objects made of glass have no ‘aura.’ Glass is,in general, the enemy of secrets. It is also theenemy of possession.”3

Benjamin contrasts this stark, modernistimage by revisiting one of his pet critiques,which centers around Bertolt Brecht’semployment of the “trace.”4 Benjamin writes,“If you enter a bourgeois room in the1880s… there is no spot in which theowner has not left his mark – the ornamentson the mantelpiece, the antimacassars on thearmchairs, the transparencies in the windows,the screen in front of the fire. A neat phraseby Brecht helps us out here: ‘Erase thetraces!’”5 To meet this demand, Benjaminlooks to the Bauhaus school – “with its steel”– and to expressionist science fiction writerPaul Scheerbart’s prophetic 1914 work, GlassArchitecture, as models for the creation ofmodern rooms “in which it is hard to leave

248 Material Politics in German Design Freyja Hartzell


traces.”6 Benjamin invokes Scheerbart’s uto-pian vision of a “culture of glass,” whichScheerbart himself describes as a “new glassmilieu that will transform humanity utterly…it remains only to be wished,” he concludes,“that the new glass-architecture will notencounter too many enemies.”7

In 1933, then, glass takes a distinct stance.No pliant surface awaiting human imprint,nor passive object of human use, it becomesinstead a subject – an enemy, not simply ofthe domestic dust and grime that Benjaminassociates with nineteenth-century plush-linedrooms, but of bourgeois conservatism itself:personal possession, private conspiracy –dirty secrets. But neither the coldness, northe smoothness, nor the resistance of glass –the hygienic properties to which Benjamin

assigns its anti-bourgeois agency – made itthe “enemy of secrets.” It was the essentialmaterial trait of modern glass – its transpar-ency – that endowed it with the liberating(and terrifying) power to expose and reveal.Glass, in this context, was political: it was notjust an enemy, it had the capacity to makeenemies, as well.

When Benjamin identified glass as the“enemy of secrets,” the National SocialistGerman Workers’ Party had already taken anactively adversarial position towards whatwas, even then, a modern glass icon(Figure 1). In September of 1932, theNazi-dominated city council of Dessau hadforced the closure of Walter Gropius’sbrazenly transparent steel-and-glass Bauhaus(along with the progressive workshops that

Fig 1 Walter Gropius, Bauhaus, Dessau, c.1925. Photograph by author (2003). # 2020 Artists RightsSociety (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Freyja Hartzell Material Politics in German Design 249


occupied it) through funding cuts. The coun-cil’s antagonism to the school was driven byfear of its ties with Soviet artists and move-ments, as well as the school’s overall leaningstowards the political left. The rights to all pat-ents, equipment, and even the Bauhaustrademark were put in the hands of architectMies van der Rohe, who had in 1930assumed directorship from the openly social-ist Hannes Meyer, director of the Bauhaus, inhis turn, since 1928 – the year of Gropius’sdeparture. Mies reopened the Bauhaus as aprivate institution in Berlin in late October of1932, but even the school’s new private sta-tus failed to shield it for long. While itappears that Mies did seek accommodationfor a short period with the government inregard to the Bauhaus faculty, he finally dis-solved the school in August of 1933 as aresult of Nazi pressure.8

The same transparency that Benjamin (andthe Bauh€ausler) hailed as social and political lib-eration, the Nazis decried as “un-German,”“Bolshevik,” and “degenerate.”9 Despite theirreal and symbolic opposition to both Bauhausorganization and building, however, the Nazigovernment continued throughout the ThirdReich to support and exhibit the work of sev-eral Bauhaus artists, among them the glassdesigner WilhelmWagenfeld. In 1938,Wagenfeld designed a set of stackable food ser-vice and storage cubes, whose manufacturefrom cheap pressed borosilicate glass enabledthem to travel smoothly from table to refriger-ator in households across the Reich during theSecondWorld War (Figure 2). But these mass-produced Kubus containers bore an ironicresemblance to the quintessential Bauhausobject. Wagenfeld’s cubic vessels, their con-tents laid bare by clear glass walls, mimicked –

Fig 2 Wilhelm Wagenfeld, Kubus storage containers, c.1938. Vereinigte Lausitzer Glaswerke, AG. 1.Museum Associates/LACMA/Art Resource, NY # 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.



in miniature – the Bauhaus itself, whose glass“curtain wall” provided a penetrating view of itsown contents: the school’s activities and actors.

This glassy correspondence signals howthe inherent, physical properties of materialscan transform them from passive objects toactive subjects: how these material subjectscommunicate specific messages to those whoencounter them, and how, in turn, the mate-rial’s engagement with its temporal surround-ings invests it with new – and oftenconflicting – meanings. What follows is aninvestigation of the cultural and political impli-cations and impact of two materials, ceramicand glass, both of which offer malleability astheir fundamental working property. Thoughboth are ancient materials, their shapes andmeanings changed, during Germany’s inter-war years, in conjunction with developmentsin their process of manufacture, promotion,and use. Though both are in these multiplesenses shape-shifters, glass is translucent (andsometimes transparent), while ceramic isopaque. Though both can be architecturalmaterials, I consider them here not at monu-mental scale, but in the domain of thosemodest objects of everyday use whose mate-rials and forms were (or were intended tobe) the substance of modern life.

The material politics under investigationhere centers around the long-cherished beliefin a polar opposition of handcraft and indus-trial production.10 Within this binary conven-tion, “craft” emits that aroma of individualitythat Benjamin calls the “aura.” No matterhow many strikingly similar products thehand creates, each handcrafted object retainsits uniqueness through the “traces” of themaker’s (fallible) hand, whose touch lives onin the object’s function. Where the machine-made object is cool, the handcrafted thing iswarm. Where the product of industrial

technology is clinically clean, its handcraftedcounterpart is organically earthy. This rhetoricof hygiene – a dialectic of controlled, sterilecleanliness versus a rampant, fertile dirtiness– became highly charged in Germany, notonly materially and socially, but politically, inthe years leading up to the Second WorldWar. The modern desire to sanitize or to ridobjects of unhygienic traits or content throughalterations in their materials and design wasrecognized and manipulated by a fascistregime that propagandized images of cleanli-ness and dirtiness in a cunning campaign forsocial control, and, ultimately, in the serviceof genocide. These micro and macro phe-nomena – the homely, everyday response tonew trends in industrial design, and the sinis-ter political capitalization thereon – betray anunderlying cultural perception of craft objectsas both invested and infested: already filled upwith characteristics and meanings transmittedoften quite literally “by hand.” Where hand-crafted objects appeared opaque or “full,”then, modern industrial products – likepressed glass or mass-produced porcelain –

seemed to become, as Benjamin suggests,increasingly “transparent,” open to interpret-ation, evacuated of precise or circumscribedmeaning. Applied to German design betweenthe First and Second World Wars, however,these conventional oppositions between thehandmade and the machine-made breakdown. Within the interwar period’s complexweb of materials, processes, and ideas, “craft”and “industry” not only coexisted, but over-lapped and interacted.

The Prewar Hybrid: Craft andIndustry in the German WerkbundWell before the Third Reich – and evenbefore the Bauhaus – both ceramic and glass



had established their own reputations asmodern materials, chiefly through designprojects either directly implemented or sup-ported by members of the GermanWerkbund. This organization of architects,designers, industrialists, retailers, and otherreformers supported and undertook the lit-eral re-forming of everyday objects and envi-ronments as a means of modernizing andelevating German culture and society.11 Aprime target of the Werkbund’s modernreform project (and eventually, one of itsmost successful products) was Germanstoneware, an industry which had been inoperation since the thirteenth century, but atthe dawn of the twentieth century hadrequired a double injection of modern designstrategies and new manufacturing processes

to ensure its survival in the so-called“machine age.”12

Munich designer Richard Riemerschmidcame to the industry’s aid on both frontswith a progressive response to what hiscountrymen understood as a “rough, hard,manly” material with a unique history ofcraft.13 Riemerschmid’s simple, sphere-and-cylinder design for a 1903 jug (Figure 3)appears restrained and rationalized in con-trast to the comparative complexity of thesixteenth-century baluster jugs that providedits archetype. The historical jugs were exe-cuted in a multi-step construction processthat had involved free-throwing on a potter’swheel; molding and attaching a decorativefrieze by hand; stamping, rouletting, and incis-ing the clay surface; and finally, applyingcobalt oxide pigment to accentuate the orna-ment. Riemerschmid’s jug, while it alludes toits predecessor’s decorative vernacular, wasnot handcrafted in this conventional sense.Though its decorative lozenges had to becarved – just once – into the body of an ori-ginal, “model” jug, these ornamental incisionsbecame endlessly replicable reliefs when theoriginal jug was cast to create a hollow mold.Modern potters – now called technicians –could then throw jug after identical jug insidethe mold cast from the original. The surfacedecorations were no longer applied painstak-ingly, one at a time, by hand, but insteadimprinted all at once into the jug’s surface asthe technician pressed the soft clay againstthe sides of the mold to form the vessel itself.While Riemerschmid’s process modernizedthe one-off production of the vernacular pot-ter, it was yet a far cry from the slip-castingof industrial mass production. The maker’shand could still be felt in the final product,and yet his role – and certainly his identity –within the making process had become

Fig 3 Richard Riemerschmid, Jug, 1903. Salt-glazedstoneware with cobalt-oxide decoration.# V&AImages/2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.



complex and veiled. Whose fingers hadtouched the grainy stoneware, and at whichstep in the mysterious fabrication sequence?

If Riemerschmid’s production processoffered the German stoneware manufac-turers a compromise between their long-standing craft traditions and the modern drivetowards progress, the forms and decorationof his vessel designs concretized and exter-nalized this compromise for the modernGerman consumer. His straightforward con-structions of reduced, geometric compo-nents, though made of the same stuff as their

more idiosyncratic historical counterparts,were not only simpler to reproduce but eas-ier to clean. Their ornamental schemes, too,straddled a reverence for historical conven-tion and an inclination towards modern taste.One reviewer noted that althoughRiemerschmid’s stoneware decorations“spring from a strictly modern force of line,”they still “nestle against the body of the ves-sel, as the old reliefs used to do.”14 By ena-bling a production process in which form andornament were created simultaneously inone infinitely repeatable step, while at the

Fig 4 Bruno Taut, Pavillon der Glasindustrie, Werkbundausstellung in K€oln 1914. Foto Arthur K€oster #2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Akademie der K€unste Berlin, Bruno-Taut-Collection No. 210, Ph. 2a.



same time “handing” the consumer the sen-sations and symbols of timeless craft,Riemerschmid’s design bridged a gapbetween stoneware’s historical, culturalauthenticity, and the modern demand forstandardized, sanitized housewares.15 Hismodern stonewares were at once nostalgicand progressive: they manufactured a facsimi-lie of the aura for the modern age, whichBenjamin famously called “the age of techno-logical reproducibility.”16

Modern German stonewares, includingRiemerschmid’s – with their ties to a sharedpast. and their promise of a future in whichall Germans might have culture and conveni-ence at their fingertips – were featured asexamples of good modern design at theWerkbund’s 1914 exhibition in Cologne. Atthe same exhibition (cut short by the out-break in August of World War I), expression-ist architect Bruno Taut displayed a similarlyJanus-faced, though far grander and more fan-tastic object: a pavilion made of colored glass(Figure 4). While Taut’s Glass House wasstartlingly and self-consciously new – a con-scious reflection of Paul Scheerbart’s futuristicarchitectural fantasies – as architectural his-torian Rosemarie Haag Bletter has argued atlength, both Taut’s and Scheerbart’s projectswere rooted in a vision of glass, extending farback into the ancient world, as transforma-tive, alchemical – magical.17 Scheerbart haddedicated his 1914 Glass Architecture to Taut,and that same year at Cologne, Tautreturned the favor. Scheerbart’s vivid descrip-tions of a fluid, floating, mobile, and multicol-ored architecture of glass are materialized inTaut’s Glass House, whose interiors were nei-ther purely colorless nor truly transparent,but polychrome and translucent, enabling andamplifying the animated play of gemlike colorand prismatic light.

The modernization of weighty, opaqueGerman stoneware may be understood asboth progressive (despite its dialogue with his-tory) and socially conscious, not simply in itsdemocratization of well-designed productsmade from quality materials but in its rehabili-tation of a collective cultural memory. By con-trast, however, experimental, expressionistdesigns for glass, like Taut’s 1914 pavilion, con-veyed overtly utopian – and pointedly political– meanings. The transformative possibilities ofglass architecture in Scheerbart’s book repre-sented, as Bletter has explained, “the meta-morphosis of the whole society, an anarchistsociety, which through its exposure to thisnew architecture, has been lifted from dullawareness to a higher mode of sensoryexperience and from political dependence toa liberation from all institutions.”18 During theFirst World War, when architectural commis-sions were scarce, Taut engaged withScheerbart’s utopian schemes through pictorialtreatises relating glass architecture and anarch-ist society. In Taut’s Alpine Architecture, pub-lished in 1919, transparent, crystal housesperch high up in mountains whose peaks areadorned with colored glass, and whose clearlakes are decorated with floating glass orna-ments.19 Taut’s text promotes the impractical-ity of these structures in his pacifist responseto the devastating, utilitarian logic of war:

Yes, impractical and without utility! Buthave we become happy through utility?Always utility and utility, comfort, conveni-ence – good food, culture – knife, fork,trains, toilets, and yet also – cannons,bombs, instruments of murder!20

Bletter observes that Taut’s crystallineconstructions were to be achieved“communally by the masses in the same way



that Taut imagined Gothic cathedrals hadbeen built.”21

“In Earth, as It Is in Heaven”:Crystal and Clay at the BauhausThe image of the “glass house” as a catalystfor social and political transformation reap-peared that same year in an illustration for apamphlet circulated by one of Taut’sWerkbund colleagues, the architect WalterGropius (Figure 5). American-born artistLyonel Feininger’s woodblock print, TheCathedral of Socialism (sometimes called TheCathedral of the Future), accompaniedGropius’s Program for the State Bauhaus inWeimar, which included the now legendarytext: “Together let us desire, conceive andcreate the new structure of the future, whichwill embrace architecture and sculpture andpainting in one unity and which will one dayrise toward heaven from the hands of a mil-lion workers like the crystal symbol of a newfaith.”22 Gropius’s program (later known asthe “Bauhaus Manifesto”) was a recruitmenttool, calling young artists, who had justreturned from the trenches or come of agein their wake, to offer up their individual tal-ents in the collaborative service of craft. Laterthat same year, in an address to the first cropof Bauhaus students, Gropius likened thesemodern craft collectives to medievalBauh€utte, or:

small, secret, self-contained societies,lodges. Conspiracies will form which willwant to watch over and artistically shape asecret, a nucleus of belief, until from theindividual groups a universally great, endur-ing spiritual-religious idea will rise again,which finally must find its crystallineexpression in a great Gesamtkunstwerk.And this great total work of art, this

cathedral of the future, will then shine withits abundance of light into the smallestobjects of everyday life…”23

Together, Gropius’s words and Feininger’spicture bound the notion of craft not simplyto expressionist images of crystal and light,but – through the concept of transparency –to the utopian politics of collectivism.Ironically, however, while Gropius hadenlisted Feininger’s print to embody tran-scendent transparency, this woodcut wasinherently earthy and opaque – its opacitycemented by the obvious traces of its craft:the visible, indexical marks of the making pro-cess, in which wood fibers had been gougedfrom the heavy, solid block. More than opa-que, it was earthy – dirty. Its craftsman hadmade no attempt at achieving the crisp,“clean” lines synonymous today with theBauhaus’s legacy for design. The object’srough, jagged cuttings, and especially theerrant flecks of black ink within the white,voided areas, besmirch and fundamentallynegate the pristine immateriality of its sub-ject: glass.

This friction between transparency’spromise of transcendence or social trans-formation and the earthbound opacity ofcraft at the Weimar Bauhaus was nowheremore pronounced than in the ceramics work-shop, which, unlike the other Bauhaus work-shops, was located at a 20-kilometer removefrom the central Weimar campus: atDornburg an der Saale in the buildings of anabandoned castle, owned by the local stategovernment. Bauhaus ceramic students hadinitially worked in confining and ill-equippedquarters in a room rented from a Weimarkiln factory. Their relocation to Dornburg in1920 was accomplished as part of a collab-orative agreement with the established local



potter, Max Krehan, who agreed to take theBauhaus students on as his apprentices, thusbecoming their Werkmeister.24 Krehan, whoseworkshop was located on the castle grounds,represented the fourth generation of aThuringian pottery family.25 His work wascharacterized by the influence of the well-respected local tradition of B€urgel, a nearbyproduction center whose manufacture ofstoneware and high-fired earthenware vesselswith brown slip decoration had begun in the

Middle Ages.26 B€urgel’s guild records show itto have been the earliest pottery producer inThuringia, and Krehan’s family workshop hadbeen in operation since 1770.27 Not only didthis firm foundation in local production con-vention serve to root the Bauhaus studentsin the historic soil of the guild system, it alsoestablished a necessary link between Krehan’sfamily trade and the next generation.28

Because he had no heir to carry on his trade,he welcomed these serious students – not to

Fig 5 Lyonel Feininger (artist) and Walter Gropius (author), Manifesto and Program of the State Bauhaus,April 1919, with title page “Cathedral” by Lyonel Feininger. Four-sided leaflet, letterpress on gray-green fac-tory printing paper, on the cover sheet. Original size reproduction (zinc etching) after woodcut. MuseumAssociates/LACMA/Art Resource, NY # 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.



mention the financial support of the StateBauhaus at Weimar.29

In his Bauhaus Manifesto, Gropius hadproclaimed craft as the liberator of the“unproductive” (or, as was frequently thecase in postwar Germany,unemployed) artist:

When young people who take a joy increation once more begin their life’s workby learning a trade, then the unproductive“artist” will no longer be condemned todeficient artistry, for their skill will now bepreserved for the crafts, in which they willbe able to achieve excellence.30

It was Krehan’s practical embodiment ofthe Bauh€utte philosophy, not merely throughhis adherence to tradition but also throughthe sales of his “rustic” pottery, which pro-duced an income for the Bauhaus ceramicsworkshop (allowing it to be financially as wellas ideologically self-contained), that facilitateda tangible “return to the crafts” for theseBauh€ausler.31 Just as it had done before thewar, clay offered significant connections tothe past: to the material past, but also to amore evanescent, idealized past of secretsocieties and their “conspiracies.”

The mystical, and even at times explicitlyreligious language of Gropius’s early procla-mations was reflected in the formation of analmost cultic cohesiveness at Dornburg.Gropius’s imagery, revolving around bothcommunal and spiritual structures – themedieval Bauh€utte and the collectively con-structed cathedral – materialized in the close-knit, earnest band of students and instructorsat Dornburg and their vital sense of missionand moral purpose.

The Bauh€utte model was consciouslyadopted by the workshop’s Formmeister

(Master of Form), the sculptor GerhardMarcks, who made clear from the establish-ment of the workshop that, “in essence weare all striving to unite all of the fine arts inthe Bauh€utte, along with a foundation in han-dicraft training.”32 The framework of theDornburg experience rendered this conceptpractical. Although the self-sufficiency and ini-tiative of the Bauh€ausler were evident in theirvery first project – the construction of a newworkshop in the stables of the old Rococopalace given to the Bauhaus by theThuringian government – it was largely owingto the pre-established structure provided byKrehan that they were quickly able tocoalesce into something spiritually akin to thetime-honored German craft guild.33

According to Marguerite Friedl€ander(later Wildenhain), an enthusiastic Bauhausapprentice who would become an inter-nationally recognized ceramist, the entireexperience of the Bauhaus ceramics work-shop was earthy, messy, dirty: some would-beapprentices arrived at the workshop “in uni-forms, tattered and torn from four years inthe trenches, others in old clothes that theyhad worn since the beginning of the war,some barefoot…”34 And yet, “all of themwere ready to start afresh with all they had inideals, energies, gifts, and total devotion… Itwas a rebellious group, afire with ideas of abetter future for mankind, where the craftswould be an integral part of art, and art oftotal life.”35 Workshop members dug theirown clay from the banks of the local river (inwhich they also washed themselves); theychopped wood and slaved day and nightover smoky, wood-burning kilns. TheDornburg Bauh€ausler worked the soil togrow much of their food, and several womenpotters, including the apprentice LydiaDriesch-Foucar, undertook to cook for the



community.36 Friedl€ander was herself a driv-ing force in the Ceramics Workshop, andarticulated in retrospect her perception ofthe workshop’s predicament in the contextof the Bauhaus financial structure, not tomention Germany’s postwar economic crisisand skyrocketing inflation:

What we produced belonged to theBauhaus, which sold our work and gave us apercentage of the price as remuneration. Asthe German inflation accelerated, we werepaid three times a week, and rushed to shopthe very minute we got our money; a fewhours later it would all have been worthonly half as much… It was a horrible timefor all of us, and food was scarce becausenobody wanted to sell anything. If we couldbuy a hundred-pound sack of oatmeal, wedid, and many times we ate oatmeal forbreakfast, oatmeal and home-grown chardfor lunch, and chard and oatmealfor dinner.37

These trying conditions seem to havegalvanized the Bauhaus potters: Friedl€anderasserts that “… against the outside world,we were as one… we became a realcommunity.”38 The experience thatFriedl€ander, Driesch-Foucar, and other mem-bers of the Dornburg ceramics workshopdescribe is in many ways Gropius’s Bauh€utte,realized in the gritty and sometimes direterms of communal, subsistence living. Here,participation in what he had envisioned as agrand Gesamtkunstwerk was not a dilettantishwhim – it was a matter of survival: you rolledup your sleeves, pitched in and got yourhands dirty, or you starved. For the Bauhauspotters, however, this was a productive, fec-und kind of dirtiness. Mud was at onceMother Earth, medium, and muse. The local

slip-painted pottery tradition, embraced byFormmeister Marcks and inculcated byWerkmeister Krehan, mined this mud for allits aesthetic properties: Bauhaus pots wereboth made from and decorated with dirt. Infact, to those who take the Bauhaus at itswell-established word about form, function,and “clean lines,” Bauhaus pots (especiallywhen one encounters them “in the flesh”)can seem surprisingly humble, rustic, andbrown (Figure 6).39

For Friedl€ander, the Bauhaus had, fromher very first encounter with it, embodiedthe hands-on, material process of craft. Shedescribes a kind of conversion on a trip toWeimar in 1919, when she came upon aposter displaying Feininger’s Cathedral ofSocialism, along with Gropius’s manifesto. Thewords that stirred her soul – and promptedher to enroll as a Bauhaus student –were these:

Architects, sculptors, painters, we must all[re]turn to the crafts. Art is not a profes-sion, there is no difference between theartist and the craftsman. In rare momentsbeyond the control of his will, the grace ofheaven may cause his work to blossominto art. But proficiency in his craft isessential to every artist. Therein lies thesource of creative imagination.40

Feininger’s cathedral, erecting itself scratchby scratch before her eyes (just as it had ori-ginally emerged from a solid block of wood),represented for Friedl€ander both the physicalprocess and material product of craft thatbound its practitioners together in the con-struction of the “great total work of art, thiscathedral of the future,” destined to shinewith “abundance of light into the smallestobjects of everyday life…”41



One of Friedl€ander’s fellow apprentices,the native Thuringian Otto Lindig, seems tohave translated Feininger’s woodcut into clay,while at the same time interpreting Gropius’sverbal image most literally. Lindig’s thrownand hand-built Temple of Light (1921) mightbe understood variously as a small-scalesculpture, an expressionist architecturalmodel, or an elaborate lantern (Figure 7).Period photographs testify to its distinctionfrom the more rustic, intentionally rough andearthy pots of Friedl€ander, Krehan, andMarcks not only in terms of its multi- (ornon-) functionality, but, perhaps more

strikingly, by virtue of its intricate structureand its refined white clay body. The LightTemple, its pure whiteness rendering italready somehow lighter – less assertivelymaterial – than the rich, muddy, grainy potsthrown by Lindig’s colleagues around thesame time, undergoes a transformation – afurther dematerialization – when illuminatedfrom within. Rather like the contrast betweena photographic print and its negative, the illu-minated object seems to dissolve, its once-solid body now serving only as the aperturefor light itself. Otto Lindig’s ceramic Templeinhabited the liminal territory betweenmateriality and immateriality – that limbobetween heaven and earth: the “abundanceof light” that it was designed to emit trans-formed it from an embodied thing into thebodiless, spiritual “symbol of a new faith.”

The Emperor’s New Clothes: ThePolitics of EmptinessBut a faith in what, exactly? In response toideological shifts within the Bauhaus itself, aswell as financial pressure applied by its spon-sor, the local state government in Weimar,Gropius began in 1923 a systematic reorien-tation of the Bauhaus – theoretically andpractically – towards industrial production,under the slogan: “art and technology – anew unity.”42 In a letter to Marcks on April 5,1923, Gropius expressed his concerns aboutthe handcrafted singularity of Dornburg’s ver-nacular-inspired pottery: “Yesterday I had alook at your many new pots. Almost all ofthem are unique, unrepeatable; it would bepositively wrong not to look for ways of mak-ing the hard work that has gone into themaccessible to large numbers of people…We must find ways of duplicating some ofthe articles with the help of machines.”43

Fig 6 Marguerite Friedlaender-Wildenhain, PaintedPitcher with Handle, 1922–23. Earthenware withsalt glaze over clay slip. # Charles Friedlaender,New York. Courtesy Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.Photo: Gunter Lepkowski.



Although the vision of clay as deriving a cul-tural richness and rootedness from its historyof handcraft was one that many of theBauhaus potters shared with the artists andtechnicians who had helped to revive theflagging German stoneware industry two dec-ades before, the Bauh€ausler, their utopian col-lectivism notwithstanding, had developed nostrategy for disseminating or democratizingeither their products or their values, whilestrategies for the promotion of both hadbeen central to the successful modernizationof stoneware. Indeed, some of the Bauhauspotters were strongly opposed to productionin multiples, as this seemed to fly in the faceof the art-craft ideal that Gropius had estab-lished in his 1919 manifesto, which hadserved for many as a lure – or a catalyst.

Marcks, for his part, was deeply skepticalof the broader implications contained inGropius’s critical assessment of Dornburg’sproduction. Much later, recalling his time inWeimar, Marcks writes: “The year 1923marked a change: the poster at the train sta-tion, Art and Technology – A New Unity,was the signal. ‘Exactly what we didn’t want,’Feininger said to me.”44 The Formmeister sawGropius’s shift towards industry, expressed inhis new conviction that “crafts and industryare today steadily approaching one anotherand are destined eventually to merge intoone,”45 as a betrayal of and a threat to whathe, Marcks, termed his “sole artistic purposeof uniting handicrafts with art as much aspossible.”46 Gropius’s radically altered pos-ition that “the teaching of craft is meant to

Fig 7 Otto Lindig, Light Temple, 1920–1921. Earthenware. # Maria Hokema, Schw€abisch-Gm€und.Courtesy Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.



prepare for designing for mass-production”47

did not sit well with Krehan, either.48 Thegoal of the Werkmeister’s instruction was tobuild skill in his apprentices, to train them toproduce almost identical forms one after theother by hand, without any technological aidbeyond the wheel. If apprentices were nowto be encouraged to replicate their formsindefinitely through molds and modules, thiswould significantly devalue Krehan’s trainingin the precision and efficiency of the hand – ifnot render it altogether obsolete.

But not all of the Bauhaus pottersopposed the rapprochement of craft andindustry. The Ceramics Workshop, in spite ofthe resistance of its masters, as well as itsmaterial and ideological bases in regionalcraft, was the first of the Bauhaus divisions toform links with industry.49 Design historianRobin Schuldenfrei has characterizedGropius’s 1923 proclamation, “art and tech-nology – a new unity,” as advancing not sim-ply an agenda of industrial collaboration, buta prescription for Bauhaus objects them-selves, involving “the use of new materials,more stripped-down forms, and a spare,functional aesthetic.”50 Lindig and his fellowapprentice, Theodor Bogler, had since 1922been handcrafting forms composed of geo-metric components potentially suitable tomass production, and glazed in dark, metalliccolors evocative of the aesthetics of heavymachinery. Together they also developed anew clay body that was more plastic andhigher-firing than its predecessor, and so bet-ter adapted to the industrial process of plas-ter casting, as well as more hygienic formodern use. After visiting area ceramics man-ufactories, the two men set up a series design“laboratory” at the rustic Bauhaus pottery,where they developed modular prototypesfor industrial production.51 One of the

earliest of these was Bogler’s earthenwareMocha Machine, assembled from boththrown and cast modular components(Figure 8). Bogler’s interlocking geometry ofwarmer, water tank, pot, filter fitting andstrainer reflected his aspirations towardsindustry. Even the term “machine” bespokethe transformation of the modern kitchenfrom a multipurpose living space to an“industrial-age” workplace.52

But Bogler’s high-fired earthenwareprototype, while intended for industrial pro-duction, still spoke, through its rough, brownbody and dirty, slip-smeared surface, to craft’sintimacy of process and material: the physicalcontact embedded in and embodied byFriedl€ander’s cow and Feininger’s cathedral.Bogler’s attempt to transcend clay’s earthi-ness through a collaboration with the €AltesteVolkstedter Porzellanfabrik, a local porcelainmanufactory, reveals a gap between theBauhaus’s industrial intentions and the real-ities of Dornburg’s design process. Thoughthe Mocha Machine was briefly manufacturedin Volkstedter porcelain, the multipart designproved too complicated – and thus toocostly – to mass produce in the long term,and was dropped from production by 1924(Figure 9).53 Its industrial unwieldiness not-withstanding, however, Bogler’s MochaMachine was indeed transfigured in its newporcelain body. With its complex, puzzle-likeconstruction – like a utilitarian translation ofLindig’s expressionist Light Temple – itapproached transparency (while remainingopaque) through its clinical whiteness andhighly reflective surface. Was Bogler’sblanched Mocha Machine the new “cathedralof socialism” – the new “cathedral of thefuture”? Might it symbolize, in spite of itstechnical failure, Gropius’s re-vision of a socialequality forged not in the sacred flames of



mystic brotherhood, but in the purifying fireof industry?

The cathedral’s metamorphosis – fromTaut’s multicolored mysticism of the 1910s,to Feininger’s scratched sign for a socialistfuture, to Lindig’s luminous lantern, and finallyto Bogler’s porcelain “machine” – traces ashift not simply through a set of beliefs ormeanings, but across an array of materials:glass, paper (its cousin, wood), and varioustypes of clay. A further work – WilhelmWagenfeld’s now iconic table lamp (Figure10), which he designed in conjunction withCarl Jucker at the Bauhaus Metal Workshopbetween 1923 and 1924 – marks an evenmore significant step in this modern evolu-tion, as the lamp reunites the Gothic imagewith its ur-material, glass, while simultaneouslytransforming it from a utopian prototype (abeacon or promise of future realization) to ahumble, utilitarian object that, through itssimple, everyday function of shining light,

appears to make good on that promise.54

With its cool, resistant, and (sometimes)transparent materials, the “Wagenfeld lamp”was an aura-less object upon which, like theBauhaus rooms Benjamin described in 1933,it was “hard to leave traces.”

But “the dark secret of this bright light,”as design theorist Frederic Schwartz has putit, was that, for all its visual, material signifiersof rationalized industry, it was never put intomass production.55 Years later, Wagenfeldhimself recalled that “these designs whichlooked as though they could be made inex-pensively by machine techniques were, infact, extremely costly craft designs.”56

Despite its utilitarian intentions, Wagenfeld’slamp remained – like its crystalline predeces-sors – a miniature monument to a futurewhere Gropius’s “abundance of light” wouldno longer shine “into the smallest objects ofeveryday life,” but, instead, where clean, cool,transparent objects themselves would shine

Fig 8 Theodor Bogler, Mocha Machine (five-part), 1923. High-fired earthenware painted with iron-oxideslip, free-thrown and assembled. # Maria Laach Monastery. Courtesy Klassik Stiftung Weimar. Top photo:Renno. Bottom photo: Roland Dressler.



forth their own transformative light, revolu-tionizing modern life from the inside out.“The transparent glass of the base and shaftin the version we most often see transmitsthe light;” Schwartz writes, “the milky glass ofthe shade diffuses it; the chrome steel in thecenter reflects it back.”57 The complex designfor the transmission and emission of light viathis visually simplified object conveys, asSchwartz argues, a very different socialismfrom the embracing anarchism cast throughTaut’s warm colored glass, or fromFeininger’s and Lindig’s collaborative, crystal-line collectivism: “The white light ofWagenfeld and Jucker… is even, objective,diffuse, everywhere the same. It won’t des-troy hatred, but it will show it clearly; it won’tpierce the consciousness with any sort ofrevelation, but will simply expose the worldto the power of the mind.”58

As an “everyday” object, then, the lampfailed: like Bogler’s Mocha Machine with itsmechanistic, industrially suggestive design, theWagenfeld lamp could not be mass-

produced, and as a result, would never bedisseminated to the masses. As such, itssocialism was passive, symbolic – whatSchwartz has called “a socialism of vision.”59

“Impractical but nonetheless compelling,”Schwartz writes, “a vision of the future thatstill had to be crafted by hand, the Bauhauslamp serves as a symbol for a moment whenpolitics retreated into visual form…”60

Bauhaus objects that, like Lindig’s LightTemple, Bogler’s Mocha Machine, andWagenfeld’s lamp, struggle to shake them-selves from the visible “dirt” of handcraft, butare yet incapable of dispensing with its trad-itional processes, betray a rhetorical shift inthe politics of modern design away from theideological opacity or “fullness” of specificcraft traditions – B€urgel’s earthy, slip-paintedpottery, for instance, or the kaleidoscopicecstasy of the Gothic window – towards theimpartial reflectivity of chrome, and the“empty” transparency of glass.61 Did modern-ism’s retreat from expressionist warmth andanarchist action into a cooler, more removed

Fig 9 Theodor Bogler, Mocha Machine, 1923. Slip-cast porcelain, for €Alteste Volkstedter Porzellanfabrik.# Maria Laach Monastery. Courtesy Klassik Stiftung Weimar. Photos: Roland Dressler.



and observant “socialism of vision” mark akind of political withdrawal? What sort ofvessel did the ostensibly progressive objectiv-ity and aesthetic passivity of modern design –

its openness, emptiness, and transparency –furnish those who recognized the aestheticsof the everyday as a powerful instrument ofpolitical propaganda?

In 1925, the Bauhaus workshops relo-cated from romantic, sleepy Weimar to theindustrial city of Dessau, where they wereinstalled in Gropius’s full-scale, modernistcathedral: his steel-and-glass temple to theideal of mass-design. The ceramics workshop,anchored to Weimar’s local craft tradition(and having failed, ultimately, to create

enduring links with industry) did not jointhem. It was this new Bauhaus that wasclosed in 1932 due to withdrawal of govern-ment support. Historian Paul Betts hasargued that, in light of the Nazis’ persecutionof the subsequent Berlin Bauhaus as an“unwanted scourge of cultural bolshevism,”and in conjunction with their populist, agrar-ian, rhetoric of “blood and soil,” it has longbeen taken for granted that the Bauhaus’sultimate demise in 1933 signaled a reinvest-ment in – even a deification of – vernacularhandcraft within the vocabulary of ThirdReich design.62 And this is not entirely untrue– the values associated with indigenous hand-craft certainly resonated with fascist ideolo-gies. However, the Nazi image of craft wassystematically sanitized: traces of the grittyvernacular that clung, for instance, toRiemerschmid’s serially produced stonewaresand to Friedl€ander’s “muddy” slip-paintedpottery (though both of these exampleswere actually far from “authentic”) had beencarefully erased. This politically engineered,generic German craft was sterile, not simplyin a hygienic, utilitarian sense; it was aesthetic-ally infertile (Figure 11).

While purging the Bauhaus cathedral of itssocialist “contents” – its workshops and work-ers – effectively crushed the progressive, socialagenda of modern design in 1933, Betts con-tends that designed objects themselvesremained “pro-modern, in both rhetoric andstyle” during the Nazi era.63 The Nazis recog-nized the cultural currency of stylistically“modern” objects – aura-less objects likethose pioneered at the Bauhaus – and capital-ized on the political promise of allegiance to amodern style. Ironically, it was the Nazi sub-sidization of modern design originally devel-oped during the years of the WeimarRepublic, including designs by former Bauhaus

Fig 10 Wilhelm Wagenfeld and Carl Jakob Jucker,Table Lamp (Glass version MT 9/ ME 1), designedc.1923–1924, executed 1927. Glass, chrome, steel.# 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York /VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Courtesy Bauhaus-ArchivBerlin. Photo: Gunter Lepkowski.



artists like Lindig and Wagenfeld, that made itgenerally affordable, enabling it to achieve thatstatus of true “mass design” for the firsttime.64 And since metal, concrete, and woodwere increasingly requisitioned for weaponsproduction, ceramic and glass commoditiesbecame important sources of revenue for theNazi economy. These commodities, Bettswrites, “quite unchanging in actual design –became a favorite repository of Nazi mythsand fantasies.”65 In other words, the Nazistook modern design hostage, forcing it to playhost to their parasitic populism.

Modernist emptiness beckoned the Nazisnot simply with its dispassionate, clinical

order, but with its very lack of specificregional or historical style: a stylelessness thatthe Nazis apprehended, popularized andpropagandized as ewige, or “eternal” form,acting as material evidence of “timelessGerman greatness.”66 Over the twenty yearsbetween one world war and the next, themobile, multicolored, anti-utilitarian andanarchist glass of expressionism had graduallybeen blanched and frozen by a cold, rational“socialism of vision,” in which, according toWilhelm Wagenfeld, utility itself was beauty.Motionless and mute, modernism’s defense-less “eternal forms” passed intoenemy hands.

Fig 11 “Bauerlich gleich deutsch gleich gut [Rustic¼German¼Good].” Reichsstand des DeutschenHandwerks, Handwerkliches Bilderbuch 5 (1939), 15.



Years later in the 1980s, after both warswere long over, Wagenfeld reminisced abouthis Kubus storage vessels, designed in 1938and produced during his years at theLausitzer Glassworks, in the late 1930s andearly 40s:

Some people came to visit us [at theGlassworks] once and said that, just likethe Volkswagen factory [newly constructedand opened in 1938], a new refrigeratorfactory would be built, and for this theyneeded our set of refrigerator storagecontainers, measured it, and declared itwonderful. We sold the sets in huge quan-tities. Some were shipped to Kiel, andsome to Le Havre [both port cities]. I wastricked into believing they were for export,but it turned out they were for theGerman navy.67

While Wagenfeld believed this subterfugeto have taken place in 1938, the historicalrecord does little to support his suspicions:there is no hard evidence that the Kubusblocks were delivered to or used by theGerman Navy during World War II.68

Though Wagenfeld recalls that the Kubusblocks were widely popular as “civilianwares,” it was the ghost of this possible“swindle” that seems to have haunted hismind despite the lapse of almost 50 years.But whatever their motives, the visitors toWagenfeld’s Glassworks apprehended themass-produced Kubus containers as funda-mentally populist objects, capable, certainly,of serving a direct, functional purpose withinthe complex machinations of the approachingwar, but, perhaps even more importantly (ifless pointedly) of bringing simple “joy” to theGerman people – akin to the Volkswagen or“people’s car,” which Adolf Hitler had just

celebrated at a 1938 rally as built “for thebroad masses… to answer their transporta-tion needs, and… intended to give themjoy.”69 But why (and how) did Wagenfeldimagine his “people’s containers” – eminentlyuseful, but also intentionally passive andempty forms – as immediately filled with fas-cist aggression?

Industrial modernism’s snowy porcelainsand icy glass cubes were objects on which itwas “hard to leave traces.” Their designs hadevolved through the desire for both materialand conceptual cleanliness. Taking moderndesign’s complex and ambivalent historywithin the context of interwar politics intoaccount, then, the notion of Bauhaus mod-ernism as simply and invitingly “empty”becomes problematic, because despite itsconsciously evacuated design, it was nevertruly emptied of meaning. On the contrary,this very stylistic vacuity itself meant some-thing unique, irreplaceable. Betts writes thatthe progressive, modernist design object,understood as an active subject, or agent, inNazi cultural politics, became a “living witnessof cultural rebirth, social reconstruction, racialvictory, and private pleasure.”70 In otherwords, it meant something, in the way thatan important hostage, held because of a spe-cific, provocative cause or set of values,means something. And the modernist object– designed to be transparent, empty, andfree – was an easy hostage to apprehend. Itwas, in fact, more like a host – a vessel,which, though originally invested with socialistobjectivity, became quickly infested withnational socialist hypocrisy. Wagenfeld feltswindled in 1938 – and, apparently, still in1980. But, like modern industrial design itself,Wagenfeld had, on the eve of World War II,already retreated, ceded the public field. Hisbright “socialism of vision” had faded to



political blindness. Why did the Nazis fearthe glass Bauhaus, while desiring the glassblocks by a Bauhaus designer? Was it becausethe first was so difficult to empty, while thelast were all too easy to fill?

Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reportedby the authors.

Notes

1 For further discussion of this phenomenon seeFreyja Hartzell, “A Renovated Renaissance:Richard Riemerschmid’s Interiors for the ThiemeHouse in Munich,” Interiors: Design/Architecture/Culture 5, no. 1 (March 2014): 5–35.

2 I will discuss this process in further detail below.See also Freyja Hartzell, “A Ghost in theMachine Age: The Westerwald StonewareIndustry and German Design Reform,” TheJournal of Modern Craft 2, no. 3 (November2009): 251–77.

3 Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” inWalter Benjamin: Selected Writings, volume 2,part 2, 1931–34, ed. Michael W. Jennings,Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge,MA: Bellknap Press, 1999), 733–4.

4 Bertolt Brecht, “Aus dem Lesebuch f€urSt€adtebewohner” (1926–27), in Bertolt BrechtHundert Gedichte: Ausgew€ahlt von Siegfried Unseld(Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2013), 42.

5 Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty,” 734.6 Ibid.7 Ibid. See also Paul Scheerbart, Glass Architecture

(1914), translated by James Palmes andreprinted in Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! APaul Scheerbart Reader, ed. Josiah McElheny andChristine Burgin (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 2014), 90.

8 For more on Mies’s relationship to Nazi politics,and the closing of the Dessau and BerlinBauhaus, see Celina R. Welch, “Mies van deRohe’s Compromise with the Nazis,” Wiss. Z.Hochsch. Archit. Bauwes. – A. – Weimar 39(1993) 1/2: 103–14; and Franz Schulze, Mies van

de Rohe: A Critical Biography (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1985), 186.

9 Paul Betts, The Authority of Everyday Objects: ACultural History of West German Industrial Design(Berkeley: University of California Press,2004), 63.

10 The assumption that handcraft and industrialtechnology stand as polar opposites is basedlargely upon nineteenth-century British Arts andCrafts rhetoric and its idealization of themedieval craftsman. Peter Dormer challengesthis perception of technology as antithetical tocraft by demonstrating the interdependentnature of the two, and their organicdevelopment as part of the process of making,in The Culture of Craft: Status and Future(Manchester: Manchester University Press,1997), 8.

11 For detailed and comprehensive accounts of thehistory and theory of the Werkbund, see JoanCampbell, The German Werkbund: The Politics ofReform in the Applied Arts (Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1978) and Frederic J.Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory & MassCulture before the First World War (New Havenand London: Yale University Press, 1996).

12 Modern reforms of the Westerwald stonewareindustry were underway at the turn of thetwentieth century, several years before thefounding of the Deutscher Werkbund in theautumn of 1907. However, the artists,manufacturers and government officialsinstrumental in the rehabilitation of the Germanstoneware industry soon became influentialWerkbund members. For a thorough treatmentof the topic, see Hartzell, “A Ghost in theMachine Age,” 251–77.

13 See a description of stoneware by Gustav E.Pazaurek, director of the K€oniglichesLandesgewerbemuseum in Stuttgart in “NeuesSteinzeug von Albin M€uller,” Die Kunst 24(1910/11): 178.

14 H. H., “Die keramische Ausstellung im BerlinerKunstgewerbemuseum,” Keramische Monatshefte7 (1907): 148.

15 See Hartzell, “Ghost in the MachineAge,” 263–65.

16 See Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age ofits Technological Reproducibility” (1936), in



Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 3, ed.Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA andLondon: Bellknap Press, 2002), 101–33.

17 See Rosemarie Haag Bletter, “The Interpretationof the Glass Dream – Expressionist Architectureand the History of the Crystal Metaphor,”Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians40, no. 1 (March 1981): 20–43.

18 Bletter, “Glass Dream,” 32.19 Bruno Taut, Alpine Architektur (Hagen: Folkwang-

Verlag, 1919). An original edition of this five-volume publication, including 30 originaldrawings, is available in the archive of theAkademie der K€unste, Berlin.

20 See Bletter’s translation of the text from plate 16of Taut’s Alpine Architektur in “Glass Dream,” 35.

21 Ibid., 35.22 Walter Gropius, “Program of the Staatliches

Bauhaus in Weimar,” in Weimar RepublicSourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, andEdward Dimendberg (Los Angeles: University ofCalifornia Press, 1995), 435.

23 Walter Gropius, “Address to the Students,” inThe Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau, Berlin, Chicago, ed.Hans Maria Wingler (Cambridge: MIT Press,1969), 36.

24 Each Bauhaus workshop was co-led by aWerkmeister (master of work, or craft),responsible for developing the apprentices’technical skills, and a Formmeister (master ofform), responsible for guiding the students’artistic vision.

25 Hans-Peter Jakobson, Otto Lindig – der T€opfer,1895-1966 (Karlsruhe: Museen der Stadt Gera,1990), 11.

26 David Gaimster, German Stoneware, 1200-1900:Archaeology and Cultural History (London: BritishMuseum Press, 1997), 276.

27 See ibid., 282, and Marguerite Wildenhain, TheInvisible Core: A Potter’s Life and Thoughts (PaloAlto: Pacific Books, 1973), 24.

28 Lydia Driesch-Foucar, “Erinnerungen an dieAnf€ange der Donburger T€opferwerkstatt desStaatlichen Bauhauses Weimar, 1920-1923,” inKeramik und Bauhaus, ed. Klaus Weber (Berlin:Bauhaus-Archiv, 1989), 71–81.

29 Wildenhain, Invisible Core, 24.30 Walter Gropius, “Program of the Staatliches

Bauhaus in Weimar,” 435.

31 Jeannine Fiedler and Peter Feierabend, eds.,Bauhaus (K€oln: K€onenmann, 1999), 440–2.

32 Quoted in Klaus Weber, “Zwischen Traditionund Avantgarde. Gerhard Marcks am Bauhaus,”in Keramik und Bauhaus, 37.

33 Wildenhain, Invisible Core, 25.34 Ibid., 23. Upon her marriage to Hans

Wildenhain in Halle, Friedl€ander took herhusband’s surname and was known during hercareer in the United States asMarguerite Wildenhain.

35 Ibid., 23–24.36 Driesch-Foucar, “Erinnerungen,” 76. Driesch-

Foucar admits that cooking for the community,which she undertook single-handedly at first,proved to be such an overwhelming task thatshe eventually felt compelled to stop makingpottery and become Dornburg’s resident chefafter her marriage to Johannes Driesch in 1922.Despite its indisputably progressive admission ofwomen students from the time of its founding,the Bauhaus has accrued a reputation inscholarship for its frequently traditional – andsometimes even dismissive or repressive –

approach to the question of gender equalitywithin its workshops; however, women likeMarianne Brandt in the Metal Workshop andGunta St€olzl in the Weaving Workshop, albeitin the face of genuine adversity, were alsorecognized and even promoted as important,innovative designers central to the institution’smission and success as both school anddesign laboratory.

37 Wildenhain, Invisible Core, 28–29.38 Ibid., 28.39 Juliet Kinchin also remarks on the ways in which

the “materiality of the clay bodies and irregularlypitted glazes (from matte black-brown to palewhite-buff, from translucent to viscous)references an essentially Romantic explorationof inanimate matter through the art of theindividual potter.” See Kinchin, “Theodor BoglerTeapots. 1923,” in Bauhaus 1919-1933:Workshops for Modernity (MoMA: 2009), 110–3.

40 Gropius’s “Program for the Staatliches Bauhaus inWeimar,” as quoted in Wildenhain, Invisible Core, 22.

41 Gropius, “Address to the Students,” 36.42 See Walter Gropius, The New Architecture of the

Bauhaus (London: Faber and Faber, 1935),



55–6, and introduction to Neue Arbeiten derBauhauswerkst€atten, Bauhaus Book, 1925 (Mainz:Florian Kupferberg Verlag, 1981). For acomprehensive historical discussion of theBauhaus’s ideological and practical shifts seeGillian Naylor, The Bauhaus Reassessed (NewYork: E.P. Dutton, 1985), 83–102; 124–45.

43 Magdalena Droste, Bauhaus 1919-1933 (Berlin:Bauhaus-Archiv Museum f€ur Gestaltung,1998), 70.

44 From Gerhard Marcks, “My Short Stay in Weimar,”in Bauhaus and Bauhaus People, ed. EckhardNeumann, trans. Eva Richter, and Alba Lorman(New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1970), 30.

45 Walter Gropius, “Theory and Organization ofthe Bauhaus,” in Bauhaus 1919-1928, ed.Herbert Bayer, Walter Gropius, and Ise Gropius(Boston: Charles T. Branford Company,1959), 25.

46 Marcks, “My Short Stay,” 30.47 Gropius, “Theory and Organization of the

Bauhaus,” 25.48 Droste, Bauhaus, 70.49 Jakobson, Otto Lindig, 17.50 Robin Schuldenfrei, “The Irreproducibility of the

Bauhaus Object,” in Bauhaus Construct:Fashioning Identity, Discourse and Modernism, ed.Jeffrey Saletnik and Robin Schuldenfrei (Londonand New York: Routledge, 2009), 37.

51 Michael Siebenbrodt, ed. Bauhaus Weimar:Designs for the Future (Ostfildern-Ruit: HatjeCantz, 2000), 15.

52 Ibid.53 Klaus Weber, “’Weimarer Dinge’. Die Veltener

Keramik und Das Bauhaus,” Berlin undBrandenburg: Keramik der 20er und 30er Jahre,ed. Hans-Joachim Theis (Stuttgart: Edition Cantz,1992), 26.

54 This lamp has been generally attributed inscholarship to Bauhaus apprentices WilhelmWagenfeld and Carl Jucker (see, e.g. FredericSchwartz’s reference in note 55, below).However, as has recently been brought to myattention by Dr. Julia Bulk of WilhelmWagenfeld Fondation in Bremen, a 1999 courtruling by the Hanseatisches Oberlandesgericht inHamburg established Wagenfeld as the singleauthor/creator of the lamp. It is still possible,though, to credit Jucker with preliminary studies/

sketches, as has been the procedure of theBauhaus Archive in Berlin.

55 Frederic J. Schwartz, “Wilhelm Wagenfeld andCarl Jakob Jucker Table Lamp. 1923-24,” inBauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity,ed. Barry Bergdoll and Leah Dickerman(Museum of Modern Art: 2009), 138.

56 Ibid. Schwartz employs Gillian Naylor’s citationof Wagenfeld in The Bauhaus Reassessed, 112.

57 Schwartz, “Wilhelm Wagenfeld and Carl JakobJucker Table Lamp,” 138.

58 Ibid., 138–40.59 Ibid., 140.60 Ibid.61 Ibid.62 Betts, Authority of Everyday Objects, 23–72.63 Ibid., 24.64 Ibid., 68.65 Ibid., 49.66 Ibid., 67.67 Wagenfeld executed other commissions for

Nazi organizations, including the KdF (Kraftdurch Friede, or “Strength through Joy”); in thesame interview he describes a specialcommission of burgundy glasses for G€oring’sLufftwaffe ministry. Wilhelm Wagenfeld quotedin interviews with Walter Scheiffele during the1980s in Walter Scheiffele, Wilhelm Wagenfeldund die moderne Glasindustrie: Eine Geschichteder deutschen Glasgestaltung von Bruno Mauder,Richard S€ußmuth, Heinrich Fuchs und WilhelmWagenfeld bis Heinrich L€offelhardt (Stuttgart:Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1994), 221.

68 Wagenfeld’s interview statement did of courseproduce a powerful response, and the questionof whether his Kubus designs were “enlisted” bythe Navy has colored the Wagenfeld literaturesince the late 1970s. Beate Manske lists a seriesof reasons why it is highly unlikely that theKubus-Geschirr were used by the German Navyin “Wilhelm Wagenfelds Rautenglas – Aufbauund Vermarktung des Sortiments,” in Zeitgem€aßund Zeitbest€andig. Industrieformen von WilhelmWagenfeld (Bremen: Wilhelm WagenfeldStiftung, 2012), 172.

69 Hitler’s speech is quoted in Steven Parissien, TheLife of the Automobile: The Complete History of theMotor-Car (Thomas Dunne Books, 2014), 119.

70 Ibid., 72.



cleanliness, clarity – and craft: material politics in

Documents