Christmas in Weimar, 1919
Winter holiday unites students and faculty of the new, revolutionary Bauhaus School.
This is an adaptation of Chapter 31 of my still-unpublished (MADE IN BERLIN) nonfiction title: “The Will to Style: Radical Utopians of the Weimar Bauhaus, 1919-1925.”
Students at the Weimar Bauhaus State School generally didn’t have much in the way of personal belongings. Arriving for the fall semester of 1919, many disillusioned soldiers returned to civilian life by removing the patches and emblems from their military jackets and trodding into class.
For more complicated work, they sought out those craftsmen (mostly women) who could cut and sew cloth. Sometimes taking payment, the new Bauhäuslers tackled the labor of altering veterans’ clothing — pants, jackets, and heavy coats — sometimes constructing entirely new clothes from the old. The women found that dying the familiar, field-green or gray material could transform the cloth into something less familiar to those who’d seen and worn it on the battlefield.
With only a few weeks before Christmas, the sudden artisans dove into their work. From scraps and ‘found’ materials, the Bauhaus students made toys, dolls, holiday decorations and stuffed animals….
As the weather turned cold and daylight hours diminished into dark, some of the women made extra spending cash by selling hand-made woolen mittens or dyed hats. One day, a painting student, Gunta Stölzl, overheard another student come up with a new, exciting plan:
“Let’s make Dada booth at the traditional Christmas market in Weimar!”
It was “just the ticket,” Stölzl wrote. “Everyone started creating ‘handicrafts.’ ”
With just a few weeks before Christmas, the sudden artisans dove into their work. Stölzl and others knocked on the doors of local women, who willingly donated scraps of fabric, yarn, lace and veils. Some handed over beaded handbags, leather and furs and from such treasures the Bauhaus students were able to produce toys, dolls, holiday decorations, and odd stuffed animals of different kinds.
Other students happily joined in. They made things of colored paper and wooden games, Stölzl remembered. When the public market opened, the young Bauhaus artisans appeared among the other vendors, their Dada Christmas booth standing proudly alongside the rest. Fully staffed and stocked with their ornaments, toy animals, dolls, and wooden sculptures, the students’ fledgling business thrived at the annual Weimar Christmas Market. They sold their work like crazy — hand-carved horses and birds….
“Especially attractive were the animals made of wooden roots,” Stölzl tells us, describing how the lively pieces had been “worked a little with a knife and painted very colorfully.”
Angels were especially popular, although the popular Bauhaus model required linen canvas. Here, the students faced some competition for materials. School instructor Otto Dorfner (who taught his book-binding classes in his own longtime fine-binding business in Weimar) complained that the less-consequential Christmas angels consumed valuable linen, which he used to bind books.
Other conservative school instructors also were offended by all the “childish” school activity surrounding the Christmas Market. These were the instructors of the former Grand Ducal Art Academy of Weimar, whose facilities had been replaced that year by the new Bauhaus Public School, the “brain-child” of its director, Berlin architect Walter Gropius. For his part, school director Gropius was thrilled at his students’ spontaneous burst of creativity and hard-driving industrialism. All the new activity, he said, “has really set this place on its head.”