S'It is a political art, used to house people and to identify the aesthetics of a territory, it is architecture. She also says the times. Thus the extreme right alternative party für Deutschland (AFD) in Germany and Donald Trump in the United States seized it at the same time, in order to lead the same battle in the name of a familiar refrain: the beautiful, the traditional, national identity.
AFD, which has just alled in a unique way to the German right (CDU) on the migratory issue, and which could increase to 20 % in the federal elections of February 23, violently attacks the famous school of the school Bauhaus, who was from all the fronts of art in three successive cities – Weimar, Dessau and Berlin – from 1919 until it closed, in 1933, by the Nazis. The latter saw it as a place full of Bolsheviks and Jews spreading the virus of a degenerate art.
AFD has the architectural theories of the Bauhaus, accusing him of having inspired, before and after the war, of the buildings of a “Abyssal ugliness”. Namely, by schematizing, a white cube in concrete, with right angles, with flat roof, with large glass windows, without shutters or ornaments on the walls.
AFD qualifies these buildings as sinister shoe boxes, impersonal and communists, cuts from ancestral traditions. The supporters of this movement, on the contrary, praise an elegant aesthetic, pure lines energized by asymmetry or slender balconies. Especially simplicity and functionality have made it possible to build quickly and at low prices in order to house millions of people, before and after the Second World War.
Conceptual faras
AFD recently paid a motion to the Parliament of Saxony-Anhalt asking that the festivities for the 100th anniversary of the installation of the Bauhaus in Dessau, in 2025, be the occasion for a “Critical exam”. The motion has been rejected, but the main thing is elsewhere.
It is already frightening that a German parliament debates a text speaking of“Aberration of modernity”of “Uniform masses”of vision ” horrible “buildings “Antiallemands” – The words used by the Nazis to close the school, that AFD appropriates while extending them to migrants, as noted by the historian Katja Hoyer, in the Guardian of October 29, 2024.
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Source: Lemonde