Page 62 - Studio International - September 1968

Banknotes designed by Herbert Bayer in 1923
for the State Government of Thuringia.
A complete breakaway from the pompous
`guarantee' type of bank note design that
has not since been bettered

The Bauhaus authors had no prerogative here of course ;
the pattern had been set by the Constructivist and
Futurist manifestos, to be continued by Dada, by De
Stijl, and by the Esprit Nouveau and continued by Le
Corbusier to the end. The text and typography convey
the feeling that time is short and that the message is
urgent. The new world was of the future; the future is
now, and it is telegrams, not eloquent, well-reasoned
essays, that are needed; and the form must be that of the
advertisement which says : NO W.

The Bauhaus typographic design was not only propa-
gandist, but activist. During the dramatic inflation of
1923 Herbert Bayer designed banknotes for the
Thuringia State Bank in multiples of million mark
issues that were entirely heavily sans serifed and
without any historical reference to the traditional
scripted and engraved bank note. This revolutionary
design was accepted against the vast crisis that made
money worthless on the day that it was issued.
Public indignation was shown much more clearly in
wide-spread protests in 1925 when the Bauhaus agreed
with Bayer to completely abandon the use of capital
letters. 'Why should we write and print with two
alphabets ?' wrote Bayer, 'both a large and small sign
are not necessary to indicate one single sound'. He
justified his approach by the logic above, and on the
grounds of economy, saving space and time in setting
and reading.
However, in retrospect, this rationalization is beside
the point. Almost certainly the real intention was
revolutionary and provocative. It would have been
truer to the day to say that upper and lower cases are
unnecessary, conventional and bourgeois, and not
functionally but ideologically out of place in the new
world. The provocation produced the required effect,
shocking a wider public to a far greater extent than
any extravagant futurist or Dada manifestation had
done. It confirmed the authorities' opinion that the
Bauhaus was revolutionary in the political sense as well
as the formal sense, probably more than any other
single Bauhaus action. The full effect of the dropping
of upper case was of course much greater in German,
where all nouns began with a capital letter, than in
English with a far more selective use of capitals for
identification. This elimination of capitals became a
Bauhaus act of faith, a kind of banner under which
the Bauhaus purist marched.
Bayer followed up this action by specially designing a
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