Bauhaus Walking Tour in Weimar

In April 1919 Walter Gropius founded the State Bauhaus in Weimar. The new school set out to bring art, craft and architecture together. It moved into the buildings of the former Grand Ducal Art School and of Henry van de Velde's School of Arts and Crafts, which now belong to the Bauhaus University. In 1925 the Bauhaus had to move to Dessau, and in 1933, in Berlin, it dissolved itself under pressure from the Nazis. The museum in front of you opened on April 6, 2019, for the hundredth anniversary of the Bauhaus. It was designed by the Berlin architect Heike Hanada together with Benedict Tonon. The plain concrete cube has five levels. Twenty-four narrow horizontal bands of light run across the facade, and they glow as soon as it gets dark. Inside, the Klassik Stiftung Weimar shows the world's oldest Bauhaus collection. Gropius himself laid its foundation. When the Bauhaus left Weimar in 1925, he and the museum director Wilhelm Köhler picked more than one hundred and sixty pieces from the workshops for the museum. Many of them are now seen as design classics. The collection also holds prints and paintings by Lyonel Feininger and works by Paul Klee. The Bauhaus made its first experiments with form, colour, materials and shared teaching here in Weimar. Now walk left past the museum and down the steps into the Weimarhallenpark, which borders the museum terrace.

The Weimarhallenpark lies between the Bauhaus Museum and the Weimarhalle, the city's congress and concert hall. With its pond, lawns and old trees, it is one of the quietest places in the neighbourhood. The first Weimarhalle opened in 1932, on the hundredth anniversary of Goethe's death. It was designed by Max and Günther Vogler. During a planned renovation in 1997, serious structural faults were found, and the old hall was torn down. In its place, the new Weimarhalle was built to a design by the Hamburg architects von Gerkan, Marg and Partners. It opened on June 26, 1999, the year Weimar was European Capital of Culture. Large glass walls open the bright building towards the park. Today the Weimarhalle hosts concerts, meetings and congresses. In summer the Staatskapelle Weimar, the city's orchestra, also plays in the open air on the lake stage in the park. From here, walk back past the Bauhaus Museum and head east. After about five minutes you reach the large building of the Museum Neues Weimar.

The Museum Neues Weimar is older than the Bauhaus, and it shows where the Bauhaus came from. Grand Duke Carl Alexander had it built as the Grand Ducal Museum for the princely art collections. The Prague architect Josef Zítek designed it in the Neo-Renaissance style. It was built from 1863 to 1868 and opened in June 1869. It was one of the first purpose-built museums in Germany. Around 1900, Weimar became a centre of modern art. The art patron Harry Graf Kessler brought works by the French Impressionists and other avant-garde artists to the town, and the Belgian artist Henry van de Velde designed furniture, houses and whole interiors. In 1908 the Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts was founded, with van de Velde as its director. When he left, he suggested Walter Gropius as his successor, and in 1919 Gropius founded the Bauhaus in those same buildings. The permanent exhibition, "Van de Velde, Nietzsche and Modernism around 1900", tells this earlier story, from the Weimar School of Painting to Monet and on to van de Velde's chairs. The building was badly damaged in the Second World War. It was restored in the 1990s and reopened in 1999, and it has shown this exhibition since 2019. For the last stop, walk about four minutes northeast to Friedrich-Ebert-Strasse.

The Volkshaus, or People's House, at Friedrich-Ebert-Strasse 8 is older than the Bauhaus. It was built from 1906 to 1908 as the first Volkshaus in Thuringia. The idea came from the Weimar Social Democrat August Baudert, and the Weimar architect Bruno Röhr drew up the plans. It opened on April 26, 1908. Social Democrats and trade unions now had a building of their own, with a hall, a stage and a restaurant. Before the First World War, the speakers here included Clara Zetkin, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. In 1919, the year of the National Assembly in Weimar, the parliamentary group of the Majority Social Democrats met here. On March 15, 1920, during the Kapp Putsch and the general strike against it, Weimar workers gathered in the Volkshaus for a rally. Soldiers of the Reichswehr, the German army, who sided with the putschists, fired on the crowd. Nine people died. A memorial plaque on the outdoor staircase on the west side lists their names. From May 1933 the SA and the SS occupied the building and renamed it "Deutsches Haus", German House. Later it passed to the German Labour Front. In 1948, after a rebuild, it reopened as the house of the FDGB, the East German trade union federation. From 1954 it was called the Kreiskulturhaus "Michael Niederkirchner", a district house of culture. Many people from Weimar celebrated their Jugendweihe, the secular coming-of-age ceremony, here, along with carnival and dance nights. After 1990 the town ran the building as a venue, including for concerts. The building has stood empty since 2009. On January 1, 2024, the city of Weimar bought it and made the roof safe. A competition is to decide how it will be used in the future. This is where the tour ends. The town centre is about ten minutes' walk to the south.