The Bauhaus is the most celebrated artistic institution of our time. Its ideas transformed our urban Landscape. Nothing we read, wear, or live in is devoid of its influence. Yet there has never been a history of the Bauhaus and its fourteen tempestuous years, when those who taught there included Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Robe, Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and many other great pioneers of modern art. It was here that the ideas that would dominate the world of art for the better part of this century clashed and became defined, in an era when the contest between ideologies was fought with the fervor of a religious war. Elaine S. Hochman's unprecedented access to the school's archives, formerly in East Germany, give this book an intimate and surprising view of the tumultuous day-to-day events that made the Bauhaus the world's most influential crucible of modernism.