A hundred years since the opening of Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus building in Dessau, Germany, there may be no centenary. This December 4, the winner of the election in the surrounding state of Saxony-Anhalt, the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), does not intend to throw a big party for the Bauhaus Foundation, but to shut it down.

According to the AfD, the Bauhaus is a “misguided path of modernism,” whose works are impersonal and uninviting. From there, it’s only a stone’s throw to the word “degenerate” — the term used in the Third Reich to describe “un-German” art, that is, art by Jews or art whose aesthetics did not conform to the Nazi regime’s propaganda glorifying “racial purity.”

If the AfD succeeds in forming a government in Saxony-Anhalt, after scoring 44 percent of the vote in the September 6 state election, the Bauhaus would not be the only victim of its “cultural policy.” Still, it would certainly be the most prominent. The party’s cultural-policy spokesperson in the state parliament, Hans-Thomas Tillschneider, already demanded during the campaign that, in the future, all theaters and cultural institutions that want state funding must sign a declaration of their “commitment to the state, democracy, and German culture.” The statement is supposed to confirm that each recipient of public funds treats German cultural tradition “with respect.” Tillschneider leaves open exactly what this means. Naturally, cultural professionals in the state are up in arms over this demand.