If the day of Otti Berger’s death is not known, its place and cause are. In April 1944, Berger – part deaf, Jewish, a communist – was arrested in her home town of Zmajevac, in German-occupied Yugoslavia. On 29 May, she was put on a transport to Auschwitz. After that, nothing.
Of the eight Bauhaus students to die at Auschwitz – half the number murdered in other camps and ghettoes – Berger was the best known. With Anni Albers and Gunta Stölzl, she had revolutionised weaving, turning it from a craft into an art. She had come to Dessau – the iteration of the school most of us think of as the Bauhaus – in 1927, when she was 28. That same year, belatedly, the school had opened a department of architecture. A few months later, a young Austrian called Fritz Ertl signed up to study at it.
