Zwischen Bauhauskritik und Bauforschung: Konrad Nonn

Abstract

Abstract As a committed publicist, the architect and ministerial official Konrad Nonn is known as one of the most prominent right-wing critics of the Bauhaus. Both the extremely polemical and inflammatory style of his texts and his incessant agitations against the school and its director Walter Gropius have contributed to seeing him as an oddity driven by a peculiar, almost pathological hatred. However, the perception of Nonn as a mere eccentric obscures the fact that he was by no means a loner. In fact, during the Weimar Republic, Nonn was a recognized member and functionary of a number of professional associations in the field of architecture. One such association was the Koldewey Society of architects working in the field of archaeology, whose members can be found in the elitist educated middle-class spectrum of the Weimar period. Within this educated bourgeois, humanistic elite with its special moral based attitude towards modernism in Germany, Nonn represented a cultural-conservative-national position. Although not equally shared, this position was widely understood and accepted by Nonn’s peers. Not least the moral support from these associations, in which he was also active as an official, allowed him to continue his agitation against the Bauhaus even after setbacks and to regain status from 1933. Nonn’s criticism of the Bauhaus can therefore be seen as an extreme reaction of the German humanistically very well-educated academic elite against the challenges of modernization, but not just as an isolated nerd’s extremist activism.