But the life of this successful designer did not always go smoothly. When she first came to the Bauhaus as the daughter of a high judicial officer, she was already 30 years old, a late bloomer like, for example, Josef Albers. Previously she had destroyed all the pictures she had executed thus far, in one radical gesture. She had studied art in Dresden and travelled to France and Norway. After leaving the Bauhaus at the end of 1929, she directed the design department at a metal goods plant in Gotha. But after only three years, her marriage having failed, she returned to her parents’ home in Chemnitz and lived a withdrawn life there as a painter. It was not until after the Second World War that she was summoned to the Dresden Academy of Art by Mart Stam, a lecturer there. In 1952 she moved to East Berlin, which was now the capital of the GDR, and designed objects of daily use at the “Institute for Industrial Design”, including a stackable canteen service as well as shoes, handbags and wallpaper. After this three-year guest stint, Marianne Brandt, the most famous female German designer, finally turned her back in 1954 on a design world now firmly under the sway of the reigning political party.