For years, she had been looking for something. She
studied sculpture in Berlin, then worked decorating
porcelain at a factory in Rudolstadt, where she began to
fall in love with ceramics, and with the shape and form of
the objects she held. On weekends, she’d wander the
countryside. During one of those trips, she traveled to
Weimar and saw a proclamation posted on the wall. As
she remembers, “I stood in front of that proclamation,
moved to the quick, read and re-read. ‘That’s it,” I said. ‘I
must go to the Bauhaus and learn my craft there. It was
that simple.” Walter Gropius words asking for "a new
guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions which
raise an arrogant barrier between craftsmen and artists"
had spoken to her, had found her where she was and a
cathedral of thought opened.
At the Bauhaus ceramics workshop, in the small city of
Dornburg, they lived in the old stable in tiny, whitewashed
rooms with no windows to look out of. They slept
in“virginal” beds and lived like acolytes. They woke to
work from 7 am to 4:30 PM each day. The masters they
worked under, sculptor Gerhard Marcks and potter, Max
Krehan, worked alongside them, “what our masters
expected of us, they did too.”
Krehan was the last Thuringian master-potter. The
Thuringian region had been famous for its ceramics since
the 18th century and workshops reflected this history:
wheels were turned by artist's feet, clay was found and
harvested from the nearby woods and the kiln fire was
built from logs cut from the same forest.After the workday ended, their minds still spiraled with
artistic ideas, so they’d gather to participate in more
creative activities like life drawing or reading books. On
warm days, they would walk down to the river Saale and
swim naked in its cool waters. They were a family, naked
in their becoming. It’s in this family that Marguerite met
Franz. He was the last student to join the workshop before
it ended in Dornburg.
When the Dornburg workshop dissolved, Marguerite
accepted a position as head of the Ceramics Department in
Halle at the Municipal Art School four hundred kilometers
away. Margerite and Franz were married in 1930.It's
during her tenure as a teacher in Halle that Marguerite
achieved the status of master potter; she’d be the first
woman to achieve such an honor. But as her recognition
grew, so did the Nazi’s power.
In 1933, the Nazi presence pressed hard against the
community in Halle. Schools all around were being
pressured to fire any teachers who were “non-Aryan.”
Marguerite remembered, “One day, the mayor of our city
came to me, and with tears in his eyes, asked me if I
would do him the painful favor to resign. I was the only
Jewish teacher at Burg Giebichstein, and he hoped to be
able to save the school….I did not hesitate…and left the
next day.”
On a tip from her brother, the typographer, Henri
Friedlaender, who had already immigrated to
the Netherlands, Marguerite traveled to Putten, Holland,
where she found “a small ceramic workshop with a home
adjoining it for lease.” She rented it and wired her
husband, Franz, telling him he could quit his job (he was
also working in the Halle program) and join her there.
Back in Halle, that same day, the Nazis fired all of the
teachers and closed the school. Her departure had not
saved the school from closure.
69Once reunited in Holland, they established their
workshop, which they called “Het Kruikje,” after the
small jugs that held Dutch gin, under the magnificent,
“always changing” sky. On clear nights, she’d go outside,
lie in a deckchair, and look up at the milky stars, trying to
name the constellations. She studied them until she knew
them all like trusted friends.
Their home and studio was covered in all things from the
natural world. Feathers stuck out of doorjambs and rocks
and plants covered the surfaces. They both found
inspiration in these natural objects.
In Holland, she collected rocks. There weren’t many in
Holland to collect, except for Rapakivi, a type of granite
from Finland that was carried over to Holland during the
ice ages. Days when she wasn’t at the wheel, she hunted
for the stones in old glacier moraines.
She lived in this peace for seven years during which she
learned the stars, she collected the stones from the ice age,
and she and Franz made pots in their studio. It was exile,
but it was a comfortable exile until the threat of a Nazi
invasion increased.
In 1939, the architect Gordon Herr, his wife Jane, and
their young daughter Gail had come to Holland from San
Francisco and visited with Marguerite and Franz. The
Herrs shared with the couple their dream of founding a
Utopian artist community of Jewish artists in California
(modeled on Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin Fellowship in
Spring Green, Wisconsin). Marguerite and Franz shared
with the Herrs their fear of what would happen to them if
the Nazi’s invaded Holland. As Gordan Herr recalled in a
letter, “They yearn to leave Europe to go to California. I
was asked to help and I will do it.”Because she was born in France, Marguerite had a French
passport and was therefore able to obtain a visa to the
United States. Franz, on the other hand, did not have it so
easily. He was a German citizen. Throughout their stay in
Holland, they both tried to become Dutch citizens as a
way out. But to no avail. The only way Franz would get a
visa was to secure a job at an American university. So,
Marguerite decided to leave alone and try to find Franz
work while she was there. She gained passage on a ship
from Holland to New York City. As she remembered in
The Invisible Core: “I left Holland on March 3, 1940, on a
Dutch boat. We glided through the mine fields in the
English Channel in the night and arrived on the 12th in
New York.” Franz was left standing on the dock, waving
the massive ship goodbye, his hopes for a new life in his
wife’s hands. She had no idea how long it would be before
she’d see him again.
In New York, Marguerite felt the weight of the long
shadows from the skyscrapers that towered above her.
Meanwhile, in Holland, the Nazi’s occupied Putten.
Because he was German, Franz was viewed as part of the
occupation, and he was soon enlisted in the German Army
against his wishes. It would be weeks before Marguerite
would hear about this in a letter from Franz.
Marguerite had tried everything on the East Coast, and she
longed to reunite with her friends, the Herrs. Their vision
of a Utopian artist community, in the country, away from
the chaos of cities, called to her. So, she bought a bus
ticket to San Francisco. It was the cheapest one she could
get and took a full seven days to crawl slowly across the
country.
At each bus stop, Marguerite eyed the new American
landscape and chose a stone to carry with her to her
destination, whatever that was. Picking up rocks she found
along the way made her feel as if she was capturing her
71new landscape, not conquering it, but building somewhere
new from what she gathered.
From her window seat on the bus, Marguerite wrote back
to Franz (She’d heard about the Nazi’s invasion, and she
didn’t know if he was still alive, but she wrote him
anyway). Her descriptions of what she saw are tainted
with the fear she felt about her husband, the isolation and
alienation she felt while driving across America, “The
county widens, and undulates, offers views across the
mountains and valleys. The towns spoil the impressions,
they are ugly, they are a reflection of today’s life, they are
without form…one town after another, they have no face,
but suddenly emerge in the landscape like a boil of pus.”
When she writes this, is she anticipating the land that
awaits her on the other side of her journey? The oak leaves
shimmer in the hot sun. That dream of an artistic Utopia
that had been planted in her head in Holland when the
Herrs visited. They’d preached to her, “California is about
as near Paradise as a land can be.“
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