Richard Grune, Title page from a camp songbook, winter 1939/40. Collection of Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum.

Bauhaus Designers, Nazi Persecution, and the Missing Archive: Alice Glaser, Lotte Rothschild, and Richard Grune

A Modern Design History lecture by Elizabeth Otto (University at Buffalo, State University of New York)

Histories of Germany’s Bauhaus art, architecture, and design school (1919–33) usually position it exclusively as a movement in exile after the National Socialist seizure of power in 1933. Yet the vast majority of the Bauhaus’s more than 1,400 members remained in Germany and either embraced Nazism, survived it, or became its victims. In this talk, Elizabeth Otto excavates traces of the work and lives of three Bauhaus members who, because of their persecution by the Nazi government, have been lost to history. Using previously untapped archival sources—often scant materials preserved by family members and friends, including documents, photographs, and private memoirs—she reconstructs aspects of these artists’ work and lives to consider what this movement looks like when we include the art histories that violence has taken from us.
Elizabeth Otto is professor of modern and contemporary art history and director of the Humanities Institute at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. A specialist of visual culture in twentieth-century Europe, her books include Haunted Bauhaus: Occult Spirituality, Gender Fluidity, Queer Identities, and Radical Politics (2019), Bauhaus Women: A Global Perspective (2019), and Tempo, Tempo! The Bauhaus Photomontages of Marianne Brandt (2005). She cocurated the 2024 exhibition Bauhaus and National Socialism in Weimar, Germany and is currently completing a related book titled Bauhaus Under Nazism: Creativity, Collaboration, and Resistance in Hitler’s Germany.

She has coedited five books, including The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s (2011) and Passages of Exile (2017). Her essays and reviews have been published in journals including Art Forum, Genders, History of Photography, and October. Otto’s work has been supported by numerous organizations including the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the National Humanities Center, the Getty Research Institute, and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.