WEIMAR, Germany (AP) — The German city where the Bauhaus was born a century ago is paying tribute to the school behind a string of modern design icons with a new museum meant to anchor it in its turbulent historical context.

The Bauhaus Museum in Weimar opens Friday. It showcases many of the items that blurred the lines between the artistic and the industrial — producing some of the precursors of modern mass design and helping make the Bauhaus influential far beyond its relatively brief existence.

But the museum also explores the wider and constantly shifting ambitions of the Bauhaus, which started work in April 1919. It reflects the political troubles that forced the school to move twice, and then close down shortly after the Nazis came to power in 1933.