In her new life in Weimar, Anni was not yet among those who wore all white. She told me that then, as always, she “purposely avoided an arty look,” and sewed her own dresses, which were mostly in a kimono style, with white collar and cuffs that may have been an unconscious reference to what she and Lotte wore to the Berlin opera as little girls. Tall and thin, with a large nose and fiercely intelligent face, she had thick long brown hair usually rolled up in a comb; she was, in vintage photographs, a striking beauty, but neither girlish nor pretty, as she claimed to wish she had been. Rather, even as others admired her appearance, which was that of an Egyptian deity, she was uncomfortable with it. Her greatest issue was that she felt that her coloring and nose revealed that she was Jewish, which, while she never tried to conceal it, made her self-conscious.
Anni called her Jewishness “that stone around my neck” and referred to other Jews as having “that dark side.” It was never clear if she disliked being Jewish because she considered her Ashkenazi origins the source of her appearance, which she disliked aesthetically, or didn’t like her nose because, in a world where antisemitism was so pervasive, it identified her as Jewish, but what is certain is that her own facial type and Jewishness were intertwined in her thoughts. And while she considered her husband a handsome man and attractive to ladies, she thought of herself as an ugly duckling.
Until she learned about it in the 1980s, Anni seemed unaware that a century earlier her mother’s family, the Ullsteins—owners of the largest newspaper and magazine publishing firm in the world—had had a mass family baptism, in which some eighty-five of them became Protestant on the same day. Of course she knew she had been confirmed at Berlin’s fashionable Karl Wilhelm Gedenkniskirche—she often referred to this—but, as she explained, she was “in the Hitler sense Jewish.” She blamed herself for what that fact imposed on Josef in the 1930s; the Ullsteins’ attempt to be thought of as Christian had been, like everything she associated with her mother, ineffectual.
It was only when I was researching this book that I learned that a census had been taken at the Bauhaus in 1923 to determine the percentage of Jews there, and hence to refute the charge of the Weimar citizenry that the school had too many “non-Germans.” This knowledge helped me understand the discomfort Anni had felt almost from the moment she had begun her new life. She had been more comfortable as an assimilated Berlin Jew, as she was in her childhood, than she was at the Bauhaus, where she was identified as Jewish.
Anni often told me with pride that being officially Protestant, and having produced her confirmation certificate, enabled her to secure burial plots in the oldest section of the town cemetery in Orange, Connecticut. She and Josef preferred this precinct of the cemetery, with its simple gravestones, to the newer part where Catholics were obliged to go, and where the marble monuments were too ornate. Anni had loved it when at this late stage of their lives, her background gave Josef something he wanted.
Yet her ambivalence about her background was clear. Anni’s most magnificent artwork ever would be a memorial to the six million victims of the Nazi concentration camps. With interwoven threads, she succeeded in evoking swarms of humanity—a vast population of vibrant, connected lives—so that the mélange of black and white and gray fibers becomes audible. Six Prayers, like a Torah cover and ark curtain Anni also wove, has elements that resemble written Hebrew (see color plate 29). It is a deeply moving work, charged with life yet somber, inspiring hours of contemplation and deep emotional awareness.
Anni once tried to talk with me about Anne Frank, whom she resembled physically, and who was also born on June 12, exactly thirty years after Anni. Suddenly she could not go on. Anne Frank’s fate was one of those subjects she was incapable of discussing—as unfathomable as the construction of the concentration camp at Buchenwald, only five miles from Weimar, where the gas chambers went into operation twelve years after the Bauhaus had moved on. When she told me of her parents’ ship needing to dock in Mexico because U.S. ports were no longer open to these incursions of refugees from Nazism, she also had to stop speaking. When Anni learned, in the 1970s, that Marcel Breuer had totally concealed his Judaism at the Bauhaus, and officially had himself made un-Jewish in a government office in Weimar, she was as appalled as she was fascinated. After Josef’s death, two Bottrop city officials came to Connecticut to propose building an Albers museum in his natal city. The smiling bureaucrats had been in the house for scarcely five minutes when she told them, “Sie wissen dass ich jud-ishe bin [You know that I am Jewish].” It was possibly the only time in her life that she uttered these words with such clarity, instead of waffling by saying, “My family was, although only in the Hitler sense of the word, Jewish.” The German officials told her that they already knew; she was too smart to be surprised.
She was rarely one to gloss over the truth, and she came from a world where being Jewish was significant. However much she disparaged the idea, and reminded me and others that she had never in her life actually been inside a synagogue, even though she had executed textile commissions for two of them, Anni always acknowledged that she belonged to a Jewish family on her mother’s side—even though they had converted and their money embarrassed her. She preferred her father’s less wealthy but more stylish and aristocratic family, although their name, which was of course also hers—Fleischmann—appalled her, as much because it was a badge of Jewishness as because it meant “meat man,” or butcher, but here, too, there was denial.
What she wanted in life, however, had nothing to do with any of that. She hoped, from the moment she got to the Bauhaus, to make art and design the central issues of her life and thus obliterate the issues of background. What mattered was devotion to art; her spiritual ancestors were the artisans of ancient Peru and the anonymous builders of Gothic cathedrals, and her current family of soulmates included other advocates of modernism and good design. For Annelise Else Frieda Fleischmann, even before she was Anni Albers, these were the real aristocracy of mankind. But, to her dismay, this new life she had chosen made her more, not less, aware of her background. There was no getting around it: to Gropius and Kandinsky, if not to Klee, and to the government authorities who founded the Bauhaus, and, eventually, to the bureaucrats who closed it, the distinction between being “Jewish” and being “German,” whatever one’s religious beliefs, was a pivotal issue.
For all of its idealism and emphasis on design for all of humanity, the Bauhaus, both because of the accusations that the German nation was funding “foreigners” and because of attitudes ingrained in German society, did not allow those attitudes of background to fade.
WHEN ANNI WAS in her early nineties, almost entirely bedridden, and reduced to very limited conversation, I once walked into her room and the first thing she said to me was “You’re so lucky.”
“Yes, I am, Anni, in many ways,” I responded.
She continued, “They can’t tell.”
I pretended not to understand what she was saying, and asked, “They can’t tell what?”
She explained that I did not seem obviously Jewish—either by appearance or by name. “No one would know you have that dark side.” She knew I did not consider it anything to be ashamed of, but she had been lying in bed ruminating about her own Jewishness for hours, and what had come out were thoughts that had haunted her for a lifetime, and that her life in artistic milieus had intensified rather than diminished.