The art of history
In Munich and Dessau, art and design call — but history is even more compelling
In the final years of Second World War, about 90 per cent of Munich’s Alstadt, or Old Town, was reduced to rubble by Allied bombers. In the years that followed, using an extensive archive of prewar photographs, the city worked to rebuild it stone by stone, to restore as much as possible of its prewar grandeur.
About 451 kilometres north, a much smaller city, Dessau, was also similarly destroyed during a bombing raid in March 1945. Its reconstruction took a different form: the sterile apartment blocks that became emblematic of the
German Democratic Republic, or East Germany. In fact, arguably Dessau’s most historically important building — an amalgamation of grey concrete and dark glass that housed the short-lived but hugely influential Bauhaus art school from 1926 to 1932 — wasn’t restored until 1972.
I visited both cities — so different from each other that at times I had to remind myself I was in the same country — for the arts, which put them on this year’s 52 Places list. Munich is making a name for itself in the global performing arts scene.
Dessau is one of three German cities celebrating the centenary of Bauhaus, the revolutionary artistic movement. As is often the case when you travel anywhere expecting something specific, I found far more to think about than opera and architecture.
Looking beyond Munich’s shiny facade
Munich’s efforts to rebuild itself in the model of its past haven’t always been completely accurate. On some buildings, intricately carved columns and stone facades have been replaced by trompe-l’oeil paint jobs, because a financially destroyed postwar Germany couldn’t afford the construction that had once been routine for the Wittelsbach royal family that ruled Bavaria.
Elsewhere, the darkest parts of Munich’s history — as the nexus for the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party — have been scrubbed away. The Hofbrauhaus is now the most famous beer hall in a city of beer halls, where, downstairs, the long, wooden tables are always packed, mostly with tourists seeing how many litres of Helles beer they can stomach and still stand up straight. Upstairs, in a hall that is now mostly quiet, Hitler and the National Socialists held their first major meeting in 1920.
Just a short walk away, on a stone wall in the picturesque Odeonplatz, a few out-of-place dark bricks are the only traces of what once was a monument to the Nazi party operatives who were killed in the National Socialists’ attempted coup in 1923. A trail of nearby golden cobblestones marks the way through Viscardigasse, known as Dodgers’ Alley, because it was the preferred path taken by those who wanted to avoid walking past the monument where they were required to give a Nazi salute.
At the English Garden, a 370-hectare park, one of the biggest urban greenspaces in the world, life is very good. Crowds sunbathe in their birthday suits while children throw Frisbees and run free. At the Eisbach, a man-made river that cuts through the park, a standing wave sees a regular rotation of wetsuit-wearing surfers taking turns in the one-metre break until they tumble into the rushing water. Spectators sip cold beers and hold their phones up trying to get the perfect surfer Instagram Boomerang.
Clearly marked bike lanes run through the city and along the Isar River. The scooter-share menace that has spread across the world like a pandemic is here, too, but (conforming to stereotypes) the scooters are almost always perfectly parked in neat rows and I actually found them to be an incredibly safe way to cross the city.
The biggest revelation for me was the Lenbachhaus, a 19thcentury villa that in recent years has been expanded with the addition of a modern copper-and-aluminum-lined building by Norman Foster. It houses an eclectic collection of local art spanning centuries, but its centrepiece is its permanent exhibition on the Blue Rider movement, founded in Munich in 1905 by a group of Russian immigrants that included Wassily Kandinsky and Marianne von Werefkin.
The timeline of the group’s history blends seamlessly with the colourful, abstract art, allowing the uninitiated to gain a surprisingly clear understanding of it all, without too much effort.
And then, of course, there’s Munich’s calling card: beer by the litre, served in giant, glass Masskrugs that the superhero wait staffs improbably carry by the dozen-strong handfuls.
Abig birthday in Dessau
When you walk into the first exhibition room at the brandnew Bauhaus Museum Dessau — a giant glass “black box,” as its architects call it — you immediately hear recordings of excerpts from newspaper articles from the early 1930s debating whether the Bauhaus school should be shut down for being degenerate and communist as the rising nationalist right claimed.
The school had been chased out of town by conservative politicians before: in Weimar in 1925, just six years after it was founded by architect Walter Gropius. In 1932, the National Socialists won the ongoing debate in Dessau, and the school was moved a second time, to Berlin. It would be shut down for good less than a year later.
Bauhaus was an avant-garde art and design school that aimed to combine every form of art — architecture, painting, weaving, industrial design — into a Gesamtkunstwerk, a term translating roughly to “total work of art.”
Though the focus shifted under successive directors, it was always built on the idea of form meeting function and beauty without the frills.
The idea was to create things — light fixtures, chairs, entire buildings — that everyone and anyone could use and love.
Much of the focus during the centennial celebrations in Dessau, where Bauhaus arguably had its heyday while housed in the famous building that’s now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was on the movement’s legacy. Apple products, Ikea furniture and public housing projects — anything that could generally be described as “modern” — have all, at some point or another, been traced by someone back to Bauhaus.
Most of all, the museum made me appreciate my walks around Dessau even more.
There’s the Bauhaus school building itself. On the scheduled guided tours you get access to otherwise off-limits sections, like the auditorium and the dorms, where it’s easy to imagine young people from 30 different countries putting their creativity into overdrive.
There are the Gropius-designed Masters’ Houses, where the likes of Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe lived. Once I had Bauhaus on my mind, I saw it everywhere — in the big rectangular windows of newly built homes along the Elbe River and in the right angles of the GDR-era apartment blocks in the centre of town.
But it was Bauhaus’ other, less tangible legacy that stuck with me. On one of my walks through Dessau, a mostly sleepy town, I saw some disconcerting graffiti: a metre high swastika, spraypainted in yellow against the side of a shop. Germany, like so many countries, has seen the anti-immigrant, far right gaining ground. I thought back to the voices at the museum, reading the opinions of those who believed Bauhaus was a danger to society. If some of our esthetic tastes haven’t changed much since the end of Bauhaus, it’s also true that, for some, neither has a fear of the new.