Was the Bauhaus a great equalizer? Perhaps that idea was beside the point for its visionary founders, but they did have to confront modernity’s democratically inclusive trajectory, which has consistently pitted mass production and its resultant “low” culture against a reductive aesthetic resistant to populist incursions into the “high” art realm. It fell to the Bauhaus, that iconic institutionalization of avant-garde theory and practice, to attempt a fusion through an educational structure that sought to reconcile art and commerce (with a decided bent for the former). Always a subject for modernist art historians, the Bauhaus is under fresh scrutiny from the generation that evolved from the system established by the school’s exiles in the United States. Its brief and ever-changing existence at mid-twentieth century continues to provoke investigation, aided by the availability of information heretofore withheld by East German authorities. Interest in the contradictions within Bauhaus pedagogy has recently increased, as the effects of a curriculum grounded in both design and fine art has become apparent in contemporary practice, evident in the 2008 symposium, “Bauhaus Palimpsest: The Object of Discourse,” mounted at Harvard (bastion of tradition as well as home to Walter Gropius in exile) by HGCEA, the Historians of German and Central European Art and Architecture.

Several years ago, Kathleen James-Chakraborty initiated a similar conversation among scholars, now collected in Bauhaus Culture: From Weimar to the Cold War. The authors included in this generous compendium consider the institution as much a socio-political experiment as an aesthetic program. Recognizing the extent to which Bauhaus ideals infused the Western Bloc’s artistic pedagogy after the Nazi-induced diaspora beginning in the mid-thirties, these post-Bauhaus writers form a group dedicated to filling in the lacunae created by Cold War agendas. Their essays form an important complement to John Maciuika’s book-length study, Before the Bauhaus: Architecture, Politics, and the German State, 1890–1920.

James-Chakraborty’s own contributions (an introduction and two essays) to Bauhaus Culture are joined by seven others that range from Wilhelmine precedents to theatrical experimentation, and also include the Bauhaus’s attempts to market its prototypes, as well as its graduates’ status in the Hitler Jahren and afterwards. These last topics are perhaps the least-known and thus provide the most revealing chapters, but each essay contains enough new information and interpretation to satisfy even the most obsessive Bauhaus scholar.

Maciuika’s essay on the reforms leading up to those initiated by the Weimar Republic compresses information from Before the Bauhaus into a digestible précis, setting the stage for others to examine the many unresolved problems addressed by Bauhaus leaders during the school’s fourteen-year existence. Following Maciuika’s lead, James-Chakraborty explores the stylistic phenomenon known as Sachlichkeit in “Between Avoidance and Imitation,” a discussion of the theoretical conflict between the architects Henry van de Velde and Walter Gropius, who originated the idea of the school during the heyday of the Deutsche Werkbund.

The essays that follow analyze the impact of the school’s curricular programs and aspirations. Rose-Carol Washton Long (“From Metaphysics to Material Culture”) and Juliet Koss (“Bauhaus Theater of Human Dolls”), like Frederic Schwartz (“Utopia for Sale”), offer convincing arguments for the responsive role the Bauhaus played in the development of both high and popular culture in Weimar Germany. But the last three chapters, detailing the institution’s collapse, subsequent dispersion, and resurgence in Dessau are the most compelling. This information, collected by Winfried Nerdinger (“Bauhaus Architecture in the Third Reich”), James-Chakraborty (“From Isolationism to Internationalism”), and Greg Castillo (“The Bauhaus in Cold War Germany”), completes a useful and often startling mini-history of this design program’s ultimate fate.

If Maciuika’s leading essay in the anthology fails to satisfy those with a desire for detail, they need look no further than the author’s exhaustive scholarly study of the development of modernist design pedagogy that coalesced in Dessau. His Before the Bauhaus, published in 2005, presents the definitive argument for Germany’s central role in the formation of design programs. The Second Reich’s schools, organizations, and state-supported artists’ colonies melded the demands of the Industrial Revolution and nationalist competitiveness with the aesthetic practices common to both art academies and applied design schools, separate entities in the arts educational system until the advent of the twentieth century.

Drawing on a plethora of disparate studies, Maciuika meticulously traces this development from its origins in the influential English Arts and Crafts movement to the short-lived Darmstadt Artists Colony, along with a dizzying number of state- and city-supported schools reflecting the recently unified Germany’s desire to enter fully into the promise of industrialization and mass production. At the center of this consolidation (and Maciuika’s book) stands the Prussian Hermann Muthesius, a polymathic Übermensch with strong roots in both the creative and political spheres. Seconded to the new Reich’s embassy in England as a “technical reporter” (a more accurate description might be “economic mole”), Muthesius spent more than six years (1896–1903) investigating the development of the Garden City movement, its domestic structures, and the potential for similarly training a generation of craftsmen to supply industry with aesthetic goods. That this last was not a viable result for the English failed to deter Muthesius, whose enthusiasm for “artisanal training” grew more focused during this period.

On his return to Berlin, Muthesius played a dual role, pursuing a private architectural practice while accepting a powerful public position in the Prussian Commerce Ministry. He had already set the stage for his concentrated efforts by leading a professional tour of twenty-seven English arts, crafts, and trade education schools for the Ministry. Subsequently, Muthesius fostered the reorganization of thirty-five German schools, many of which had already begun to reconsider the connections between art and commerce. These escalating changes drew architects, craftsmen, social activists, and politicians into a new coalition, which perhaps inevitably, given the German penchant for forming clubs, led to the Deutsche Werkbund.

Founded in Munich in 1907, the Werkbund conflated regional educational reforms under a progressive nationalistic and largely economic organization run by Muthesius, whose ministerial duties had included government decrees placing instructional workshops under the aegis of architects. This group then spent the next seven years debating the system, mounting lectures and an unexpectedly final exhibition in Cologne in 1914 that visually presented the varied philosophical conflicts never far from the members’ minds. Germany’s confrontation with modernity in the fine and applied arts was, as Maciuika demonstrates, lengthy, nationalistic, bureaucratic, interrupted, and—finally—given its best chance at the Bauhaus.