Swiss urbanist Hannes Meyer joined the Bauhaus faculty to head the new Architecture Department in 1927; he replaced Gropius as the school’s director just a year later, in April 1928. His architectural projects and theoretical writings preceding his appointment established his reputation as an innovative architect who tried to address new social challenges with an architecture that stressed function and collectivism over aesthetic concerns and individualism. His accomplishments as director—including a reorganization of the curriculum, increasing revenues through mass-production of Bauhaus designs, and drawing large numbers of new students to the school—have been overshadowed by controversies about his politics and his dismissal by the municipal authorities in August 1930.³ Dividing the Bauhaus era into periods based on the terms of its directors, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe also had little more than two years until the Bauhaus finally closed, in 1933, when the Nazi Party came into power. His leadership was characterized by an unfortunate start (students on strike owing to Meyer’s dismissal) and an even less fortunate end as a private school in a Berlin backyard, poorly financed and under observation by the Gestapo.⁴

With regard to the Bauhaus, thus, we may ask what role communication played in the developments mentioned here, particularly beyond the merely aesthetic considerations usually applied in evaluating the Bauhaus’s merits. If this perspective is instrumental in assessing the Bauhaus as an organization—and we believe this to be the case—the evidence accumulated in this book should help future research to explain the Bauhaus’s mode of operation and thus provide a distinct framework for our understanding of the ups and downs characterizing this institution, perhaps the major cradle of modernism in the twentieth century.

After the Bauhaus closed in 1933, its founding spirit as well as its principles of education and design survived, even without the spiritus loci of the Bauhaus building and a regular school. The Bauhaus moved from an institution to a “community” as we understand it today: Most of its members, harassed and menaced by Nazi rule, were displaced and scattered all over the globe, but for decades they managed to maintain personal networks of support and inspiration. Deprived of its physical hub and its norms, both requisites of an institution,⁷ what remained of the Bauhaus were its leading principles and values as adapted by the individuals who had left it behind. Thus the group of “Bauhäusler” became a “Bauhaus community”—a group of individuals engaged in mutual relationship to pursue shared interests—and their interactions were, of course, dominated by communication over time and space. For the survival of the Bauhaus community, the maintenance of relationships by communication media was crucial, bridging the gaps between local networks of varying consistence and endurance.⁸ For example, regarding the communications of former Bauhaus master Gerhard Marcks, spanning the different periods of the Bauhaus movement, previous analysis has distinguished networks including intellectual groups, chains of masters and students, and ties of rivalry.⁹

If we accept the vital role of communication for institution building on the one hand and, on the other, the prevalence of Bauhaus networks of communication relating its members over time under the umbrella of a shared mission, it appears promising to analyze the communication within, around, and outside the Bauhaus in order to better understand its performance. Whether the Bauhaus can be considered to have been a success—in its time or from a today’s point of view and according to which criteria—is still a controversial issue. In an early data-based account, Folke Dietzsch, who began his work under the scientific structures of the German Democratic Republic, aimed at collecting the names and biographical details of all Bauhaus students identifiable from the official sources in Weimar and Dessau.¹⁰ He offers a wealth of data that might be suited for an assessment; for instance, he reports that looking at the graduations, only about 15 to 20 percent of all Bauhaus students actually obtained a diploma or a certificate of apprenticeship.¹¹ This low rate of completed studies can be seen as a failure, given the school’s general objective of educating young people. However, in their later lives, a considerable number of Bauhaus students were able to establish their own studios, agencies, or architect’s offices; in retrospect, most of the Bauhäuslers stated that their studies at the Bauhaus—whether completed with a grade or not—were formative for their future careers and essential to their definitions of success in their personal lives.¹² According to other criteria (e.g., share of international and female students respectively, relationships between masters and students, number of guest lectures, etc.), the Bauhaus was in the vanguard, conceding that its aesthetic concept remains in dispute even today. With regard to its effects on global issues of art, design, and urban development, former Bauhaus students have left their traces in a many nations.¹³

In retrospect, even critical accounts of the Bauhaus acknowledge the tremendous impact it had throughout the years of its chequered reception in various contexts.¹⁴ The two main indicators of its inefficacy, however, cannot be argued away: The Bauhaus was twice chased away from its locations in two different German states and was led by two different directors. And for a comprehensive view, we cannot disregard the fact that governmental structures in these environments were based on democratic elections. So despite our ongoing sympathy for the Bauhaus as representing a refuge of cultural opposition against conservative and fascist forces in Weimar Germany, public opinion at that time was mixed to say the least. This leads us back to the basic notion of this book mentioned above—to analyze the contribution of communication processes in their broadest sense to the Bauhaus’s success as well as its failure. From today’s knowledge, we argue that the Bauhaus can be understood as an organization to which, for analytic purposes, today’s standards of “corporate communications” can be applied, being well aware of the misleading description of the Bauhaus as a corporation. While a more correct designation would instead label the Bauhaus as an institution or just an organization, we decided to preserve the technical term of corporate communication (and, consequently, corporate identity, design, and behavior) because they are well established in previous research, and applying these concepts exactly accounts for one major novelty in Bauhaus research.

Within this framework (see Figure 1.1) the activities of what we would call public relations—the communication relationships with internal and external audiences—deserve our special attention because they put aspects of corporate design and corporate behavior into a perspective that may constitute a link between the approaches in art history and social science.

Edward L. Bernays’s primer titled The Art of Public Relations, published in 1928, first established public relations—then referred to as “propaganda”—as a broad-based instrument of strategic communication.¹⁸ He devotes two separate chapters to the spheres of education and art, at whose intersection the Bauhaus operated. He clearly identifies dependency on the state and/or sponsors as a determining factor, while describing art as minority rule by means of pressure on public opinion. For this reason, he argues, public relations plays an especially important role in this field: “In applied and commercial art, propaganda makes greater opportunities for the artist than ever before.”¹⁹ He ...