Otto’s project tells the story of how members of the Bauhaus grappled with life under the Nazi dictatorship. As arguably the most influential twentieth-century art and architecture school, the Bauhaus transformed teaching and practice across disciplines and media. Unlike most scholars who focus on iconic Bauhaus figures in exile after the school’s 1933 closure, Otto considers the majority of the school’s 1,400 members—over eighty percent—who remained in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe. This approach recasts the movement’s history after 1933 into one of surprising compatibility with Nazism. Many adapted to the regime or even embraced it. Some worked as artists or in design and media; others designed concentration camps and armaments plants. Understanding how Bauhaus art and design served the National-Socialist regime challenges common assumptions of Nazi aesthetics as retrograde and modern art movements as intrinsically virtuous. It also reveals the complexities negotiated by those marginalized in Nazi society, including communist, Jewish, queer, and female Bauhäusler.

Elizabeth Otto is Director of the Humanities Institute and Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. She is the co-author of Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective (Bloomsbury, 2019) and the author of Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt (Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin, 2005) and Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics (MIT Press, 2019), which received the Peter C. Rollins Book Prize from the Northeast Popular Culture Association. In 2024, Otto co-curated the blockbuster exhibition “Bauhaus and National Socialism,” held in the German city of Weimar.

Portrait credit: KC Kratt