To this day it is considered the primordial cell of modern architecture and design - the Bauhaus. But "Bauhaus" doesn't just mean the cubic white house with flat roof, the steel pipe chair, or the Bauhaus lamp. The Bauhaus was also an educational center which serves as a model even today. World-renowned artists like Johannes Itten, Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe taught there. The film draws a picture of this singular institution of modernism - from revolutionary beginnings after the end of World War I to disintegration and emigration, covering subsequent careers as well as the involvement of some Bauhaus members in national socialist Germany. These episodes are remembered by former Bauhaus students of both sexes, most of them being featured through archival footage. This comprehensive critical account of the artistic and political aims of Bauhaus in a film portrait gives insight into the essence of Bauhaus principles, the conflicts that lead to relocation from Weimar to Dessau, the disbanding of the school during the Nazi era, the construction work in the young state of Israel, and the development of the Bauhaus myth in the USA.