Buchenwald concentration camp’s gate to be part of Bauhaus exhibition in Germany

Buchenwald gate part of Bauhaus display

WEIMAR, Germany — The iron gate at the entrance to Buchenwald has been temporarily removed to form the centerpiece of an exhibit in tribute to its designer, who was forced to come up with the concept while an inmate at the Nazi concentration camp.

Franz Ehrlich, a German Communist Party member and activist, was arrested in the early 1930s and spent several years at Buchenwald, near the eastern city of Weimar.

In 1938, SS officials at the camp forced Ehrlich, a designer and architect, to come up with the design of the gate, which carries the cynical slogan “Jedem das Seine” or “To Each His Own.”

In a subtle act of defiance, Ehrlich used a typeface for the lettering of the slogan designed by one of his teachers at the Bauhaus school, which was shut down by the Nazis in 1933. Ehrlich died in 1984.

President Barack Obama used the gate as the backdrop for a news conference in June after visiting the camp with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, saying that more than a half a century later “our grief and our outrage over what happened have not diminished.” Some 56,000 people died at the hands of the Nazis at Buchenwald.

The gate, which was removed Monday, will be on display at Weimar’s Neues Museum from Aug. 2 to Nov. 11. A copy will be in its place at Buchenwald in the meantime.

It is one of several exhibitions being organized to celebrate the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus school of design, architecture and applied arts in 1919.

The Bauhaus school was formed immediately following World War I to transcend the divisions that had separated arts and crafts and emphasize a new modern aesthetic that could also be mass-produced.

In Berlin, the Martin Gropius Bau museum on Tuesday opened an exhibition called “Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model,” bringing together items from collections in the cities where the school was located over its 14-year history — Weimar, Dessau and Berlin.