Mazdaznan had a significant although often misunderstood impact on the life and work of Johannes Itten (1888–1967), a key figure in the development of the Weimar Bauhaus. A devout practitioner of Mazdaznan, he was responsible for introducing it to students of the Bauhaus in the early 1920s. In this essay for bauhaus imaginista, I explore the intimate relationship between Itten, Mazdaznan and the Bauhaus. In so doing, my intention is also to underscore how in its infancy the Bauhaus was very different from its later incarnation as a school associated primarily with technical innovation in the realms of design and mass production. Finally, I will discuss how Itten and Mazdaznan brought to the early Bauhaus a set of ideological tendencies and pedagogical techniques that can, from today’s perspective, appear at once arcane, messianic, inspirational and morally repugnant.

Mazdaznan is a syncretic system founded in the U.S. in the 1890s by Otto Hanisch (?–1936), who later became known as Dr. Otoman Zar-Adusht Ha’nish.¹ While it is confirmed that Ha’nish died in 1936, the date of his birth, like many other details of his life, is shrouded in mystery. The “official” narrative disseminated by those directly affiliated with the movement claims Ha’nish was born in Tehran in 1844, the son of a Russian diplomat. According to Mazdaznan disciples, Ha’nish was born with health problems and as a result was sent by his parents to live with a mysterious Zoroastrian sect in a remote mountain monastery. There the initiates who were his guardians schooled him in breathing techniques and various forms of asceticism which enabled him to triumph over his potentially fatal illness. Other sources suggest Ha’nish was a typographer from Leipzig who emigrated to Chicago, reinventing himself as a spiritual guru. Upton Sinclair claimed in his book The Profits of Religion that Ha’nish was merely a fraud. In Sinclair’s scathing account, he proposed the Mazdaznan movement was founded with the sole intention of providing Ha’nish with a source of income.

While some aspects of Mazdaznan doctrine may appear today as prudishly Victorian, there were progressive facets to the movement. This is most apparent in the somewhat surprising advocacy of gender equality. For example, Hanisch writes: “It is proper that man should understand woman as woman understand men, for when the line between them can no longer exist and the barrier once broken down, the unveiled mystery conceived to keep mankind in a condition of deep ignorance will lose its charm … that woman will steadily come to the front and the day is not too far distant when she will. Man has nothing to fear. He should call this day welcome for through it salvation will come to him as well.”⁶ However these somewhat progressive elements co-existed with views influenced by one of the more abhorrent trends of the era, eugenics. As the history of the eugenics movement reveals, it flourished to an astounding degree in the early twentieth century, propagated by organizations such as the Eugenics Education Society founded in 1907. Several decades before the rise of the Third Reich, early Mazdaznan literature displayed a preoccupation with racial superiority and anti-Semitism, promoting the idea that the earth should be ruled by the “Aryan race.” This particular aspect of the movement’s philosophy, which I will return to later in this essay, garnered varying levels of popularity and appears to have been eliminated from the movement as it was modernized.

Mazdaznan was first introduced to Europe via Germany in 1907 by David Ammann (1855–1923), and subsequently popularized by Ha’nish himself via a series of lectures he presented in 1911. The movement proved particularly popular in Germany and Switzerland, where it appealed to the burgeoning middle classes. Many Germans and Swiss viewed industrialization and the expansion of urban living as destructive, idealizing Lebensreform’s back-to-nature trend, then most visible in the emergence of a variety of rural alternative communities. These groups practiced natural medicine, vegetarianism, nudism and other restorative pursuits, believing these would hasten the return of a pre-industrial idyll. Mazdaznan proved incredibly popular in its initial phase, with movement-associated vegetarian restaurants popping up in Berlin, Leipzig, Weimar and other German cities.

Johannes Itten is thought to have encountered Mazdaznan as early as 1912 in Bern, and is known to have been a member of the Aryana Mazdaznan temple community in Herrliberg on Lake Zurich. By 1916 he was producing artworks in a distinctive vocabulary evoking Orphic Cubism while also suggesting a commitment to esoteric ideals. It is known that by 1919 Itten had become a devotee of Mazdaznan, by which time he was producing works such as Ascension and Pause, a work redolent in ideas and symbolism central to the movement. Interestingly, one can discern certain formal similarities between this painting and the iconic cathedral woodcut produced by Lyonel Feininger (1871–1956) for the cover of Walter’s Gropius’s (1883–1969) 1919 Bauhaus manifesto.

The fact that Itten was deeply engaged with the Mazdaznan before joining the Bauhaus indicates that involvement in such societies would not have been considered outlandish at the time. Indeed, it is significant to note that Itten, who arrived in Weimar in October 1919 to become one of the Bauhaus’s first masters, was initially recommended to Gropius (1883–1969) by his wife Alma Mahler (1879–1964), herself a committed Theosophist. By the time Gropius encountered Itten, he had already established his reputation as a teacher. Having trained in Geneva and Stuttgart, Itten worked as a primary school teacher before opening his own art school in Vienna, where he was said to have been worshipped by his students. Itten’s popularity amongst students initially appealed to Gropius, but would eventually be among the reasons for his departure from the Bauhaus in 1923.

Itten used his wealth of experience to develop the renowned Vorkurs, the preliminary course which was the foundation of Bauhaus pedagogy. He sought to foster an intuitive approach in each of his students, and was significantly influenced in this by the theories of Friedrich Froebel (1782–1852), the pioneering German educator who integrated active play into the learning process. The preliminary course consisted of a six-month program compulsory to all Bauhaus students. Its idea was to provide a shared foundation, and to help “decondition” students of their preconceived knowledge and assumptions regarding the artistic process. Students explored the standard subjects of form and color, but Itten also introduced them to forms of exercise, meditation, breathing and concentration—many taken directly from Mazdaznan teachings. Later accounts by students and Bauhaus masters confirm that the inclusion of such physical practices was influenced by Itten’s desire to promulgate the ideas of Ha’nish among his own students. Initially, Itten’s esoteric practices and zealous nature were tolerated at the Bauhaus. He even seems to have converted many of his students to Mazdaznan. There was what the historian Peter Staudenmaier refers to as “a bewildering array of ideologies and esoteric paths” ⁷ available at that time, often in combinations that today would be viewed as representing incompatible traditions. The desire to find new spiritual paths and modes of living was in no small way a manifestation of the aftermath of the First World War. One can well imagine that Itten’s charisma and messianic approach might have been reassuring to those unsettled by the recent experience of war. Writing in the early 1920s, Itten acknowledged that while students initially expressed a certain amount of resistance to his methods, after a few days they would join in with enthusiasm. One can imagine a coterie of enthusiastic students gathering for Mazdaznan meetings in Itten’s studio, located, appropriately, in a building once used as a lodge house by the Knights Templar.⁸

In her study of the early years of the Bauhaus, Éva Forgács characterizes the school as suffering from a type of schizophrenia, and Gropius and Itten certainly represent this split personality. However, the discord at the Bauhaus was not just a result of differences between the rationally and the cosmically inclined. Personal letters from Itten at the time reveal that he viewed Gropius as a bureaucrat, that he wished to assume the directorship himself. One can view the rupture that ultimately resulted as a consequence of Itten’s aspirations for increased authority as much as ideological differences between himself and Gropius. Both students and colleagues alike had issues with Itten, accusing him of splitting the Bauhaus into two camps. Indeed, the fact that Itten had infringing upon the constitution of the Bauhaus by involving Mazdaznan in his teaching methods is confirmed by accounts of several students from this time. Students found it difficult to work with figures like Grunow, whose approaches were viewed not only as unorthodox but exceedingly bizarre. Such sources of tension led to Itten’s departure in 1923, an event that became a turning point in the school, precipitating a radical shift in its direction. That same year Gertrud Grunow also ceased teaching, and Gropius dismissed Lothar Schreyer (1886–1966), who had been employed only two years previously to coordinate the Bauhaus theatre program. Schreyer was a mystic, fascinated with archaic Christianity and was himself in the process of developing a coterie around himself. Presumably, Gropius felt compelled to prevent the emergence of another fanatical group. Expelling individuals with esoteric tendencies was intended not only to maintain a sense of internal harmony but to assuage the burghers of Weimar, some of whom viewed the school with disdain and were outspoken in their criticism, thinking it a suspect and wayward institution.¹²

Whereas the beginnings of the Bauhaus in Weimar was shaped by an array of influences, of which Itten’s esotericism represented a strong tendency, eliminating these elements was undertaken in order to steer the school into less controversial waters, in the process strengthening its profile as a school of the applied arts. By 1923, mystical modes of thought had been replaced by a more outwardly rational, and ultimately materialistic, approach. It may have also been that Gropius had become uncomfortable with certain socio-political elements within Mazdaznan. One might conjecture he recognized that the racial mysticism and body culture advocated by Mazdaznan bore similarities to those being advocated by the early Nazi Party. From its inception, Mazdaznan was distinguished by its recurring obsession with physical and spiritual purity. Mazdaznan literature conflated theories gleaned from Theosophy regarding “root races” with racist ideas about the innate superiority—and spiritually advanced nature—of certain cultures, and pseudo-scientific theories concerning the relationship between ethnicity and physical and spiritual purity. According to early Mazdaznan literature, it was the white Aryan races that had attained the highest level of spiritual and physical evolution. In the Mazdaznan system of evolution, the soul progressed through a variety of stages and was at its most advanced when manifested in the Aryan race. Mazdaznan followers believed the physical body would eventually be completely jettisoned and the soul would continue on its path toward a divine, disembodied intelligence.

Although Ha’nish was not personally affiliated with any fascist organization, his literature contains repeated references to what he referred to as the supremacy of the “Aryan people” and a desire to maintain the inherent “purity” of certain racial types. In the interwar years, such racial theories were integrated into several popular spiritual movements, and Staudenmeier notes that the support and involvement of several Nazi leaders meant certain esoteric organizations were not merely tolerated but were in fact were embraced by the Third Reich.¹³ Movements such as Mazdaznan advocated a pastoral way of life compatible with Nazism’s anti-modern ideology, and Staudenmaier suggests that the alignment between fascism and esotericism during the European occult revival were manifestations of various pan-European forms of social modernism in search of a resolution to the West’s spiritual crisis. In the post-war years there has been an attempt to revise and sanitize the more abhorrent aspects of Mazdaznan. Assessed in its current attenuated form, one would never suspect the movement once advocated eugenics or preached the benefits of rule by an Aryan master race. Today, Mazdaznan has been cleansed of such questionable tenets and appears to be no more than a holistic health movement, “a life science of ancient Persian origin, similar to the training system of Indian Yoga or Ayurveda.”¹⁴ It should also be noted that the extent to which the movement’s racial aspects were embraced varied according to location. While some followers in the United States held racist and anti-Semitic beliefs, in Germany and Switzerland volkisch ideals proved particularly popular.¹⁵ Apart from a few exceptions, the literature produced by the movement in America and Britain is devoid of overtly prejudicial material, while several books solely on Mazdaznan theories of race and eugenics were published in French and German by Ammann—they seem to have no English-language equivalent. Importantly however, the later alliance between esoteric organizations and the Nazi party should not be viewed as anything but tenuous and temporary. Despite contemporaneous reports of swastikas hanging in its Leipzig headquarters, Mazdaznan was one of many esoteric organizations banned by the Ministry of Interior in 1935 as part of a purge of similar groups that resulted in an elimination of much occult activity in the Third Reich. The anti-Semitic magazine Judenkenner described Mazdaznan as a “mask for International Jewry,” while an SS memo concluded that it “...denies all Nazi principles. It must be destroyed.”¹⁶

Although Itten’s unorthodox teaching methods were criticized during the interwar years, the passing of time has seen many of the ideas and exercises he applied integrated into mainstream art pedagogy. Several elements from Itten’s Vorkurs program remain at the foundations of modern art and design instruction. Itten’s devotion to Mazdaznan as well as his own experience as a teacher instilled within him the desire and ability to enable his students to heighten their power of perception, intuition and bodily awareness. As mentioned, Itten used exercises outlined in Mazdaznan literature as a means of promoting a more holistic approach to teaching art, integrating body, mind and spirit. There can be no doubt that his methodology was hugely successful in enabling many of his students at the Bauhaus (and later at his own school in Berlin) to realize their creative potential. Under Itten’s direction students were introduced to consciousness expanding ideas and possibilities a more conventional education would never have offered. The case of Josef Albers, who began his career under Itten’s tutelage, exemplifies this aspect of Itten’s teaching methods.²⁰ Itten’s declaration that “Color is life; for a world without color appears to us as dead. Colors are primordial ideas, the children of light,”²¹ most certainly had an impact on Albers, who although first and foremost an artist, can also be considered a scientist of the color spectrum.²²

In 1926 Itten founded his own art private art school in Berlin. The iconic photograph of himself and his students practicing Mazdaznan postures was taken on the roof of his school in 1931, which lasted until 1934, when it was shut down on account of its “Cultural Bolshevism.” Although Itten remained active after this date, working in a variety of capacities, he has since become a somewhat marginal figure.²³ While his books on color theory are familiar to many, few would be aware of his role in forming the first phase of the Bauhaus. Undoubtedly, this has much to do with the transformation of the Bauhaus in the years after Itten’s departure. Changes occurred as the school evolved under new directors: there was a desire for the organization to focus upon quantifiable research and industrial production. As this occurred, mystical or outré elements were eliminated. It seems possible that Itten himself may have contributed to this elision of the importance of Mazdaznan to the early years of the Bauhaus. In his later autobiographical texts, he himself downplayed the importance Mazdaznan held for himself and his students at the Bauhaus: