The far right generally isn’t fond of modern art. There is nothing new in its fear of the rejection of tradition. What is new is that today’s far-right parties seem to see this threat not just in contemporary culture, but also in modern art created a century ago.
In 1933, the Nazis brutally crushed the Bauhaus school, one of Germany’s most important contributions to modern art and architecture. They saw its internationalist outlook and its many foreign and Jewish members as “un-German”; leftwingers were particularly attracted to the movement’s radical rejection of local tradition in favour of universal styles. But the Nazis failed to stop the design revolution it had unleashed. The minimalist and functional principles of Bauhaus have found their way into our lives, inspiring everything from Ikea furniture to prefabricated housebuilding. A recent development in Germany, though, has revealed that the underlying culture war is far from over.
The eastern German state of Saxony-Anhalt, where the Bauhaus settled in 1925, is planning to celebrate the centenary of its connection to the movement next year. The local Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party responded with a motion in the state parliament in Magdeburg entitled “The Aberration of Modernity”, slamming the plans as a “one-sided glorification” of the Bauhaus legacy and demanding a “critical analysis” instead. Last Friday, parliament debated the motion and voted it down, shocked by its parallels with Nazi language.
AfD MPs are unlikely to care about this defeat. They made their point. They called the sober Bauhaus architecture a “uniform mass” that “waters down regional characteristics”. Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, culture spokesperson of the AfD group, went further, saying that the Bauhaus had “artfully raped [vergewaltigt] the human need for homeliness”. Such language speaks of visceral fear of a supposedly “un-German” contamination of German tradition. Far-right parties then and now view the modernity of the Bauhaus as a threat to Germanness itself.
Today, this angst finds its most vocal expression in anti-immigration rhetoric. For the AfD, this is not so much about public services or safety as it is about allowing what it calls kulturfremde or “culturally alien” people into the country. Their anxiety that German culture is undermined in the process seeps into all policy areas. The old is ringfenced, the new rejected.
Tillschneider applies this concept widely: “Beer belongs to Germany,” he once declared. “The oriental drug of cannabis makes you weak and sluggish – it’s an immigrant drug! We don’t want it here!” While this may sound almost too absurd to take seriously, AfD ambitions for culture policy are drastic. The party rejects cultural diversity, envisioning a legally enforced German Leitkultur (lead culture) to underpin education and art.
Currently, the German state subsidies enable cultural experimentation beyond commercial viability – a principle that also made the Bauhaus possible. The AfD wants to slash funding to “art that nobody is really interested in”, as Tillschneider put it. The idea that the state should support only art it deems worthy for the masses was also espoused by Hitler, who vowed that “works of art which cannot be understood in themselves but need some pretentious instruction book to justify their existence will never again find their way to the German people”.
Yet, for all its revolutionary zeal, the Bauhaus has never posed a serious threat to traditional art. Germans have never universally embraced it. In the 1920s, conservatives fretted when modernists began to favour flat roofs while traditional German houses had pitched ones. Meanwhile, most of those who saw the first Bauhaus house, built in 1923 in Weimar, were not in a hurry to copy its flat-roofed, minimalist design. Instead, Bauhaus styles slowly merged with existing ones, like most successful ideas.
The AfD is also tilting at windmills. Postwar Germany may have held on to an entirely positive image of the Bauhaus. Its modernism had a huge impact on design and architecture in East Germany in particular. But now, even Weimar, where the school was founded in 1919, views it more critically. The town held an exhibition this summer, entitled Bauhaus and National Socialism, which did not shy away from the fact that most Bauhaus students were not persecuted by the Nazis. Some even participated in propaganda, designing posters, furniture and busts of Hitler.
It would be easy to dismiss the new Bauhaus debate as inconsequential but its implications are big. The fact that a German parliament debated whether one of its modern art movements should be celebrated or regarded as an “aberration” will send shivers down many spines. But the rhetoric of the AfD – which this year became a significant political force in Germany, winning and coming second in state elections – will find sympathetic ears, too.
Many Germans feel that their identity is under attack, and not all of them are far right. Neither are the culture wars all one-way traffic. The German left plays a role when it calls people who value tradition “Kartoffeln” (“potatoes”, the equivalent of the “gammon” slur), or when Aydan Özoğuz, the Social Democratic vice-president of the federal parliament, claims that there is “no identifiable German culture”. Such statements make many people feel beleaguered, a dynamic far-right parties exploit.
The Bauhaus debate is symptomatic of what is at stake in the culture wars. The rise of far-right parties may mainly be fuelled by the issue of immigration, but this doesn’t make them single-issue parties. Behind their declared monoculturalism looms a visceral rejection of modernity itself, which will have far-reaching consequences should they come to power.
Katja Hoyer is a German-British historian and journalist
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