“Art is only art if it helps to change people, to move them forward. The Bauhaus. Those who founded it, those who represented it, knew how to merge life and art, art and life. Within us. The Bauhaus forever.”
“The Bauhaus. That was an idea, more, an ideal. No difference between draftsmen and artists. Everyone together in a new community, we should build the cathedral of the future. I wanted to be a part of it. And something happened that freed us. We did not learn to paint, but learned to see anew, to think anew, and at the same time we learned to know ourselves” Irena Bluhova and Re Soupault
I’ve been meaning to do an episode about the Bauhaus, which is so central to the aesthetics of the Weimar Republic, and thought I would focus on the founders and amazing instructors of the school, but I stumbled upon a wonderful book about the lives of the female students of the Bauhaus. I’ve had trouble finding good histories of women in the Weimar Republic, so I thought this would be a better way to start discussing the school. So, this episode is about five women whose lives were changed by the Bauhaus: what it brought them, and the struggles they had there.
Welcome to The Weimar Spectacle, where I explore the brief and extraordinary life of the Weimar Republic. I’m Bremner Fletcher Duthie, singer, actor and theatre maker. I’ve spent years performing songs and theatre from the Weimar period, and I’m inspired and maybe more than a little obsessed by that moment in time. I’ll put images for this episode onto my website: bremnersings.com. Just click on the Weimar Podcast link on the site. So, as you know, my big, big absurd idea for these podcasts, is that the Weimar Republic invented everything about the modern world, and we are all still dealing with the possibilities and problems it gave to us. To prove this possibly unprovable idea, I’ll be exploring the arts, politics, science, architecture, social innovations of the Weimar period, and of course, the terrible and irresistible rise of the Nazi Party.
Listen to Bremner's two albums of Weimar Cabaret songs
https://songwhip.com/bremnerduthie/bremner-sings-weill
https://songwhip.com/bremnerduthie/bremner-sings-kurt-weill-vol-2-moon-faced-starry-eyed
The Bauhaus was founded in 1919 by architect Walter Gropius with a sweeping mission: to unify art, craft, and industry, and to break down the old hierarchies between fine art and applied art. The Bauhaus encouraged its students to learn by making, by experimenting with materials, and by blurring the line between art and life.
At the core of its early philosophy was Johannes Itten, a painter and teacher. Itten believed that creativity required harmony between body, mind, and spirit. Students in his classes often performed physical warm-ups before beginning their work, almost a ritual, to connect inner energy with artistic practice. Itten’s courses placed enormous value on experimentation with materials—wood, textiles, metal, glass—allowing students to discover how form, color, and texture interacted. His famous preliminary course encouraged students to break free from academic traditions and instead learn by doing, by touching, by testing. His students began the day with exercises in movement, breathing, and meditation. He introduced them to non-Western philosophies, vegetarian diets, and the belief that the artist’s inner life was as important as their outward product. It was a radical new approach to education.
Although Itten’s mystical and spiritual approach eventually clashed with Walter Gropius’s more pragmatic, industry-oriented vision, his influence remained: a belief that artistic education should engage the whole person and that the study of multiple materials and crafts could unlock unexpected creativity. Students trained in his philosophy came away with a deep respect for experimentation and for the expressive qualities of materials. For the women who studied there, these lessons would shape their ambitions, careers, and lives.
While the Bauhaus opened its doors to women and declared ideals like equality, those ideals were under pressure from social, assumptions about women’s ability and role. Gropius himself, in the founding statute, made statements like: “no difference between the beautiful and the strong sex; absolute equality, but also absolute equality of obligations.” But in practice, the number of women admitted, and the workshops they entered, were regulated. From quite early on, female students were often “guided” into weaving, bookbinding, ceramics—even when some expressed interest and ability in painting, architecture, or metalwork.
Today, we’ll focus on five women: Friedl Dicker, Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp, Margarete Heymann-Loebenstein, Marianne Brandt and Margaretha Reichardt. We’ll explore what drew them to the Bauhaus, how their ambitions shifted within its walls, and how their lives carried Bauhaus ideals into the world.
The book that I’m drawing from is Bauhaus Women, by Elizabeth Otto and Patrick Rossler. I feel terrible about having to pick only five stories from the book, since all there about 45 lives in the book, and they’re all extraordinary sketches of complex lives. After they left the Bauhaus, most went on to take the Bauhaus ideals into long lives, but beside each name there is a small box with dates of their births and deaths, and it was difficult to work my way through the book, turning pages and glancing at those dates and seeing that many ended in the early 1940’s and knowing that those amazing women must have died in one of the concentration camps. Let’s start with one of those stories:
Friedl Dicker arrived at the Bauhaus in 1919 as part of its founding class. Born in Vienna in 1898 into a lower middle class Jewish family, she had already trained in photography and printmaking. Her ambition was to fuse the art with design. What attracted her to the Bauhaus was the promise that walls between disciplines would be torn down and an artist could try her hand at anything. Before she arrived at the Bauhaus she had already studied composition with Arnold Schoenberg and performed street theatre with puppets.
Itten, with his blend of mysticism and rigor, appealed deeply to Friedl, who was searching not just for a craft but for a way of life. She embraced his teachings, practiced his breathing and meditation exercises, and explored his theories of color and form. Her versatility was remarkable; she seemed to thrive on crossing boundaries. In workshops, she experimented with bookbinding, stage design, and textiles, architecture, painting and costume design. She joined the Communist Party and created art that opposed fascism and capitalism. She said: “If you … don't like this world, then you'll just have to change it.”
After leaving Weimar in 1923, she continued her work in Vienna, collaborating with fellow Bauhaus student Franz Singer. Together, they established a studio that produced innovative interiors, furniture, and stage sets and they had a romantic and political partnership. Both were drawn to left-wing causes, and their design work was infused with a belief in social progress. But there is evidence that many works from their joint atelier were published under his name even when her influence was substantial. Dicker also created a series of photomontages, a kind of photo collage that was so popular among avant-garde artists at that time, like John Heartfield or the Dadaist. All of those works are deeply anti-capitalist, anti-fascist and anti-war.
So sieht sie aus diese welt, meine kinde. (this is how the world looks, my child)
The rise of fascism in the 1930s upended her career and her life. As a Jewish woman and an outspoken leftist, she was doubly vulnerable. Tragically, despite having a visa to immigrate, she decided to stay with her husband who had been denied a visa. Deported to the Terezín Camp in 1942, she might have succumbed to despair. Instead, she returned to her Bauhaus roots. She gathered the children and gave them art classes. She offered them paper, colors, and exercises—just as she had once done at the Bauhaus. For these children, her lessons were more than creative play; they were acts of survival, ways of holding on to identity and hope. One student later wrote: “We didn’t illustrate the misery and horror that surrounded us, but rather a different world that Friedl transported us to. She painted flowers and had us paint what we imagined we’d see looking out of windows”, “ there was only a big table with painting supplies and the paper was sometimes just waste paper or packing paper from some old packages, but at these moments, I felt like a free human being”. Finally, and again tragically, she asked to be deported to Auschwitz in the hope of rejoining her husband. Before she left, she hid a suitcase of 5000 drawings by her students in the attic of their dormitory, and those were discovered after the war, and remain a legacy of her dedication and love. At the Bauhaus, she learned to see design as a path to inner harmony. In Terezín, that training became something else entirely: a tool of resistance, a gift to the next generation. She was murdered at Auschwitz in 1944, but her legacy endures in the thousands of children’s drawings preserved from Terezín—each one a testament to her belief in the power of art.
Lou Scheper, later Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp, enrolled at the Bauhaus in 1920. Originally, she wanted to study medicine or philology (languages), but her art teacher, Margarete Schall, noticed her talent in color and painting and encouraged her to apply to the Bauhaus. When she entered the Bauhaus in 1920, she already had a painter’s eye and a keen interest in the new visual languages emerging in modern Europe.
Unlike many of her female peers who were directed into the weaving workshop, Lou pursued painting and color design. She worked closely with figures like Paul Klee, and her understanding of color relationships shows the influence of both Klee and Itten’s theories. Klee in particular became a lasting influence, encouraging her to think of color as a living force, capable of transforming mood and meaning. She also absorbed Itten’s systematic approach to color harmonies, but where Itten sought spiritual order, Lou’s ambitions were practical: she wanted to use color as an architectural tool. I love this quote by her about the spirit of the Bauhaus teachings: “Rather balance on wisps of air than sit on dogmas.”
Her work is filled with invention and delight: magicians, jugglers, angels, fantastic animals and strange creatures fill her paintings.
A letter to her husband
At the Bauhaus, she met Hinnerk Scheper, a fellow student who specialized in wall painting and color design. Their personal and professional lives soon intertwined—they married in 1925—and for much of her career, Lou worked alongside her husband. Together, they developed large-scale color plans for buildings, applying bold palettes to exteriors and interiors in ways that made modern architecture more human, more alive.
Lou went on to become a leading figure in color design for architecture, particularly in the years after the Bauhaus closed. She collaborated with her husband Hinnerk Scheper on large-scale color projects, bringing Bauhaus ideas into the practical world of building interiors and exteriors. In Berlin, during the late 1920s and early 1930s, Lou’s career blossomed. She worked on housing estates and public buildings, pioneering what we might now call “color consultancy.” She believed that color should not be a mere afterthought in architecture, but a structural element—something that shaped how people experienced space in their daily lives.
Her later career in Berlin involved teaching and developing theories of color planning that bridged art and everyday architecture. In a sense, she embodied one of the Bauhaus’s key missions: to make artistic knowledge serve society directly. While her role was sometimes overshadowed by her husband’s, Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp’s contribution to architectural color design was pioneering, and she remained active in promoting Bauhaus ideas long after the school was closed by the Nazis. After her husband’s death in 1957, Lou carried on, teaching, writing, and lecturing about color. She participated in projects like the design of the Germanic National Museum, the Berlin Philharmonic and the Berlin Airport.
Lou developed the color scheme for the Berlin Philharmonic
Her late career was dedicated to keeping Bauhaus principles alive, ensuring that a younger generation understood the importance of integrating color into design. She also designed stage costumes, sets, contributed to the stage workshop under Oskar Schlemmer.
her designs for the Stuttgart Ballet
When she died in 1976, she was working on the color design of the National Library in Berlin
Margarete Heymann, born in Cologne in 1899, entered the Bauhaus with an ambition that set her apart: she wanted to bring modern design into the heart of everyday life. She was already trained in applied arts and saw in the Bauhaus an opportunity to combine artistic innovation with mass production.
She took the basic courses in 1920 and in the ceramics workshop, she embraced it with extraordinary determination. But in 1922, when she stormed out of the Bauhaus because she was denied a permanent place in the ceramics department and instead offered a place in the bookbinding dept, she obviously was not content: a note in the archives says: “To the secretariat of the Staatliches Bauhaus, Miss Heymann left our department on November 2 […]. She broke a window into pieces … the room had to be cleaned …”
She took her ambition and her Bauhaus training and in 1923, she founded the Haël Workshops for Artistic Ceramics near Berlin, one of the earliest independent businesses launched by a Bauhaus-trained woman. Her designs were bold, geometric, and brightly colored, reflecting the Bauhaus vocabulary of form and function. Unlike traditional decorative ceramics, her work emphasized clarity of shape and suitability for modern living.
Her designs were striking: bold geometric forms, vivid glazes, and shapes that were functional yet distinctly modern. They echoed the Bauhaus ideals of clarity and simplicity but carried her own artistic signature. Margarete wanted her ceramics to be affordable, to reach middle-class homes, to democratize modernist taste. The design, as you can see from the pictures is remarkable. Following the Bauhaus, and socialist ideals of making good design affordable and available to more people in society.
Her workshop grew quickly, employing dozens of workers and exporting internationally. She was a rare figure: a Jewish woman at the head of a successful industrial enterprise in 1920s Germany. Her marriage to Gustav Loebenstein, and later her partnership with his brother, Gerhard, were both personal and professional. Together they expanded the business, though Margarete was clearly the creative driving force.
The rise of the Nazis shattered everything. As a Jewish entrepreneur, she was forced to abandon her factory in 1933. She was forced to sell it at a price so low that after the war, the German Govt stepped in to compensate her. But in 1934, a local paper wrote: “The great purification begins… the company has a new master…. Women and men have begun work under the symbols of the German Labor Front (a Swastika inside a gear)”. Margarete fled to Britain. Her husband had already died in a car accident, leaving her to manage both the business and her young children alone. She attempted to reestablish herself, producing ceramics under the name Grete Marks. But the British market she never achieved the same recognition she had enjoyed in Germany.
Margarete Heymann had entered the Bauhaus with a vision of uniting craft and industry. She achieved it brilliantly, only to have it stripped away by politics and persecution. Yet her continued work in exile is a testament to her belief in the Bauhaus ideal that beauty and function should belong to everyone.
Margareta Reichardt was born in Erfurt in 1907 and joined the Bauhaus in 1926. She had already completed four years at a local school of applied arts. From the beginning, her ambition was practical: she wanted to master textile design and to see her work enter everyday use. Her career reflects both the limitations women faced at the Bauhaus, where they were often funneled into “feminine” disciplines, and the opportunities they seized within those boundaries, transforming weaving into a central pillar of modern design.
At the Bauhaus, she learned weaving as both art and science. Students were trained to investigate new materials, to discuss possibilities with industry, to do cost benefit analysis of new designs and materials. Under Stölzl’s guidance, the workshop became a place where women transformed constraints into creativity. They experimented with synthetic fibers, industrial looms, and new patterns. Margaretha embraced this experimental spirit but kept her eye on functionality. Her designs often balanced bold geometric patterns with the needs of mass production.
From archival sources, we see her involvement in protests within the Bauhaus weaving workshop leadership. She, along with others, criticized the conditions—especially as the weaving workshop shifted increasingly toward fulfilling industrial contracts. One piece of her work was a collage titled “sie brauchen das bauhaus” in which she used textile swatches, Goethe verses, and a pointed commentary: “erziehung am fließband” (education on the assembly line) and “Tempo, Tempo” emphasizing the speed and industrial time pressures. She included a “tüchtigen Webmeister,” a strict male foreman pointing to a clock.
After leaving the Bauhaus in 1931, she returned to Erfurt, where she set up her own weaving workshop. There, she continued the Bauhaus mission of fusing art and industry. She produced textiles for curtains, upholstery, and clothing—everyday items that bore the mark of modernist clarity. In the more than fifty years that she ran her own business most of her creative work lay in designing and producing materials for everyday use and decorative fabrics, including clothing and home textiles. She also created stunning pictorial wall tapestries focusing on gardens and nature and literature and music. Amazingly, these were mostly created directly on a hand loom without a pattern.
During the Nazi period, her opportunities were limited, yet she managed to keep working, often focusing on traditional or neutral designs that could pass under the radar. After the war, she resumed her teaching and workshop activities, training younger generations in the principles she had absorbed at the Bauhaus. She never became a household name, but her career embodied the continuity of Bauhaus ideals: the belief that textiles, so often dismissed as “women’s work,” could carry modernist design into the heart of ordinary life.
Marianne Brandt entered the Bauhaus somewhat later than some of the earliest female students—but she broke some of the barriers women usually faced in the school. Born Marianne Liebe in 1893 in Chemnitz, Germany, she came from an upper-middle-class family; her father was a lawyer who appreciated theatre and fine arts. Brandt’s early training was in painting and sculpture—she intended (like many students) that art might be her path. She studied at private art schools and at the Grand Ducal Saxon College of Fine Art in Weimar before the Bauhaus.
But by 1923-24 she was drawn to the Bauhaus—she says “ I was drawn to Bauhaus almost magically”. She plunged in, so much so that she burnt all of her previous works. She loved the Preliminary Course under Moholy-Nagy and Albers, and was drawn irresistibly to the possibility of working more directly with materials, with design, with industrial production. She saw in the Bauhaus a chance to move beyond expressionist painting into design as craft, technique, form and function.
When she arrived in the metal workshop, she confronted prejudice: metalwork was dominated by men, and the idea of a woman working there was resisted. She later recalled: “At first I was not accepted with pleasure — there was no place for a woman in a metal workshop, they felt. They admitted this to me later on and meanwhile expressed their displeasure by giving me all sorts of dull, dreary work. How many little hemispheres did I most patiently hammer out of brittle new silver, thinking that was the way it had to be and all beginnings are hard.”
She was “the only woman after the preliminary course” to be permitted to continue in the metal workshop. Moholy-Nagy was instrumental in recognizing her potential. He encouraged her and supported her. And some of her famous design pieces date from her student years. The tea infuser (sometimes called the MT49 teapot), coffee and tea-services, lamps, ashtrays—all show her mastery of geometric forms, sleek lines, and a functionalist aesthetic
In 1926, after the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to Dessau, Brandt became “Mitarbeiter” (associate) in the metal workshop; by 1928 she was acting head of the metal workshop when Moholy-Nagy left. She also negotiated industry contracts—lighting fixtures, lamps, etc.—so her role wasn’t merely artistic, but organizational, technical, industrial. She designed most of the metal fixtures that were used in the new, iconic building and as homes around Germany were increasingly being modernized, her fixtures, desk lamps and hanging fixtures, appeared across the country.
Brandt's design of light fixtures for the Bauhaus
Her career, like many others, was affected by changing politics. After 1933, she was less able to maintain her presence in design industry; WWII, the Nazi period, and post-war division of Germany all intervened. She worked as a designer, teacher, and artist, but never again had quite the same institutional visibility.
Marianne Brandt’s life illustrates several of the strengths of the Bauhaus system: access to multiple materials, exposure to theory and industry, the chance (though rare) for women to cross into male-dominated zones, and to negotiate with factories. Her designs remain iconic: the MT49 teapot, lighting objects, household objects that combine beauty and utility. Even her experiments in photography and photomontage show a willingness to bridge art & critique.
The Bauhaus was a complex place—radical in its ideas: learning by doing, multiple crafts, the unity of art and life, equality at least in the founding documents—yet still, riddled with contradictions. Walter Gropius declared it open to men and women alike, but in practice, women were funneled into certain workshops, told that their place was in weaving or ceramics rather than architecture or metal.
And yet, within those confines, women like Friedl Dicker, Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp, Margarete Heymann-Loebenstein, and Margaretha Reichardt forged extraordinary paths. Their ambitions shifted as they navigated the realities of the Bauhaus and the turbulent world beyond it. Some, like Dicker, carried Bauhaus methods into acts of resistance. Others, like Heymann, turned craft into thriving industry. Scheper-Berkenkamp transformed color into an architectural language, and Reichardt quietly wove modernism into the fabric of everyday life.
The Bauhaus gave them confidence in experimentation, respect for materials, and the conviction that art and life were inseparable. For women who faced social, political, and institutional barriers, this education was transformative. But the school’s breadth—its exposure to many materials, its mixing of theory and practice, its encouragement of cross-disciplinary work, and interface with industry—gave many women the opportunity to develop skills, artistic voices, and careers they would not have had elsewhere. Even when pushed into so-called “feminine” crafts, they expanded those crafts until they became pillars of modern design. And these women often sensed and resisted the limitations imposed on them, used their creativity to critique, to expand, to persist.
I highly recommend the book Bauhaus Women and not just for the history of the Bauhaus and its impact, but because the book gives a clear view of the impact of the disaster of the Nazi rise and fall and the 2nd WW and all it’s horrors. The writers chronicle about 45 women’s lives, and, well, for one thing it reminds me that people live long and complex lives full of strange and sometimes beautiful, sometimes tragic choices, but it also allows us to see the fracturing over and over again of these lives by the events in Europe. It’s a brutal, depressing thought exercise to imagine how all these lives of these beautiful, amazing, talented women would have progressed had it not been for those events. The art they would have made, the choices that would have been available to them, the way they might have changed the world. The unknown possibilities and uncreated beauty that we today might have inherited from them.
So, once again, if some of the concerns and desires in these stories seem familiar, well they should, because I believe the Weimar Republic helped give birth to the modern world.
Thanks for listening. Hit subscribe or follow if you want to know when the next episode appears. I don’t have any advertising budget for this show or really a budget at all, I’m just some obsessed singer repurposing an old microphone, so if you leave a review on your app, or hit the star button, it really encourages the podcast to be found by other listeners, or just forward a link to a friend, that’d be great. And I hope you’ll join me in the coming months as I explore more about the strange birth, life and death of an experiment in creating a new society.
I’ll put images for this episode onto my website: bremnersings.com.
And who am I to discuss Weimar? Well, I’m not a sociologist, a political scientist or an historian. I’m an obsessive artist. A singer, play-write and cabaret performer who has been obsessed with the arts and music of the Weimar republic all my life. I’ve recorded three albums dedicated to the music of this time and particularly the music of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. If you want to listen to them, just search for Bremner Fletcher Duthie in any music streaming site, and you’ll find all my albums. And if you want to know more about my work, see the images from the period, or suggest a specific Weimar subject for an episode, check out bremnersings.com
Join me next time for another walk through the amazing creative madness of 1920’s Germany.