1.
My wife and I moved to a smaller house recently, at a time when we could foresee both of our sons leaving for college and taking the first tentative steps in their own lives. We had to dig down into the strata of belongings in the attic, sorting out what to keep and what we no longer needed. Neither of us recognized a faded blue garment bag, wedged in among quilts and Halloween costumes. It turned out to contain my serape, which I had acquired long ago on a teenage trip to Mexico. I hadn’t seen the thing in thirty years. When I opened the stiff folds and slipped it on, poking my head through the slit in the center, we both laughed. I looked a bit like Clint Eastwood playing the silent man in those Italian Westerns set in Mexico.
Woven by hand of scratchy wool, the serape is simple in design. Three earth colors—gray, brown, and large expanses of off-white—are arranged in traditional Mayan motifs. There is a flourish of stepped patterning around the central opening, like tentative plans for a ziggurat. Along the base with its knotted fringes is the ancient interlocking pattern, which also appears on Greek vases and Navajo blankets, known as the meander, or Greek key.
I could dimly remember buying the serape, bargaining in that shameless, exuberant way in which tourists negotiate what they consider a good price. I conceived of myself as poor in those days, the voluntary poverty of a privileged American, and I was on a strange pilgrimage of my own devising. I carried almost nothing in my blue backpack; except for books and the barest essentials, I traveled light. The serape was part of that journey, like a pilgrim’s staff or a scallop shell. I bought it in Mitla, the spectacular ruins up above Oaxaca, where stones are arranged—woven, really—in a complicated mosaic fretwork resembling the geometric patterns on my serape.
I traveled alone to Mexico during the summer of 1973, when I was about to turn twenty and had spent a formless and frustrating year at a college in Indiana. My father asked me at the time why I had chosen that particular destination. I told him, with that confident manner that we never fully recover later in life, that I was going to Mexico to discover suffering. “You don’t need to look for suffering,” my father said. “Suffering will find you.”
At the time, I assumed that this was the kind of paternal advice, drawn from Shakespeare or the Bible, that my father was accustomed to giving. “Work while it is day,” he would say. “The night cometh when no man can work.”
I wasn’t the only teenager on the road that summer; my whole generation seemed to be in transit, looking for that utopia that had seemed in reach during the 1960s but was quickly fading. I myself wasn’t looking for utopia—just the opposite. I hitched a ride as far as Albuquerque from friends in Indiana; they were driving on to California, trying to extend the endless Summer of Love. In the Albuquerque bus station, a desperate place, I remember staring at a woman in tight shorts and a bikini top, whose exposed stomach was a crater of concentric scars, as though a meteorite had landed there.
During the long, clattering bus ride through Chihuahua and the night, the passengers would wake to floodlit towns and sweet drinks handed through the window by hawkers. Then more night, and after what seemed like many days and many nights, the arrival in the smog and traffic of Mexico City. The local headquarters of the American Friends Service Committee was my base there: a dormitory of bunks and a distant, beak-nosed man named Vaughan Peacock. It was Peacock, a project manager who had worked throughout Mexico, who told me how to get to San Damián Texoloc, a remote village in the small and desperately impoverished state of Tlaxcala.
I had an invitation from a family there. A man from my college had worked in Texoloc with the American Friends Service Committee many years earlier, trying to introduce beekeeping as a cash crop, along with more sanitary practices in the handling of dairy cows. (Neither practice had taken root.) He had remained in touch with a family there, whose name was Martínez, and they offered to put me up for a few weeks in exchange for work.
And so it was that I found myself in the brown-roofed village of Texoloc, in the high country between the sheltering volcano of La Malinche and the more distant and imposing Iztaccíhuatl. It was dry up there, all arroyos and cactus, and a spindly river that threaded between the village and the wilted cornfields—la milpa. There were jeweled lizards, slow-moving and poisonous, amid the stones and crags by the alfalfa fields. I lived with the Martínez family in a small house with a dirt floor and no running water. Scorpions hid in our shoes at night. Across a gravel courtyard was a concrete barn for pigs and chickens.
I liked the family very much. There was Estela, the all-suffering mother, who loved the country life and whose furtive husband had another woman and another family in a neighboring village. Their younger son, Sergio, was my age, and had had a hard time in Mexico City, spending too much money and getting caught up in the urban life. He had become involved in the student riots that swept through the city during the summer of 1968, that near-revolution in which so many students died—no one knew exactly how many. Sergio and I played guitars, and he taught me how to sing sad mariachi tunes: “Volver” and “La Morenita.”
My battered, mustard-colored copy of the poems of Pablo Neruda and César Vallejo, edited by Robert Bly, is a journal of that summer and fall, the margins and flyleaves filled with my own reflections on a single theme. “If you enjoy suffering,” I wrote, “is it still suffering?” Next to lines from Bly’s interview with Neruda—“I was in a very lonely situation. I was in an exciting country which I couldn’t penetrate”—I have written the words “July 15, 1973 Texoloc.” Above the title of one of Vallejo’s poems, “I Am Going to Talk about Hope,” I have written, “Suffering is hope? We will have to look further.”
Did I find the suffering I was looking for? I certainly saw more death in Mexico than I had seen anywhere before. I saw a bleeding pig on the cobblestones of Texoloc, his slashed neck held open by drunken men to keep the blood flowing. I saw corpses by the highway after a traffic accident—though accident seems the wrong word for the random and predictable slaughter on the monotonous death trails between Mexican cities. I heard of a Texoloc man who quarreled with his brother over a woman, so they shot the woman. In the town square, a man with no arms sold breadfruit and mangos. Earlier, before the accident that maimed him, he had sold fireworks.
Mostly, looking back on that summer in Texoloc, I remember learning skills that I haven’t used—couldn’t even imagine using—since.
I learned to cut alfalfa with a sickle, moving down the rows on my hands and knees. Then I fed it to the pigs. As I chopped up the alfalfa with a machete on the bare floor of the pigsty, I felt like the Prodigal Son, muscles aching and blisters on my hands and feet.
I learned to plow behind a mule, with a single-bladed curved plow that snagged in the sullen earth.
I learned to milk a cow by hand. Tío Miguel taught me, all the while making sexually suggestive jokes at my expense. The cow was called La Cubana, and a certain dark-skinned girl I knew, daughter of the vendor with no hands, was also known as La Cubana. Her real name was Elia, and she had the blue eyes of the early French inhabitants of Tlaxcala. Elia and I had led a donkey down to the river one afternoon. We had kissed and made promises that neither of us intended to keep. Somehow the whole village knew of this excursion.
One day, I slaughtered a chicken with a broomstick. I held the chicken upside down by the splayed and knobby feet and placed the broomstick over its neck and placed my feet on either end of the stick and yanked hard on the legs. “Sí, sí!” they told me. “That’s how you kill a chicken.”
What comes back to me now from that sojourn in Mexico is my father’s warning. “You don’t need to look for suffering. Suffering will find you.” I can see now how it rhymes with the remark, attributed to the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.”
I had chosen Mexico as a destination in part because it had nothing to do, as far as I knew, with my family history. It was a place all my own, with hardships that belonged only to me. I could shed the past—how grandiose a nineteen-year-old’s notions!—and start anew. What I didn’t realize then and had no way of knowing (most of it was unknown even to my father) was how deeply Mexico was interwoven, like a red thread, into the white ground of our own family history. Even Trotsky, who was murdered in Mexico, played a small part in our story.
I can see now that I was retracing, in some half-conscious way, earlier journeys, trying to feel between finger and thumb some thread of trauma and survival from those earlier generations. I wanted to know how suffering had found us, and what we had made of it. I wanted to be able to touch it, like the frayed edge of my serape, with its jagged and esoteric key design.
2.
It is an overcast morning in June 1937. The mountains on the horizon are veiled in mist. In the middle distance, a pyramid rises abruptly from the plain. A flight of stone steps leads to the first of five platforms, with a rounded mound looming above them. Three figures are walking toward the side of the pyramid, as though someone—perhaps the photographer—has asked them not to block the view. The figure in the middle is a short, heavyset woman in a dark dress. She leans on a long walking stick, one foot turned inward, as though it is painful for her to walk. Beside her and turned toward her is a tall, stately man in a linen jacket and brimmed hat. Slightly removed from this couple walks a willowy younger woman dressed in a patterned light skirt and darker blouse, a comfortable white hat, and sturdy walking shoes. She moves with a swinging motion, her loose-fitting clothes wafted by a breeze. The contrast between the two women, dark and light, is striking, almost comical.
The three figures are walking along the Avenue of the Dead at Teotihuacán, the pre-Columbian ruins an hour’s drive from Mexico City. They are heading north, toward the Pyramid of the Moon. Behind the pyramid is the upper rim of Cerro Gordo; the apex of the pyramid and the notched summit of the sacred mountain coincide exactly. From the angle at which the photograph is taken, the young woman’s hat and the man’s hat just
touch the top of the mountain range. There is a melancholy feeling to the scene. It looks as though it might rain soon.
The woman with the cane is my great-grandmother, Toni Ullstein Fleischmann. She is accompanied by her husband, Siegfried, and one of her two daughters, the textile artist Anni Albers. The photographer is Anni’s husband, the artist Josef Albers. The stepped platforms of the pyramid resemble his Homage to the Square paintings. Among the iconic images of modern art, these arresting pictures, composed of concentric squares in contrasting colors, were inspired by Mexican adobe architecture, with its bright colors applied to sun-baked clay.
The Alberses, during the summer of 1937, were teaching art at Black Mountain College, the legendary educational experiment in the mountains of North Carolina. They were making their third trip to Mexico since their arrival in the United States in 1933. The Fleischmanns were on vacation, too, from their home in Berlin. They had not seen their daughter Anni in four years. Their younger daughter, Lotte, was back in Berlin. She was, or would be, my grandmother.
3.
On this, their first trip to Mexico, the Fleischmanns traveled in luxury. Siegfried was a purveyor of fine furniture whose clients included a cardinal stationed in Berlin, soon to be named Pius XII; Toni was an heiress—the Ullstein firm, founded by her father and run by her five brothers, was the leading publisher of books and newspapers in the world. The Fleischmanns traveled first class on the Orinoco, with caviar to celebrate the jubilee of the shipping line. Days passed quickly, Toni noted in her journal, with games of shuffleboard on deck, books borrowed from the ship’s library (Toni chose a popular novel about Julius Caesar), and stylish parties—“in the evenings there’s almost always something going on.”
One night there was “a quite charming bock-beer party.” Then came “a fancy-dress ball, quite charming costumes, one little French boy, maybe eight years old, was dressed as Napoleon.” As the ship headed into southern waters, the stewards suddenly donned summer outfits, all in spotless white. On June 13, the Fleischmanns spotted Key West on the starboard side. That night they strolled through the streets of Havana, “all the men in white, the women very elegant, with theatrical hats… For the first time we saw people dancing the rumba.”
Toni was aware, that summer of 1937, that some of her fellow travelers were leaving Europe for other reasons. In first class, she noticed “a few Spanish and other uninteresting little people.” On June 1, she jotted down in her journal the news of “the German bombardment of Spain. Awful.” She was referring to Guernica. On June 2, she noted the contrast between her own opulent mode of travel and those less fortunate: “On one of the third class decks a group of at least thirty people, pitiful individuals, each with a package under the arm, their total belonging.”
If we expect a note of sympathy and self-scrutiny from Toni, we are disappointed. “But on closer inspection,” she writes haughtily, “these people are poor pitiable little beings [arme, armselige Menschlein], and the third class, which is much improved from what it used to be, is still pretty bad, mainly because of the people.”
The Mexican city of Veracruz, where Anni and Josef Albers came to meet the Fleischmanns as they disembarked, was, in Toni’s view, “a pitiful seaport.” They arranged to have their abundant luggage unloaded: great steamer trunks that contained Josef Albers’s paints, all his photographs, and a box of glass fragments from his years of work at the Bauhaus, the design school in Germany where he had studied and taught. After clearing customs, they all boarded a train for Mexico City because, as Toni sniffed, “we have little confidence in the Veracruz hotel.”
4.
Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist, helped open Toni’s eyes to the beauty of Mexico. Rivera was a close friend of the Alberses, but his political activities—the exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky was staying in Rivera’s heavily guarded Blue House at the time, monitoring the show trials in Moscow—had little interest for them. Toni had admired Rivera’s “beautiful frescoes” of Mexican history in the education ministry in Mexico City. “Propaganda here is carried out through art,” she noted. She went three times to see the murals. On the drive to the pyramids at Teotihuacán, she looked out the window as though she was viewing a fresco of Rivera’s: “The villages consist of the most primitive mud huts, their inhabitants pitiful, Indians in rags, but with wonderful, very hard facial lines.”
Josef Albers, Diego Rivera, Anni Albers, Clara Porset
The Alberses, for their part, admired Rivera’s formal ingenuity, his use of traditional geometrical patterns and of pictorial motifs drawn from Aztec and Mayan mythology. They relished his passion for pre-Columbian art. They spent hours admiring his private collection of artifacts, many of which were dug from the recently excavated ruins of Tlatilco, later turned into a brick factory. “We were among the privileged few ‘gringos’ to see… the Rivera collection at his house in San Angel,” Anni wrote, “and later in his house in Coyoacán… We felt that Rivera had an oversized appetite for all that came to light and was brought to him by the natives from many parts of the country.”
The car trip to Teotihuacán was for viewing the ruins, but it was also a scavenging junket. “Our first small pieces,” Anni wrote, “came to us on our visits to prehistoric sites from little boys offering them to us through the car window, just as turkeys and goats were also held up for sale.” The search for ancient pottery led them farther into the countryside.
We went along high cactus fences in village streets silent and empty, but whenever we turned around and looked back, faces would quickly withdraw and hide. We were obviously the sensation of the day. We sat in fields, sandwiches in hand, and wherever we looked, ancient pottery shards protruded.
Among the ceramic heads collected by the Alberses at Teotihuacán, one is particularly striking in its anxious intensity. The head has a large, square forehead and a dark brow extending across the face. The mouth frowns slightly and the nose is broken—cracked, perhaps accidentally, though the effect resembles the broken nose of a boxer. The wide, hollowed-out eyes have a brooding intensity, a dark air of foreboding.
5.
Whenever I look at the photograph of Anni Albers and her parents at Teotihuacán, I want to tell them to turn around on the Avenue of the Dead. I want to grab my great-grandfather Siegfried by the stylish lapels and shout, “Don’t go back to Berlin! Are you out of your mind?”
But of course he did go back, confident that his profession, his name (Siegfried, for heaven’s sake), and his social status would save him from whatever the upstart Hitler had in mind.
Before leaving Mexico, the Fleischmanns bought serapes for their grandsons Rudolf and Teddy (my father!)—“so they can dress up as American Indians.”
6.
Two years later, like something out of Kafka, the Fleischmanns found themselves aboard the same ship, bound for the same port. This time, however, the idyllic voyage assumed the contours of a nightmare. The masked balls and first-class cabins were a thing of the past, another age, almost another universe. This time, the Fleischmanns were refugees, in flight for their lives and subject to the brutalities of bureaucrats and the Gestapo. They had been forced to join the army of “poor pitiable little beings,” the pathetic Menschlein that Toni had scorned during their first voyage.
Toni reflected on the bitter ironies of this second crossing, a voyage into uncertainty and darkness:
In 1937 I wrote a diary about our first trip to Mexico and I never imagined that I would see that country again. Now, two years later to the day, we begin the same journey on the same boat, the Orinoco, but under totally different circumstances. At that time it was a trip to see our children again and through them to see a distant and lovely country. Today it is a departure from our native land, which we must leave forever.
What little they were allowed to pack in their suitcases—a few clothes, some family silver, a limited amount of cash—was now the sum total of their belongings. The rest they had to leave behind in Berlin. On May 28, 1939, they flew to London for final farewells with their daughter Lotte. “My daughter’s well-ordered family has been torn apart,” Toni noted. She was referring to my father, age thirteen, who would remain in England for the duration of the war.
The Fleischmanns picked up their Mexican visa in London. Before they could board the Orinoco in Cherbourg, across the Channel in France, they were told that they would also need a French transit visa. The French visa was then refused because they were booked on a German ship. They imagined the Orinoco leaving that day for Mexico as scheduled, with their luggage on board.
But then, a miracle: The Orinoco, they learned from a cable, was delayed in Antwerp.
With a hastily obtained Belgian visa, they took a train to Harwich and a boat to Antwerp, only to learn that the delay, a blessing for them, was a death sentence for others. Toni remembered the desperate scene on board, after the ship steamed out of the harbor:
In the evening after the meal, the captain stood up and made a speech. He regretted terribly to have to announce that Cuba had totally blocked entry of emigrants; all his attempts to have Cuba allow entry for the Cuba-destined passengers already on board were fruitless, as were his efforts with the Belgian authorities to accept these emigrants temporarily (hence the long delay in Antwerp), and he was therefore told to return to Cuxhaven to bring these emigrants back. The Gestapo had given assurances that those returning would suffer no unpleasantness. The ship was already on course for Cuxhaven and we would be there by midday Saturday. The boat would leave again immediately and go directly to Cherbourg. Deathly silence followed this speech and all sat chalk-white with horror, all these people who had left everything, who had given up their native country, now had to start all over again to find a way of getting out, without money, without a home.
A new note of sympathy enters Toni’s account: “It was horrifying to have to see the despair on every face without being able to help.”
This time, the ocean was eerily calm. Inhospitable Cuba, so charming on the earlier voyage, now seemed sinister: “In the streets at the harbor, quite open and shameless bordellos from whose French windows—long and pulled down—the girls look out and present themselves.”
In Veracruz, where Anni and Josef Albers once again waited impatiently for their arrival, there were more bureaucratic barriers. The Mexican passengers were allowed to leave the ship and so were the Spanish refugees, but not the Germans, who learned, to their dismay, that they would have to wait aboard ship until their papers could be carried to Mexico City for approval. Three whole days the Fleischmanns waited, “three unnerving days,” while Anni and Josef desperately tried to resolve the situation. When it became clear that the visa that the Fleischmanns had acquired in London was a forgery, perpetrated by confidence men, the hurdles became even higher.
During this ordeal, the Alberses were accompanied by Alex Reed, a favorite student of theirs at Black Mountain College. Alex (also known as Bill) proved invaluable in the negotiations. He ran from the hotel to the ship and from the ship into town, trying to secure, with bribes paid at each transaction, the necessary permissions and papers. “It isn’t just hot as Hell,” Josef Albers wrote of the bureaucratic nightmare.
You also find out that Hell never stops. That there are many devils in Hell, and that at first they look just like people. Then you find out that Hell is a business. The devils keep Hell hot so that you’re willing to spend everything in order to escape it. Then the damned are delighted that Hell has an end, and the devils are delighted that they have money and can live on it until more ships come with more sacrifices for Hell.
Another day passed before Reed’s bribes had their intended effect. Toni and Siegfried, anxious and exhausted, were finally given their passports and allowed to go through customs into Josef Albers’s waiting car. In Mexico City, the altitude made their heads numb and their limbs listless until they descended a couple of thousand meters. “Our heads become clearer,” Toni noted, “but with this clarity the awareness of all that has happened to us engulfs us, and we become depressed. The relinquishing of all that was ours, the emigrant’s distress, and the frightening question, what now?”
Diego Rivera’s murals looked different to Toni this time around. Earlier, it was their vivid colors and formal patterns that had appealed to her, while their political message was lost on her. Now she could see that Rivera was trying to envision a more just society, in which the downtrodden Indians could feel at home. The murals, she wrote,
depict the whole history of the Indians, their customs, their crafts, their festivals, their rituals, and then their frightful suppression by the Spanish conquerors, Cortés’s triumphal march through the country. This propaganda is being shown to the people because the government is endeavoring to lift up the Indian people again, to help their almost vanished crafts flourish again.
7.
On this second sojourn in Mexico, as Toni and her husband waited for official permission to enter the United States, she found it too painful to record her impressions in a travel journal. Instead, she wrote poems, in English, signing them—with a poet’s and a geborene Ullstein’s pride—Toni Ullstein. The poems are rhymed, giving a sense of order to chaotic experience:
I am so lost in this vast and foreign town
I am strolling along the streets, I am depressed, I frown,
I want to meet somebody I know,
Why cannot a familiar face show
Up, from home, and while I look at the shop window with ties
Suddenly somebody cries
Perhaps a cousin?!
Halloh
Oh
But no.
On September 2, 1939, the day after Hitler’s troops marched into Poland and ignited, as Toni wrote, “a world conflagration,” she took anxious stock of her newly nomadic fate: “We find no rest; the calamity of this war has irresistibly come over all.”
At Black Mountain College, Anni Albers developed a classroom exercise that she called, in her wavering English, “starting at the point of zero”:
What intrigued me in regard to teaching was that I think something should be reversed in teaching. We always, in architecture, or whatever you do, you start from what there is today and try to explain it. While I was trying to set a task, put the students on absolute zero, in the desert, in Peru. Nothing is there. What is the first thing you have to think of? And build up? And maybe, for instance, something for fishing, or something for the roof. You gradually develop something, inventions, as you go along… And some of the students… like also the idea of not being told a brick is done like this, and we build it like this, but how we arrive at the brick?
“At least once in life,” Anni liked to say, “it’s good to start at zero.”
9.
Though Anni was, as she phrased it, “Jewish in the Hitler sense,” the reason the Alberses had left Germany in 1933 was not because of racial laws, which took effect later, but because of the closing of the Bauhaus, the innovative design school where they had first met in 1922. She was twenty-three at the time, from a family—my family—that was respectable and established in every conceivable way.
Siegfried Fleischmann loved the arts and took them seriously. He haunted the museums in Berlin and later in New York. He encouraged Anni’s interests and gave her a room of her own in their spacious apartment at 7 Meinekestrasse in the posh Kurfürstendamm neighborhood. My grandmother Lotte, Anni’s younger sister, remembered the layout: “We had eight or nine rooms. There was the music room that was only used for parties… There was a room for Anni’s painting.”
Lotte and Anni had an Irish governess who taught them to speak fairly good English. Anni also had an art tutor and later took classes with a painter who worked in an Impressionist style. In her early teens, she was drawn to the Expressionist portraits of Oskar Kokoschka, and tried to paint a portrait in a similar vein of her mother. Mother and daughter traveled to Dresden to meet the master. Kokoschka glanced at the portrait and asked, “Why do you paint?” Anni was fifteen or sixteen at the time and, as she put it later, “that was the end of that.” She tried an art school in Hamburg for a few weeks—another disaster—and then, by chance, saw a leaflet from the Bauhaus, a new school of design recently opened in Weimar. There was a woodcut of Lyonel Feininger’s on the cover, a cathedral in German Expressionist style. “That looks more like it,” Anni thought.
10.
Anni abandoned the luxury apartment in Berlin to start from zero at the Bauhaus, with a rented room and a bath available once a week. Anni noted that the Bauhaus, too, was looking for a new beginning.
Anni Albers
Well, the Bauhaus today is thought of always as a school, a very adventurous and interesting one, to which you went and were taught something; that it was a readymade spirit. But when I got there in 1922 that wasn’t true at all. It was in a great muddle and there was a great searching going on from all sides.
Though billed as a social experiment where women and men had equal access to instruction, Anni learned that certain workshops were more welcoming to women than others. The glass workshop interested her, but it had room for only one student, and Josef Albers was already enrolled there. She settled, reluctantly, for the weaving workshop. “Fate put into my hands limp threads!” she later wrote. Photographed around 1923, Anni looks contemplative and determined, hands clasped on her knee.
She hated the photograph, claiming that it made her look like Whistler’s mother.
Anni Albers, Black-White-Red, 1927
11.
In 1925, Anni and Josef Albers were married. He was Catholic, the son of a housepainter. After several false starts, he had settled on the Bauhaus as his doorway to modern art. “I was thirty-two,” he wrote, and “threw all my old things out the window, [and] started once more from the bottom.” While Anni was taking drawing lessons from genteel private tutors, Albers was scrounging around in the Weimar dump. He packed his rucksack with broken glass and made a new kind of art, stained glass for the modern age. He was soon promoted to junior Bauhaus master and quickly established himself as a gifted teacher.
They honeymooned in Italy, where they were struck by the striped marble and brickwork of the cathedrals at Florence and Sienna. During the years that followed, their abstract designs in weaving and in glass, influenced by Tuscan architecture, followed parallel paths. In her dynamic composition Black-White-Red, Anni has gotten the most from her three bedrock colors. The repeated cross motif, black on white and then reversed, may recall the honeymoon amid the striped cathedrals in Italy.
12.
The year 1925, when Anni and Josef Albers were married, was also the year in which the Bauhaus moved from Weimar to its streamlined glass-and-brick building at Dessau, designed by Walter Gropius. The Alberses subscribed to the “form follows function” ethos of the Bauhaus, where all ornament was stripped away and the wastebasket was regarded as the perfect design. Anni’s work during these years is almost entirely a series of experiments with different threads. Like other Bauhaus artists, she shared the hope that ideas discovered at the Bauhaus might infiltrate industrial practice and spread to the general public. She showed no sentimentality about crafts or handmade things; she embraced cellophane, rayon, and other artificially manufactured textiles.
Nazis in the local government in Weimar cut funding to the Bauhaus in the fall of 1932. The architect Mies van der Rohe opened a privately funded Bauhaus in Berlin, which lasted for six months. During that time, Anni and Josef lived in a comfortable apartment in the Charlottenburg neighborhood, paid for by Anni’s parents. And then, in April 1933, came the definitive end, as the Nazis took over the German government and shut down the Bauhaus.
That summer, the American architect Philip Johnson happened to visit Berlin and was eager to meet artists from the Bauhaus. He was particularly impressed by some small weavings of Anni’s. A few weeks later, back in New York, he was approached by John Andrew Rice, a classics professor who had led a breakaway group of faculty from Rollins College, in Florida, to found Black Mountain College. Rice asked Johnson to recommend an artist to run the academic program there. Johnson, with no hesitation, suggested Josef Albers. Her weavings, as Anni said later, were their passport to America.
13.
So often in the early photographs we see the Alberses in transit, in ships and trains and automobiles, the tragic conveyances of the 1930s. A photograph shows them aboard the Europa, arriving in New York harbor on November 24, 1933. He is in formal suit and tie, his thin hair carefully brushed to the side, his wide-awake eyes noticing every detail. He came to America, he said, “to open eyes.” She is tall and alert and slightly condescending. With her mink stole wrapped around her neck, her sealskin coat, her transparent veil and her Twenties toque, she herself is eye-opening. They could be waiting to be announced at a formal dinner party or at an art opening in Berlin, rather than heading for an experimental college in the middle of nowhere.
For the local newspaper in North Carolina, they were simply Germans, strangers on a train. Germans on Faculty at Black Mountain School, the Asheville Citizen reported. They were met at the railroad station, just down the line from Asheville, by Ted and Bobby Dreier in their Model A convertible. The “Germans” were driven over dusty back roads into the hills overlooking the town of Black Mountain.
There, like some nostalgic dream of the Old South summoned from the mountain mist, stood Robert E. Lee Hall, a white mansion with massive Doric columns supporting a broad porch, with a view out over the valley. This, the Alberses learned, was the main building of Black Mountain College. This was where the students lived, where meals were taken, and where dances were held every Saturday night on the front porch.
Walking up the monumental staircase, Anni was puzzled to see notices nailed to the marble columns. On closer inspection, she found that the columns were made of wood. It was a first lesson that American things were not always what they appeared to be. A few days later, Anni recalled, “there was a big festival at the college… a great event that was Thanksgiving. And we thought it was really a day to be thankful for.”
Josef Albers ran Black Mountain College almost from its inception in 1933. During his fifteen years there, Albers brought the avant-garde composer John Cage and the dancer Merce Cunningham to campus; he brought Buckminster Fuller there to build his first geodesic dome; he brought Willem de Kooning and Jacob Lawrence to teach painting at Black Mountain; he himself taught the artists Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, and Ruth Asawa.
It is often said that the Alberses brought the Bauhaus to Black Mountain, smuggling in their suitcases such fundamental convictions as the fusion of form and function and the honest use of materials. It is true that Anni and Josef drew on their Bauhaus experience. But Josef Albers was a master at the Bauhaus as well as a former student there. Whatever was distinctive in the Bauhaus experience owed a lot to him. As Albers proudly remarked, “I have done more to the Bauhaus than the Bauhaus to me.”
14.
The world as found, in its loops and leaves and landscapes, was a way for the Alberses to get a handle on their new surroundings. The lay of the land harbored messages for their alert eyes. Josef discerned the numeral three in an aerial view of the Loop, a highway in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. With stenciled blue paint he accentuated the 3 and added a 9 for a New Year’s postcard.
The fall leaves prompted a round of experimentation for Josef Albers and his students. A section in his classic book Interaction of Color is called “Fall leaf studies—an American discovery.” “Nowhere in the world,” he wrote, “is the autumn foliage as brilliant in color as in the United States.” He invited his students to see what happened “when leaves are collected, pressed, and dried—eventually varnished, even bleached, and sometimes also dyed or painted.”
In Albers’s collages, oak leaves perform like ecstatic dancers. In one study, leaves hover above a surreal stage like something in Dalí or Magritte. In another, two leaves, one with spiked edges and one with rounded contours, lie like a married couple on beds of colored paper. Yet another features three pairs of dancing oak leaves, each couple made up of one red and one blue leaf locked in embrace. They leap above the green stage, while a drabber corps of six brown leaves dances below them, like their shadows, perhaps, or their real selves.
15.
In Germany, Josef Albers had tended to restrict his palette to two or three urban hues such as red, black, and white. Suddenly, in the hills and mountains of western North Carolina, color gradations were everywhere. Interaction of Color sometimes seems, with its lines laid out like poetry, an ode to American colors:
Usually, we think of an apple as being red.
This is not the same red as that of a cherry or tomato.
A lemon is yellow and an orange is like its name.
Bricks vary from beige to yellow to orange,
and from ochre to brown to deep violet.
Foliage appears in innumerable shades of green.
During his time at Black Mountain, Albers concluded that colors, like people, are profoundly relational; colors interact with other colors. His students learned that the same color could be made to look quite different against different grounds, while two different colors—an even greater surprise—could be made to appear to be identical. His art classes at Black Mountain were built around such juxtapositions, “like making a gloomy raw sienna look as alive and shining as gold by ‘working on its neighbors.’” Albers drew moral lessons from this neighborly give and take. “We may consider such calculated juxtaposition as a symbol of community spirit,” he wrote, “of ‘live and let live,’ of ‘equal rights for all,’ of mutual respect.”
Materials, too, were relational. “Nothing,” Albers said, “can be one thing but a hundred things.” In other words, objects change according to their surroundings, their neighbors. There is no such thing as an object “in itself.” Albers invented exercises to show relatedness and contrast and to reveal how materials, like colors, could be deceptive. He was particularly fascinated with brick. How can we “make a brick look like something spongy?” he asked. “How can we make something looking like bread and it is stone?”
16.
Anni Albers was also experimenting at Black Mountain with the world as found, especially during the war years, when expensive art materials were hard to come by. She fashioned jewelry from ordinary household objects, such as faucet washers and paper clips. Although her family in Berlin had lost all their valuable jewelry in the move to America, she herself claimed to prefer cheap ceramic beads made in Mexico to pearls.
Anni’s collaborator on these projects was a shy Black Mountain student named Alex Reed, the same young man who had helped in the negotiations to get my great-grandparents, the Fleischmanns, off the boat in Veracruz.
Anni Albers and Alex Reed, necklace from hardware
With bobby pins hanging from a metal-plated ball-link chain, they made a necklace that looks like something an African warrior might wear into battle. A chain attached with two paper clips to a sink-drain strainer, with more paper clips fanning out from the lower arc, suggested a fusion of silver and feathers out of the American Southwest. Most ravishing of all was a necklace of ordinary aluminum washers strung along golden grosgrain ribbon.
Anni was asked, during the spring of 1942, to describe the work that she and Reed had been doing and to relate it to national defense. “Though our work has nothing to do with defense work,” she responded in her lecture “On Jewelry,” “there was something right in asking to connect it with it.” She added, however, that “for many of us our part can not be that of going into a munitions factory or that of helping those who suffer in this war in a direct way. Many of us are tied to our homes, to our normal circle of action, to our work continuing as usual.”
Anni was asking her audience to think more deeply about what constitutes “our homes,” “our normal circle of action,” and “our work continuing as usual.” War, she argued, was the opposite of the normal and the usual. It was in the context of everyday life that she felt that something new might be accomplished and some opening might be achieved to a more hopeful future.
17.
For Anni Albers, the door to this realm of everyday objects was Mexico. In her 1942 speech, she explained that the jewelry she was making with hardware was inspired by archaeological excavations at the temple of Monte Albán in Mexico, which she and Alex Reed had visited together. “These objects of gold and pearls, of jade, rock-crystal, and shells, made about 1,000 years ago,” she remarked, “are of such surprising beauty in unusual combinations of materials that we became aware of the strange limitations in materials commonly used for jewels today.”
The Mexican jewelry seemed to Anni to have arisen from experiments in combination and interaction, like those that she and Josef had arranged in the Black Mountain classroom: “Rock-crystal with gold, pearls with simple seashells.” Back in North Carolina, Anni and Reed looked for new materials to use:
In the 5 & 10 cents stores we discovered the beauty of washers and bobby-pins. Enchanted we stood before kitchen-sink stoppers and glass insulators, picture books and erasers. The art of Monte Alban had given us the freedom to see things detached from their use, as pure materials, worth being turned into precious objects.
The value of these pieces of jewelry was not in the materials used, which could hardly have been more common, but rather in their “surprise and inventiveness—a spiritual value.” Ultimately, this surprise was Anni’s contribution to defense work. War, she implied, was a matter of competing over mistaken ideas about what was truly precious and worth fighting for. “If we can more and more free ourselves from values other than spiritual, I believe we are going in a right direction.”
18.
I have wondered what working with Anni meant to Alex Reed, a mysterious and tragic figure in Black Mountain lore. An accident on October 8, 1941, near the Lake Eden dam at Black Mountain, made a big impression on Reed. Mark Dreier, the nine-year-old son of Ted and Bobbie Dreier, fellow teachers and close friends of the Alberses, was struck and killed by a truck driven by the college cook.
Reed and his friend Molly Gregory designed and built a simple stone structure, reminiscent of a Quaker meeting house, to the boy’s memory. It was known as the Quiet House. Reed gathered the local stone and laid it, cut the wood for the roof, and wove the curtains for the windows. He and Gregory built the simple chairs and benches for the austere interior.
Reed finished building the Quiet House just before he left Black Mountain, in February 1943, to report to Civilian Public Service Camp 32 in West Campton, New Hampshire, run by the American Friends Service Committee. A conscientious objector, Reed had spent the previous summer at a Quaker work camp in Reading, Pennsylvania, and soon joined the Society of Friends. Like other CPS camps, the West Campton site was remote and the conditions primitive. Reed was put to work as a linesman repairing telephone wires in the pine forests.
Josef Albers sent Reed a copy of the writings of Meister Eckhart, the medieval German mystic, in whose meditations, grounded in plain language and vivid images, Reed found comfort in what he called the idea of obedience. He could see how closely Eckhart’s worldview was related to the Quaker concept of turning a conscripted task into a voluntary one by one’s own individual assent. He copied a passage from Eckhart: “For the purpose of making a crock a man takes a handful of clay; that is the medium he works in. He gives it a form he has in him, nobler than his material.”
By May 1943, many of the workers at Campton were transferred to CPS Camp 37 in the mountainous desert region of Coleville, California. “We are of course miles away from anything,” Reed wrote Dreier, “in a hair-raisingly beautiful place.” During breaks from serving on lookout duty, fighting fires, and working as a stonemason, Reed studied Chinese and read Arthur Waley’s translations of classic Asian literature. Ten years before the Beat movement began to take shape in San Francisco, Alex Reed was already assembling its tenets and tastes. On those rare occasions when he was allowed to leave camp, he explored Chinatown in San Francisco and Los Angeles, looking for the perfect teapot for brewing his smoky Lapsang souchong tea.
Reed spent a few weekends at the English religious thinker Gerald Heard’s Trabuco retreat in the Santa Anita Mountains, practicing meditation and listening to talks about human access to higher consciousness. “It seems to me now that different kinds of clay are used in the making of people,” he wrote Barbara Dreier in March 1944. Through Heard, he was put in touch with other pacifists with a mystical bent. In Hollywood, he met Christopher Isherwood—“a good clever little man, with a surprisingly gamin face.” As a volunteer for the American Friends Service Committee, Isherwood had been teaching English to German refugees at Haverford, in Pennsylvania.
After the war, Alex Reed studied architecture at Harvard with the Bauhaus masters Gropius and Marcel Breuer and taught design at MIT. He seems to have struggled to find his place in the world; from the Coleville camp he had written of his “unsureness of where one belongs.” Invited by the Dreiers to join them at their estate on Martha’s Vineyard, Reed designed his own Asian-style modernist house and garden. A photograph of the interior shows tatami mats, Japanese screens, a bare brick wall, and Reed himself, handsome in the loose-fitting sweater that Anni Albers admired, sipping a cup of tea. The house (since destroyed) was near Harlock’s Pond and commanded a sweeping view of the water.
Alex Reed died under ambiguous circumstances in 1965. According to the Vineyard Gazette, he “drowned in Vineyard Sound when his blue, German-built kayak capsized,” but many suspected suicide. Friends established a bird sanctuary in his memory.
19.
After the war, Josef and Anni Albers continued to visit Mexico each summer. They left Black Mountain in 1949, amid tensions concerning the centrality of its arts curriculum. That fall, the Museum of Modern Art in New York devoted an exhibition to Anni’s work, the first show the museum had mounted by a weaver. Josef accepted an appointment for one year at Harvard and in 1950 began his long association with Yale. It was also the year—Albers was sixty-two at the time—that he began his
Homage to the Square series. During that same remarkable year, Albers designed a brick wall for installation in Gropius’s Harvard Graduate Center, a work that Albers named America.
Brick had fascinated Albers for a very long time. He liked how the uniform, ready-made units, like Anni’s washers and paper clips, exacted a certain surrender by the artist, banishing self-indulgent subjectivity. He liked the humbleness of the material, so unshowy and matter-of-fact. He liked that brick could be made to resemble other things—sponges, for example, or bread.
The wall at Harvard, eleven feet tall and eight feet wide, with a fireplace on the opposite side, is built of masonry bricks in regular alternation of stretchers (bricks laid lengthwise) and headers (bricks laid along their width), in the pattern known as the Flemish bond. Albers created a series of recessed vertical patterns by eliminating a width of brick from some of the courses. The resulting impression is that of a wall of bricks pulled slightly apart, as though to reveal something worth seeing on the other side. The pattern is produced not by the bricks themselves but by the shadows caused by recessed brick. The effect recalls the many photographs Albers took of the mazelike walls
Josef Albers, Detail of Stonework, Mitla, 1937
at Mitla, where cut stone was laid in intricate patterns to look like textiles.
In an essay about America, Albers began with his dissatisfaction with Mexican muralists like Rivera. He felt that their wall paintings weren’t truly murals, art made of walls, but were actually “enlarged easel paintings” that happened to be placed on walls. Albers decided instead “to make a real mural in which the murus (Latin for wall) was respected and preserved to the last degree possible.” In a sense, in America, Albers was bypassing Rivera and José Orozco and going back to the earlier Mexican builders of Mitla and Monte Albán. He was aiming, he said, to give his brick wall a feeling of “lightness (lack of weight), which counteracts the visual weight of the wall rectangle.”
For me, a descendant of so many departures, Anni and Josef Albers seem masters of travel, nomads of the modern world. Their zigzag journey from Berlin to Black Mountain seems like a form of life, adopted and refined. I admire their appetite for change, for risking everything, for picking up their lives and moving them elsewhere. Anni thought deeply about what she called “the nomadic character of things”:
We move more often and always faster from place to place, and we will turn to those things that will least hinder us in moving. Just as our clothes are getting lighter and are increasingly geared to movement, so also will it be with other things that are to accompany us. And if these include a work of art that is to sustain our spirits, it may be that we will take along a woven picture as a portable mural, something that can be rolled up for transport.
“Something that can be rolled up for transport” brings a scroll to mind, perhaps, but it also suggests a magic carpet—or a folded-up serape.
The modern world, in Anni’s view, had changed the human sense of scale. Skyscrapers and the monstrous dreams of dictators were typical expressions of the age, but they needn’t be the only expression of it. The clay figurines that the Alberses had culled from the fields of Mexico and the jewelry that Anni and Alex Reed made from cheap hardware were reminders that great art does not have to be made of expensive materials on a large scale.
When the time came for departure, for starting again from zero, such imposing things would have to be left behind. The Alberses’ collection of pre-Columbian figurines, by contrast, comprised an art form for nomads. Made in the “modest material of clay,” the whole collection, according to Anni, “can be held in two hands.”
