Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was appointed director of the Bauhaus in Dessau, marking a shift toward tighter discipline, an “unpolitical” posture, and a stronger emphasis on architecture under his leadership.
Dessau’s mayor dismissed Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer amid political controversy, setting up Ludwig Mies van der Rohe—brought in with Walter Gropius’s mediation—as the next director to stabilize and de-politicize the school.
Mies took up his post in the 1930 autumn term and reorganized teaching into departments (including Architecture and Fine Arts), shortening and “academizing” the program while reducing the relative centrality of workshop-based industrial design.
To enforce an emphatically nonpartisan institutional stance, Mies removed (expelled) students identified as supporters of Hannes Meyer, aiming to reduce overt political activism within the school.
In Dessau municipal elections, the Nazi Party (NSDAP) became the strongest party, intensifying pressure to end public support for the Bauhaus and foreshadowing the school’s forced departure from Dessau.
At the NSDAP’s request, the Dessau city council decided to close the Bauhaus effective 1 October 1932, ending the institution’s municipally supported phase in Dessau during Mies’s directorship.
The Bauhaus in Dessau was formally dissolved at the end of September 1932, forcing Mies to seek a last-minute continuation outside municipal control.
Mies organized the move to Berlin, restarting the school as a private institute in an abandoned telephone factory in Berlin-Steglitz (commemorated near Birkbuschstraße 49). Classes resumed there in October 1932.
In Berlin, the Bauhaus operated under Mies as a privately run “Free Teaching and Research Institute” (Freies Lehr- und Forschungsinstitut), relying in part on licensing income and contractual salary arrangements that extended beyond Dessau’s closure.
As part of further curricular tightening, Mies shortened the preliminary course and then abolished it entirely in 1932, narrowing workshop activity largely to preparatory work for architecture.
After a raid by the Secret State Police (Gestapo), the Berlin Bauhaus building was sealed on 11 April 1933, and arrests were made—an escalation that made continued operation politically untenable.
Following state pressure and restrictive reopening conditions, the teaching staff decided to close the Bauhaus on 20 July 1933, ending Mies’s attempt to sustain the school in Berlin.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s Bauhaus leadership and Berlin relocation (1930–1933)
