The Nazis drove Bauhaus out of town. Now the far right is waging another war against the movement

Poll to take place in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, where Bauhaus blossomed a century ago – and where AfD is promising ‘patriotic culture policy’ if it wins

The city of Dessau, where the Bauhaus design school flourished a century ago, catapulted Germany into the modern era and revolutionised global design.

It is also where the Nazis drove the avant garde movement out of town and attempted to crush its utopian principles. A hundred years later, another high-stakes culture war over its legacy is looming.

The EU’s biggest democracy will face one of the riskiest tests of the postwar period when Dessau’s home state of Saxony-Anhalt goes to the polls on 6 September. In what would be a first since Adolf Hitler’s time, a far-right party could win an absolute majority and take power in one of the 16 Länder .

The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is running first in national polls and is poised to capture about 40% in Saxony-Anhalt. It has widened its double-digit lead among the state’s 1.8 million voters by homing in on the cost of living, fears around immigration, and the whipsaw effects of deindustrialisation and depopulation.

But the party’s programme also lays out a vision for Germany with Saxony-Anhalt as a foothold, in a plan oddly fixated on Bauhaus. “The state government is running an image campaign called ‘think modern’ that seeks to derive the identity of Saxony-Anhalt from Bauhaus,” reads one passage.

The AfD said it is countering with “a ‘think German’ campaign” that promises a “new, patriotic cultural policy” and an end to funding for “anti-German art and culture”.

Bauhaus’s blend of form and function in architecture, art and industrial design shaped everything from Ikea style for the masses to the user-friendly elegance of Apple products.

It was also a buzzing hive of sexual liberation, new roles for women and international collaboration before the Nazis drove its “degenerates” into exile.

In her modest, sleek-lined office at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, director Barbara Steiner said that much like a century ago, the AfD’s anti-Bauhaus crusade was a Trojan horse aiming for the heart of Germany’s open, liberal society.

“There would be a lot of people leaving the state”, if the AfD took control, said the Austrian-born Steiner. She argued the region was underestimated by its purported champions and their “absurd” war on a warped vision of Bauhaus.

“People are always talking about the economic downturn and how everything’s going down the drain, but the people here are brilliant,” she said. “I’m afraid what is now so tenderly sprouting will be snuffed out by this rigidity and isolation.”

While her own institution would probably face funding cuts, her bigger worries concern the chilling effects on public debate, cooperation and innovation. “They want cultural hegemony. That’s the really threatening thing.”

Today Dessau-Roßlau, as the city has been known since a municipal consolidation in 2007, can seem like an open-air museum of the past 100 years’ tumult. Its historic, deserted market square is bookended by soaring spires. But taller still are the prefab communist-era housing blocks hulking over gutted brick warehouses.