The most important architects who were involved in the construction of the State of Israel and who had a decisive influence on its modern architecture had learned at the Bauhaus in Dessau. Some of them had come to Germany from Palestine specifically to study, others had to emigrate from Nazi Germany in the early 1930s. In Israel, they worked as educators - for example, on the new design of the famous Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem - designing buildings for the kibbutzim, planning cities or, like Arieh Sharon, even settling the whole country. In its current issue, the magazine of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation examines their stories and the manifold after-effects. In the process, a completely new view of the weighty influence of the Bauhaus on the State of Israel emerges.

We visited Jews of German descent, the Jeckes, in their apartments and found the Bauhaus in their living rooms, we talked to the "Israeli Obama", the Knesset member of parliament Dov Khenin, and investigated Tel Aviv's supposed Bauhaus history - which on closer inspection turns out to be pure fiction.

Inevitably, we came across the problem of settlement policy time and again, in our preoccupation with local architecture as well as in our examination of social issues. And we discovered the dazzling personality of Selman Selmanagic, a Bosnian Muslim who built Bauhaus modernism for the Arabs in Palestine - having previously worked in the office of the Jewish architect Richard Kauffmann.
The authors of the current issue include the controversial Israeli architect and journalist Sharon Rotbard, this year's Bauhaus Fellow Zvi Efrat, the architect Joachim Trezib from the University of Braunschweig, the curator and art historian Gideon Ofrat, the architecture historian Karin Wilhelm and the artist Heidi Specker.

Published by Bauhaus Dessau Foundation

Design: Novamondo

Leipzig, Dessau March, 2011

Details: 

- 28.1 x 21.5 cm

- 152 pages

- with numerous illustrations

- Backstitch brochure

- Languages: English, German