Born: Etel Fodor, December 28, 1905, Zagreb, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Croatia)
Died: August 13, 2005, Wynberg, Cape Town, South Africa
Matriculated: 1928
Locations: Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany, South Africa
When, at the age of seventy-five, Etel Mittag-Fodor decided to write her memoirs, she could not have foreseen that she would be granted a further twenty-five fulfilling years, surrounded by her family. In leaving behind her autobiography, published posthumously, she not only gave her grandchildren the story of her century-long life, but provided a key resource for understanding everyday life at the Dessau Bauhaus. If Ise Gropius captured the bird’s-eye view of the Bauhaus leadership in her diary, Mittag-Fodor—almost as if in response—provided a kind of view from below; the students’ perspective of young people amidst an atmosphere of change, who believed in a better future and their own contribution to making the world a better place. Although her name is now primarily associated with this valuable chronicle, as a photographer, she also gave us some of the most poignant snapshots of life at the Bauhaus. Photography was her passion, and Walter Peterhans’s workshop was long her cherished home, until she had a falling out with the workshop director and left the Bauhaus.
Fodor, the daughter of a high-ranking postal official of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, spent her childhood in Budapest and learned German from her nanny. Even as a teenager, she loved drawing and book illustration, and designed embroidery patterns for her mother. After completing her high school examination (Abitur) and an educational trip through Italy, she took private drawing lessons with the famed Hungarian Art Nouveau artist Álmos Jaschik before being accepted to study at the Vienna Federal Training and Research Institute of Graphic Arts. She received a scholarship and enrolled in the photography and commercial art departments in 1925, and also worked part-time in the photographic studio of her landlady’s daughter. Even more successful were her designs for decorative fabrics, with which she won several small industrial competitions; they even earned her a job offer as a textile prints designer at a clothing factory. Instead, she decided to apply to the College of Graphics and Book Design in Leipzig, where, in September 1928, she was admitted for a trial semester. However, her life took an unexpected turn when by chance she met the son of a business associate of her father’s—a Bauhaus student—who persuaded her to transfer to the nearby but far more modern Bauhaus.
Fodor enrolled in the Bauhaus for the 1928–1929 winter semester and was impressed by the open-minded atmosphere and harmonious coexistence of masters and students. Although her continued interest in fabrics drew her to the looms, after taking Josef Albers’s preliminary course (Vorkurs), she opted for another workshop, because only women worked in the weaving class. “It was not easy to have a girlfriend, you soon came under the suspicion that you were a Lesbian. This was one of the reasons, that although I was always drawn to this craft, I foolishly did not consider it that time.” Instead, she enrolled in the printing workshop, where, conversely, she was the only woman.
The regular care packages she received from home were just one of the reasons that Fodor was popular among her fellow students; a large ration of goose liver was the beginning of her friendship with her school friend Ernst Mittag, whom she eventually married in 1930. “I was very much taken with Ernst by the end of the semester. He was an excellent companion, had great physical strength, particularly compared with mine.” The couple had what would later be referred to as an “open relationship,” and their mutual tolerance formed the basis of a marriage that would last more than fifty years. It was Mittag who introduced her to the leftist Bauhaus student group, which also opposed overly authoritarian structures within the art school itself.
Etel Mittag-Fodor, Albert Mentzel and Lotte Rothschild, c. 1930
Etel Mittag-Fodor, Portrait of Ernst Mittag sleeping, 1930
The director of the photography workshop, Peterhans—whom she described as being “a difficult person, moody, unpredictable, with neurotic tendencies”—accused her of not having taken her photographs herself. According to her own account, she defended herself against this accusation by exhibiting her work, to which she invited both masters and student representatives. Although she came out on top of this dispute, she left the Bauhaus in April 1930. Her parents had called her to return home, in order to earn her own living. After marrying Mittag, she temporarily returned to Dessau as a guest student in 1932. Meanwhile, she worked as a photographer providing photo essays for Willi Münzenberg’s Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung (AIZ)—the famed communist illustrated magazine—from locations such as Moscow, where she documented former Bauhaus director Hannes Meyer’s group.
Etel Mittag-Fodor, Untitled, photographic study with toy pistol, sugar cubes, and glass, 1928
Beginning in 1933, the couple was involved in the anti-fascist resistance movement, and was repeatedly threatened with arrest. A Roman Catholic, Mittag-Fodor was declared persona non grata by those in power because of her Jewish heritage and so robbed of any possibility of employment. Her architect husband, on the other hand, could always find work in Nazi Germany’s booming construction industry. In 1938, after the birth of their first son, Thomas, the couple decided to immigrate to South Africa, where Mittag-Fodor was initially able to work as a photographer. But with the outbreak of war, photographic materials were rationed, and dire financial need forced her to sell her darkroom equipment. Subsequently, Mittag-Fodor worked as a translator for the South African Board of Censors until her second son, Michael, was born in 1940, after which she helped out in her husband’s architectural firm. In the 1950s, she began selling her own wine from grapes she cultivated on a farm, and in 1964, rediscovered weaving. She became a member of the National Guild of Weaving and taught courses in “creative textiles” at the nearby Frank Joubert Art Center. In 1984, her wall hangings were shown in a monographic exhibition for the first time; she did not sell them but instead gave them as gifts to friends and family.
Even in their old age, the couple never ceased striving for a better and fairer world: Mittag-Fodor volunteered to supervise the weaving workshop of a Jewish institution for people with intellectual disabilities, and both supported the anti-apartheid movement. Because Mittag was also still a member of the Communist Party, they were placed under surveillance, banned from traveling for years, and not issued visas. Mittag-Fodor’s 1928 photographic still life with a revolver and sugar cubes can be seen as an allegory for her life story. As one of the Bauhaus’s longest lived students, it is a story throughout which intimidation and persecution were consistent threads, but so too were play, creativity, and an ironic perspective. It can also be seen as a representation of the familiar pattern of an artistic talent that—in the shadow of history and a spouse’s career—was too-often left untapped.