BLUEPRINT

A powerful novel which brings to life the Bauhaus Movement. Luise Schilling wants to tear down the past and build a new future. At the beginning of the turbulent 1920s, she leaves her father's conservative household in Berlin for Weimar's Bauhaus University, with dreams of studying architecture. But when she arrives and encounters a fractured social world of mystics and formalists, communists and fascists, the dichotomy between the rigid past and a hopeful future turns out to be a lot more muddled than she thought. Luise becomes involved with a cult-like spiritual group, looking for community, and falling in love with elusive art student Jakob. Surrounded by luminaries like Gropius and Kandinsky, Luise throws herself into the dreams and ideas of her epoch. While her art school friends retreat into a world of self-improvement and jargon, her home city of Berlin is embroiled in street fights. Amid the social upheaval, she has to decide where she stands. From technology to art, romanticism to the avant-garde, populism to the youth movement, Luise encounters themes, utopias and ideas that still ring familiar today. Told in the first person, a coming-of-age story to immerse yourself in the atmosphere and setting, first in the Weimar and in the second in Dessau, both reflecting the political and cultural shifts in the schools' movement across Germany and its director Walter Gropius, depicted as a distant, imposing figure. 224pp. One illus.