The Bauhaus is the most celebrated artistic institution of our time. In the fourteen years of its existence in Weimar Germany, the Bauhaus became a center where the ideas that would dominate art in the twentieth century clashed and became defined. The ideas forged within the school literally transformed our landscape. Almost nothing we read, wear, or live in is devoid of its influence.

Yet there has been a history of the Bauhaus. For the first time, Elaine S. Hochman sets the school in the context of the turbulent times to which it was born following the collapse of Imperial Germany in 1919. The Bauhaus emerged just as radical social and political upheavals swept through Europe in the wake of World War I, a product of the convulsions of an age when the contest between ideologies was fought with the fervor of a religious war.

Left was pitted against right of the streets, and these battles penetrated the walls of the Bauhaus as well. They shaped the destiny of the fledgling school and those who taught there, including some of the most illustrious names in the world of modern art - Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky.

Hochman's access to the school's archives, previously off limits to Western scholars, provides an intimate day-to-day perspective of the school which reveals a different Bauhaus than the one projected by its latter-day champions in the U.S. This is the Bauhaus of its contemporaries, for whom the political and cultural implications were often more important than aesthetics.