The strange religious fundamentalism of Ludwig Christian Haeusser
The rise of a German doomsday preacher and "sex prophet"
This article is based on chapters 26 and 27 of my unpublished book,
The Will to Style: Utopian Radicals of the Weimar Bauhaus, 1919-25. -ts
THOSE WHO lived through the poverty that followed World War I found it difficult, if not impossible, to describe the terrible everyday torture of that time. Alongside the physical hardship of never getting enough food to eat, nor the clothes and fuel they needed to stay warm in winter, students at the new, revolutionary Bauhaus State School of Art described the parallel challenges of maintaining one’s spiritual and intellectual health.
“Every German was pushed to extremes during this desperate epoch,” remembered student artist Paul Citroen. “Agonizingly, you searched for something you could claim as your own.”
Preaching different kinds of extremism, Haeusser represented himself as a Christ-plus-Nietzsche Übermensch and ‘healer’ — somehow drawing both angry German war veterans and modern young women into his intimate fold….
As such, Bauhaus students faced a barrage of appeals from German spiritual groups, religious cults, and over-hyped post-war intellectual movements. Later, Paul Citroen (a Dutch-Berliner) understood it in terms of the common human need for meaning — as a search for one’s own identity. In these dark philosophical corners, Citroen remembered, one found all manner of God-seekers— mystics, ghost-hunters, hypnotists, supernaturalists, and transcendentalists. Other German intellectual spaces were haunted by pan-European dadaists, the cynics, nihilists, and “liars of all kinds,” the artist said.
“Christian Haeusser brought all these together,” according to Citroen. “The extremists from all of these trends were united in one person who was representing himself, in his official appearances, as the ‘Healer of all ills.’ ”
Ludwig Christian Haeusser (1881-1927) was a man whose noxious rhetoric had landed him in a Swiss prison before his arrival in Weimar. That was in 1919, the same year Berlin architect Walter Gropius opened the Bauhaus School to its first class of 150-or-so international students. The bearded Haeusser could often be seen wandering Weimar streets, dressed in his sandals and white penitent’s robe — a self-described “holy prophet” speaking loudly to anyone who would stop and listen.
During the following year, Haeusser won acolytes. Several Bauhaus students were drawn to him, some even shedding their shoes and donning his signature white clothing to join him as couch-surfing beggers. Discussing him with other faculty, Bauhaus School director Gropius noted the man’s ability to bring angry war veterans and young Bauhaus women alike into his intimate fold….