ANNI ALBERS died in May 1994, just shy of her ninety-fifth birthday.
With the death of Nina Kandinsky fourteen years earlier, Anni was the last major Bauhaus figure still alive. At times, that position conferred a certain stature on her, but on other occasions, given what a major artist she was, the lack of recognition was equally remarkable.
To her delight, Maximilian Schell filmed her for a scene in his documentary about Marlene Dietrich. Anni, at age ninety-one, went to Berlin so he could do this, and she was fascinated to hear her beloved Maximilian direct the cameramen and instruct her on what to do. He had the authority and artistic definiteness that she adored, and she relished complying with his instructions. She showed no interest in Berlin itself, no apparent nostalgia for her colorful and luxurious childhood; she cared only about her new adventure.
In the documentary, Anni is shown going through lots of discarded 32-millimeter film, running it between her fingers as she might have once handled thread. She is the perfect foil to Dietrich, for while Dietrich appears to be a vain prima donna, Anni is seen with little makeup and with uncolored white hair, and her intellectual curiosity is made manifest as she studies the celluloid.
Yet after the documentary appeared, Gabrielle Annan, in her review for The New York Review of Books, while pointing out that “the name Anni Albers appears on the cast list,” asks of Anni, “Who is Schell’s dark lady? … Can she be the widow of the irresistible Hans Albers, a German cross between Gérard Depardieu and Maurice Chevalier, the raffish darling of the Berlin public before the war? … Whoever the old lady is, we can read her as a symbol of the last years of the Weimar Republic, when Dietrich was in her prime. Her look of displacement haunts and disturbs.” Annan describes the mysterious Anni as “a small old German-Jewish lady, bewildered and bewildering”—all in contrast to Dietrich.5
When I read this, I took a fit. I immediately fired off a snippy letter to the editors of The New York Review of Books, identifying the world’s foremost textile artist and saying that the Albers to whom she had been married was not Hans but Josef, the renowned painter and color theorist. I also pointed out that Anni stood five-foot-seven, which is not normally considered short for a woman, and asked if Annan had determined Anni’s religion because of the shape of her nose. There was no other reason for declaring Anni Jewish, since no reference is made to this in the film.
Annan replied in a letter that was forwarded to me. She said that she now realized that Anni Albers was her cousin and godmother, whom she “had last seen at the baptismal font.” She offered no further explanation.
I HAD DETERMINEDLY KEPT all of this—the review, my response, Annan’s letter—from Anni, since I felt that the “small old German-Jewish” description would have greatly upset her. But then Maximilian sent her Annan’s piece, along with some other reviews.
I phoned him and asked why he had done so. He said he thought Anni would not be bothered by Annan’s description of her—after all, Annan’s overall take on his film was very positive—and that Anni was used to bizarre criticism and was even excited by it.
In this last statement, he was right. But she was, of course, irked by what Annan had written. Once I knew she had read it, I showed her my letter to the Review’s editor and Annan’s subsequent response. Anni thought for a moment and said, “Of course, her father was Louis Ullstein, the youngest brother. But she was Lotte’s godchild, not mine.” It made sense to both Anni and me that Annan had reconstructed history to have her godmother be the Fleischmann sister who ended up being famous and important in the eyes of the world. This, Anni reminded me, was the way that people falsified the past. “Anyone who was at the Bauhaus or Black Mountain, and then read all the nonsense, should understand.”
OTHER PEOPLE, however, knew exactly who Anni was.
In 1978, my wife brought Jacqueline Onassis to meet Anni. Katharine and Jackie had spent the day looking at American country antiques, mainly in a barn and former chicken coop in South Windsor, Connecticut, and were ending their outing at the Alberses’ house, from which Jackie’s driver would continue with her back to New York, while Katharine would go home with me.
Jackie, in an old baggy sweater with small holes in it and well-worn corduroys, looked unbelievably beautiful that afternoon. Her hair was big and somewhat messy, and if she had makeup on, it was the type someone like me could not see; she had a magnificent vitality, and exuded energy and alertness that were almost savage.
As the former first lady walked up the half flight of stairs, Anni awaited her in her wheelchair on the landing. Jackie acted like a well-brought-up Miss Porter’s School girl being presented to royalty. In a tremulous voice, she told Anni what a great honor it was to meet her. And then, after just a few seconds of observing the living room with its walls bare except for the four Homages to the Square, Jackie said, without hesitation, “Just like Matisse’s chapel in Vence: all the white, and then the color.”
No one could have scripted the line for her, and rarely had anyone said anything as appropriate about the Alberses’ vision.
The two women began to discuss design, and the need for open space. Anni started a sentence with the words, “At zuh Bauhaus …,” and then interrupted herself to ask, “Have you heard of zuh Bauhaus, Mrs. Onassis?”
“Oh, Mrs. Albers, I have, and you just can’t possibly imagine what an honor it is to meet you!”
WHEN ANNI DIED, I phoned Maximilian right away. He expressed sadness, but we agreed that she had outlived herself. He would not be able to attend the funeral scheduled two days hence, he told me.
I knew, but he did not, that he was not mentioned in Anni’s will. Except for some of Josef’s paintings that she left to her brother and to the children of her late sister—a gesture she decided on in spite of their having nothing more than polite interest in the art she and Josef made, but that was meaningful now that Josef’s art had significant financial currency—she left everything to the foundation that was to continue their legacy. Besides, had she included Maximilian in her will, it would have suggested that her material wealth mattered to him. It was vital for her to maintain the idea that the intense love between her and the younger actor/director was based on purer, less worldly concerns.
As the executor of Anni Albers’s estate, I decided to send Maximilian two personal objects. One was a black cashmere scarf, very much his style, which I found among her possessions. Another was her gray Parker fountain pen, which was at her bedside, and which she had used for years, even when her hand trembled so severely that she needed me to hold it to guide her to make important signatures.
I wrote him a slightly smarmy, sanctimonious letter explaining the meaning of the objects and what they acknowledged about his and Anni’s personal connection. My secretary, who always suspected Maximilian of the worst, was delighted to send the package.
A few days later, Maximilian phoned, sounding irate. “Is this it? Is this all I get from Anni?”
“Yes, Maximilian.” I followed Anni’s cue in being among the only people close to him not to call him “Max.” “I thought you would be touched to have them.”
“Is there nothing more? She left me nothing more?”
I explained that Anni had left everything to the Albers Foundation, and I reminded him of how generous she had been to him in the past, giving him such wonderful paintings, even giving a splendid oil on paper to his stepson after he married Natasha, the lovely woman he met when he was shooting a film in Moscow a few years earlier.
“A foundation! A foundation! Motherwell had a foundation too, and Renate [Ponsold, Motherwell’s widow] was saying what a problem it could be. What about people? What about friends?”
He then calmed down, and told me, with the most ironic laugh, that the scarf was something he had given Josef many years earlier.
A FEW DAYS LATER, Maximilian’s sister, the actress Maria Schell, phoned. I had met her on various occasions with Anni, and, except for the time when Maria had insisted on deferential treatme
nt at the opening of the Josef Albers Museum in his hometown of Bottrop in 1983, we had always gotten along well. In Bottrop, my issues with Maria had made Maximilian so furious, that, in front of Anni in her elegant room at the Schlosshugenpoet, a luxurious small country house hotel where we were all staying in nearby Essen, he and I nearly came to blows. What I remember most about the occasion is that as Maximilian and I were boiling over and looked as if we might start throwing right hooks, Anni looked more engaged than at any time during the inaugural festivities. In fact, I had rarely seen her as excited.
I was remembering that episode when I heard Maria on the phone after Anni’s death. For, as she had when she explained why she needed the mayor’s car at her beck and call in Bottrop, she again delivered a tremendous performance. She consoled me with incredible warmth, saying she knew how close Anni and I had been, and how much I must be feeling, and how wonderful I had been to her, adding, “But of course, dear Nick, she is now in another world, and must be serene there.”
Then, suddenly, Maria’s voice changed completely. Normally very deep, it went up an octave, and she had a new animation. “Did she really leave Maxy nothing? Nothing more?”
I explained to her, as I had to him.
“But he was so devoted to her. For so long. And you know, he has had financial setbacks. Even a great actor cannot always afford to direct his own films.”
The call quickly wound its way to conclusion, once Maria recognized that Anni’s will was inviolate.
IN WEIMAR OR DESSAU, who would ever have imagined any of this?
4
What the Bauhauslers did was for all times, but the world in which they did it was unlike any other one in history.
In 1939, Sebastian Haffner—a pseudonym used by the writer whose real name was Raimund Pretzel—completed a memoir that serves as a contemporaneous account of German life as viewed by someone who suffered no direct threat from the Third Reich. He was not a Jew, a homosexual, a Gypsy, a modernist, a Communist, a Socialist, or a member of any other minority at risk, but he still recognized the total transition of German culture during the years when the Bauhaus flourished and then ceased to exist.
When Haffner’s son, Oliver Pretzel, translated and published this unknown memoir shortly after his father’s death in 1999, he opened it with a quotation from Goethe, Weimar’s most heroic figure, its guiding light even when the Bauhaus was started there a century after the poet’s heyday: “Germany is nothing, each individual German is everything.”6 The Bauhaus was conceived with the intention not only of making that statement true, but of expanding it to include non-Germans who were present at a school funded by the German state—much as the Bauhaus’s foes opposed that idea of allowing students and faculty of other nationalities to be there.
What was happening in Germany, however, can hardly be called “nothing” in its impact on the Bauhaus. The extremes to which civilization had moved, the economic situation and the zeitgeist, sparked and fueled the school at the beginning, then caused its demise.
The conditions Haffner describes as being prevalent in the early 1920s give a sense of the world of which Gropius was in some ways a part, and against which, in other ways, he reacted. Haffner characterizes the Germans of that epoque as having
those characteristics that are so strange and incomprehensible in the eyes of the world, and so different from what used to be thought of as the German character: the uncurbed, cynical imagination, the nihilistic pleasure in the impossible for its own sake, and the energy that has become an end in itself. …
No other nation has experienced anything comparable to the events of 1923 in Germany. All nations went through the Great War, and most of them have also experienced revolutions, social crises, strikes, redistribution of wealth, and currency devaluation.
None but Germany has undergone the fantastic, grotesque extreme of all of these together; none has experienced the gigantic, carnival dance of death, the unending, bloody Saturnalia, in which not only money but all standards lost their value. The year 1923 prepared Germany not specifically for Nazism, but for any fantastic adventure.7
The Bauhaus was one such adventure. It took place, however, in the context of another societal change that would have far greater impact—Nazism—which, although its roots went back in time, gained steam the same year of Gropius’s great Bauhaus Exhibition. As Haffner recorded, “That year gave birth to its lunatic aspects: the cool madness, the arrogant, unscrupulous, blind resolve to achieve the impossible, the principle that ‘might is right’ and ‘ “impossible” is not in our vocabulary.’ “8
SEBASTIAN HAFFNER describes the spring of 1933 in Berlin. The conditions under which Mies and the other remaining faculty members chose to close the Bauhaus, as the school struggled to keep going in its final shell, were such that most people were
permanently occupied and distracted by an unending sequence of celebrations, ceremonies, and national festivities. It started with a huge victory celebration before the elections on March 4. … There were mass parades, fireworks, drums, bands, and flags all over Germany, Hitler’s voice over thousands of loudspeakers, oaths and vows. …
A week later Hindenburg abolished the Weimar national flag, which was replaced by the swastika banner and a black, white, and red “temporary national flag.” …
The colossal emptiness and lack of meaning of these never-ending events was by no means unintentional. The population should become used to cheering and jubilation, even when there was no visible reason for it. It was reason enough that people who distanced themselves too obviously—sshh!—were daily and nightly tortured to death with steel whips and electric drills. Better to celebrate, howl with the wolves, “Heil, Heil!” Besides, people began to enjoy doing so. The weather in March 1933 was glorious. Was it not wonderful to celebrate in the spring sunshine, in squares decked with nags?9
The Bauhauslers who chose not to be part of this were exceptionally fortunate. Almost all of them made it out of Germany.
THE CLASS ISSUES and the economic situation were part of the picture for all of these artists.
This came to mind when, while I was working on this text, I encountered, on the platform of a train station, the brother of a friend of mine from college. I had not seen him since my friend’s twenty-first birthday party, but I was delighted to recognize the person I will rename “Ashton Somerset.” Among other things, he was a perfect exemplar of a patrician American type that fascinated Anni, with whom I had a quick mental dialogue. I was also glad to see him because I had a vivid memory of Ashton’s father having been one of those rare people who responded heart and soul to Paul Klee’s work.
Ashton now had distinguished white hair. In his elegant, long, black cashmere Chesterfield topcoat and paisley silk scarf tied like an ascot, he resembled a character in a J. P. Marquand novel, which seemed just right for someone to run into waiting for the train from New Haven to Boston. I asked what he was now doing, and he explained that he was an investment banker. I then jumped to tell him something I thought he would enjoy hearing, which was that in 1967 his brother had arranged for me to go with their father to the Klee retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and that it had been an incredible pleasure for me at age nineteen. His father was as alive to Klee’s work as anyone I knew at the time.
I also told him how much I had enjoyed going to their family house in Washington and seeing the many Klees his father had acquired over the years. His father, I said, was the rare thing. He had pointed out to me details in the work that only a true aficionado would recognize, and spoke with me about the work with infectious enthusiasm. Klee’s world was unlike anyone else’s, and Ashton’s father was clearly among the rare people who ventured into its depths.
I knew that Mr. Somerset had since died, because I had seen that some of these Klees had been sold from his estate, in 2007, at Christie’s. “Yes,” Ashton said with a grin, “he had a lot of Klees. And we did very well with several of them at auction.”
�
�You know, your father was different from other collectors. He had such passion, and because, if I remember correctly, he collected only two things—Klee paintings and Rembrandt etchings—he had an unparalleled eye.”
“Yes, he was a wise collector, because the ones we sold fetched, well, you know, between three and four times their reserve price. There are twelve grandchildren, so this is a very good thing in our lives.”
“It’s all so strange,” I said. I tried to sound lighthearted, not to pontificate, but could not help continuing. “I have just been writing about Klee, at a moment in 1923 when he and Kandinsky went to a café in Weimar, each to have a cup of coffee, nothing more, but then went home without having ordered, because they could not afford the two cups.”
“Yes, we were very happy with what Christie’s did with the work, and the timing was just right—before the current downturn.”
In a way, this could have been the 1920s.
5
Toward the end of September 2008, I was riding my bicycle on the Avenue Gabriel in Paris one morning when a movement on the other side of the road caught my eye. The sun was bright, but the air crisp and cool; it was one of those days when every sight sparkled. A powerfully built black man, about age forty, was unloading cargo from the back of a large truck. To shoulder his load, he had his torso twisted, with his forward shoulder lowered. His knees were bent, and his weight was clearly concentrated in his legs rather than his back. The way he was managing the large, and presumably heavy, wooden box showed a complete knowledge of his methods, a consummate grace and professionalism.
As I pedaled along the tree-lined avenue, past the spectacular and ornate structures that line it, I realized that this was what the Bauhaus intended. The goal of its guiding lights was to get us to see things, to notice what is allegedly ordinary but is in fact totally extraordinary. My mind flashed to an occasion thirty-three years earlier when I was driving Josef and Anni Albers to New York. Josef was obsessed with a structure then going up alongside the Cross County Parkway, because of the way it was being sheathed from the top down once the scaffolding was in place. Other people I knew would have focused on the traffic jam we were entering, or might have had their minds far from where we were; he was riveted to what was right there, and to what many people would not have perceived.
The Bauhaus Group Page 65