Lena Bergner
From the Bauhaus to Mexico

This article examines the correspondence between a teacher (Hannes Meyer) and his former student (Tibor Weiner), who met at the Bauhaus in Dessau, going on to live for a period in the Soviet Union. Each migrated to Latin America shortly before the outbreak of World War Two, and returned to Europe in the late 1940s. The surviving letters between Meyer and Weiner, preserved in the DAM Archive in Frankfurt am Main, are not only a testimony of comradeship but also a window into some key moments in the first half of the twentieth century.

Doreen Mendes Arbeit Hamhung’s Two Orphans, die nach einem Kapitel aus Coréennes (1959) von Chris Marker benannt ist, untersucht die Transformation des Bauhaus von seiner Bedeutung als internationalistische Moderne hin zu Elementen eines sozialistischen Internationalismus der DDR in einer Zeit, als Architektur eine staatsgründende Funktion im Kontext des globalen Kalten Krieges hatte.

In this article Marion von Osten focusses on the curatorial research involved in two of the project’s four chapters: Moving Away and Learning From. She rethinks the importance of the migratory life of the Swiss architect Hannes Meyer and Bauhaus weaver Lena Bergner, starting with Meyer’s two-year directorship of the Bauhaus Dessau, the couple’s time working in the USSR (1931–1936), and, finally, their decade-long period as exiles in Mexico, which lasted from 1939 to 1949, the year they returned to Switzerland.