In September 2020, barely a year after the Bauhaus centenary, the President of the European Commission-the German politician Ursula von der Leyen-published in several of Europe's leading dailies an article that presented a political project aimed at relaunching the idea of a community united in a pandemic, but united, too, in addressing enormous social and environmental challenges. That call included the concept of an ambitious 'European Green Deal' that transcended the economic and environmental sphere to undertake a grand cultural project conceived as a New European Bauhaus: a space for the joint creativity of architects and artists, engineers and designers, like the legendary schools of Weimar, Dessau and Berlin in the period between the two world wars. It was a mere declaration of intent that instantly aroused an unprecedented degree of interest among the design disciplines, particularly within the academic world. From the project's early stages, it would seem quite clear that the New European Bauhaus is grounded more on the propagandists pull of the myths associated with a trademark, than on any critical thinking on a par with the current historiographical knowledge existing on the Bauhaus. If we look more closely, however, we can delve deeper and see that Von der Leyen's initiative is in line with one of the principal cultural traditions of the Bauhaus: that of recurring and changing appropriations of its huge symbolic capital by the most diverse and contradictory political, economic and cultural interests. The reception processes that contributed to the gelling of numerous myths about the Bauhaus from the late 1930s onward now take up a central place in studies on the history and continuity of the famous German school, as five of the books and catalogues published in 2019, for its centenary, illustrate.
展开▼
