The Cemetery @museum.de

Before you make your way into town, perhaps you’d like to take a look around Dornburg cemetery. It was laid out in 1806, and just to the right of the entrance is the grave of the writer Frieda von Bülow, who lived and worked in the Old Palace in around 1900.

Make your way along the main path until you’ve almost reached the end. On the left-hand side, you’ll notice three gravestones amid the grass. They belong to an old-established local family of potters: Karl and Louise Krehan and their son, the Bauhaus master Max Krehan.

Karl, the master potter, died in 1900, and his black gravestone is very much in the Art Nouveau style. The two gravestones on the right reflect the formal idiom of the Bauhaus, which was the fashion in the 1920s.

And if you look closely, you’ll notice that at some point between the two generations, an H went missing in the family name: Kre-H-A-H-N has become Kre-H-A-N. That also has to do with the Bauhaus:

Founded by Walter Gropius in 1919, the revolutionary Bauhaus school of crafts and fine arts was actually located in Weimar, 30 kilometres– or around 18 miles away. However, the school’s pottery workshops were here, in Dornburg. Max Krehan, then in his mid-40s, was the master, and he ran the pottery class along with Gerhard Marcks.

Walter Gropius consistently missed out the second H when he wrote Krehan’s name, so the master eventually dropped the tiresome letter and chose the version with the spelling mistake as his professional alias. Incidentally, the gravestone Krehan erected for his mother was designed by the Bauhaus sculptor Josef Hartwig.

Diagonally to the left behind the Krehan's graves, you’ll find two other names of significance in the history of Dornburg pottery: Heiner Hans Körting and his second wife Lisa, who moved to Dornburg after the Second World War. You can identify the grave by the two artists’ signatures on the gravestone and by the owl.

That’s because the owl with the rotating head designed by Heiner Hans Körting is regarded as one of his most important sculptures. Faithful copies are still being made today by his son Ulrich Körting. The workshop is also still here, at the Marstall, the former royal stables opposite the Rococo Palace.

Right next door, also in the royal stables, is the Bauhaus Workshop Museum, which is well worth a visit. It’s devoted to Dornburg’s unique ceramic art and is the only Bauhaus workshop to have been preserved in its original location. Find out how the Bauhaus potters and later ceramicists lived and worked here in Dornburg and which trend-setting designs they came up with.