“For many people,” said Dr. Jaeggi, “Bauhaus has more of a negative aspect than a positive one.”

Yet a closer look at Bauhaus and the German modernist architectural movement known as Neues Bauen, or New Objectivity, makes clear how little these movements had to do with the prefab obscenities of postwar modernism. Today, many Bauhaus devotees hope the centenary program will sow domestic interest and pride in the movement at a time when Germany is bitterly divided over its reception of refugees and reckoning with its cultural identity.

Though small, Weimar, a leafy, picture-book tourist town about 50 miles southwest of Leipzig, has an outsized cultural significance in the country. Yet as pretty as the hometown of Goethe and Schiller is, there’s something stifling about Weimar’s cobblestone Old Town, with its faux-medieval terrace restaurants full of retirees contentedly eating fruitcake.

Only recently has Bauhaus joined in earnest Weimar’s pantheon of cultural accolades. It was here that Gropius, a handsome 36-year-old architect decorated for valor in World War I, was asked to head a new school formed from the merger of the Weimar state schools of applied and fine arts. When he opened the Bauhaus in 1919, he recruited master teachers and called for artists and craftsmen to create the “building of the future.”

Image A portrait of Walter Gropius in front of a development plan, 1930. Credit... ullstein bild, via Getty Images

Occupying a suite of Art Nouveau school buildings, the early Bauhaus was “more than a school,” as Tom Wolfe wrote in his 1981 book “From Bauhaus to Our House.” “It was a commune, a spiritual movement, a radical approach to art in all its forms, a philosophical center comparable to the Garden of Epicurus.”

With their long hair and androgynous clothing, Bauhaus students lived together, worked together and held wild, legendary parties, built around themes (Lantern Festival, Kite Festival) that in later years became increasingly high-concept (Metal Festival, Beard, Nose and Heart Party).

Life at the Bauhaus was in many ways a precursor to the bohemianism that took hold in America’s liberal arts colleges half a century later. The student body was international and diverse, with women making up about half. Though this was outwardly encouraged, Gropius internally asked that all women be funneled into the weaving workshop, with pottery and bookbinding as alternatives. Nevertheless, several women made names for themselves, including the metalworker Marianne Brandt, whose slick, otherworldly teapots became icons of industrial design.