On Sunday, January 26, upon the occasion of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the Jewish Community of Osijek organised the lecture and presentation of life and work of Otti Berger, a famous Croatian Bauhaus designer of Jewish origin, born in 1898 in Zmajevac (Vörösmart), in the region of Baranya, in the vicinity of Osijek, killed in 1944 in Auschwitz. The lecturers were professor Ana Lehocki-Saramdržić,PhD, from the Faculty of Humanities in Osijek, highschool history teacher Andreja Mlinarević and highschool student Zvonimir Rajčević.

Since Zmajevac (Vörösmart) at that time was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where most of inhabitants have always been of Hungarian origin, she is also often regarded as a Hungarian artist. She is dominatly presented as a Croatian artist because she studied in Zagreb.

Otti Berger completed the Royal Academy of Arts and Artistic Crafts in Zagreb in 1926. In 1927 she went to Bauhaus in Dessau and officially enrolled in a course of studies where she first took part in the preparatory course, with Lászlo Mohloy-Nagy, and the lectures given by Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. Afterwards she enrolled in the Textile workshop from which she graduated in 1930. In the autumn of 1931, at the recommendation of Gunta Stölzl, Otti became the incumbent Head of the Bauhaus Weaving workshop, but she was never given the official appointment. The new director, Mies van der Rohe, entrusted the management of the Textile workshop to designer Lilly Reich, while Otti Berger became her deputy.

In 1932 she left the Bauhaus and opened her own 'Atelier for Textile' in Berlin, establishing successful cooperation with numerous textiles companies which were producing materials based on her innovative solutions. In 1936 she was banned from working in Germany due to her Jewish origins, and was forced to close her company down.

It was in that period that the majority of the Bauhaus professors, including her fiancée Ludwig Hilberseimer, managed to obtain visas and leave for America. Otti Berger tried to do the same because in 1938 László Moholy-Nagy invited her to join the New Bauhaus in Chicago. Looking for work and waiting for the visa she had spent several brief periods in London. Her mother’s sickness, the inability to find work in England (she did not speak the language, was of impaired hearing, with no friends – for the English she was a German), in 1938 she came back to Zmajevac. Sadly, in April of 1944 she was deported to Auschwitz together with her family, and she died there.