Otti Berger

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Otti Berger (in the picture above right, 1930)
Web piece by Otti Berger

Otti Berger (born Otilija Ester Berger on October 4, 1898 in Zmajevac / Baranja , Austria-Hungary ; died unknown date of death (after May 3, 1944 ) in Auschwitz concentration camp ) was a textile artist and weaver .

Life

When Otti Berger was born in 1898, her small hometown Zmajevac was still part of the multi-ethnic kingdom of Austria, and from 1918 to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The place is also known by its Hungarian name Vörosmart, which is why she is sometimes referred to as the “Hungarian artist”. She received her school education at the higher girls' school in Vienna.

From 1912 to 1926 Otti Berger attended the Art Academy and School of Applied Arts in Zagreb , which she later described as a “spiritless place of tradition”. In January 1927 she matriculated to study at the Bauhaus Dessau , where three teachers supported her significantly: Paul Klee (next to Wassily Kandinsky, the most important teacher for artistic form and color theory), her friend, weaver and textile designer Gunta Stölzl (since 1927 head of the Bauhaus weaving) and László Moholy-Nagy (until 1928 head of the preliminary course and the metal workshop).

In the winter semester of 1927 she became a member of the Bauhaus weaving workshop . After an outside semester in the summer of 1929 at the Johanne Brunsson weaving school in Stockholm , she took on a half-job as an employee of the weaving mill at the Bauhaus from November 1929. During the summer of 1930 she and Anni Albers represented the director Gunta Stölzl, who had had a child. The main goal of the work in the weaving mill was not the production of artistically individually designed individual pieces, but the development of reproducible fabrics and patterns. This is how the change from hand-weaving to textile design took place in teaching practice . A letter of recommendation from Gunta Stölzl dated September 9, 1930 shows how enthusiastic the lecturer was about the work results of her nine-year-old student: "... they are among the best that are done in the department".

During her studies, Otti Berger developed programmatic ideas for the new path of Bauhaus weaving, which reveal a synaesthetic feeling: "A grand piano, for example, can already be music in itself, flowing, harmonious, full of melodies and vibrations," she wrote in 1930 in her essay "Fabrics in Space". Transgressing traditional forms of perception and expression was so important for Berger because she was almost deaf due to an illness and thus developed a sensitive tactile ability.

In October 1930 she passed the weaver's journeyman examination at the Chamber of Crafts in Glauchau / Saxony, whereupon she received the Bauhaus diploma in November of the same year.

From November 1930 to May 1931 Otti Berger worked as an artistic assistant at the curtain weaving mill Fischer and Hoffmann in Zwickau . From May 1931 to October 1931 she worked for Websky, Hartmann & Yiesen, tablecloths and linen weaving mill in Wüstewaltersdorf . In October 1931 she was appointed head of the weaving mill at the Bauhaus Dessau, where she initially taught until February 1932; the position was extended until March 31, 1932. After Lilly Reich took over the management of the weaving mill, Berger received a contract as deputy manager. In November 1932 Berger opened his own textile atelier “laboratory and test workshop. fabrics for clothing, furniture, curtains, wall coverings and floor coverings ”in Berlin .

After the seizure of power of Adolf Hitler, she worked from 1933 to Wohnbedarf Zurich and weaving De Ploeg, Bergeijk together / Netherlands, produced the materials for their designs. In 1935, Berger applied for admission to the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts and was rejected because of her Jewish roots. From May 1936 she was banned from working as a craftsman. After several short stays in London from September 1937, where she could not find work and felt isolated due to a lack of English skills, Otti Berger returned to Yugoslavia to live with her family because her mother was ill. An attempt to emigrate to the USA - László Moholy-Nagy invited her to teach at his New Bauhaus in Chicago in 1938 - failed because she could no longer obtain a visa. A letter from 1941 has been received in which she complained about the tightness of her home and reported that she was still hoping for an opportunity to leave the country and was working on a carpet.

From Russian documents published by Yad Vashem in 2005 , it became apparent that Otti Berger and her family were deported directly to the Auschwitz extermination camp without prior internment in another camp. The date of death is given as April 27, 1944, only her younger brother survived the Shoah.

literature

  • Antonija Mlikota, biography of Otti Berger ( memento from September 12, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), on bauhaus-online.de.
  • Barbara von Lucadou, Otti Berger - fabrics for the future. in: Interactions between the Hungarian avant-garde in the Weimar Republic. Marburg 1986, pp. 301-3.
  • Art in exile in Great Britain, New Society for Fine Arts, exhibition catalog, Berlin 1986, p. 117.
  • Magdalena Droste & Manfred Ludewig (eds.): The Bauhaus weaves. The textile workshop of the Bauhaus . Berlin 1998.
  • Ulrike Müller : Bauhaus women: masters in art, craft and design . Munich, Sandmann, 2009, pp. 62–67.
  • “Notice in the weaving mill” from November 26, 1931, signed by Mies van der Rohe, Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin.
  • Otti Berger . In: Patrick Rössler , Elizabeth Otto : Women at the Bauhaus. Pioneering modern artists. Knesebeck, Munich 2019. ISBN 978-3-95728-230-9 . Pp. 96-101.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Patrick Rössler, Elizabeth Otto: Women at the Bauhaus - pioneering artists of modernism . Knesebeck, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-95728-230-9 , pp. 97 .
  2. ↑ Patrick Rössler, Elizabeth Otto: Women at the Bauhaus - pioneering artists of modernism . Knesebeck, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-95728-230-9 , pp. 99 .
  3. ↑ Otti Berger , in: Volkhard Knigge , Harry Stein (Ed.): Franz Ehrlich . A Bauhaus member in the resistance and concentration camp. (Catalog for the exhibition of the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation in collaboration with the Klassik Stiftung Weimar and the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation in the Neues Museum Weimar from August 2, 2009 to October 11, 2009.) Weimar 2009, ISBN 978-3-935598- 15-6 , p. 142.
  4. ↑ Patrick Rössler, Elizabeth Otto: Women at the Bauhaus - pioneering artists of modernism . Knesebeck, Munich 2019, ISBN 978-3-95728-230-9 , pp. 101 .
personal data
SURNAME Berger, Otti
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Textile artist and weaver
DATE OF BIRTH October 4, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Zmajevac , Baranja , Hungary
DATE OF DEATH around May 3, 1944
Place of death Auschwitz concentration camp