by Patrick Rossler
‘Between 1929 and 1943, an outstanding new lifestyle magazine called Die Neue Linie (“The New Line”) was published by Beyer Press in Leipzig. No other publication in this period was so consistent in bringing avant-garde typographic ideas to a mass audience, as leading graphic designers from the Bauhaus, including László Moholy-Nagy, Umbo and Herbert Bayer, steered the look of the magazine, whose contents combined fashion, literature, graphic design and art. Unembellished fonts, dynamic diagonals and dramatic use of photomontage were key to the journal’s striking appearance. Its authors included Walter Gropius, Aldous Huxley, Gottfried Benn and Thomas Mann; even the advertising pages, designed by Bauhaus veterans Herbert Bayer and Kurt Kranz, were always attractively composed. Despite widespread media conformity during the Nazi era, strangely Die Neue Linie was largely spared the regime’s sanctions. The Bauhaus at the Newsstand illustrates the turbulent times in which the magazine appeared, reproducing spreads, statements, articles, a visual checklist of every issue and analyses of the magazine’s delicate balancing act between modernism and conformity. The Bauhaus at the Newsstand is published as an abridged, revised and bilingual edition of the bestselling edition of 2007.’