iMü
H9K111
ippHVPMttiiai
Hü -
' - flf* ^
iMMHI
HB ■ I
mm.
mm
SU
55-57 Josef Berger • Martin Ziegler: Einzelmöbel, Bimini-Werkstätten. - Reproduktion nach
zeitgenössischen Fotos
Then there appeared in quick succession J. M. Levy’s mankind embracing poetry, one
of Buddha’s Vedas, and work by minor writers. Established writers, like Franz Werfel,
who had supported the idea of a socialist Publishing house, wisely stayed with their
profiteering publishers. One great hope to win Kafka as an author of Die Gefaehrten
was disappointed. He politely declined to join the “Verein”. So the venture ended, when
the printer's credit was exhausted. The co-operative had not made any profits nor
could it pay Fritz Lampl, its frontman, any salary.
Now Fritz returned from a journey to Berlin full of enthusiasm and determination. He
had seen an exhibition by a sculptress, Marianne von Allesch, who had made fantastic
shapes from blown glass. Fritz found that glass shaped with fantasy was poetry mate-
rialised and that was what he was going to do.
He rented a darkish, cheap, basement room, engaged an unemployed industrial glass-
blower and asked me to design fantasies in glass and sit beside the craftsman, to
teach him the mysteries of form and for him to teach me the technique of glass blow-
ing. Ours was not to be the method of the Venetians, developed and refined over cen-
turies, who dipped a iong pipe into molten glass and worked their magic on it by blow-
ing the red hot lump, swinging it through the air to make gravity from outside and air
pressure from inside work on it, while repeatedly reheating the glowing vessel. We
worked from glass tubes of different diameter and colour, some striped. First a mouth-
piece was formed and then the man suddenly turned up the burner until the glass grew
red hot and pliable, expanding as he blew into it, twisting, reheating and finally cutting
the bubble with a knife to form a foot; a vase had been born. There was great virtuosity
in handling such brittle material, like taming an obstinate animal. It had to be married to
sensitivity to turn craft into art.
67
