Blueprint
Weimar in 1921, and Luise Schilling has moved from her comfortable family home in Berlin to study architecture at the Bauhaus art centre, led by the visionary Walter Gropius. She forms an attachment to a clique of eccentric and ascetic, cult-ish students, as well as starting a strong emotional attraction to Jakob, one of its members. Later she moves to Dessau with the relocation of the Bauhaus and forms a defining relationship in her emotional life as well as focusing on her professional priorities.
The story reads like a rather naïve memoir by Luise, a young woman initially inexperienced in the complicated ways of life. Narrated in the first-person present tense, the story provides a good understanding of the dynamics of studying at the Bauhaus in Weimar and Dessau – the tuition and work required in the classroom that slowly builds up the cultural and artistic success that the institution developed. There are also clear signs of the conflicts and barely-suppressed violence that post-Great War Germany suffered, and the prejudices and hatred that later led to the catastrophe of Nazi Germany. The tale, however, is a little simplistic, without depth or strong analysis. Events just seem to trot along on a superficial basis, and it failed to absorb me as a narrative, though the subject will be of interest to anyone interested in the Bauhaus movement and Germany in the difficult years of the early 1920s.
