ABSTRACT
This essay will investigate the strange and complex history of the Bauhaus Manifesto-a small, ephemeral document that has functioned as a symbol of the institution for ninety years. A four-paged broadsheet with a woodcut on the cover, the Manifesto has been misidentified, blown out of proportion, and seen as both a seditious and an innocuous piece of paper. From the beginning the Manifesto was problematic, and confusions have persisted through the cold war to the present. In order to unpack this complicated ambivalence, it is important to explore the Manifesto as both a material object and a mode of address-as a woodcut of a fractured and fragmented Cathedral, and as a pedagogical and political treatise that Walter Gropius continued to return to throughout his life (Figure 1.1). As the founder of the Bauhaus, Gropius is the one figure most associated with the school, and although he was replaced as director in 1928 by Hannes Meyer, and later by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, Gropius had a clear interest in controlling how the Bauhaus program was historically positioned, and therefore he continued to redraft the history of the school throughout his life. As a German émigré and later as a German-American emissary, he was also compelled to rewrite his own biography. This revisionist project (both that of Gropius and that of current scholarship) makes it clear that one must always be on the alert to scrutinize Bauhaus facts and fictions, as well as to acknowledge the interstices between the two.
