Dörthe Helm and the Bauhaus

Autoportrait
Von Dörte Helm (1898-1941) - Grete Grewolls: Wer war wer in Mecklenburg und Vorpommern. Das Personenlexikon. Hinstorff Verlag, Rostock 2011, ISBN 978-3-356-01301-6, S. 4063, Gemeinfrei, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=71335141

One of the protagonists of the German series "Bauhaus - A New Time" created in 2019 under the direction of Lars Kraume, and broadcast on Arte, is the German artist Dörte Helm, performed by Anna Maria Mühe.

Anna Maria Mühe, as Dörthe Helm

Dörte Helm, born in 1898 in Berlin, and died in 1941 in Hamburg, was a German painter and graphic designer, daughter of the classical philologist Rudolf Helm and his Jewish wife, Alice Caroline Bauer.

Dörte Helm continued his studies in 1918-19 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Weimar In 1919, after the Academy was transformed into Staatliches Bauhaus, she continued as an apprentice in the mural and textile workshop. Her teachers, with whom she had (in the series at least) intense and sometimes stormy  relations, were Johannes Itten, Lyonel Feininger, Oskar Schlemmer, Georg Muche and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius.

She remained a member of the Bauhaus until 1924, when she returned to Rostock, her parents' home town. She continued her artistic activity there as well as in Austria and Switzerland.

In 1930 she married the journalist Heinrich Heise and moved to Hamburg. From 1933, being half-Jew, she was banned from exercising by the Reich Chamber of Culture. She could then only publish as a writer, partly under a pseudonym. In February 1941 she succumbed to an infectious disease.