The Bauhaus Foundation has warned that the far-right Alternative for Germany is reviving rhetoric reminiscent of the Nazi-era attacks on the art school, as it prepares for a possible legal battle if the party wins regional elections in the eastern state where the institution is based.
Bauhaus Dessau Foundation head Barbara Steiner said the institution that revolutionised modern architecture and design had become a prime target of the AfD ahead of September’s elections in Saxony-Anhalt as the far-right party pursues a “patriotic” cultural policy.
The AfD’s criticism of Bauhaus echoes Nazi-era attacks on modernism, Steiner told the FT in her office in Dessau-Roßlau, where the institution reopened in the 1970s after closing its Berlin headquarters under pressure from Adolf Hitler’s regime in 1933.
“They use these trigger terms, or codes. Those who know them know exactly where this comes from. Others think it’s harmless.”
The Austrian art historian said she had, for the first time, taken out directors’ and officers’ (D&O) liability insurance against potential lawsuits. Cultural organisations across the state were also exchanging advice on how to respond to potential dismissals, funding cuts or political interference, drawing from experiences in Slovakia, Hungary and Poland, she added.
“We are legally prepared,” she told the FT in her office in Dessau-Roßlau.
“We are worried because the whole idea of culture is overhauled,” she said. “We know roughly what’s coming, we have other examples.”
Culture features prominently in the party programme of Saxony-Anhalt’s AfD, which Germany’s domestic intelligence agency designates as “rightwing extremist”. In its manifesto, the party says it would pursue a “patriotic cultural policy” designed to strengthen “German identity” and “national self-confidence”.
The proposal forms part of a radical plan the far-right party could begin rolling out if it secures control of Saxony-Anhalt, a state of 2.1mn people whose parliament oversees culture, education, policing, judicial appointments and public broadcasting.
Polls suggest the AfD could secure 41 per cent of the vote, placing it within striking distance of an outright majority if smaller parties fail to clear Germany’s 5 per cent representation threshold. Winning control of a state would be a first for a far-right party in the country’s postwar era.
Steiner traces the current confrontation to 2024, when Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, the regional AfD culture spokesperson, submitted a motion in the state parliament ahead of planned celebrations of the centenary of the Bauhaus’s move from Weimar to Dessau.
Entitled Irrweg der Moderne (the wrong path of modernity), the motion called for a “critical examination” of Bauhaus, arguing that its minimalist aesthetic had produced “architectural blunders”, promoted “cold” and “unwelcoming” buildings and undermined “traditional and culturally rooted notions of living spaces”.
Steiner said she had already planned to address the Bauhaus’ shortcomings, which led her to believe the AfD motion was pure political calculation.
But for her, the significance lay not only in the criticism itself but in the language used: The phrase Irrweg der Moderne evokes anti-modernist rhetoric under the Nazi era, she said.
Tillschneider has dismissed such historical references as absurd, maintaining that the Bauhaus should not be beyond criticism and describing its architecture as “unbearable to look at”.
Another clash occurred this April after the Bauhaus Foundation and 26 other cultural institutions in Saxony-Anhalt signed a joint statement warning that the AfD’s programme threatened artistic freedom and institutional independence.
AfD city councillor Laurens Nothdurft, a lawyer who was a member of a now-banned neo-Nazi youth organisation, questioned whether Steiner had the right to express such political opinions given the Bauhaus receives public funds.
“As a board member, as CEO, I have to speak up, because I have to defend the institution when it is under attack. I can and must speak,” Steiner said.
Nothdurft told the FT that while he was “proud of the Bauhaus” and held Steiner in “very high regard”, he believed she should have remained “impartial”.
Founded by the architect Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919, the Bauhaus sought to integrate art, design and architecture into everyday life, becoming one of the most influential movements in modern culture.
But its relations with political power were often turbulent. After the state of Thuringia cut its funding, the school moved to Dessau in 1925. Seven years later, the Dessau city council, where the Nazis had become the largest force, voted to close it. After a final year in Berlin, the Bauhaus dissolved itself in 1933 under mounting harassment by the Nazi regime.
Many of its figures including Gropius and painter Wassily Kandinsky went into exile, helping spread Bauhaus ideas across Europe and the US. The movement experienced a revival in East Germany in the 1970s, where its building designed by Gropius in Dessau was restored. The Bauhaus Foundation is one of the main guardians of the design school’s heritage.
The Unesco-listed site attracted nearly 180,000 visitors last year from around the world — a boon for Dessau-Roßlau, which has suffered from deindustrialisation and demographic decline. But the relationship between the foundation and its home town remains “ambivalent”, said Steiner, who lives in Dessau.
“The difference from a hundred years ago is that we have now a lot of fans,” she said.
The AfD “has understood that culture is the most important political area of all,” she said. “It is about values, social coexistence and what defines normality.”
The party is tapping into “fear, uncertainty, the feeling of having no control over crises”, she said, adding: “We can’t fully compare the times of a hundred years ago, but we can compare the moment.”
Steiner, who dealt with Austria’s far-right Freedom Party when she ran the Kunsthaus Graz museum, believes the Bauhaus Foundation can survive the loss of state funding because it also relies on municipal and federal support.
But, she warned: “If the city were one day governed by an AfD majority or if the AfD became part of a federal coalition, then the Bauhaus could close again.”
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