14

All the Bauhaus books say that Anni was the director of the weaving workshop in Dessau after Gunta Stolzl left in 1930. When I first asked Anni about this, in the early 1970s, she said that if she had not read it, she would have had no memory of having headed the workshop. “My main function was the continuation of my own work.”

The weaving workshop at the Dessau Bauhaus, 1928. While Anni Albers eventually became its director, she minimized the significance of the position and even pretended that she did not remember having held it.

What did this mean? Was it a slight game, to make clear that titles and official status meant nothing to the Alberses, that she and Josef were above such things? Or was it a reflection of the truth—that what she really cared about most was her own art? She then explained that the point of the Bauhaus was to leave students “largely on their own,” and that she was “simply an acting director who tried to interfere only when necessary.” So she remembered after all.

She had been toying with the facts to make her point. Anni manipulated the telling of her story, and that of the Bauhaus, as carefully as she interlaced threads. Her goal was to belittle titles, and to make clear how much more important official designations sounded than they actually were. This was of vital importance to both Alberses, who felt that designations like “Dr.” before the name of someone who had a PhD, or a medal on one’s lapel or framed certificates on the wall, had little to do with real intelligence or skill. Consistent with that belief, when an honorary doctorate was conferred upon Anni by the Royal College of Art, amid much fanfare in a long ceremony at the Royal Albert Hall—during which Sir Jocelyn Stevens, the director of the Royal College, said it should now be renamed “Royal Albers Hall”—she told me, after I wheeled her out while the attendees applauded her in a standing ovation, that it had been “three of the most boring hours” she had ever spent. On the other hand, after Maximilian Schell introduced her to H.R.H. Duke Franz of Bavaria at a social event in Munich, her face lit up with a smile as she told me about it—but part of her delight was that she was among those who were invited to call him “Franzy,” and because he knew about modern art and asked her about her work.

Nicholas Fox Weber and Anni Albers at the Royal College of Art graduation ceremony, London, June 29, 1990. Anni enjoyed going to London to receive the college’s Gold Medal, its highest level of honorary doctorate, but considered the ceremony “completely boring” and much preferred her visit to the British Museum, where she appeared to communicate directly with the Minoan art.

Once she had her diploma, Anni was, apart from this stint as director, not connected officially with the Bauhaus, although she attended many activities as Josef’s wife. With her large loom at home, spending time there rather than in the weaving workshop, she was not as taxed by the move to Berlin as were people more directly connected to the school. And she did not have a salary to lose, as Josef did.

Otti Berger, 1927–28. Photograph by Lucia Moholy-Nagy. Berger was a favorite of Anni’s among her fellow weavers; they often went to Berlin together. Berger’s death in a concentration camp marked Anni forever after.

This was when her family helped pay the rent in an apartment that delighted her and Josef in one of the recently developed Berlin neighborhoods. If others felt the pain of exile after the brief idyll in Dessau, and were sad to leave behind the school building and the masters’ houses, Anni was excited to be back in the capital and to put white linoleum on the floor.

Berlin, she told me, was the way it appears in Cabaret. Although she had seen only vignettes from the live and film versions, she had read Christopher Isherwood’s stories on which it was based and thought them a perfect vision of the world that fascinated and appalled her in a society falling apart. Anni, however, could not bear most books or films set in the Nazi period. She found the sound of German military marches intolerable. Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl, she explained, was simply too painful to read.

THEN, ONE DAY, Anni began to talk to me about Otti Berger. Berger was among her favorites of the other weavers. Before Anni was married, she often took Berger to Berlin for weekends with her family, and since Josef liked her as well, the three of them occasionally did things together.

Berger, Anni said, lost her life at Auschwitz. Anni managed to tell me this without using the word “Jewish,” which never came to her lips easily, but she didn’t need to. I had never seen her look so sad.

She then told me that Berger had given her a jacket that was true folk art, made of traditional material from Berger’s native Yugoslavia. Anni had saved it. One day she would have the strength to show it to me, she said, but at the moment she could not face it.