1922: Spirituality or New Spirit?
With Bernadett Bigalke

With the fourth episode of our second season, we arrive in the year 1922 and explore how esoteric practices found their way into the Bauhaus. The cult of the Mazdaznan movement played a particularly significant role at the Bauhaus, above all through master and Vorkurs director Johannes Itten. As a life-reform practice, this hybrid of breathing exercises, vegetarianism, Orientalism and spirituality became part of everyday life at the Bauhaus – along with its darker sides.

In Weimar, we meet Bernadett Bigalke. The scholar of religious studies has researched the Mazdaznan movement and tells us about its origins and about the fin-de-siècle zeitgeist, with its new forms of spirituality and alternative lifestyles. Against the ruinous backdrop of Johannes Itten’s former studio, we try to place ourselves in the mindset of the time and to understand what fascinated Itten and the Bauhaus practitioners about the practices and teachings of the Mazdaznan movement – as well as the discriminatory racial theories that were also part of the cult.