page_title: Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp
section_title: The National Socialism period
hierarchical_section_title: Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp / The National Socialism period
caption_attribution_description: Cleaned up contemporary view &lt;a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/observationpost/3181129461/"&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; Staatliches Bauhaus - typography by Herbert Bayer. Wikipedia page &lt;a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauhaus" rel="nofollow"&gt;here&lt;/a&gt; The Bauhaus existed in Dessau between 1925 and 1932, having been forced out of Weimar. The architect was the first director of Dessau's Bauhaus, Walter Gropius, who was followed by Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
context_page_description: Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp nee Hermine Luise Berkenkamp was a German painter, colour designer, the avant-garde author of children's books, fairy-tale illustrator and costume designer.
context_section_description: After another shorter stay in Moscow in 1931, the Schepers returned to the Bauhaus in Dessau under the new director Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. When the Bauhaus moved in 1932, they also moved to the capital Berlin.
   
  "Light-clear and dark-clear tones, pure white and pure black, varied shades of grey without contamination - that was the colour world into which the terrible brown, the burnt red of the Third Reich broke. What was before 1934 was buried and must be laboriously brought back to light, brought to consciousness.“
  — Lou Scheper, review 1971,3. 179
  Due to the worsening political situation in Germany in 1932, further cooperation with Soviet colleagues was no longer conceivable. The right-wing magistrate in Dessau, the leading faction in the city council since 1931, cut all funding for the Bauhaus. On October 1, 1932, the Bauhaus Dessau closed down involuntarily and under high political pressure. The building was used as the Gauführerschule of the NSDAP. Mies van der Rohe wanted to continue the Bauhaus in Berlin with his own funds under the title "Free Teaching and Research Institute" in the former Steglitz telephone factory, but the fascists forced him to close the institute on 20 July 1933. From then on, the teachers had to secure their livelihood with casual jobs. Some Bauhaus artists emigrated to Palestine and the USA.
  "There are two ways to respond to disasters: by going mad or by getting into oneself.“
  — Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp, Rudolstadt Palace Museum, 1948, p. 2
  Since the closure of the Bauhaus in 1933, Lou Scheper-Berkenkamp worked as a freelance painter in Berlin. Between 1933 and 1945, Scheper-Berkenkamp designed a number of children's books, many of which were published following the Second World War by the publisher Ernst Wunderlich, Leipzig. Her son Dirk was born in Berlin in 1938. Lou accompanied Hinnerk on his "Norddeutsche Reportage-Reisen" and wrote texts for his various landscape photo series of landscapes. Repressions in 1934 against her husband Hinnerk, who was forbidden by the Nazis to join the Reich Association of German Photojournalists, also cut off this source of income for the family. So they concentrated on the colour design of public houses, murals and restoration work. Hinnerk Scheper did military service in Germany from 1942 to 1945. During this time, Lou provided for the family alone. She invented picture stories, which were not published as children's books until by Ernst Wunderlich Verlag in Leipzig. The family survived the war years in complete seclusion.
caption: Das Bauhaus, Dessau, DDR May 1990 (5288787560)
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