It has the makings of a scene in an old-fashioned Hollywood movie. The rich girl from Berlin, having insisted on going to a new and experimental art school in spite of her parents’ protests that she should simply marry and run a household even if she painted on the side, brings home her impoverished artist boyfriend. He comes from a city no one had ever heard of or would want to go to, and he is significantly older than she is. She presents him to her mother and father and younger siblings in their elegant flat in the finest quarter of the cosmopolitan metropolis. In the film version, the mother and father, even the sister and brother, would be disapproving at best. His family would be delighted at their son’s ascent into money and the higher ranks of German society; hers would fight the match tooth and nail.
With Anni and Josef, that was the scenario, but Hollywood didn’t write the script. One day I was sitting at their kitchen table with the two of them when Anni recalled, “You know, when I brought Josef home for the first time, the parents liked him so much, right from the start, that they said to him, ‘Our Anke is so difficult: if you can’t deal with her, you can always come home to us.’” Annelise’s teenage brother, twenty-one years younger than Josef, instantly had a new hero; her sister approved equally of the young man she thought looked like “a beautiful Memling.”
By then Josef had been offered a teaching position, and Annelise had made great strides in the Bauhaus weaving workshop, constructing innovative wall hangings and subtle upholstery materials that established her as one of the leading textile artists at the school, where weaving was one of the most important activities. Her parents were, astonishingly, very content with the progress of the family rebel.
Annelise Fleischmann, ca. 1923. Photo by Lucia Moholy-Nagy. Taken shortly after the future Anni Albers arrived at the Bauhaus, this photo shows her dressed in the white collar and cuffs she favored at the time. When she saw this image later in life, however, she compared it to Whistler’s Mother and, saying she hated her haircut in it, wanted it banished.
THE ALBERSES OFTEN REFERRED to the warmth between Anni’s family and Josef, but never alluded to Josef’s family’s take on the match. It was only when the correspondence with Perdekamp emerged that I learned about their reaction. Anni’s family was Jewish, although both sides had converted to Protestantism a generation back. As Catholics, the Albers family thought the conversion only made matters worse.
In 1925, on a summer holiday in Val Gardena, which had been in an Austrian province until 1919 but was now in Italy, Josef wrote Franz Perdekamp:
It is wonderful here.
I knew nothing. Anni made all the plans, packed everything, got the visas and the tickets and I was just taken along. And will continue to be taken along. We have been here nearly 14 days and will stay a few days more. Then its off further south, maybe a long way. I am already much restored. What with the high-altitude air and the wine and the sun and the tanned skin. Selva is 1,600m [4,800 ft.] high and once we climbed very high all on our own to the great Schierspitze—2,600m [7,800 ft.] but we had to turn back 20 m [60 ft.] below the peak, I could not drag her any further. The paths are glorious here and one can quickly get into the high country.—In Dessau all is well up to the point that Anni thinks the town is ugly. It is frequently very dusty and the many factories often spoil the air. But we hope we will succeed there, though even there our opponents are already very active.
Nevertheless, the new buildings have been unanimously approved for 1¼ million [marks] and building work has already started, though unfortunately interrupted by strikes.
I shall not come to the West in the near future. Our interracial marriage is still too fresh for me to show my face.
It is quite all right to let people know about my marriage, I have written about it to acquaintances myself. At that time I did want to keep my marriage plans quiet. It seems that at home they do not like to talk about my bad match. And my sister Lore is angry because I didn’t tell her beforehand. Well let her be, I am well and I didn’t want to hurt other people. In spite of everything, I am not angry with anyone and wish them all well. That I may not now have as many opportunities to express this wish changes nothing.
In winter I shall set up a new glass workshop in the new building. I am looking forward to the new enterprise very much. I am confident about the future and hope it is the same for you. Give my love to Friedel and the children.
And though Anni is still asleep I send her love too.
Your Jupp1
While the Alberses never mentioned to me that Josef kept their relationship and then their marriage secret from his family until well after the fact, Anni did tell me that she met Josef’s father and stepmother only once. The occasion was an awkward visit to Bottrop, during which Josef’s father drank a lot. And although they remained on polite terms with his two sisters lifelong, Anni suspected one of them of being a Nazi. That it was a “Mischehe” (the word Josef used for an “interracial” or mixed marriage), and therefore took him even further from them than had his move to the Bauhaus, was his family’s point of view to the end.
Josef’s way of handling their feelings about the match—without disputation, keeping his distance—was in character for him, given his goals of balance and temperance, studiously achieved, in human relationships as in art. Anni, however, wore her passions on her sleeve. She was totally, consumingly in love with Josef, not only with the man, but with his reverence for visual art and his priorities concerning all that he did; at the same time, she disdained his family and the world he came from, which had none of his style and placed no value on what were, for her and Josef, top priorities. She was also alternately condescending and indifferent to the world she came from. She disliked her family’s aesthetic taste—an apartment with raised paneling, ornate cornices, and Biedermeyer furniture—and, although she enjoyed her father’s companionship, she resented, right up until the end of her life, her mother. This was, and remains, strange to me, for Anni by then had achieved so much that made her unlike her mother that she could have afforded to recognize Mrs. Fleischmann’s charms at no expense to her own self-definition. Anni’s younger sister and brother found their mother amusing and warm. In addition, Toni Ullstein Fleischmann kept a personal journal describing the family’s escape from Nazism and flight to America, which shows great intelligence and depth of feeling, as well as rare humor under dire circumstances, yet all Anni ever said about her mother was that she was “not interesting with her bourgeois values” and was “fat.”
The connection with Anni’s parents, in spite of all of her mixed feelings about them, remained important to both Josef and Anni. For one thing, there was the simple fact of money. Without her family, in this period of tremendous inflation, when Josef was on a meager salary, there would have been no holiday in Val Gardena. That Anni had taken full responsibility for organizing it and was so good-spirited about a mountain trip was remarkable; the reason Josef had to pull her along the trail was that she had a genetic illness that affected her leg muscles and the formation of her feet. But she was one of those people determined to live to the fullest, to ignore her physical disability as best she could.
Siegfried and Toni Fleischmann were, in 1925, delighted to give the young couple a wedding at a Catholic church near their flat, with an elaborate lunch afterward at Berlin’s finest hotel, the Adlon. They saw Josef as a stabilizing force for the daughter whose passions they could hardly fathom. Their son-in-law was rare in matching her devotion to artistic modernism while, at the same time, being down-to-earth, good-humored, highly intelligent, and presentable. That he was from another stratum of German society mattered far less.
While Anni was uncomfortable about the milieu in which she had been raised, Josef was enthralled by it. The world of the Ullsteins, even more than that of Anni’s father’s family, was as new to him as the Bauhaus was. He once told me, as if he were pronouncing a miracle, that during World War I, when most people in Germany did not have milk, Anni’s maternal uncles “had crème fraiche.” Anni was palpably annoyed at his delight in her family’s extravagance, but to the poor child of Bottrop it was immensely significant, and he was unembarrassed by his fascination with Anni’s family’s wealth and prominence.
No one went to the Bauhaus to get rich, but—as was equally evident with Gropius, Klee, and Kandinsky—in the volatile financial situation of Germany in the 1920s, money was an issue to be confronted on a daily basis. Josef had greatly improved his lot. And Annelise, by marrying someone who was both indigent and strong-willed, had satisfied her desire for something different from the wastefulness and fluff of her upbringing.
Annelise Else Frieda Fleischmann now became Anni Albers, replacing what was baroque and flowery with a trim reduction. On all fronts, she preferred concision and opted for the streamlined over the frilly. It was one of her ways of becoming modern, similar to what another young Berlin woman—almost her exact contemporary, although in most ways her polar opposite—did by shortening the Helene Amalie Bertha that preceded Riefenstahl to the crisply effective Leni. Both of these women now sported short bobs rather than long tresses, and favored tailored jackets over lavish dresses; clean lines and compactness were the order of the day. There was no better exemplar of the lean and trim, of concentrated thinking and a diamond-hard strength, than the man Anni had chosen to marry.