Gesamtkunstwerk, Gestaltung and the Bauhaus Stage

This chapter argues that understanding how the notion of Gesamtkunstwerk or “total work of art” played out in the Bauhaus and especially on Oskar Schlemmer’s stage requires a radical recasting of the idea of Einheit or unity in the work of art. This arises from the deeply changed circumstances of art and aesthetics between late nineteenth century Bayreuth and the Weimar of 1918. We need to recognize, as Nicholas Vazsonyi does in this volume, that the idea of Einheit originates in late eighteenth and early nineteenth Romantic thought. Seen in this way, both Wagner and the Bauhaus are embodied manifestations, peculiar to their time, of what is essentially the same impulse.