“We can still feel Otti Berger’s sense of touch”

My grandfather, Walter Low-Beer, would touch a fabric like you sip a glass of wine with your lips. His fingers told him where the materials were from and how they were put together. My grandfather would say we need to regain our sense of touch in the materials that surround us.

Otti Berger, for me, has the most sophisticated sense of touch of the 20^th century. She has shaped my sense of touch. She weaves textiles with the touch of snow, as she writes:

Otti Berger realised how rich touch is as a sense, the umami of senses, used to awaken artist sensibility at the bauhaus.

There are layers to her sense of touch. The first layer is the feeling of material and structure with the hands. Otti writes “Fabric can be understood with the hands as much as colour to the eye or sound in the ear”. She was taught by Paul Klee who explained that touch reveals the “traces of discrete movements of the hand … like footprints in the snow”.

The second layer is visual touch. Otti Berger was also taught by László Moholy-Nagy and influenced by the visual and tactile challenge of photography. The visual world is not virtual and flat like you feel after a call on zoom, but depends on the fall of light on the texture of materials. This is what gives the depth of colour or the luminescence of snow.

The third layer is unconscious touch which she describes in “Stoffe in Raum”, influenced by Freud. She writes “We must grasp the structure not with our minds alone, but feel it out with our subconscious”. Objects touch you unconsciously, and textiles give a sense of warmth to modernism as in the Tugendhat Villa, they can turn a house into a home.

There are two separate circuits of touch in your brain, the emotional and the physical, connected to 5000 varied sensers in each cm of skin for heat, cold, pain and social touch.

Finally, Otti Berger recognised movement, the dancing textiles she brought with her to the Bauhaus from her home in Central Europe, and the zebra fabric which literally allows a horse to disappear in movement. “Through material we can weave immateriality”, “we want to achieve the dissolution of material!” A textile “can be music in itself”. If we listen, we can still feel Otti Berger’s sense of touch.

In 1938, Walter Low-Beer, my grandfather, was standing on a line which had just cut Czechoslovakia in two, Europe in two and the Jewish world into pieces. The line, agreed at the Munich Conference, ran along the stream through the Low-Beer factory, that would later become Schindler’s Ark.

Walter stood face to face with a battalion of Nazi soldiers on the other side of the bridge. They fanned out along the other side of the stream. Walter held up a map agreed by Hitler and the British Prime Minister Chamberlain.

He stood his ground, a Jew defending the borders of a broken Czechoslovakia. He told them to check their orders and borders, which they did. That is how Walter Low-Beer held up the Nazi invasion for three days.

I often wonder from where my grandfather got the force to stand his ground. I think he was defending a European identity in the very centre of Europe. He refused to split into pieces a Czech, a Jewish, an Austrian, a German part.

Our family factory was stolen by the Nazis and by Oskar Schindler who was a Nazi. Oskar and Emilie Schindler later built a concentration camp that was managed by Schindler and where 1.200 Jews on Schindler’s List were saved, as shown in the film by Stephen Spielberg. The factory is still standing, with the beautiful and haunting historical buildings and gate as they were in 1945.

In 2017 our family was officially invited back to spend a weekend in the Tugendhat Villa. The Brno authorities expected a few survivors, but almost one hundred arrived from Canada, Brazil, England, Australia, France, Great Britain, Switzerland, none had survived in Czechoslovakia.

In 2019–20 we bought back and consolidated the land of our factory which had gone bankrupt. We won a modest EU grant “Making a Museum” to work with students from the Czech Republic, Hungary, Germany, Austria, Poland and Slovakia to co-design a Museum of Survivors for the next generation.

The Museum of Survivors will open in Schindler’s Ark in May 2025 to mark 80 years since the end of World War II. It will show the testimonies, life and art of survivors, in the place where the events occurred, based on the 110,000 hours of testimonies collected by the Shoah Foundation. Can an individual stand up to a killing system and to discrimination, how do survivors shape our world? It is a place of light dedicated to survivors, who should not feel guilt. They save my and our world. We still need support to save Schindler’s Ark.

A branch of our family commissioned the Tugendhat Villa in Brno, built by Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich, the Bauhaus directors of architecture and textiles. The home was a wedding present for Greta Tugendhat (born Low-Beer) from her parents Alfred and Marianne Low-Beer. The Tugendhat Home was built by German architects with Czech artisans for a modern Jewish family way of life. They lived there for only eight years until 1938.

In June 2024 we open our first exhibition “Starting at Zero” in the Tugendhat Villa, showing the work of Otti Berger, Anni Albers, Lilly Reich and Lucie Rie. How did these artists start from zero? How did survivors shape our world so fully in art, textiles, ceramics and architecture? Was art, beauty and the joy of making their response to war? Was starting at zero a creative force?

Their art and lives illustrate the role of survivors who shape our world, and the words on the ring given to Schindler in our factory in 1945 that “Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire”.

We are reweaving the Lilly Reich carpet commissioned from Alen Muller Hellwig for the Tugendhat Villa. Lilly Reich was perhaps the most architectural with textiles – taught by Josef Hoffman as early as 1910 and working as an equal with Mies van der Rohe for a decade. Lilly Reich brought the “courage for colour”, materiality, impeccable taste, and an interior warmth to modernism with her use of textiles.

We show the pots of Lucie Rie, the closest to modern decorative objects without ornament. She was taught by the Moravians Adolf Loos and Josef Hoffmann. She fled Austria in 1938 and was only allowed to make buttons when she arrived in Britain. It took her a further 25 years to start from zero and shape 20^th-century ceramics for a second time.

We will build the textiles of Otti Berger and Anni Albers into the materiality of the museum, the textile dividers and walls for hanging works. Anni Albers survived and shaped modern textiles, Otti Berger was murdered in Auschwitz in 1944. Otti Berger is a particular challenge, we believe through the new book and exhibitions, her legacy can still survive to shape our world.

Whenever I touch a fabric, I feel my grandfather and the touch of Otti Berger.