The triumph, after the war, of the Bauhaus as a style and a brand were almost inversely proportional to its failure as a social program. Bauhaus furniture and objects became marketable, Bauhaus architecture a cuboid product available to anyone. Bauhaus became one more form of enabling the growth of consumer society, with its microgradations of taste corresponding to class and status. One of the high (or low) points was the exhibition of a model house by the Bauhaus alumnus Marcel Breuer in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art in 1949: An early blockbuster exhibition in MoMA’s history, it also betrayed the spirit of the school by showing a house that was far too expensive for most working-class Americans. (John D. Rockefeller Jr. bought the actual house that was exhibited and used it as a guesthouse on his estate in Pocantico Hills, N.Y.) This was a trend observable even to Bauhaus contemporaries. In a 1930 essay titled “Ten Years of the Bauhaus,” the Hungarian art theorist Erno Kallai, who edited the Bauhaus journal under Meyer, laconically telegraphed the standardization of form at the expense of content: “Tubular steel armchair frames: Bauhaus style. Lamp with nickel-coated body and a disk of opaque glass as lampshade: Bauhaus style. Wallpaper patterned in cubes: Bauhaus style. No painting on the wall: Bauhaus style.”

One of the fears that attends the centenary is that this Bauhaus brand will overwhelm any similar attempt to revive the radical spirit of the school at its founding. As the Bauhaus’s influence spread across the world as the pre-eminent global design concept of the postwar era, its history and goals became increasingly watered down, a way to sell gift-shop-ready objects and promote cultural tourism instead of using design to improve the lives of working-class people. This contrast has created a complicated legacy. A loose grouping of intellectuals and architectural theorists, which goes under the name Projekt Bauhaus, intends to take the problem head-on. Last September, I met with Anh-Linh Ngo, one of its members and the editor in chief of Arch+ magazine, in eastern Mitte, a now tony section of former East Berlin with many examples of spruced up Plattenbau, prefab concrete housing construction. Ngo told me the group wants to “look at the legacy of the Bauhaus from an outside, critical perspective.” In honor of the original Bauhaus’s critical spirit, they intend — while everyone in Berlin, Dessau and Weimar is celebrating the centenary — to conduct a ceremonial “burial” of the Bauhaus, culminating in a musical requiem directed by Schorsch Kamerun at the Volksbühne theater in Berlin in June.

“We need to bury this kind of undead figure — this kind of zombie — to put certain aspects of the Bauhaus to rest in order to deal with our own problems,” Ngo told me. Those problems are much in evidence in Germany, he said, with the rise once more of the far right. He pointed to their attempts to gain hegemony in urban spaces using techniques pioneered by the student movement. There are reconstruction projects taking place all over Germany that focus on aspects of pre-20th century German heritage (especially churches), which are primarily initiatives of the far right. Perhaps thinking of the attacks on refugees that had taken place in Chemnitz just a week before we spoke, he suggested quietly that, rather than resurrect the Bauhaus once again, it was “more important to think about the mutual obligations we have toward each other.”

TO SEE THE SITES of the Bauhaus firsthand today is in many ways to glimpse the failure of its collective wisdom: Buildings that weren’t destroyed or commandeered by the Nazis were left to slowly decay after the war, and the ones that still function mostly do so as tourist landmarks. And yet, especially with the works that still operate as they were originally intended, it is possible to glimpse the image of the future that the Bauhaus evoked for its students, teachers and contemporaries.

Unlike Weimar, with its overwhelming German classical and Romantic heritage — the erstwhile home of Goethe and Liszt — the eerie, moribund town of Dessau is overwhelmed by the legacy of the Bauhaus. The capital of one of the country’s numerous provincial princely states from the 16th to the early 19th century, it was almost completely destroyed by Allied bombing in World War II, which targeted the city because of its role in airplane manufacturing. During the onslaught, the main Bauhaus building was somehow spared, if damaged. During the German Democratic Republic, it again became an industrial center and played host to an impressive variety (if that is the term) of Plattenbau, still visible across the skyline. The average age of the residents is 50.

In Dessau, the complex known as the Laubenganghäuser, and usually translated with dogged literalness as the “Houses With Balcony Access,” reflects the humane principles of reproducible workers’ housing. Designed under Hannes Meyer, these, like the ADGB Trade Union School, were true Bauhaus buildings, conceived and executed under the collective imprimatur of the Bauhaus. Three-story brick buildings, with apartments linked by long-running balconies — a precursor to the “streets in the sky” of later British social housing complexes — the Laubenganghäuser cram a number of amenities into small spaces. Kitchen cabinets are hidden behind sliding doors; bright shades of maroon and mauve enliven the otherwise incredibly tight quarters, which give off an impression of openness and space. A current resident recently told Berlin’s Monopol magazine that because there aren’t “sterile corridors in the building,” residents “spend a lot of time outdoors, so neighbors often come into contact with each other. It feels more like a community than an apartment building, and many people have become friends.” Here was a vision of the Bauhaus’s potential beyond consumer society, beyond the rule of markets and private property — one in which collective provision defeats private greed, and in which strangers are made to feel welcome as members of a group. Had history not intervened, there might have been more of them in Dessau: nearly anonymous testaments to the ideals of the old, fractious, continuously fascinating school, present only by implication, as its students and teachers wanted, in everyday life.

Production: Monika Bergmann at Picture Worx