Ise Gropius / Jana Revedin

Show notes

This episode of "bauhaus faces“ is not about a typical Bauhäusler, not a student or a master. She nevertheless played crucial part in documenting the history of the Bauhaus between 1923 and 1928 in her diary. Of course she was also Walter Gropius’s closest confidant, advisor, and editor, his wife, Ise Gropius.

Ilse Frank was raised in Hannover and worked as a Red Cross Nurse during World War I. She moved to Munich in 1922 to work at a publishing house. When her mother was dying Ilse returned to Hannover in 1923. Here she met Walter Gropius at one of his lectures about the Bauhaus. They started to write letters to each other and quickly became affectionate. She wrote to him „Up to now my whole life I felt as if I have been pushing a very heavy boat over a gravel path. And the minute I met you, my big boat suddenly glided into water.“ She had been waiting to meet a person like him, although at first she was more interested in his Bauhaus idea than in the man himself; that came with getting to know him better. So, she broke off the engagement to her cousin, moved to Weimar and only a few months after knowing Walter Gropius, they got married. From the very start, their relationship was a symbiotic one, also shown in their nicknames. While she Walter Gropius was known at the Bauhaus as “Pius”, Ise was often called “Pia”.

Ise Gropius entered the service of the Bauhaus as a secretary, editor, organizer and ‘equal partner’ for Gropius. Soon, she became “Mrs. Bauhaus” and liked her role very much. „The Bauhaus infected me,“ she would later say.

For this episode the architect and author Jana Revedin helps to tell the story of Ise Gropius. She wrote a biographical novel called "Jeder hier nennt mich Frau Bauhaus“. The novel is based on Ise Gropius as a main character and her diary that she kept during her stay at the Bauhaus from 1923 to 1928.

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www.bauhausfaces.com | @bauhausfaces

JANA REVEDIN www.revedin.com ISE GROPIUS bauhauskooperation.de, gropius.house

NOVEL "JEDER HIER NENNT MICH FRAU BAUHAUS" www.deutschlandfunkkultur.de

FILM „Wie wohnen wir gesund und wirtschaftlich: Neues Wohnen“ https://vimeo.com/292714014?from=outro-embed

TOUR OF THE GROPIUS HOUSE https://gropius.house/location/video-tour-by-ise-gropius/

THE FORGOTTEN STORY OF „MRS BAUHAUS“ by Katy Kelleher, 2018, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-forgotten-story-mrs-bauhaus