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.Events such as these nonetheless were limited to private initiatives and smallgalleries; and after 1933, the German works became hard to sell, as J.B.Neumannwrote to Paul Klee: There is no perspective here for German painters all myefforts ten years of difficult work are for nothing.Luckily you are Swiss and not a Hitlerianer. 32 The climate began to relax later in the decade, as evidenced by the1929 centennial celebration for Carl Schurz, a respected American who had made nosecret of his German heritage.Although the militarism of the German spirit and Ger-man culture had been criticized up to 1925,33 writers now began to speak of the newGermany. Films such as The Cabinet of Dr.Caligari and Metropolis were well reviewed,and there was marked interest in Ernst Toller s article on the new German theater orHelen Appleton Read s reports on the Bauhaus, exhibitions, and other cultural events.Altogether, the image of Germany remained ambivalent for the duration of theWeimar Republic.The situation was complicated by the common equation of Germany with social-ism, a word that inspired hostility among most Americans.They associated socialismwith the 1917 revolution in Russia and thus with violence.34 After 1919, nationalpatriotism grew into an anti-communist hysteria, fed by war and the Russian Revolu-tion.Known as the Red Scare, it left a trace of fear among the populace and politicianseven after it had ebbed.Labor laws, for example, reflected the suspicion of socialist measures for years to come.Thus, it was legal until 1932 for an employer to enforce acontract in a court of law that prohibited employees from joining a union.The mini-mal control exercised on the most wealthy reflected the conviction that wealth andinvestment were indivisible guarantees of national economic health.Political isolation-ism, economic power, and self-made men were all favored.35 The minimal power ofthe country s left-wing intellectuals and politicians left no reason to expect any changein these conditions.In his influential 1966 book The Arrogance of Power, Senator J.William Fulbrightdescribed the relationship that had prevailed since that time between the United States 179 POLITICALLY MOTIVATED BARRIERSto socialism or communism: Despite our genuine sympathy for those who cry outagainst poverty and social injustice,.our sympathy dissolves into hostility whenreform becomes revolution; and when communism is involved, as it often is, our hos-tility takes the form of unseemly panic. 36 Some of the Bauhaus s faculty hoped to con-tribute actively to the establishment of socialism in Germany and thus understood architecture as a medium.in which to make politics explicit. 37 In this context,they saw the Bauhaus as a gathering place for those who wished to build the cathedralof socialism, dedicated to the future and rising toward the heavens. 38 After theBauhaus moved to Dessau, the municipally subsidized projects realized there, such asthe school building, the municipal employment office, and the Törten Siedlung, andthe practical cooperation between school and city, became known as paradigms of so-cial democracy.In the United States, the Dessau Bauhaus and the Weissenhof Siedlungwere associated with social democratic politics.39 It seems paradoxical that Gropius sand Mies s favorable reputations in America were based on the Bauhaus building andthe Weissenhof Siedlung if only after some ideological purging.Beginning in the mid-twenties, the political climate between Americans andGermans became more relaxed.New economic and cultural ties were forged.Thus, in1930 in Cologne, the cornerstone of the German Ford factory was laid in Henry Ford spresence.American correspondents wrote more amiable reports on German culturaland intellectual life.Nonetheless, anti-German sentiments were fueled anew by theNational Socialists seizure of power.Even universities saw confrontations sparked bytense German-American relations.At Harvard University, for example, feelings ranhigh when the German visitor Ernst Hanfstängl, at times a close acquaintance of theFührer, offered the school a scholarship for the study of Hitler s Germany. The uni-versity declined.40 But a moral ambivalence was also at work on campus.When Erich30 F.W.Coburn, Boston Happenings (February 1931), 141 142.31 See the section Points of Contact, chapter 2, above.32 J.B.Neumann, letter to Paul Klee, 27 February 1934, Felix Klee-Nachlass, Klee Nachlassver-waltung, Bern.33 See Raymond Wyer, Germany and Art, 16.34 Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones, Soziale Folgen der Industrialisierung und der Erste Weltkrieg,1890 1920, 265.35 Dudley E.Baines, Die Vereinigten Staaten zwischen den Weltkriegen, 288f., 304f.36 J.William Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power, 76.37 Johannes Werner, Die Kathedrale des Sozialismus, 265.38 Oskar Schlemmer, Das Staatliche Bauhaus in Weimar, 181.39 Paul Philippe Cret, for example, in 1933 described the relationship between the direction inarchitecture supported by Gropius and Mies and the political left in Ten Years of Modernism, 92.Also see Hitchcock and Johnson, The International Style, 141 147, 181, and Franz Schulze,Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography, 143.40 Lincoln Kirstein, Harvard and Hanfstängl, 648 649, and Harvard University Rejects Fellow-ship, 423. 180 CONTROVERSIES SURROUNDING BAUHAUS ARCHITECTURECohn, a potential sponsor, asked the director of the Germanic Museum not to includepolitically controversial art in a show planned for 1935, Charles L.Kuhn instantlydropped the anti-Nazi works of George Grosz from the exhibition list.41Mies, Gropius, and other Bauhaus immigrants were not spared the suspicionwith which Americans regarded Germany.Some were accused of espionage by theFederal Bureau of Investigation not long after their immigration, Mies in September1939, Gropius in July 1940, and Moholy-Nagy in 1943.Thereafter, extensive fileswere kept on all of them.42 Other Bauhaus people such as Josef and Anni Albers, Her-bert Bayer, Lilly Reich, Walter Peterhans, and Xanti Schwawinsky who did not be-come subjects of individual FBI investigations are named and identified in the mainfiles of their friends and affiliates.The dates fall outside of the period of reception un-der study here, but the attitudes that initially led to the suspicion had been buildingover the course of the previous years and remained influential.Thus, the FBI activityreflects the tense atmosphere that formed the background in particular for Mies s andGropius s efforts to receive commissions or positions in the United States.Both were accused by people whom they knew only barely or not at all.In bothcases, the accusation arose from banal evidence, misinterpreted by poor observation orthe imagination.In the hysterical atmosphere of that time, the architects Germannationality was sufficient to make them suspicious.Mies was brought to the attention of the FBI s Chicago office on September 6,1939, by a Commissioner Walker who had received a written accusation a short timeearlier from a business woman living in Glencoe, Illinois
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