Otti Berger (Otilija Ester Berger) was born on 4 October 1898 in present-day Zmajevac, Croatia. She was a student and later teacher at the Bauhaus, where she was a textile artist and weaver. She was murdered in 1944 at Auschwitz during the Holocaust.
Early life
Otti Berger was born on 4 October 1898 in present-day Zmajevac, Croatia. At the time of Berger’s birth, Zmajevac was part of the Baranya region of Austro-Hungary and was known as Vörösmart. Berger’s Jewish family was granted unrestricted residence and freedom in religion under the rule of Emperor Franz Joseph I. Because of Vörösmart’s national transition from Austro-Hungarian to Yugoslavian in 1918, and later Croatian, Berger’s nationality was and still is often mistaken. Though a native Hungarian speaker, Berger was also fluent in German. Due to a previous illness, Berger suffered from partial hearing loss, which was said to have heightened or enhanced her sense of touch.
Education
Berger was born in Zmajevac in Austro-Hungarian Empire (present-day Croatia). She completed education at the Collegiate School for Girls in Vienna before enrolling in the Royal Academy of Arts and Crafts in Zagreb, now the Academy of Fine Arts, University of Zagreb. She continued her studies in Zagreb until 1926 before attending Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany. There, Berger studied under László Moholy-Nagy, Paul Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky, among others. Berger has been described as "one of the most talented students at the weaving workshop in Dessau."
A core member of the experimental approach to textiles at the Bauhaus, Berger experimented with methodology and materials during the course of her studies at the Bauhaus to eventually include plastic textiles intended for mass production. Along with Anni Albers and Gunta Stölzl, Berger pushed back against the understanding of textiles as a feminine craft and utilized rhetoric used in photography and painting to describe her work. During her time in Dessau, she also wrote a treatise on fabrics and the methodology of textile production, which stayed with Walter Gropius and was never published.
In 1929, Berger attended classes at Praktiska Vävnadsskolan in Stockholm where she wrote a nine-page thesis about Swedish Weaving techniques called 'Schwedische Bindungslehre', which later influenced her published weaving instructing booklet, Bindungslehre.
In 1931, Berger became the new head of weaving at the Bauhaus under the advisement of Stolzl, who had resigned from the position. She began to create her own curriculum, and acted as a mentor to younger Bauhaus students who carried on Bauhaus methods, including Paris-based weaver Zsuzsa Markos-Ney and , who became a hand weaver in South Africa. It was a short-lived position, however, as she was replaced in 1932 by Lilly Reich, the partner of new Bauhuas directer Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
Career
When the Bauhaus closed under German force in 1932, Berger opened her own textile design studio, "otti berger atelier für textilien," which she ran from her apartment in Berlin using looms she purchased from the school's weaving workshop. There, her goal was to produce textiles for use in industry. She secured contracts with several design firms, including Wohnbedarf AG, a Swedish design company, and worked with manufacturers C.F. Baumgärtel & Sohn, Schriever and Websky, as well as Hartmann and Wiesen.
Berger was interested in authoring her own work and making a name for herself as a designer of woven textiles, which is uncommon in the industrial textile production field. She went so far as to begin signing her woven works with her initials in lowercase, “o.b.” In 1932, while working on designs for Wohnbedarf AG, Berger pushed for recognition, in fear that her work would be subjected to anonymity within the large design company. She asked that her prototypes be attached to the name “Otti Berger-Stoffe”, a request which was granted by Wohnbedarf.
In her continued efforts for recognition, Berger sought patents for some of her fabrics. In fact, she was the only weaver from the Bauhaus to apply for patents for her designs. Though she sought to patent three of her inventions, she received patents for only two - one in Germany in 1934 and the other in London in 1937.