Fembio Special: Bauhaus women
Alma Siedhoff-Buscher
(née Alma Buscher)
born on January 4, 1899 in Kreuztal near Siegen, Germany
died on September 25, 1944 in Buchschlag near Frankfurt/Main, Germany
German craftswoman, cabinetmaker, furniture designer
125th birthday on January 4, 2024
Biography
Bauhaus student Alma Siedhoff-Buscher first made a name for herself in 1923 with a brightly painted room for children inspired by reformist ideas in education. The success of her designs for children’s toys and furniture meant she soon entered the ranks of the woefully small number of female Bauhaus students who were admired for their accomplishments outside of the weaving workshop. Nevertheless, her earnings were meager and she was never offered a permanent position. Her career came to an unexpectedly abrupt end.
“...I NEVER DEVELOPED AN AFFINITY FOR THE THREADS”: ESCAPE FROM THE BAUHAUS WEAVING WORKSHOP
Sometime during 1923, amidst the hardships of hyperinflation, Bauhaus student Alma Siedhoff-Buscher summoned up all her courage and wrote to director Walter Gropius: “I ask ... for my dismissal from the weaving workshop” (cited in AK, 2004, all subsequent Siedhoff-Buscher quotes ibid.); she explained that as she “had never developed an affinity for the threads,” she would in future prefer to work in wood sculpturing. Siedhoff-Buscher never sent the letter. And yet it marked the beginning of her extraordinary career as a craftswoman as only a year previously had she passed the preliminary course and been forced to join the weaving class. Immediately after the opening of the Weimar art institute in 1919, Gropius had guaranteed female students their unconditional equality, vowing to “fiercely combat” the confinement of women to the “sole occupation of painting cute little salon pictures as a pastime” (cited in Baumhoff, 2008, p. 65). In the end, however, everything turned out differently. “No more experiments” was the message from the director in 1921. Lacking the necessary physical strength, the supposedly weaker sex was “generally ill-suited for the strenuous trades” (cited in Baumhoff, 2008, p. 66). In accordance with the firmly entrenched bourgeois conviction that women were genetically predetermined to work with textiles, the “Bauhaus ladies” were thus required to take their places behind enormous looms. The fact that operating these looms actually involved extremely arduous physical labor was bemoaned by Gertrud Arndt and other female Bauhaus students.
Knowing full well that she had no chance of obtaining an apprenticeship in the all-male wood sculpturing workshop, Siedhoff-Buscher cleverly tried the back door: she merely needed to participate in the wood workshop as a guest, she explained. She only had to put the finishing touches on her new designs for various objects—“children's toys, lamps, wooden utensils”—and then they could be “handed over to the industry for serial production.” This was by no means a fanciful argument; she had been trained in Berlin at the Reimann School and subsequently at the Unterrichtsanstalt des Kunstgewerbemuseums Berlin—the institute of applied arts that was a department of the Berlin Museum of Decorative Arts—and the talented craftswoman also immediately laid on the table concrete plans which included designs for a puppet theater. Given its notoriously tight budget, the Bauhaus could hardly turn down the prospect of such a rare financial windfall. An exception was thus made, and she was granted permission to participate in the wood workshop.
“AFTER THE EXHIBITION, I WANT TO GO FAR AWAY”: PRESSURE TO SUCCEED
At the age of just 24, shortly after starting in the wood workshop, Siedhoff-Buscher received the commission for which she is best known: from the floor to the ceiling, from the bed to the wardrobe, she was to furnish the children's room of the Haus am Horn in Weimar. She felt under immense pressure to succeed, as the Haus am Horn was at that time the most prominent of all Bauhaus projects. Designed in 1922/23 by Georg Muche as an experimental house for the upper middle class – and now part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site – it embodied the first Bauhaus architecture ever realized. The small building, named after its location, was planned as the highlight of the first Bauhaus exhibition. After the excesses of Expressionism, the show was to bear the motto “Art and technology - a new unity.” A resounding success would not only boost the image of the art school itself; it would demonstrate beyond any doubt to the sponsor, the Thuringian state government, that the renowned art institute was a worthy public investment. In April 1923, four months before the exhibition opened, Siedhoff-Buscher was obviously seeking a means of escape when she declared: “After the exhibition, I want to go far away, to Sweden or America.” As it turned out, she need not have feared failure. The exhibition organizers had to ignore many a snide comment. Paul Westheim, for example, dryly noted that after “three days in Weimar (…) you can't bear to see another square for the rest of your life” (1923, cited in Fiedler 1999). Siedhoff-Buscher's children's room, however, met with unanimous approval and was purchased by the Zeiss company in Jena, among others, for the company kindergarten. The room was considered revolutionary because until then hardly any architect had dared to tackle the genre: children's rooms had previously been haphazardly filled with discarded adult furniture. Since the turn of the century reform pedagogues had developed many alternative theoretical models of children’s development, but they typically neglected to include any concrete design specifications.
THE CHILDREN'S ROOM IN THE HAUS AM HORN
Siedhoff-Buscher's design for the Haus am Horn was imbued with striking references to constructivism: the numerous white surfaces of the sparse, cubic, container-like furniture provided a marked contrast to the primary colors. Siedhoff-Buscher believed that white increased the “cheerfulness of the colors” and thus also the “joy in the child - a powerful factor in the child’s education.” All the furniture was multifunctional and economical; it “grew” along with the child. The changing unit could be converted into a desk, the crib into a teenage bed, and the toy cupboard with a puppet theater door into a bookshelf. The so-called ladder chair could be used as a trolley, bench, ladder or storage space. Colorful, washable drawing boards completed the room, and Siedhoff-Buscher would later integrate these into subsequent commissioned works as well. The children's room became the flagship product for the entire art school. Weimar avant-garde artists had indeed previously promised to work with manufacturers. In reality, however, very few objects were industrially reproducible. Siedhoff-Buscher’s children’s room was the exception; in choosing to showcase it, Bauhaus master László Moholy-Nagy hoped to appease angry conservatives who had always been quick to accuse the art school of producing nothing but “incomprehensible and 'upside-down' things that were unsuitable for everyday use” (László Moholy-Nagy 1924, cited in AK 2004, p. 54).
SHIPBUILDING GAME AND BENDY DOLL: CHILDREN'S TOYS
“It doesn’t aspire to be anything – neither cubist, nor expressionist, just a funny interplay of colors on smooth surfaces and in angular shapes according to the principle of the old building sets” (cited in ak, 2004, p. 29). This was how Alma Siedhoff-Buscher described the other bestseller, which she called a shipbuilding game. Designed around 1923/24, she had it produced in a large version with 39 and in a small version with 22 brightly painted bricks. Both versions quickly became some of the most successful items ever sold by the Bauhaus and, given their apparent timelessness, are now even available again. Children's toys were a favorite theme of classical modernism. However, most of the plans did not make it past the design stage. Siedhoff-Buscher, on the other hand, persistently brought her ideas to product maturity, had them mass-produced and sometimes applied for a patent. For example, her Wurfpuppe—a bendy doll made of raffia and chenille yarn—was patented. She also painted and drew. Among the other things she created was the well-known Bützelspiel for small children, a space-saving folding puppet theater with rod puppets (around 1922), freely adaptable stage sets for children's theater, painting primers for school beginners and crane and sailing boat cutout kits with their progressive, metaphorical allusions to futurism.
“NO EXTERNAL RESTRICTIONS SHOULD DISTURB THEM”: SIEDHOFF-BUSCHER AND REFORMIST PEDAGOGY
Alma Siedhoff-Buscher believed that “if at all possible, children should have a space in which they can do whatever they want.” “No external restrictions should disturb them;” the “admonition 'don't do that' is to be banned.” The furniture in a child's room should encourage free play, promote creativity and allow for individual preferences. In addition, it should grow with the mental and physical development of the child. A similar motif could be found in her toys: the shipbuilding games were intended to enable children with little imagination to build simple replicas of ships. More resourceful children, on the other hand, could use them to construct innumerable objects. As she explained on the packaging, her sets could be used to create a “roller coaster, a gate, an animal and much more.” Although Siedhoff-Buscher had much in common with reform pedagogues such as Maria Montessori (1870-1952), she distanced herself from others, for example from Friedrich Fröbel and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, as she believed that their games were “based on purely pedagogical considerations” (Will, p. 43/44). By contrast, she felt her own games were truly “free games” that took into greater account the desires of the child.
“WHAT USE IS ALL THIS IMPRESSIVE, ARTISTIC GENEROSITY”: AN IDEALIST ARTIST WITH A DOWN-TO-EARTH ATTITUDE
Siedhoff-Buscher was an ardent disciple of Paul Klee. According to Bauhaus researcher Ulrike Müller, Siedhoff-Buscher’s work, alongside that of Benita Koch-Otte, was the “most consistent and at the same time the most independent implementation” of Klee's ideas in Weimar. Siedhoff-Buscher, who in the spirit of the early Bauhaus always warned of the “icy coolness of pure intellect,” also ventured into esoteric domains. Seeking to bring body, mind and soul into harmony, she developed ties within Mazdaznan, the strictly vegetarian social reform movement that later fell into disrepute due to its racism. Yet from the outset she also maintained a discreet distance; she was convinced that an incessant and intense preoccupation with the self could result in an inability to “actually make use of the day” (2004, p. 47). In addition, she was put off by unrealistic artistic attitudes and evening-long theoretical discourses on art: “What use is all this impressive, artistic generosity if it is so doubly petty and very, very narrow-minded behind the scenes” (June 1925, p. 55).
“BITTERNESS IS STUPIDITY”: FAREWELL TO THE BAUHAUS
Today, Alma Siedhoff-Buscher is considered the unrivaled specialist for toys and children's furniture at the Bauhaus. Apart from her, no other woman without a workshop connection managed to stay at the art institute for four years. In 1932, she achieved what only two other female contemporaries - Ella Briggs and Grete Schütte-Lihotzky – had accomplished in Germany: she was included by Walter Müller-Wulckow in his influential four ‘Blue Books’ on German architecture of the 1920s (Architektur der Zwanziger Jahre in Deutschland).
Interestingly, her career had already been dormant for five years at the time. She had married Bauhaus actor Werner Siedhoff in 1926 and given birth to their son Joost. Plagued by dire financial straits, she asked Gropius for a permanent position and her own studio. He refused and pointed out that the Bauhaus did not have the money. In addition, he noted, her creations for children were thematically “only on the periphery” of the company (cited in Will, 1997, p. 46). In accordance with the commonly held opinion of the time that children embodied “the natural realm of women” (Hildebrandt, 1928, p. 157), it was perhaps the masters themselves who had initially pushed Siedhoff-Buscher into this restrictive realm. She had originally planned on many designs for adults.
From 1927/28, Siedhoff-Buscher had to make her way through life without a Bauhaus. Due to the changing theater engagements of her husband, she moved several times. Daughter Lore was born in 1928. There is no record of any significant artistic activities after that. The estate includes wallpaper and fabric designs. It is unclear whether they were commissioned.
In 1933, when intimate artistic circles were drifting apart due to the Nazi regime, she revealed to her husband: “No, I'm not at all bitter. I think bitterness is stupidity.” The few published documents from those days reveal an admirable fighting spirit. On September 21, 1944, when she was living in Frankfurt/Main, she wrote to her son, now a well-known actor, “in bleak times there are also always some cheerful hours, and you should take advantage of them.” It was her last letter to Joost Siedhoff. Four days later, at the age of 45, Alma Siedhoff-Buscher died during an air raid.
(Text from 2014; translated with DeepL.com; edited by Ramona Fararo, 2023.)
Please consult the German version for additional information (pictures, sources, videos, bibliography).
Quotes
what is play? play is work. - work (work done with pleasure) is play. - children's play is gradually growing into work. (Alma Siedhoff-Buscher: children's furniture and children's clothing. In: Vivos voco. Zeitschrift für neues Deutschtum 5 (1926), H.4, p. 157)
toys: shouldn't we accommodate the child? Shouldn't the toy - the child's tool - be allowed to be serious? not a finished product - such as the luxury stores offer – a child develops, or rather it strives - it searches. and in this searching striving, a finished product can only become a destroyed one. (Alma Siedhoff-Buscher: children's furniture and children's clothing. In: Vivos voco. Zeitschrift für neues Deutschtum 5 (1926), H.4, p. 157)
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