The school of design, the Bauhaus school, current particular founder for contemporary architecture, mark its centenary in Germany, with the unveiling this week of a new museum very policy which aims at the extreme right of yesterday and today. Founded on 1 April 1919 and driven out of Germany by the nazis in the 1930s, the Bauhaus will be from Saturday, his temple at Weimar, a small town where is born this art movement and who has given his name to the brief German democracy between the two world wars.

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“You can’t see this opening separately from its political context”, explains to the AFP Wolfgang Holler, director of the museums of Weimar. Because the city is located in the regional State of Thuringia, in the former East Germany, which became a stronghold of the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD). The table on scores to two digits as well in the european elections of may that the regional scheduled for the fall.

“The Bauhaus was, from its inception, intensely political. And so this is a perfect place to start a conversation, especially with young people,” adds Wolfgang Holler, who expects 100,000 visitors per year. The museum itself was built in its historical context, the architect Heike Hanada who have stretched between a space dating back to the Weimar Republic, a nazi edifice and of the buildings erected during the communist era.

“I was able to achieve my main objective, which was that the museum could do in the face of the nazi architecture,” explained Heike Hanada in the local daily Thüringer Allgemeine . “These juxtapositions are fascinating to say so much about how this country sees itself,” notes Wolfgang Holler.

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Furniture, dishes, plans, photographs, shows, etc. The museum attempts to draw a complete picture of the movement and its influence until today. JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP

A window has also been specifically positioned on the top floor of the museum so we can see the memorial of the nazi concentration camp of Buchenwald. Huge contemporary portraits of survivors of this camp have also been prepared this week on the buildings leading to the train station of Weimar up to the museum.

Furniture Ikea and iPhones

The photographer Thomas Müller has told a German radio that these pictures were intended to challenge the AfD, whose leading figures multiply the controversial comments about nazism or the holocaust. “In view of the elections (regional) in Thuringia, we need to face our history in a responsible way”, he explained, while the extreme right is credited with 20% of the votes in the polls.

the persecution of The Bauhaus figure, of course, in a good place in the museum that tells the story of how the school and its founder Walter Gropius fled from Weimar to Dessau in 1925, then to Berlin in 1930, before the movement was forbidden by the nazi regime in 1933. “We learn how much it can be difficult for those who are ahead of their time”, recalls the director of the museums of Weimar.

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But it is this exile which has also enabled the power to conquer the world with this idea of making practical, simple, and beautiful, and that is found in iPhones and Ikea furniture contemporary. Of the works of iconic design are also exhibited in the new museum such as chairs revolutionaries of Marcel Breuer or the teapot of Marianne Brandt. Critics, however, are that the building of the museum of Weimar, a grey cube ultra-sober, which cost 27 million euros, has more the appearance of a bunker military as a mecca of architecture.

“Some have even compared to the Wolfsschanze”, the Lair of the wolf, by the name of the headquarters of Hitler in Poland during the Second world War, admits Mr. Holler. “But we wanted something that says: “We don’t hide”” advocates there.