The Bauhaus Canteen (1919-1930)
This radical, new commons-for-all quickly functioned as a creative workshop.
This is a chapter from my unpublished book about utopian youth of Germany’s Weimar Time:
“The Will to Style: ‘Radical’ Utopians of the Weimar Bauhaus, 1919-25.” -ts
Scores of Bauhaus students entered the canteen on that first cold day, in late October 1919. It was early in the semester, and most here were new arrivals, sitting down together for the first time. The school itself had only opened the previous spring.
Gazing at the green-painted walls, the white cloths on all the tables, the new-comers shivered with cold — and with nervous anticipation, as well, of being in a new school among so many strangers. Steaming cookpots scented the chilly air with the rare promise of food. Students and faculty members alike shared a deep-down, knawing hunger, both physical and intellectual.
Serving a single, meager meal per day for most of the next four years, the opening of the new Bauhaus canteen was a party that people remembered for the rest of their lives. The Weimar students desperately needed this steady source of food; also a huge relief to the first Bauhaus School faculty, also facing the postwar struggle of getting enough to eat. Many of the men were returning veterans. More than a few of the women had nursed the war-time wounded and dying, getting as close to the battlefield as they cared or dared to.
Now, however, there seemed to come a time when a person was allowed to be optimistic, and this was something the German and Austrian students also carried into the canteen. The place would host some of the most exciting moments of their lives at the Bauhaus School, including the notorious parties that anointed the decade as “the roaring twenties.” At the Bauhaus canteen, friends would gather to dine, to learn, to lecture, and to perform. Here, one might stand up for the rest of the student body to sing a song, exchange recitations of poetry, or dance late into the night to music coming from an ever-present phonograph.
As she watched other students entering the canteen for the first time, graphic artist Gunta Stölzl noted how cautious everybody seemed. Taking seats, they kept to their own cliques — the young people from Munich at one table, those from Vienna at another.
Older, more experienced students must have sat together too — those who’d been “grandfathered” into the Bauhaus by virtue of their enduring positions. These were young men and women who had been students at this institution for years — or, rather, they’d been studying within the confines and protection of the Bauhaus’s predecessor in Weimar, the “Ducal Academy of Art.”
During the meal, school director Walter Gropius gave a speech, telling all the students and faculty — “and it’s important to have every hand working for this” — that, after damage from the war, their new school needed both building and rebuilding. If nothing else was clear to all, it was this: Emerging from the past four years of soul-walloping war, both the buildings and the people needed a substantive make-over.
Stölzl and others took his message to heart, sensing revolutionary changes occurring around them. The students watched in astonishment as the school director and his newly hired Bauhaus teachers joined them in their new commons, even deigning to sit down humbly at the same tables to eat.
“[We must] not shrink back from chaos,” Stölzl wrote, “but rather use it to give shape to that which (now) seems to be coming to life.”