Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project For Craft and Decorative Arts in America

Interview with Ruth Adler Schnee
Conducted by Anita Schnee
At the Artist's home in Southfield, Michigan
November 24-30, 2002

Preface

The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Ruth Adler Schnee on November 24-30, 2002. The interview took place in Southfield, Michigan and was conducted by Anita Schnee for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. This interview is part of the Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America.

Ruth Adler Schnee and Anita Schnee have reviewed the transcript and have made corrections and emendations. The reader should bear in mind that he or she is reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written prose.

Interview

ANITA SCHNEE: This is Anita Schnee interviewing Ruth Adler Schnee at Mrs. Schnee’s home and studio in Southfield, Michigan, on Sunday, November 24th for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, disk number one.

Okay, Ruth, if you could put the glass down, be very gentle with it because that mike will pick it up.

So let’s start this by finding out where and when you were born.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: I was born in Frankfurt am Main and it was the year 1923, May 13th.

ANITA SCHNEE: And let’s just talk a little bit about your parents, if you would.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: My parents, Marie and Joseph Adler, came from an old Frankfurt family, going back as far as I know since 1365, particularly my dad’s family. My mother’s family came from outside of Frankfurt, but in those days it was very important that families reach far back and that everyone knew the history of that family.

**[This note pertains to tape one where I am talking about our family history, which I’m mentioning goes back to 1365, I believe. I should mention here that my dad’s ancestors, beginning with the Schwelm family, were first mentioned in the annals of the city of Frankfurt in 1530. The Jews had been living in Frankfurt in ghettoes for a hundred years, and David Schwelm, whose last name was bestowed on him after living many years in the city of Schwelm in Westfalen, was first mentioned. He had four sons and in 1556 he lived with his brother Mosche, who was the founder of the Hahn family, and Isaac, who was the founder of the Rothschild family in the Haus zum Hahn. Historically, the houses in Frankfurt were always named according to the people that lived in them.

ANITA SCHNEE: And this is coming from the family history that Papi wrote, right?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Yes, my dad was a great archivist and incredibly interested in genealogy.

Additionally, I think I should add here that in the tiny hamlet of Abenheim in Germany, and this is located near the Rhine River, northwest of Worms, Marcus Spiegel was born on December 8th, 1829, and that was a family that could trace its roots to the 16th century.

According to the family legend, and I think this would be of interest here, the house that he was born in had a large Spiegel, which is in German a mirror in front of the home, and in those days, when Napoleon liberated the ghettoes, the Jews were given the surnames of the houses that they lived in, and it was that Marcus Spiegel who started the Spiegel Company in Chicago, and I think the rest is mail-order history.

The Schwelms and the Spiegels were related.

I should also mention that the first time a profession was mentioned in connection with the name of Schwelm was with Hayum Jacob Schwelm who was a dealer in clothes, and that was around 1689 to 1720, because up to then Jews had not been allowed to be merchants. They were moneylenders.

That store seemed to have been in the family and was inherited by David Beer Schwelm.

ANITA SCHNEE: I’m sorry, Mom, which store?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: The dress and clothes shop that I just mentioned. He was the first one that got permission to do that, according to the annals of the city of Frankfurt. He had permission to trade outside the ghetto and dealt in second-hand dresses and sale of used furniture.

Until that time, as I mentioned before, the Jews were officially allowed only lending of money or exchange of coins brought in by travelers or merchants during the annual Frankfurt trade fairs.

David Beer Schwelm must have prospered because he was able to give his son Simon a well-rounded education and Simon, my great-grandfather, registered and opened a book, and Antiquariat store at the Schaefergasse 10 in Frankfurt and that I think was the beginning of the bookstore that really belonged to the family and, as I mentioned before, was in the same house until the Nazi regime.

In 1836, Karl Adler, my grandfather, became assistant in that bookshop and worked there. And in 1884, according to the history of Frankfurt, or 1887, he then registered as owner of that store.]

My dad’s family – was in the book and antique business. The bookstore in Frankfurt. Was in the same family, in the same house for many, many years, as mentioned.

My dad has always said the reason he couldn’t research the family further is because in 1365 there was a big fire and the records were destroyed.

My dad in his youth was active in the family bookstore. My maternal grandfather was in the wine business. He was extremely successful in that business, delivering to the court of Belgium. He was friends with the King of Belgium. And I think my grandmother on my mother’s side, Helene Née Schoenhof, grew up in the leather business. My mother was always very proud that her great-grandfather brought the Singer sewing machine to America, but in the early 1920s left for Germany again – couldn’t get accustomed to America.

At any rate, that was the family background, middle class. They felt very strongly that they were German rather than Jews. There was very little religious observance. They knew the philosophy, the music, the poetry of the Jewish religion, but they did not practice it in a formal way.

ANITA SCHNEE: What was the context of the Jews, the rest of the Jews? How did they compare to the rest of the Jews in Germany, if you know?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: That circle was pretty much the same thinking. They felt very strongly that they were Germans and identified with German politics and the German intellectual milieu in those days.

ANITA SCHNEE: Was this most Germans, could you say, in Germany – most Jews in Germany were like that or were they –

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Well, in that circle they were. I can’t – first of all, I was too young. We left Frankfurt when I was four. But they were very proud of their German tradition and the fact that they as tradesmen in Germany were able to make a success of it.

[Oh my god. Also on this tape, I just want to insert a little bit about my parents’ meeting, which was in 1921. My dad was working in the bookstore – and incidentally, I forgot to mention that my grandmother’s maiden name was Schwelm, and this is why I referred to the Schwelm family previously.

My dad had the intention of going on a buying trip, and on the way, he had planned to stop in Munich where my mother was studying at the Hans Hoffman School. She was the youngest daughter of Ernst Salomon, and I have referred to him as being a wine merchant, and it is said that even as a little girl, she already loved the feeling for symmetry, color and painting and studied – [phone ringing.]

And as I said before, my mother loved color. She was one of the few students who had been allowed to work in the Staedel Gallery in Frankfurt in her spare time to copy the famous painters, and that was a very special honor. But she wanted to work and live at the center of art and literature and surrounded by the new ideas and the new culture that was – that she had read about and with people who lived for these new expressions in art and design.

She admired the painters of the Blue Rider [Der Blaue Reiter] like Kokoshka, Herschelman and many others, and that brought her to Munich and eventually then to the Bauhaus. She studied calligraphy, and I have her Bauhaus portfolios, which I absolutely cherish, because they are perfect.

According to my dad, that was really her place. It was the center of the art revolution. He mentioned it many times. She found the basis of her thinking and the environment that really shaped her future.

She was not a good cook. In fact, she never cooked. We had a staff in Germany. I don’t remember my mother ever entering the kitchen except possibly for planning meals. According to my dad, they inherited my grandfather’s cook when they were married, and not until the Nazi emigration did my mother learn to cook.

ANITA SCHNEE: But she really did learn because in my own childhood we used to just fall all over particularly her baked goods – unbelievable.]

ANITA SCHNEE: Yes. Okay. So when you were born – where – which apartment were you born?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: I can’t tell you that. I don’t have any recollection. But I think my parents lived in the Eschersheimer Landstrasse. I remember the apartment incredibly well. In fact, I think I could probably draw a floor plan of that apartment, although we left it when I was about four, and moved to Düsseldorf.

[Again, tape one, I neglected to mention a little about the modern apartment that we had in Düsseldorf. I remember my dad coming in one afternoon with a Signac painting. He had worked with a gallery owner, and I have the feeling that he did not get paid for that work. It was a modern gallery, and he took it out in a painting.

I have a feeling that by that time he got smart, because when he found the apartment for the Klees in Düsseldorf, they were not able to pay him the commission and offered, Paul Klee offered him some of his paintings from the studio and my dad would not accept them at that time because, famous words, he said, “Mr. Klee, I cannot support my children or feed my children with your paintings.” But in this case, he took the Signac, and I am ever so happy he did. It’s hanging in our – although it was torn, as I mentioned, during the Kristallnacht activity, the Nazis totally tore it. My mother had it restored. It is a beautiful watercolor that hangs in our dining room and is my great joy.]

ANITA SCHNEE: And what were the circumstances of your move from Frankfurt to Düsseldorf?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: I think my dad was unhappy with being involved in the family business. It was I think quite restricting to him. And when he moved to Düsseldorf – when he moved the family to Düsseldorf – he became active in real estate and German real estate is not the way it is in this country; it is really investments and brokering and that type of thing.

And he was – I think he had connections in Düsseldorf, and my mother, I have a feeling, was only too happy to move to Düsseldorf because it was a modern city, it was considered the Paris of West Germany, and it was totally different from the Frankfurt environment because Frankfurt was a very, very old city, very traditional.

And so I think they welcomed starting new in fresh, new, modern surroundings. And that then became their circle of friends really.

ANITA SCHNEE: And about what year was that, do you remember, that you moved?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: I think it was either 1927 or 1929. I can’t be that sure about it.

ANITA SCHNEE: So you remember the first apartment. That was the one you were talking about the floor plan.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Yes.

ANITA SCHNEE: And now this one that you moved to in Frankfurt, where was that?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: In Düsseldorf.

ANITA SCHNEE: I’m sorry.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: We moved to Düsseldorf.

That was in the Zietenstrasse. I think Zieten, if my memory – my German history is correct, Zieten was a military person.

It was a very modern apartment. I loved it. Sunny, not like the Frankfurt apartment, which was sort of antique. The apartment in Frankfurt was wonderful because I remember the Kachelofen [tiled stove], which was the fireplace in my dad’s study. It was old tiles, and it’s interesting that in Frankfurt, I remember the apartment being very traditional. It was furnished in Biedermeier furniture.

ANITA SCHNEE: And that was what era in Germany, Biedermeier?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Biedermeier was – oh dear, I should have studied my art history better but I think – see, the Baroque period was really more for the upper echelon, the royalty, and then when Biedermeier came in, it was available to the common people because it was a lot simpler in style than Baroque, it was bourgeois.

And my parents’ apartment was Biedermeier but also Thonet furniture.

ANITA SCHNEE: That’s in Frankfurt still?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: In Frankfurt.

When they were married they went to Czechoslovakia, to the Thonet factory and bought the new Bentwood chairs that were available at that time.

And so the Frankfurt apartment was mixed with Biedermeier and Thonet furniture but one room was reserved for strictly being Biedermeier and that was the parlor. That was very important to my mother.

ANITA SCHNEE: And she entertained there, she received tea? Did she serve tea there and that sort of thing?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Yes. Let me think. I remember very well objecting to the Biedermeier furniture, as little as I was, saying it’s so old-fashioned looking. And my mother – I hear her say it – said, “When you get older, you will appreciate that one mixes the classic old with the new.” And I think that has sort of been the thread in my life. I’ve never forgotten it. Because the paintings were – that I remember from the Frankfurt days were Ingres, who I felt this was much too traditional in style, and it’s curious now that I think about it that I should have objected to that. I didn’t know much about art history, nothing. I mean, I was only four or six years old. But when we moved to Düsseldorf, it was a totally different scene.

ANITA SCHNEE: Well now, if I could just interrupt and backup, Mom, where would a four or five year old be exposed to Ingres?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Well, we had him on the wall. My mother was very careful to explain all that to us and I very much took it in. But then when we went to Düsseldorf, it was a much more contemporary look in the place that we lived in.

ANITA SCHNEE: What do you mean when you say contemporary? Contemporary to that time?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Well, the house was modern. The apartment house was – perhaps one shouldn’t call it modern. It was between Art Deco and modern, the architecture, and I think my mother tried to furnish the place in Art Deco – not necessarily Art Deco but much more modern style.

If I remember this correctly, and I hope I do, they called in an architect by the name of [Bernard] Pfau, P-F-A-U, who was familiar with – he was not a Bauhaus devotee, but he was embedded in that culture and he designed that apartment for them. In fact, he lived with us for two weeks because he felt – and I don’t think it was ever expressed that way; I was much too young to be involved in that – but that’s how my parents wanted it so that he would familiarize himself with their style of living.

ANITA SCHNEE: So he lived with them to just – and I know a lot of times in your work you talk about knowing the client’s culture. Is this the same concept that he went so far even as to live with the people to see the patterns of their life?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Yes, absolutely, and my parents welcomed that.

ANITA SCHNEE: He was at the breakfast table and things like that?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Yes. My parents insisted on it because they felt that’s the only way he could design for them.

In any case, that Düsseldorf apartment was very much more to what I liked to live with. I remember my mother and he created what my mother used to call a winter garden in the master bedroom – a place with white marble chips where she could have her cactus plants. The fact that my brother fell into the cactus plants and had all the prickles all over him didn’t seem to be important to them. But I remember that he sat for hours and pulled them out of his hands. In any case, that was Düsseldorf.

And then in Düsseldorf, as I got to be a little bit older, I remember parties and functions that my parents had in their place with artists of the area and particularly a sculptor by the name of [Leopold] Fleischhacker, who was one of their very good friends and they had a son and I was very friendly with him. But Fleischhacker’s work was contemporary, definitely, and I really very much enjoyed it. I was not at the parties, mind you, because we were not allowed to the parties. In fact, we were not allowed to eat at the dinner table. We were delegated to the kitchen where we had a little table to eat with Anni, our wonderful nanny. But that kind of life lasted until 1936, I would say.

[In line with the Düsseldorf experience, I also have mentioned the sculptor Fleischhacker. On my trip back to Düsseldorf, the city had asked me to come. They paid for my trip.

ANITA SCHNEE: Do you remember what year that was?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: That was the first time we went back to Germany.

ANITA SCHNEE: The ‘60s.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: In 1958. The city was very proud to be the city where Fleischhacker worked, and the powers-that-be there took us to the cemetery where Fleischhacker’s work had in some cases been destroyed by the Nazis, but in other cases had been re-erected, gravestones that he designed were re-erected in an Art Deco style that I thought was extremely beautiful. I really loved his work.

I also mentioned the Klees in that tape having lived in Lausanne. It was not Lausanne; it was Berne, and it was in Berne that I visited them. It was during the time of the automobile road races. I was a great admirer of Hans Stuck who raced in Alfa Romeo cars. We just had a little Opel in Germany, but the Alfa Romeo styling at age 13 blew me away. I loved it. And I would sit – and I bought the same headdress, linen headdress that Hans Stuck raced in. I wore it. I sat by the side of the highway waiting for him to race by. And, of course, it was just seconds – just a turning of the head, it was so fast – but I didn’t mind sitting there for hours in the sun. That was the time when I also visited the Klees, a totally different picture, of course, but as I mentioned before, Frau Klee was an incredible cook, and they were just wonderfully genial people.]

ANITA SCHNEE: So let’s back up a little bit and just talk about what your school was like in those days before Hitler. Let’s stay talking about before Hitler for a while.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: First I went to the Blüscherschule, which was, if I remember it correctly – of course, this was in Düsseldorf – a Montessori teaching method. And I remember the first day of coming to school and Fraülein Uihline was my teacher. I came in a brilliant yellow sweater that my mother had knitted just for this occasion, and Fraülein Uihline stood in front of the class, and when she saw me come through the door, she raised her arms and she said, “Ah, die strahlende sonne,” which means, “Ah, now comes the radiant sun,” and it made me feel warm and welcome all over.

I was not very good in math. I was very bad in gymnastics, which is extremely important in Germany. But I loved to draw, and I loved – I loved school, I really did.

No, I think that was Müller Lyzeum later.

Then when I graduated from the Blüscherschule, which was I think in American terms the grade school, my parents sent me to a private school, which was the Müller Lyzeum.

ANITA SCHNEE: Mom, before you go on to that one, we have a number of drawings that you did when you were that young, very young. Where did you do the drawings? Did you do them in school, did you do them at home?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: No, I did them at home. That was not schoolwork. I loved to create my own little world with little people who did all kinds of little things. And when I came home – I mean, the school day was very, very long in Germany because you have the academic classes in the morning and then the gymnastics and all the sports in the afternoon. Then you came home for lunch and then you had the sports and then, if I remember this correctly – and this is probably not in grade school but later on at the Müller Lyzeum – you had to come back into class and do sewing and that kind of thing.

In any case, the little people that I drew in those days – I did that I think on Sundays or early mornings. I just was enchanted with creating little scenes, whether they were interiors or landscapes or whatever they were. They had to have my little people in them. And when I did the landscapes, for instance, I concentrated on weeping willows because they were easily recognizable. All the other trees I couldn’t draw. So everything has weeping willows.

[Laughter.]

ANITA SCHNEE: But not because you were sad?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: No, no. Weeping willows I could draw you know, they have a very definite silhouette.

ANITA SCHNEE: Okay. Then you went on to the Müller Lyzeum.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Müller Lyzeum. Okay, it was a private school, a very fancy private school. We used to come to class with white gloves. Frau Witt, Frau von Witt [Director], who came from a very distinguished Prussian military family and was very regal, with white hair mounted on her head – but she was wonderful. I liked her very much. But every time we passed her in the hall, we had to curtsy.

But there I met a type of young girl that came from a higher than middle class background. Isabella von Bülow was one of my friends – of course, von Bülow was active in the German government, they had a beautiful estate with a moat all around, like the medieval castles – another one was Gisela Grüters [niece to Rudolph Serkin].

I cannot remember very much about the lesson plan at the Müller Lyzeum except that Frau von Witt was very strict about having the rabbi come in once a week to teach the Jewish students.

ANITA SCHNEE: And there were how many?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: I don’t think there were many. It was a very small group. But I remember the social side of the Müller Lyzeum better than the academic.

I should take that really back because after – I can’t remember the dates – I think it was ‘35 – after ‘35 the Nazis created a lesson plan and were determined to interject their own philosophy. We had to learn to throw hand grenades. We had to concentrate on more domestic art than academic. And, of course, after 1936 – or in 1936, we were delegated to the back of the classroom where we could hardly hear the lesson plan and were very rarely called upon, and then Hitler published the Nuremberg Laws, and that was the end of my German schooling.

But the friends that I made at the Müller Lyzeum I retained. And to my astonishment, they corresponded with me, under threat, because you were not allowed to have Jewish friends, of course, as a Christian.

But Gisela Grüters came from a Christian/Jewish family. Her father I think was Jewish, her mother was not, or maybe it was the other way around; I can’t remember exactly. But one of her parents came from the Busch family and, of course, the Busch family has become extremely well-known in the musical world the Busch Quartet with Adolf Busch and Rudolph Serkin was part of that family.

In any case, I spent weekends with the Grüters’ family in Oberkassel, which was the little town across the Rhine River. Those weekends were unforgettable because there was a great deal of music. They used to have chamber music every evening, almost every day through the day, and I remember Rudi am Klavier always. This, of course, was Rudolph Serkin.

So that was my introduction to chamber music, which I have loved to this day.

[I should also mention that I played the recorder at age 10. I loved the instrument. I loved it not for the tone, but for its sculptural shape and the beautiful rose wood texture. When I was subsequently asked to joint the “Children’s symphony,” I was not asked to play my recorder. I was delegated to the last seat, where I played “Nightingale” and triangle. I have asked many of our American musician friends if they are familiar with this wonderful little instrument. No one knows of it.

I have discovered that it was mentioned by Mozart. Haydn, in one of his symphonies created a part for it. It was the perfect toy for me. It meant that a beautiful little table sat next to me with a well designed glass pitcher. The instrument itself is a little shiny square brass container, filled with water. One blows into the spout, out comes the shrill song of the nightingale. Of course the container had to be filled many times, which I diligently performed, splashing the water everywhere. The triangle shape was attractive. I had affixed a lovely red ribbon to it, where by I held it.]

Those were the days at the Müller Lyzeum. Then in ‘36 when I was not allowed to come to a German school, my parents sent me to La Ramée in Lausanne. My brother was sent to England to school and I was sent to Lausanne. La Ramée was a finishing school on the Lake of Geneva, absolutely beautifully situated. It was a glorious building but extremely strict and my parents thought I would learn French because the Swiss region of France, of course, is high French. I did not learn French. I was much too unhappy there. I didn’t really fit in. The young girls – it was strictly a girls’ school – came from England and Austria. They came from all over Europe. And I just didn’t feel welcome. I couldn’t communicate. I did not know English. Of course, I didn’t know French at all. But it was a very unhappy time. I felt like Heidi, my Swiss literary heroine, who yearned for the mountains when she was sent to the city. With me it was just the opposite.

In fact, I once left. I just walked out of the school and they found me on the highway, because I thought I could walk back to Germany to my parents.

ANITA SCHNEE: How old were you then, do you remember?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Well, in ‘36 I was 13 years old.

ANITA SCHNEE: You were there only one year?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: I think it was not even a year. It was short of a year because my mother came, and I think she particularly mostly came to pay them because you couldn’t send monies out of Germany, and I think, if I remember this correctly, my dad’s bank account had been immediately closed after Hitler arrived.

But my mother came and was very angry at me. She said, “It’s so beautiful here. I do not understand why you’re so unhappy.” But I felt like Heidi. I was homesick, and homesick is a horrible illness.

I have no remembrance of a lesson plan. I just remember that I had tennis lessons. I had a lovely tennis outfit, which I adored, and that was the only reason I took those lessons. It was made out of raw silk. I had designed it myself – it was sleeveless and it had a short, little pleated skirt. And one day I ran across the foyer – I was late for my lessons. I had my racket and tennis balls in my arms and slipped on the white marble floor of the foyer just in front of the director. The balls bounced all over the floor. She almost tripped over them and I was very much – I was just horrified and also got a calling down, of course.

I do remember the wonderful colors of the mountains and the sun going down over the mountains and the fires that were lit in the mountains to honor the Independence Day. That is my only recollection really of Lausanne.

And also the fact that we made a trip up to Mont Blanc and I got very, very sick with altitude sickness and stuck my head out of the bus and vomited all the way up Mont Blanc to the Mer de Glace, I was reprimanded for that. That was the kind of discipline one had to have in that school.

The other thing I remember is that when I first came to Lausanne – my parents insisted that I was old enough to travel from Düsseldorf to Lausanne by myself. It meant crossing the border. I was absolutely petrified at the idea that I had to deal with the Nazi border patrol. My parents were very unhappy that I couldn’t handle that, and so they got Cooke & Co. to meet me at the border and shepherd me across to the Swiss side. My dad was furious that he had to pay for that because they felt at age 13 one should really be able to handle that sort of thing, but I couldn’t. So that’s my life in Lausanne.

ANITA SCHNEE: Now, Mom, you mentioned designing the tennis dress.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Yes.

ANITA SCHNEE: How did it come about that you were able to design clothes and then did you make them?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: No, no. I didn’t make them. My parents used to go to Paris to buy my wardrobe and my brother’s every year. And I mostly was happy with what my mother picked most of the time, except once and I think I told you about that. She came back with a kelly green and white wool – what do you call those tweeds, Harris tweed – plaid dress. In hindsight I think it was really a beautiful dress. I loved pleated skirts because I liked the pattern of it and the way they moved when you walked, but that dress had a white pique collar, which was okay too, but a large black taffeta bow in the middle of my chest where the colors met. I did not want to wear that dress. My mother insisted and in those days, of course, you did what your parents wanted and what you were told to do.

So the day we went to the zoo my mother said, “That is the dress you are to wear,” and after much struggle, I wore it. And when we got to the monkey cage at the zoo, the monkeys all gathered in front of me in the cage and started laughing. I was absolutely mortified, and from that day on, I absolutely would not wear that dress because the monkeys had laughed at me.

ANITA SCHNEE: But getting back to the tennis outfit – how it was that you were able to design and have your own clothes.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: My parents really gave me freedom to design things and, of course, I’m eternally grateful for that because it sort of pointed into my career. That dress was custom-made for me, because by 1936 we were no longer allowed to go into shops as Jews – or I should say, shops were not allowed to trade with Jews, whether it was a grocery shop or dress shop or whatever. So from 1936 on, a lot of my clothes were custom-made.

I remember I had a green wool dress, which also I loved, that I designed and was custom-made for me, particularly to come to America, and that green wool dress is what I used to wear to high school at Cass Technical High School. It was totally out of sync with the rest of the high school students, but it was all I had.

[The other thing that I should have mentioned, how Anni would bring us groceries late at night. I mentioned that we were not allowed to visit, to shop for groceries, I neglected to say that the Jewish stores at that point had all been closed, and we were not allowed to market in Christian stores. I think that is important.]

ANITA SCHNEE: Now, getting back to Papi [father] and Mutti’s [mother] circle – oh, I have it in Frankfurt. That’s going back a ways. You had that guest book that you were looking at and you were –

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Yes, there are some names there I think that were in Frankfurt. One of the names that – I particularly remember and I hope this was Frankfurt and not Düsseldorf – I’m not sure about it. We need to look at the guest book again. But Tilly Wertheim was my mother’s great friend. She was the sister of Eric Mendelsohn, the great architect, who worked in Tel Aviv, Israel. And Tilly would make regular trips to Israel – at that time it was Palestine – and brought back beautiful embroidered kaftans for us. She herself wore Yemenite embroidery on her clothes – which I loved and particularly remember.

My parents’ circle in Düsseldorf was the people like Paul Klee, whom I then met in Lausanne when the Klees were living in Switzerland, and Fleischhacker was Düsseldorf, and I should also remember Lotte Juchacz, whose mother was at the Reichstag. She was one of the diplomats and I was really very impressed with Juchacz because she was the first woman lawyer that I met, and at that time I was 11 or 12 years old but I was very impressed; she was stunning, and I thought every lawyer should look that way and should be a woman. Thinking back to those years I now realize how much my parents influenced me.

ANITA SCHNEE: Now, also before we did this interview, we looked at actual pictures of the Frankfurt apartment and you were able to recognize a lot of the items in that apartment. Do you want to say anything about those, or do they sort of speak for themselves? I mean, you could even look in and see the floor plan and talk about the situation there. No? Nothing comes up for that?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Well, I thought I had already covered that. The Frankfurt apartment had the Biedermeier Zimmer. It had the tile fireplace in my dad’s study. It had a chandelier that my mother had designed. My dad’s study had the Biedermeier desk that we now have downstairs. And I remember that Mutti designed the chandelier – which was totally destroyed by the Nazis. I liked that chandelier actually. It was, I thought, a little heavy, but I loved the chandelier in the Biedermeier Zimmer because it was little beads – pearls, little glass beads – what they call echt [real] Biedermeier, E-C-H-T, which means truly Biedermeier. They glistened in the sun and changed colors when the lights went on.

My parents also had a bell pull, which was made out of those glass beads. In fact, the key pull that I have on that little vitrine, the Biedermeier vitrine, which I inherited from my parents, has that same beadwork. It all matched very well. My mother was very conscious of those things. She kept her social stationary in a leather folder with the same beadwork imbedded on the front. I still have it.

ANITA SCHNEE: Talk a little bit about her experience at the Bauhaus.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: She never talked about it. I don’t know – the only thing I know about her introduction to the Bauhaus was that my grandfather, who was of considerable importance in her life –

ANITA SCHNEE: That would be her father Ernst Salomon?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Yes – was absolutely aghast at the idea that she should want to join those artists at the Bauhaus and, as I said many times, I don’t think my grandmother, his wife, was living anymore. She died when my mother was at a very early age, in her early teens I think. But my grandfather, Opa, was totally aghast at such a thing. It was totally out of his sphere. He was convinced she would come back a Communist or pregnant, and my mother went anyway. She went to Munich anyway.

ANITA SCHNEE: Now, this was one year after the Bauhaus had been founded, is that right, 1920?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Well, yes, but before then she was in Munich at the Hans Hoffman School where she painted. And in Munich was her first encounter with the Nazi Party, which took over the beer halls. My mother attended that and saw the fanaticism of that group. And then later, of course, in 1933 when we lived in Düsseldorf, my dad had become an important advisor to the steel industry: Krupp, Mannesmann, Thysen. The industry actually was in Duisburg but the heads, the CEOs of the industry, lived in Düsseldorf.

ANITA SCHNEE: Okay, let’s keep this still with pre-Hitler, if we can. We’ll get there. I just also wanted you to talk a little bit about the family circle and the travel to Taunus and Ostende. Remember you talked about how the family would gather and we looked at the diaries and the photographs of that. So just re-describe a little bit about how that was, how the family gathered. And actually that will lead us into the Hitler years, because I remember you told that one incident of the family members standing up and saying, “We may never do this again.”

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Well, this was the winter of ‘33. We were already in Düsseldorf.

ANITA SCHNEE: But before that, before Hitler you used to go – see, it creates a certain climate or picture of how you would go into the Taunus, what the Taunus was, what you did there, that sort of thing, vacation. If you could just get – for the record, talk about that a little bit, just describe.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Well, when we – of course, when we lived in Frankfurt the family was close and we saw each other almost every day, but once we moved from Frankfurt, the family planned get-togethers. In the winter they would meet in the Taunus over the Christmas holidays and in the summer they would meet in Ostende [Belgium].

And that was always great fun for me because that was the time when I saw my cousins. I did not have a close relationship with them. They had been brought up in a totally different atmosphere. Their parents were merchants, and intellectually, it was like night and day. But we had fun together and especially in Ostende, and I think also in the Taunus we skied together, but I have a particular remembrance of the winter or the December of 1932, when it was very clear to everyone that we may not see each other again, because it was imminent that Hitler would be put in charge and take over the Reichstag and, of course, it turned to be true January 30th, 1933.

And that date is emblazoned in my memory because I remember immediately the swastika flags coming out of the windows. And I mean I don’t know where – that certainly had not been the German flag up to that time but everyone had a swastika flag, everyone, overnight had a brown uniform, an SS or SR uniform, brown or black. But what I was trying to say is that my mother had been exposed to that in Munich in the early 1920s and she had seen the cult-like attraction of Fascism and was really very concerned about it.

ANITA SCHNEE: Do you think that made her more ready to move when the Nazis finally came, more than your dad because he hadn’t seen the Munich situation? Possible anyway? It’s just a thought.

So talk more about –

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: No, Mutti, we moved – you mean our move to America?

ANITA SCHNEE: Right, that she had foreseen –

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Our move to America had nothing to do with my mother foreseeing that. It was instigated by the Nazis because when my dad was pushed out of Dachau concentration camp he had to sign an agreement that we would leave immediately – Germany.

ANITA SCHNEE: Okay, okay. So that – sorry.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: So that instigated that.

ANITA SCHNEE: Okay.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: But my mother’s concern was that January in 1933 when my dad came back from a meeting at the Breidenbacher Hof and with a statement that Hitler had just been voted in by these industrialists and he had not raised his voice because he himself at that time felt that, number one, this was a move against communism, a move to a better Germany. He assured my mother that this would not in any way touch us because he had the Iron Cross, he had fought in World War I, which was considerable, and he felt that would be on his record and the fact that these people knew that he was very much in the German tradition.

ANITA SCHNEE: So talk a little bit about how that process unfolded for you and your experience at school, on the streets, how you began to feel the Hitler incursions.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Well, as I said before, I was not allowed to go to school after ‘36.

ANITA SCHNEE: There were intervening years there, ‘33 to ‘36. You were still in school, were you not? You didn’t talk about the teachers.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: I talked about the fact that they sat us in the last row. That my German friends kept true to me.

ANITA SCHNEE: The dress you wore, that one story about the belt.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: That was at the Müller Lyzeum. No, I did say that we could hardly hear the lesson plan, being way back in the last row. I was always poor at math and we had an instructor by the name of Liszt, who maintained that he was related to the famous composer. When I did not know my math lesson – he called me to the front of the class and took the belt off my beautiful French wool dress – it was light blue with a little pique collar and a blue calf leather belt with a brass buckle; I remember that to this day – and he took that belt and hit me because I didn’t know the lesson. And that was really the general climate in the classroom. The Jewish students were regarded as trash.

ANITA SCHNEE: But, I’m sorry, I may be confused but that was not during the Hitler years, that was pre-Hitler that that incident happened?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: I said it happened at the Müller Lyzeum.

ANITA SCHNEE: I guess I’ve lost a little track of the dates there. The Müller Lyzeum was when? What date was that?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: I came to school, to the Blüscherschule when I was 5-years old and that was in 1928, so we already lived in Düsseldorf in 1928. I think there were four years, and I’m not sure about the years there, so that would have put us into 1932, 1933. And the next three years was at the Müller Lyzeum.

ANITA SCHNEE: Oh, I see. But that was during Hitler.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Yes.

ANITA SCHNEE: Okay. So then the Nuremberg Laws in ‘36.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Yes, and that was important to my brother and myself, because those laws dictated that no Jewish family could have staff in their household and so our Anni, my nanny, had to leave.

And as I mentioned before, we were not allowed to shop for groceries or clothes or any kind of shopping in Christian stores. My parents got Anni a position or a job in a very fine Feinkost Geschäft, which was really like what’s the name of that wonderful shop in England.

ANITA SCHNEE: Marks & Spencer, Marks & Spencer?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: No, Marks & Spencer is not a fine shop.

ANITA SCHNEE: Harrods, Fortnum’s.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Fortnum & Mason. It was that kind of a store. And she was able to spirit out – of that store groceries for us. So between 11 and 12 at night she would ring the doorbell and bring us bags of things that we were able to eat.

[ANITA SCHNEE: You weren’t able to buy your food.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Right, in Christian stores and Jewish stores were closed by the Nazis.]

I’m not sure I answered that question. I can’t remember the question.

ANITA SCHNEE: The question was just talk about the atmosphere and your experience post-Nuremberg laws.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Well, that’s part of it.

ANITA SCHNEE: So there was an incident you were on the street, weren’t you, attacked? You told me about that, came home bleeding. I guess that’s part of the mythology that isn’t true. You went to –

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: No, the thing I can remember is that the Müller Lyzeum had a summer house. I think it was in the Westerwald. I’m not sure exactly where it is. And the Müller Lyzeum, of course, was a girls’ school, all girls’ school. We all would move to that summer place for four weeks. It was a lovely place with beautiful gardens and marble chips on the walks, and I fell once and cut up my knee and really badly bled. And they refused to even give me Band-Aids to stop the bleeding. And that was pretty traumatic because I hurt and I couldn’t get help – it should have really had stitches for my knee. I still have the scar.

But as far as walking on the street, that was on the 8th of November when they came to destroy our house. The Nazis broke in. Luckily, we were not home because a neighbor had warned us that they were on their way. And we walked the streets and saw the destruction and how the Nazis threw furniture through the windows onto the street.

As a family – it became clear that four people walking on the street was much too conspicuous. So we split up. My parents went their way, and my brother and I went our own way and luckily met a neighbor who took us in. Her husband was an architect and that was incredible courage, because, of course, you were liable to get shot if you took in German kids – I mean, Jewish kids.

ANITA SCHNEE: Do you remember their names?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: [I had not remembered the family that took us in, my brother and myself, during Kristallnacht. It was an architect’s wife who took us in and their name was Hahn, H-A-H-N, and I think that refers to everything that I neglected to speak about in that tape.]

I knew the names. I just know that her husband was an architect and the concierge saw that she took us in and immediately called the Gestapo to tell them that she was hiding Jewish kids – and then the Gestapo called her and said that they were on their way and so my brother and I had to leave. We went back to our apartment, our old apartment, only to find that the door had been ripped off, the windows were totally crashed, and all our furniture was out on the street, had been thrown out. The kitchen cabinets had been torn out of the walls. My mother’s beautiful Limoges china, which she really saved for just her tea parties, was totally wrecked, crashed on a heap, and from then on it was a matter of cleaning up.

We sat on the heap of broken china and crystal. My parents’ paintings had been destroyed with knives. And the [Paul] Signac, which I’m now facing, had been torn into little tiny pieces. We crawled all over the floor to find scraps of paper, which we collected and eventually my mother took to a restorer. The painting has been restored, but, of course, it’s not worth anything like if it were intact. However, it’s really much more worth to me because of what happened to it.

In any case, my parents finally came back and we just sat together and cried. But that wasn’t accomplishing anything, so we got busy and started cleaning up and prepare to sleep on the floor for that night.

Unbelievably, German neighbors came to express their sympathy, and one in particular was Frau Grüters, the mother of Gisela, who came from Oberkassel with cookies and a pot of hot tea – I still have the pot. It’s Hutschenreuther china. It’s in our lower bedroom. And she came to console us and that was under threat of life really. It was incredibly courageous.

So that was Friday night and by Sunday my dad had been taken – we had a little Dachshund. My parents had taken the dog with them on their walk on the street. And my dad took the dog out on Sunday and then was greeted on the street by a Gestapo agent in plain clothes asking him if he was Herr Adler. Yes. And the agent said, “Please bring your dog home, and then come with me.” And that night that agent brought my dad’s glasses, his gold watch, his ring back to the apartment – if you can call it an apartment because we still hadn’t a door, an entrance door, no windows – and my mother was absolutely certain that they had killed him. She was so stoic.

Later we found out that he had been thrown into the police prison. They had straw in certain areas where they told Jews whom they had taken into “protective custody” to lay down. Later I learned that my dad had a court date for one of his clients in Duisburg Monday morning. He told them that he had that date, and they came back to our place, picked up his things – his watch, his glasses, his clothes – and then took him by train to Duisburg to appear in court. My dad did that and on the way back, it was the reverse. The Nazis, of course, took in his fee after they re-delivered his clothes and things back to us.

And so that was the first week after Kristallnacht. My mother immediately got busy to try and find relatives who could get us – get my dad out of Dachau and get us out of Germany, and I remember the daily, sometimes twice a day, calls from England. Her sister and husband and their four children had emigrated early during the Nazi period, ‘34, ‘35. The calls came sometimes two, three times a day to please ship the children, and that was my brother and myself, out of Germany with the Kindertransport. That was the transport that brought German – Jewish children to England. My mother absolutely refused. She said – and I so remember her voice – “We will either die together or we will live together but we will not split up,” and that was really very lucky because we would have never seen our parents again.

But from that first Monday morning after Kristallnacht, she would take us to the Nazi agency because she wanted to know where my dad was and what happened to him. Of course, they stonewalled her. They wouldn’t give out any information. And, in fact, I remember having to climb those high marble stairs, and they would stand at the top of the stair; they would not even let her get into the offices. They would simply take their guns and push us down the stairs, and my mother would take us and walk us back upstairs. But she never got information from them, and she never gave up.

Then she got busy to repair the furniture, because it was not allowed that we would take broken pieces out of the country. And since my parents could not take money out, these were their only possession that my mother felt could be shipped and possibly turned into money. She had everything repaired. And then as we went on, the Nazis kept passing new laws. You had – in order to get your possessions out of the country, you had to have it appraised by a German appraiser. You had to pay the value of that appraisal to the government before they would give you permission to ship it out. [In other words, you had to buy back your own furniture.]

My mother put all this into action and was incredibly courageous doing it. She never lost sight of the fact that eventually we would get out of this, although during Kristallnacht a lot of our friends were killed. One of my girlfriend’s parents were shot right there in the hallway of their home because they tried to resist the Gestapo. Luckily we weren’t at the house or my parents would probably have resisted them, too. But Hannah Rath’s parents were killed, and she eventually got herself on the Kindertransport to England. [I remember her sad letters telling me how she was being treated by the family that took her in. I was grateful for having a wise mother.]

But one day – I think it was two, three weeks after Kristallnacht – we had a call from a Gestapo agent telling my mother that they were shipping Papi to Dachau. If she wanted to see him for the last time she should come to the station at a certain hour and she would see him being put on the transport. At 3:00 in the morning one night she got us up, my brother and myself, and we went down to the train station to say goodbye to Papi.

I remember my parents embracing and I remember the Gestapo agent turning his back to them so that he – and this was extremely unusual because as history has proven they would ship people without saying goodbye, of course. He turned his back and my dad kissed my mother for the last time.

But my mother was undeterred. She worked on our immigration. In the meantime – she had found family in New York who would give us a visa to come to America – there was a quota in this country, of course. And then – she submitted that to the German government and I think with the help of the Dutch and the Belgian government; I was really not kept in the picture with that. I just knew in the background that things were happening. She submitted that to the government to ask for my dad’s release from Dachau. It had, I don’t think, ever occurred to her that they would kill him. That just never entered into the picture. But then, of course, records show that they killed but I think in those days they took them in to what they called “protective custody.”

One day my dad appeared in his prison clothes. He was so weak we could hardly recognize him. He was all skin and bones. He sat on the threshold of our place and I just remember the joy to see him.

They had knocked out his teeth; he no longer had his teeth. They starved him. And they eventually just pushed him out of the concentration camp. It was winter, he walked along the railroad tracks to Munich, in his bare feet – Dachau is near Munich – where a soup kitchen had been established by Polish Jews to feed and to finance train rides back to people’s places. They helped him get a coat over the striped pajamas – they were just pajamas. It was wintertime. He had no shoes. They gave him money to take the train to Düsseldorf.

And then, of course, we within days left Germany. I think my mother had already arranged for the lift van to pick up the furniture and send it to America.

There are a number of things that I forgot. Jews were not allowed to own silver. My parents had a great collection of silver, both for eating utensils and hollowware and ornaments in silver but it had to all be given to the government and that was I think right after the Nuremberg Laws. What the government would do is melt it and eventually bought ammunition – built or bought ammunition for that.

My mother refused to do that. She herself gathered up the silver, and she took it to a place where it was melted. She designed Shabbas candleholders to be made out of that silver and I can to this day draw the design that she had. And those Shabbas candleholders were the only remnant of the silver collection that was put into the lift van to America. Of course, it never got to this country. The van was vandalized in Cologne. My parents’ wines – and these were wines that they had saved for my wedding – they were Ernst Salomon wines. My grandfather, as I said before, was in the wine business and had his own label. None of this came over, but, of course, thank God we came with our lives, and we came with a few of the wonderful things to remind us of the old days.

[I think we should mention here that on the occasion of my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, which they spent in Jerusalem, the golden city, I wrote to their friends, to send us memos of their former life together. Pictures of the Munich and Bauhaus days came back, showing (what I thought to be my conservative) mother, wearing a sailors cap, her guitar with brightly colored ribbons, and smoking a cigar. There also came a letter telling us of the candle holders which had been found in a crate marked: “wine press.” The crate was found after the war under basement steps. We were incredibly excited, thinking that after 30 years, we had found my mother’s Shabbas candle holders. When they arrived in Detroit, they were pitch black and turned out to be the antique, ornate candle holders of the Adler (my Dad’s) family – not my mother’s modern design. It took weeks to bring back their silver glow. We used them at Susan and Dan’s wedding, under the chuppah. They are now in their dining room in Colorado Springs.]

Then came the day of our emigration from Germany. That was a day of great joy. Anni came to say goodbye to us. Of course, she wasn’t allowed to come but she came anyway. People had incredible courage to show their sympathy and remind us that we had friends whom we left.

Anni came. I don’t remember very much about our leaving. All I remember is that in the excitement my dad packed the visas, which we needed to get on the ship. That was a great excitement. Once we got to La Havre, they had to unpack everything to find the visas, number one.

Number two, my dad had, having been in the book business, had a wonderful library of first editions, all of which had been burned by the Nazis with my dad paying the expense of transporting them to be burned. He retained certain volumes of authors that had not been allowed to be published in Germany. They were very dear to him. He had sent them earlier, much earlier, to Belgium into a safe deposit box. Someone, an officer from the bank I think, was instructed to meet us when we left Germany. I don’t remember where he met us. I have a feeling he came to Düsseldorf to meet us at the train and deliver those first editions. But during the train ride to the border, there was a rumor going around on the train that the Gestapo was coming through to inspect everything. Some people, who were leaving with diamonds, were swallowing the diamonds. Everyone was trying to cover up what they were trying to smuggle out, in order to exist, because we could only take $4 each, and that meant $16 [between the four of us] out of Germany. My dad had these first editions and when he heard that they were coming through the train to inspect us he opened that train window and just threw them all out into the farmland that we were passing. [Knowing how much he loved books, this was done under incredible duress.]

The minute we crossed the border I started my diary. I marked it with the time we left Germany. I called it “Leaving Germany,” begun the day of our leaving Germany, Thursday, February 23rd, 1939, and coming to America.

ANITA SCHNEE: Mom, let me interrupt. We’re just about out of tape so let’s take a pause here.

[Tape change.]

ANITA SCHNEE: Okay.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Let’s see.

ANITA SCHNEE: You were just about to read the diary. You were talking about crossing the border into France and you were opening the diary.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Okay. My diary is starting and it says, “French border, 18:20,” which is 6:20. And it says – and I’m going to talk in German and try and translate it as best as I can.

“Ein Alpdruck ist von uns gefallen.” A millstone has fallen from us. “Deutschland liegt hinter uns.” Germany lies in back of us. “Kann es denn wirklich wahr sein?” Can it really be true? “Wird man wieder als Mensch behandelt?” Is one recognized again as a human being? “O, das ist zu schön um Wirklichkeit zu werden.” Oh, it is too beautiful to be reality.

And then I describe the trip from Düsseldorf to New York. Of course, passing the Statue of Liberty I will never forget. We came on the Aquitania. It was a terribly rough trip. I was seasick all the time, all during that trip. We came with our little Dachshund, who had been put into steerage, and we were – my brother and I, were extremely unhappy about that but we were able to visit him every day. Then as we get into New York harbor, and we saw the Statue of Liberty – it was so moving. It just so happened that Bruno Walter, the great conductor, was on the ship also and I met him standing next to me looking at the Statue of Liberty. We cried.

[This now pertains to tape two where I talked about coming over on the Aquitania. Many years – many, many years later during a Thanksgiving holiday, Eddie and I were visiting our children in New York and our grandchildren, we decided to show them the restorations at Ellis Island. They were beautifully designed, and among the restored pieces was a large model of the Aquitania. And, of course, I told my grandchildren the story of our arrival in New York on the Aquitania and so they took a picture of me standing in front of the model because they said, “That’s grandma’s ship.”

The other incident that I would like to correct is I am referring to Bruno Walther as having stood next to me on deck. We were passing the Statue of Liberty, and we were both incredibly moved by it. I’m not sure if it was his first trip; it certainly was mine. I’m referring to him as a composer, but he really was a conductor or known as a conductor.]

When we arrived in the port of New York, of course, we had never seen skyscrapers like that. We had never seen people munching gum. That was unheard of. But our family, the Weils, who had given us the visa, were at the quay and greeted us with open arms.

Now, I should mention that the Weil family was in the tobacco and liquor business and had apartments on Park Avenue and in the Essex House facing Central Park. It was a totally different atmosphere for me and a little bit foreign, certainly very foreign. I didn’t know their language and I certainly wasn’t accustomed to their way of life, but they were incredibly gracious to us and then saw to it that a day or two later we got on the train to Detroit.

My mother came with gifts to them and I remember her bringing French Gobelin pillows, which she thought they might enjoy. They were hand-done, petit point pillows, from the Musée Decluny. That’s what she was into at that time.

[It is interesting to note that although she was a great admirer of the Bauhaus people and knew many of them, her own work was influenced by the Impressionists or earlier – by Gothic and Renaissance art. Her beautiful calligraphy portfolio from those school days is like missals rather than typography. The marbleized frontis papers which she used to design could fit into the old leather bound books which I remember from my Dad’s library. Now I very much love those small remembrances which my parents left. They bring me back to a culture which I dismissed during my younger days as being “too old fashioned.” I realize now what a wonderful foundation it all was.]

In any case, my dad had been promised a position in Detroit and so we went off to Detroit.

ANITA SCHNEE: Mom, if I could slow you down just a bit and bring you back to Germany, I’m sorry, but two more things about Germany before you left: the art exhibition, the degenerate art exhibition, and the story of the ticket, the Wagner ticket.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Oh. Okay. I don’t recall the year but Hitler was staging an exhibition, a traveling exhibition of what they called “Entartete Kunst [opened July 19, 1937 in Munich],” which is “degenerate art,” showing the modernists and particularly the Jewish painters and sculptors. The idea was, and I think this was well publicized, that it would turn people off to that type of art and that they should rather appreciate the art that Hitler expounded, which was very Germanic and “Heldenleben,” so to speak, was, of course, the big cry.

Well, I heard –

ANITA SCHNEE: What does that mean in English?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Heldenleben is the cult of celebrating heroes. Helden are heroes. Leben is life. And that was, of course, Wagner’s philosophy, as we all know, with the Ring and all the rest of that.

Anyway, to come back to the exhibit, I don’t remember how I heard about the exhibit but I was determined to find out what it was. Whenever there were things like that happening in Düsseldorf my parents would not attend because they were known for being – I don’t like to say radicals – but certainly in the modernist style and sympathetic toward that type of art. But I wanted to find out more about it and my parents were totally against it.

ANITA SCHNEE: Totally against your going.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Yes, my going [because it would further prove their “left” tendencies”]. I had a brown wool coat, a winter coat, and my mother got me a brown large fur hat to go with that winter coat. As I got dressed to leave she got that – I hadn’t worn that hat – she got that hat out and she pushed it down on my face over my head into my face and she said to me, “They will never recognize you in this, so go.” Well, I went.

There was a long line to get into the – I don’t remember whether it was a museum or a gallery. I stood, of course, in the back of the line, taking my place in the back of the line. What the Germans had done is with loudspeakers out on the street – I don’t know how you call it – transport the songs of Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht and the other composers that were of that era and were Jewish, and [Gustav] Mahler. They hoped to incite people against that type of music. It was the first time that I heard Lotte Lenya – Lotte Lenya, I was totally transported by it. I loved it. I loved it.

And then once I got to see the art I was beside myself. I had never seen colors so brilliant and so unusually put together as in the Kandinsky paintings. I remember those particularly, [Oskar] Kokoschka, [George] Grosz. I mean, it was as though I had been introduced to a new world. And I came home just totally transported by that.

What was the other thing you wanted me to mention?

ANITA SCHNEE: The Wagner ticket in 1936.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Oh yes. My parents had season tickets to the opera every year; that was sort of understood. I remember my mother going off in a brown satin dress with her long earrings – that she had inherited. We loved that brown satin dress. That was the only time she wore it because it had such a slick texture to it. We loved to feel that texture and her furs with it. And so off they went to the opera. They would never take us because it was considered that children could not understand, and might cause a disturbance.

Well, it was my incredible dream to hear Wagner because my parents were totally taken up by the Wagnerian operas. I decided one year – and I think I was only 13. Maybe I was 14, I’m not sure.

ANITA SCHNEE: You said it was ‘36 is the date I have.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Well, I would have been 13. I decided the spring of that year that I wanted to get myself a job. My parents had a friend who had a little button shop, and she needed some help getting the buttons organized and that was my job.

I worked all summer to earn the money. That money I had allotted to be able to see the Ring, Wagner’s Ring [Ring der Nibelungen]. By the end of the summer, I think I had enough money to buy the opera tickets.

ANITA SCHNEE: The Ring is a really long thing, right?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Yes, it’s several performances.

ANITA SCHNEE: And so you had – you wanted to see it all?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Absolutely. But I was particularly enchanted with the idea that Siegfried was going to be – that was my hero – he was going to be transported in a little boat drawn by a Swan.

ANITA SCHNEE: Oh, you have a little drawing of it.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: And I drew that into my sketchbook. And when I got to the opera box office, I could not purchase a ticket because they would not sell tickets to Jews. I was totally crushed. But that was life in Germany. You just kept carrying on.

ANITA SCHNEE: Okay, so now New York Harbor and on the train to Detroit. Your dad had been offered a job.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Yes. We got to Detroit.

ANITA SCHNEE: Now, that was – is this right, it’s March 4th, 1939? No, no, that was your landing.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: We landed in New York March 4th, ‘39. I don’t remember when we got to Detroit, but it was within that week, because we didn’t have money to stay in New York and we didn’t really have money to stay in Detroit in a hotel. I think the Weils, the New York Weils, gave us that.

ANITA SCHNEE: They were wealthy, weren’t they, the Weils?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Oh, yes, as I mentioned before Edwin Weil – was in the cigar business, and his brother – and I cannot remember the first name – was in the wine and liquor business, in fact, had his own label and, in fact, when I met Eddie, he had worked and – he knew of the Weils – and had worked one summer selling liquor, the Weil liquor. That was so curious. Anyway –

ANITA SCHNEE: That reminds me of Mutti’s family. Were they through Mutti’s family in the wine –

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: It was Mutti’s family.

ANITA SCHNEE: I see.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: So anyway we got to Detroit and then, of course – that was in March. We all had to immediately start finding a job.

Oh, the thing I should mention in Detroit is when my parents took us on a visit, wherever we went, the first thing they took us to was the art museum so that we got a feeling – and the churches, the church interiors – so we would have a feeling of what the culture of that place was.

We came to Detroit without a job or money and before looking for a job my parents took us to the Detroit Art Institute [DIA]. And to my mother’s great dismay, there wasn’t a modern painting to be found in any of the galleries, and that was unfortunate.

Now, what I also forgot to say, during my young days in Germany, the trips that we took in Germany were always with – other than the family reunions – were always with an eye toward educating us. My dad, having fought in the World War I German army, wanted to show us where the war had been, and so he took my brother and myself to the battlefields of Belgium where the bunkers had been, where the guns had been placed, where the action had been. The Belgians had left those battlefields in total destruction so that you could see the mangled trees and the mangled houses, and it made an impressive picture for me. My dad wanted us to see that and hoped that we would never live through another war. Of course, that was long before World War II, and unfortunately he was wrong. It happened again.

Then also, since my parents had the business connection to Holland, we spent wonderful, wonderful days in Amsterdam, in Scheveningen, where my mother’s Bauhaus roommate lived, in Katwijk where my parents rented a summer place and my brother and I would go out with the fishermen early in the morning, 4:00 AM, 5:00 AM to fish and eat the raw fish. And one of the trips was to Bruges.

[End of Tape One.]

The trip was to Bruges where my parents introduced us to [Hans] Memling, [Jan] van Eyck and the Flemish painters, and that was also an unforgettable experience because we had to take a little canoe. The Becinage, which was the museum where those paintings hung, was accessible only by canal, and I remember my dad rowing to the Becinage, telling us the story of Memling and Van Eyck and the miniature painters of that period.

The women sat in front of the entrance tatting the lace, and once you got into that museum, it was totally black except for those miniature paintings, and that was an unforgettable experience, too. They appeared like jewels.

I think those were the highlights of the travel in Germany. After ‘36 we were not allowed to travel at all within the German border but my parents were able to get out into Belgium and Holland. I think we also took a trip to Paris but I don’t remember that too well. But I remember the beautiful museums in Belgium and Holland.

And so coming back to Detroit, our first visit to the DIA was very disappointing, and then later we found out that Mr. [Robert] Tannahill, who was a Ford family member, established the modern collection and gave money for the modern collection. Also, Hawkins Ferry, who became our great friend and benefactor. But they certainly had very little, and if they did, they weren’t displaying it accessibly at that time.

[Just a note about Hawkins Ferry: “Hawky” whose money came from the Ferry Seed Co., whose family had donated the property on which the DIA was built, was having Bill Kessler, our good friend and architect from the Mies School, build a house on Lakeshore Drive.

Hawkins was gay, he was, I think afraid of women. He asked Eddie to help him with some interior problems by showing him what he wanted in an Italian architectural magazine. I think it was Ed’s only architectural foray. He enjoyed the lunches at the Ferry Great Grosse Point mansion before it was torn down to make space for a steel and glass structure. Those lunches were hamburgers, served off Louis XIV armoires and among the world’s greatest paintings. Perhaps this is also the place to mention that 64 years later, when my textiles were exhibited at the Cranbrook Museum exhibit “Staying Power,” I was asked why I stayed in Detroit. This is the reply out of their catalogue:

“Coming from Germany in 1939, my family made their home in Detroit. We soon discovered that Detroit’s strength is its people. Enormous encouragement by art teachers, a four-year scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design and a fellowship to Cranbrook prompted me to open my studio here. Here I met the “love of my life.” Edward Schnee had recently graduated from Yale University; we created a partnership, Adler-Schnee, which became a Detroit institution for avant-garde designs in architectural spaces, furnishings and textiles. It attracted kindred spirits. Philip Johnson pointed out to us that more architects worked here in contemporary design than in any other U.S. city. The list started with Eero Saarinen, Minoru Yamasaki and Alexander Girard – many of whom became our friends. Charlie Eames and George Nelson, working at Herman Miller in Zeeland, Michigan, told us that the public would accept whatever we were creating as long as it was well designed. They were correct, but it took 50 years! Ask me why I stayed in Detroit and I will tell you about a most misunderstood city. I have enjoyed Detroit’s extraordinary location on a major waterway, close proximity to Canada, a multi-faceted musical life, the Detroit Institute of Arts and much more. I have enjoyed the people, the people that called on us and my work.”]

ANITA SCHNEE: Okay, Mom, so you’re in Detroit, and I have a note here that if you arrived in March, you must have been put immediately into an intermediate school. I have the school records from then and that you graduated in June ‘39.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Yes – actually I was in a school with Japanese kids to learn English. I don’t think I learned anything else but it was mostly – I didn’t know any English.

ANITA SCHNEE: Well, your report card says you learned the whole gamut.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: I did?

ANITA SCHNEE: So how in the world did you do that? Did they make accommodations for language?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: I think they probably did because – the other thing that’s interesting – eventually when I got to high school and also still that fall I knew very, very little English. My German high school records served me to be able to skip chemistry and math and all those other –

ANITA SCHNEE: Appalling.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: – appalling subjects that I did not like. They determined that the German schooling was on a level of – in those subjects was on a level of the university schooling. So I was able to skip that in high school.

ANITA SCHNEE: Thank goodness.

Now, I also have a note that it must have been between intermediate school and Cass that you got the job at Fresh Air Camp.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Yes. We arrived in March and in May, I applied for a job at a summer camp. And the director, with whom I’m still friends, gave me that job and there I met young people who are still my friends.

ANITA SCHNEE: So the director was Irwin Shaw?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Irwin Shaw was the director and the campers – not the campers but the counselors were mostly university kids. People who had just been admitted to Wayne University or Michigan. I became very close friends. In fact, Selma Fraiberg was my very first friend, who later became a well-known child psychiatrist and who wrote The Magic Years [The Magic Years; understanding and handling the problems of early childhood, New York: Scribner, 1959] and many other books. Gene Agins became my good friend and he later became our insurance agent. I met a young boy by the name of Ruben – that’s his last name; can’t right now recall his first name. [George Ruben. I also met Tiny Konikow who worked in the kitchen, Tiny eventually became president of the Detroit Chamber Music Society. I worked for 40 years on the board with him.]

In any case, the people I met there were so congenial and took me in as a green immigrant that I still feel very comfortable with their friendship.

ANITA SCHNEE: This was a Jewish –

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Yes, it was Fresh Air Camp, and it catered to Jewish kids. It was a wonderful summer really. And then I applied to Cass Technical High School.

ANITA SCHNEE: And tell the story about the application and your IQ.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: On my application I was asked to do story problems. I had never heard of story problems. I didn’t know the language and couldn’t figure them out, but I did the best I could. And when I was called in and told that I was not accepted because of my IQ being 42, I couldn’t understand it. My parents obviously were very upset because Cass Technical High School was a wonderful art school – had a wonderful art department and was known for being an excellent school. My parents couldn’t afford a private school and had to send me to public school. In fact, one of the reasons they stayed in Detroit was so that my brother and I could attend Cass. Their friends were really in Cincinnati. When it was known that my dad didn’t have that job, they were seriously considering moving to Cincinnati.

ANITA SCHNEE: Oh, he did not – the job that he was offered in Detroit never panned out?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: No. It did not materialize. He had a very hard time finding any kind of work. My mother immediately found work sewing mattresses in a mattress factory. It was very hard work. I remember during the summers she would come home and complain that the tar from the roof was dripping on the mattress materials. [At night we all made lampshades, a trade we had learned in Germany, before emigrating.]

I don’t remember what my brother did but I think he was probably selling papers. My parents bought him a little red cart so he could push the papers to his customers. We really had to find any kind of job.

When it was known that Cass would not accept me, my dad went down to talk to the principal – the school was in downtown Detroit; you had to take a streetcar – he had to tell them that he thought the reason I made such poor marks – was because we didn’t know the language; would they please accept me for the first year. They said they would try.

Well, I simply blossomed when I got to Cass because it was my love. I was able to only do art in the art department: perspective, charcoal drawings, pen and ink drawings. I took a class in costume illustration. I took a class in pattern making. I just went wild.

Not only that, I held down two or three jobs, besides that. I sold bread in a market in the inner city. I took on the night shift because nobody else would take it. It had the advantage of not only paying a little money, but also I was allowed to take the day-old goods home. That fed our family.

ANITA SCHNEE: By little money, according to what I could see, you made between $0.19 and $0.45 an hour. Is this the right –

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Oh, I didn’t know that.

ANITA SCHNEE: That doesn’t –

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: That doesn’t ring a bell, but I know it was extremely little.

ANITA SCHNEE: Did you get a raise? Do you remember that? Because I found $0.19 and then $0.45. It looks like you doubled your income.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Maybe I did, because I don’t remember that. But I know that Awrey’s Bakery – was known to never hire Jewish people, and it was really quite an exception when they took me on. I was extremely happy to have a job and to be able to contribute to my parents’ household.

I also had a job babysitting. And, of course, my brother and I did all the housework at home because my parents were trying to earn money. My mother took on incredible hours at the mattress factory. My dad worked in a nursery that was open night and day. He always had a love for flowers, and so that’s what he found.

Anyway, it was extremely difficult those first years, but I made friends at Cass. As I mentioned before, I went to school in Parisian couture clothes. That was all I had. The kids made fun of me. I didn’t have saddle shoes or the kind of clothes they wore, but that didn’t seem to deter me. I made some wonderful friends, one of which I am still corresponding with, who was in the art department and whose sister’s house I eventually planned once I was in the architectural business. [It was Anita Green now Cornblit. This year, now 58 years later she flew from Los Angeles to celebrate my 80th birthday with me. She is a wonderful painter.] The other one was Eva Hoffman, they had come over from Vienna. The father was an architect at Albert Kahn’s, and we had much in common. Anita Green, the friend I’ve previously mentioned was really my only American friend. I could not relate to American teenagers, just couldn’t. My interests were totally different. For Sundays I got a job as a Sunday school teacher. Those kids I could not really relate to except when I meet them once in a while at social functions. They remember me; I don’t remember them.

ANITA SCHNEE: Now, just to double check, I can’t remember whether you mentioned the date, but my records show that you started Cass September of ‘39 just after the Fresh Air summer, and you graduated in January 1942.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Yes.

ANITA SCHNEE: Okay. Tell us a little bit about what life was like at Cass. You told us that you were taking art classes. Do you know that they actually called that the Home Economics Department?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Yes. I was in both, the Art Department and the Home Economics Department.

ANITA SCHNEE: And the dress design curriculum, that was –

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: That was Home Economics.

ANITA SCHNEE: Only girls in that?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: I don’t remember. No, I think we had also boys who cooked, but the intense remembrance of Cass was that I had an English teacher, Ms. Eaton [Also, I think I made a mistake referring to Miss Eaton as having been a lecturer. She was my English teacher at Cass Technical High School. At the McDonald Foundation, I think the foundation was McDowell. Hopefully I’m correct in that.], who had worked at the McDonald Foundation, which is I think in the East someplace, and it is a foundation for gifted students, and I had a wonderful relationship with her.

ANITA SCHNEE: Would that be the John D. and Kathryn T.? Is that the same?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: I don’t know. I really don’t know. But I know that her summers were spent at that foundation teaching and attending lectures.

And the other wonderful friend I had at Cass was Ms. Sether, who was in costume illustration, and I think she came to Cass from Lord & Taylor’s where she had been in the advertising department and did their costume sketches for the New York Times. Actually she was responsible, I think for my four-year scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design [RISD]. She helped me get that portfolio together. She critiqued my work. She was really my guiding spirit.

Another spirit of another kind was Mr. Schuholtz, who was in charge of charcoal drawing, perspective drawing. It was a custom at Cass to sit in the hallway and draw the staircases, draw the hallways to get the perspective, go out and sketch the houses around Cass. I got my first and only – only D in his class. I was devastated because my marks had usually been A, B, maybe C.

ANITA SCHNEE: And if I could just interject, speaking as your daughter, I went to Cass myself and I had the very same Mr. Schuholtz, and I might have even gotten the same grade at first, but I eventually managed. I think you did, too.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Yes.

ANITA SCHNEE: He was a good teacher.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: He was very good and I’m glad I got that D, although I was totally devastated at the time, because it made me realize that I had to work even harder and learn much more.

In any case, the other thing about Cass was it was a high school and in the life drawing classes, they would not allow a naked model. So I, in addition, took – and I don’t really know how I had the time – took classes at Wayne University where a nude model was allowed. That was the university setting.

ANITA SCHNEE: That was August 1941.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Oh, was it?

ANITA SCHNEE: Yes. I think you have your report card down there.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Anyway, my mother was absolutely convinced that every artist needed Beaux Arts training and the Beaux Arts training, of course, was drawing from the nude model, drawing from plaster casts, drawing and painting from or learning from the artists, the great artists in the art museum. I don’t know if I still have it, but I had permission to do that. You had to get special permission because your marks had to be at a certain standard. But that’s really my background. That was the foundation, and I’m awfully glad Mutti made me do that, although it was terribly dull. I wanted to design. I didn’t want to draw from the nude model.

ANITA SCHNEE: Yes, and also I want to just get in for the record, too, that when I was looking at various materials in preparation for this interview, I discovered that Harry Bertoia actually went to Cass also, which I never knew. So I thought that was interesting that he went to Cass.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Do we have to mention who Harry Bertoia was?

ANITA SCHNEE: Why not?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Well, of course, Harry Bertoia made his name in sculpture and then eventually developed a line of furniture for Knoll Associates. I met him at the judging of the Scholastic Competition.

ANITA SCHNEE: Okay. Also, I have a little note here, two things: the IW job and also the dress with pannier. Is that a taffeta you were talking about?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Oh, when I was in preparation for my scholarship portfolio, I did costume drawings and I made a dress. I had designed it, I had made the pattern and I sewed it. I was photographed in my dress, and I think that’s how I got that scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design. I had really applied to the costume design department, which was well known. Of course, being in the East, it almost assuredly landed you a job on 7th Avenue in New York.

In any case, that taffeta dress that I designed and made, instead of having the pleats that I loved, I designed it so that the pleats were on the outside and made little loops all around my hips or panniers. Is that what they call it?

ANITA SCHNEE: I’m not sure. I know they put them on motorcycles, like side pouches, they’re called panniers.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: But are they like that, loops?

ANITA SCHNEE: They’re kind of like that on either side.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Well, I don’t know anything about motorcycles, but anyway, that got me the scholarship.

ANITA SCHNEE: Now, also did you work for Winkleman during the Cass years?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Eventually I graduated from the bakery and – let’s see –I don’t know if it was the following summer. I have a feeling it was after I graduated from Cass that I applied at Winkleman’s in the display department. Winkleman’s, of course, was a chain of ladies’ ready-to-wear stores here in Detroit. Eventually they branched into Ohio and across the country.

But I landed a job in the display department working with two Oriental display men. I was assistant to them, and met Manny Hartman, who was a CEO at Winkleman in charge of window display and incredibly strict in his critiques: how the display should be shown and he would come and check. The windows were changed every week. These two gentlemen would design the display and I would help put it into action. Mr. Hartman would come around and if there was anything just the slightest little bit out of order, he would reprimand me, I was scared to death of him.

Later, much later, after I was active in the interior design career, I designed their fixtures and interiors. Mr. Hartman again, was in charge. For 17 years, and we had a wonderful relationship until he died.

[During those years I met their merchandise manager, Jerry Chazen. I helped him with the interior planning of their home, here in Oak Park. He and his wife subsequently left for New York to establish Liz Claiborne. To our great joy, and quite unexpectedly, our granddaughter Sarah Schnee received a scholarship to Duke University from the Chazen foundation. Indeed, it is a small world.]

ANITA SCHNEE: Okay, before we leave Cass and go to RISD, I have a little note here about a teacher named Ms. Louise Green. Do you remember her?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Oh, she was head of the art department. Absolutely I remember her. And while Ms. Sether was head of the costume illustration department, Ms. Green and Ms. Davis were in charge of the Art Department – but particularly Ms. Green. It was a fantastic department. I would say 90 percent of the students, once graduated, walked away with scholarships to Carnegie, to the New York costume schools or Los Angeles –the Los Angeles, I think it’s called, Art Centre School.

ANITA SCHNEE: Yeah. I think that’s spelled funny, too. I have to look that up.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: It was a wonderful training, wonderful, so that’s what happened.

Once I got to the School of Design – oh, I was thrilled. I remember the day I got that wire.

ANITA SCHNEE: I have that in either March or April of 1942.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Yes, that’s possible. I don’t know the exact date. But I remember getting that wire and being absolutely beside myself because I had really hoped I would get a scholarship to one of the New York fashion schools: Traphagen I think was the name, or Pratt. My dream was to be accepted at Pratt [Pratt Institute School of Art and Design].

When that scholarship to the Rhode Island school came in, I didn’t even know where Providence, Rhode Island, was, so my first inclination was to look it up in the atlas, and then I was really thrilled that it was in New England. That was important for me, because I knew very little about New England. I knew that there was a European culture of some sort that I could connect to. I was a little disappointed not being in New York, because New York, after all, was considered the Mecca, but that was pretty good too, to be in Rhode Island.

ANITA SCHNEE: Now, just to be sure here, if this helps your memory at all, again the records seem to show that you graduated from Cass in January of ‘42, although there is some stuff about a June ‘42 commencement also, but you got the RISD scholarship in March or April of ‘42 so there’s some time in there that –

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Well, that’s when I think, if I remember that correctly, I was at Winkleman’s in the display.

ANITA SCHNEE: Oh, okay. Any more about Cass? Well, just to add, again for those people who are listening to this who don’t know about Cass, when I went there some 20 years later, it was the same situation. Cass was still unbelievably fantastic, the background that it furnished the students, and again all my classmates got scholarships to New York and Los Angeles. And as far as I know, today it’s still the same. That’s still that same –

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: I haven’t kept up with it, but our good friend Irving Berg replaced Mrs. Green.

ANITA SCHNEE: No, no, no, [Jules] Trattner.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Oh, Trattner, of course. And then I think Irving Berg, didn’t he?

ANITA SCHNEE: That’s right.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Okay. Well, it was still way up there.

ANITA SCHNEE: A wonderful class.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: I have not kept track and I have not been at any reunions.

ANITA SCHNEE: Well, they’re building a huge addition at the moment to Cass.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Are they? I didn’t know that.

ANITA SCHNEE: Oh, it’s a whole block.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Wonderful.

ANITA SCHNEE: Okay. So are we ready to move onto RISD, Rhode Island School of Design? Entered in fall 1942 and graduated in 1945.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: [Also I should mention that the four-year scholarship to the Rhode Island School of Design was given to me by the director of the school, Royal B. Farnum. That was a very important name in my education. I had become friends of the Farnums and found that their academic background and their love for the arts was something that we shared, and I certainly owe that scholarship to him, without which I could not have attended college or art school. I feel it was the beginning of my career; it really was. So I want to be sure to mention Dr. Farnum.]

Okay. It was a problem to get the money together for, number one, the trip to Providence. The Wolverine Train was running and, of course, the cheapest ticket was the night ticket and I would sleep on those cold and hard wood benches to get to New York and then to Providence.

ANITA SCHNEE: And, by the way, too, again reviewing the records, you have a schedule – a train schedule – from those days. This is wartime and so there’s this little notice at the bottom of the train schedule that says, “If trains are sometimes late … passenger trains don’t always have clear right of way … must sometimes yield to troop trains or freight trains loaded with vital war materials.”

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Absolutely.

ANITA SCHNEE: “Please be patient and bear with us,” that kind of thing.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: I did not remember it, but it’s absolutely true. But then when did we enter World War II?

ANITA SCHNEE: Oh, Pearl Harbor Day [December 7, 1941], December 8th, 19 – now, the year I’m not very clear about, so maybe that notice was from the later time that you were at RISD because you were there through 1945 and, of course –

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: It was probably later. I don’t remember that the war was declared when I was at RISD, but I have no remembrance of that.

I do remember that my very best friend lived in Newport, Rhode Island, and going to the Newport Naval Yards to sketch and being reprimanded because I was not an American citizen at the time, and they thought I was doing subversive political stuff against the war effort. At RISD –

ANITA SCHNEE: You were not a naturalized citizen at that point. I should point that out, too.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: No. No, I was not – as a matter of fact, I was not a German citizen either, because Hitler had taken citizenship away from us. I was a nobody.

But at RISD, I met people with whom I’m still friends. My best friendship was with Roxy Price. She was the daughter of Matlock Price, who was a very important art director in New York. They were Quakers, and I was very much taken in by the Quaker philosophies. I went to the Quaker meetings with Roxy. Her real name was really Nancy. We called her Roxy – I have a feeling we called her Roxy because she was into stone sculpture. I’m not sure about that.

But anyway, I went to the Quaker meetings with her and was totally enchanted by the harmony and the beautiful expression of those people and met a lot of the Price friends. Roxy had been brought up by her grandmother and old aunts. Her mother had died very early on. She lived, as I mentioned, in Newport in a William Morris style house – during many trips to Newport I met their circle of artists.

Of course, Newport was a special place. The oldest Jewish synagogue was in Newport, and the early colonial houses were such a treasure to me. And the Price’s and their friends – John Howard Benson’s family lived in – one of those places, John Howard Benson, who was my calligraphy teacher, I have to say taught me everything I know about design.

ANITA SCHNEE: But I thought he was a sculpture professor.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: He was indeed sculpture. He designed the logo for the Rhode Island School. But I did not take classes in sculpture. He was my calligraphy teacher.

He sent us out into the fields to cut bamboo stalks and make them into pens and then do the calligraphy that way. He never used a metal pen point. He was a towering figure, not only physically but in voice, in philosophy. Everything about him was large and wonderful, as far as I was concerned.

He had bought the John Stevens workshop in Newport, which was an old stone cutting studio that did dedication plaques; they did the plaques for the Metropolitan Museum, for Yale University. They did cemetery headstones, chiseling, all by hand. Eventually at one point, I think Roxy took over that workshop when John Howard died.

In any case, when I later met my husband and we were married, it was our first trip. I wanted him to know the people that had been so close to me during my college days. We went – and here I’m skipping a little bit – we stayed at John Howard’s place. They were Quakers. His wife, Fisher, their family had a place next door. They went way back in American history. Their house was filled with American primitives and English and early American furniture. In fact, when we tried to sit together in the parlor on a Chippendale sofa, John Howard would have to prop up the leg before we could sit down. He then announced that he had been offered – and this was 1940s – he had been offered $30,000 by the Metropolitan Museum for that Chippendale sofa, but was not about to give it up.

In any case, they were thee-ing and thou-ing to each other. I met their children, who were totally the opposite with cutoffs, motorcycles, wild jazz music, while their parents were thee-ing and thou-ing.

In any case, that was the household of the Benson family, I think I should come back to that. On a trip to Washington to show our grandchildren the “monuments,” we went with Danny and his family to the Roosevelt Memorial.

ANITA SCHNEE: Danny is your son and my brother, Daniel Joshua Schnee.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Yes. We went to the Roosevelt Memorial, which was big blocks of rocks with Roosevelt’s speeches inscribed in the rocks; his famous fireside chats. I looked at that calligraphy, and I said to Danny, “I know that calligraphy. Isn’t it absolutely beautiful how it was chiseled into that rock?” And Danny was totally unmoved. He said, “What’s so special about it?” And so I pointed out how the chisel marks had been left, how everything had been so carefully studied and spaced, and when I came back to Detroit and opened my – not the National Geographic, the magazine that the National Trust publishes – I opened it up. There, lo and behold, was the story of the Roosevelt Memorial in Washington and who had chiseled those wonderful statements of Roosevelt. It was a Benson – John Howard Benson, Jr.

I immediately sat down and wrote to him of my remembrances of his father, I was so thrilled that it had been his commission. He wrote back in absolutely beautiful calligraphy, just the way we had learned it, telling me the story of what had happened to his parents who died. He had taken over the workshop.

So here were these wild kids of my college days turning out this wonderful work.

Now, while I was at the School of Design, as I mentioned, I had to earn a living, not only to pay for my trips back home – I think my tuition had been paid but I’m not sure if the room and board at the college was paid, but certainly not the art material that I was using. In addition, I had to send money home to support the family back home, because my parents still had not found proper jobs, certainly not my dad. So that was hard.

I worked in the library. I worked at night at Newberry, which was the dime store downtown. I made signs. I had babysitting jobs. I mean, I had to work very hard in addition to keeping up my scholarship work. It wasn’t easy, but I’m glad I did it because it’s part of me now.

ANITA SCHNEE: Mom, I don’t know whether you want to, but I would like you to tell the story about the Roxy prize.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Oh! Roxy was a very unusual girl, to say the least. As I said, she was raised by her grandmother and her aunts, her old aunts. Her father was in New York as art director. And she had very strange ideas about life but wonderful. First of all, she was raised in this William Morris house. Maybe it was not William Morris. Now that I think of it, it was probably arts and crafts movement, but it was dark and it was very much wood, and it had ships in bottles all over because some of her family were ship captains.

Anyway, that was her milieu. She was a wonderful calligrapher, and she designed woodcuts. One year, she decided to enter into a competition, and the competition was to design your own coffin. That was absolutely up her alley because she was intrigued by life after death.

Anyway, she won that competition and she won the prize of a cow. That was the prize. What were we going to do at school with a cow? Well, the Bensons had property in Vermont, and I think her family also had property in Vermont – I should mention that Benson, Vermont is very much on the map – Roxy, after she retired, moved to Benson, Vermont, I have visited her there in a little cottage which she occupies with millions of cats.

Anyway, the cow was shipped to Vermont, I don’t know what happened to the cow after that, but it was certainly a relief.

[Laughter.]

ANITA SCHNEE: And now a few words about Bacia.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Bacia Stepner was my roommate and came from a Boston family. She was a potter, and we were very close in college at the Rhode Island school. I would take trips to Boston with Bacia and there, of course, was taken in by the fact that Walter Gropius had become head of the Architectural School at Harvard. In the meantime I had transferred, I should mention, from costume illustration to interior architecture, and so it was a natural just to fall into that group.

Bacia and I took trips. We didn’t go to Maine but we would take sketching trips to Rockport together. After graduation and after being married, she came to our wedding and I have pictures of that. Then eventually she married Murray Edelman. I would send her the hand-me-downs of our children’s clothes and in return, she would send me the pottery she was producing.

That’s about all I can say about Bacia.

ANITA SCHNEE: Okay. Also I uncovered an article that you wrote that was published in the New York Times Magazine section dated October 17th, 1943, in which you expressed your opinions about Nietzsche, Mussolini and Hitler.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Good Lord!

ANITA SCHNEE: I know. I was totally amazed. Do you remember? It was excellent.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: I have no memory.

ANITA SCHNEE: Oh, okay.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: What did I say?

ANITA SCHNEE: It was an excellent article. Oh, well, the war was on, and you were predicting that Hitler was going to come to grief.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Oh, really?

ANITA SCHNEE: Yes.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: How good for me.

ANITA SCHNEE: I’ll show you the article later. Okay, you don’t remember.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: No. No recollection. But I was, of course, very much interested in what was going on in Europe. In the meantime we heard that our family was transported to Auschwitz and also my grandmother, whom I totally loved and adored. When I was a little girl, I would sit in front of her on a little stool, which I still have, watching her hair being combed. The lady would come every day at 11:00 AM. My grandmother had long, white hair, and she would put it up in a – what do they call those, puff –

ANITA SCHNEE: Chignon.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Chignon. And to me she looked like Queen Mary, who was also wearing that kind of hairstyle.

Anyway, that was even before I came to the School of Design. We had a letter from my aunt that my grandmother had passed away. I was totally destroyed because I had hoped that someday – she would come to America and I would see her again.

[I remember her as being the only member of my family who ever complimented me on my work. My parents expected me to do my best. Often the best was not good enough in my mother’s vision. Oma was enthusiastic. She called me “Mucki.” She would say: “Mucki wird ‘mal ein grosser künstler.” [Mucki one day will be a great artist.]

I also didn’t see my aunt anymore. Bertha was my dad’s sister. She had been a friend of Clifton Fadiman’s, who was on the radio I think, wasn’t he?

ANITA SCHNEE: And then on TV too, I think. He was just a very – and also publishing, too. Didn’t he – wasn’t he Random House or some –

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: I don’t remember Clifton Fadiman, but we had tried to get her to this country through Clifton Fadiman, whom she knew, but it was too late. She was transported off to Lodz and then gassed.

How did we get on that? Okay.

ANITA SCHNEE: That was just referencing your article. I wanted to ask you –

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: I should also mention – and I can see where I would write such an article because I was very, very much taken up by Roosevelt. I hung on every speech that he delivered. And believe me, I was the only one I think – at the Rhode Island School of Design who had any appreciation for Roosevelt. They were all against him – every one of my friends, but I looked at him as a savior. He saved our lives. And I loved the diction and the way he delivered his speeches. I was totally taken up with that.

ANITA SCHNEE: How did Roosevelt save your life, according to your perspective?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Well, I thought he had given us the quota. As it turned out, Roosevelt was really against the immigration but I thought he was responsible for our –

ANITA SCHNEE: Personal dispensation.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: – our quota. And I also forgot to mention that when we got our entry number – we had to go to Stuttgart to the American consulate to be examined and to pass tests, and you were given a number. And when we got to Stuttgart – now this is before, of course, our immigration – I did not pass the math test, and I was beside myself because I thought I had ruined the possibilities for our family to come to America. I was totally hysterical. But as it turned out it didn’t count; we made the trip.

ANITA SCHNEE: Okay, now a little bit please about the transition from the – let’s see, the costume design to the interior architecture. What was that like? What happened there?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: I think what happened was that I became to realize that fashion design was too restricting. First of all, I remember reading Goethe saying that architecture was frozen music and I remember saying to – my mother that architecture really encompassed all the arts, and I felt that that’s where I wanted to be. Fashions were just too limiting. It was too changing. I mean, I’d be designing “style.” That was kind of phony I thought. But I didn’t think architecture had that same stigma. So that’s how I decided that interior architecture – was for me, and not fashion design.

When I got into that department, it turned out that it was mostly learning about the different styles of architecture, which was pretty good. I mean, you have to know that but it was not getting into the more contemporary mode, which is really where my heart was.

ANITA SCHNEE: There’s an awful lot of interest in the effect of your being a woman and your being Jewish on your prospects in architecture. I keep getting curators asking me questions about that. I wonder if you could say anything about your experience in that area – gender discrimination or religious discrimination.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Well, architectural offices did not hire Jewish applicants, nor did they –

ANITA SCHNEE: Male or female.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Well, I don’t know about that – I can’t address the male issue because my friends in Detroit were in architectural offices and Albert Kahn was hiring Jewish immigrants – particularly from Vienna, who were architects. Of course, Albert Kahn was Jewish but not really seriously practicing Judaism. That was the deal there, but they certainly weren’t hiring women.

And I somehow knew that and I don’t know how I knew it. I had often thought – the fact that I had gotten the scholarship by competition made me aware that in order to get ahead, it was best to submit your work to competitions. I submitted my work at the Rhode Island School of Design to Condé Nast, and they recognized it and it was for the Prix de Rome or Prix de Paris. I don’t recall that.

Anyway, they were not sending people to Europe because it was right after the war and – no, the war was still going on, in ‘45 at that time when I submitted it – but they were getting people into important jobs.

And so since I was graduating from interior architecture and it was a very traditional department at the School of Design at that time, they got me a position as a designer at Lord & Taylor’s. Lord & Taylor’s was a lovely store, a beautiful store at that time and the antiques they sold – rare antiques were beautiful – I lasted about two days in that job because it was not really my métier.

So I went back to Condé Nast and I said, I’m really unhappy doing what I’m doing there and so they got me an interview with Raymond Loewy.

ANITA SCHNEE: But now, let me slow you down just a little bit to say that this was – you graduated in summer of ‘45 with a bachelor’s in fine arts and interior design, so the Conde Nast competition came towards the end of your stay at RISD?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: In my senior year. I worked on that all through the senior year.

ANITA SCHNEE: Okay. So then you won that and you went with Bacia, right? You were saying –

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Bacia and I went to New York, yes. I don’t remember what kind of a job she was looking for, but I know what I was looking for.

ANITA SCHNEE: And it wasn’t Lord & Taylor.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Right.

ANITA SCHNEE: So then you went to Raymond Loewy in the summer of ‘45, right?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: It was really spring of ‘45. I should mention that my parents came for the graduation. It was the first time they had put together enough money to be able to take a trip.

And I should also mention that I graduated with a bunch of prestigious people with fancy names, and I was only Ruth Adler. And so I had the idea if I have a fancy middle name, it makes me more important. I decided that Ruth Wellington Adler was a wonderfully sounding name, and that was the name they called out when I was called to the stage to get my diploma, and my mother did a flip.

ANITA SCHNEE: And it was not for joy.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: No. She was very unhappy.

There was something else that I think I should mention. It’s now slipped by me.

ANITA SCHNEE: Yeah, I had all that in my notes and I don’t have anything else, just to say that you were at Times Square when the war ended.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Well, I was already employed at Raymond Loewy’s at that point. It was that summer I think when the war ended, but I’m not really clear on exactly.

ANITA SCHNEE: What was that like to be there?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: I was dating a newspaper correspondent at the time. It was pretty exciting and I was really happy.

But life in New York was interesting. My interview at Raymond Loewy’s I will not forget, because I really didn’t know how important he was in the industrial design area. I just knew that they had an architectural office that they were doing graphics and industrial design, and they needed a designer, and that was the important part at the time. When I got there, they made me do a drawing of anything, and I said to them, “What’s that got to do with this position?” And he said, “Well, if we approve it, you will have a job with Raymond Loewy.” Well, that was the first time I really looked into how important Raymond Loewy was.

It was so important to me that I worked with a man by the name of Robert de Verac, who was the head of the architecture design department, but my drawing board was in back of his and next to Minoru Yamasaki’s, whom I befriended, you can’t help it. On the other side was Warren Platner.

They both became my friends. Yami, as we called him, and I were working on the Meyer Emporium in Sydney, Australia. Yami was doing a presentation drawing out of crayon.

ANITA SCHNEE: Mom, let me stop you there because we’re close to the end of the tape, and let’s just –

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Again?

ANITA SCHNEE: Again. And we’ve got to just reel it back for one second because when I was looking at the materials from RISD I noticed a mention of a guy named – I don’t know how to say it quite in German – Ramisch from Waldemar School in Berlin. Did you know him at all?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: I knew Waldemar Ramish, but he was in a different – I think he was in the sculpture department. How did I get to him?

ANITA SCHNEE: I don’t know. And also John Frazier.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: John Frazier was the head of the painting department. I didn’t take any painting lessons, but I did make friends with Mr. Christ-Janer, who was the head of the museum. The reason for that was because, off and on, I babysat for his kids and then met his brother again last year or the year before in Sarasota.

ANITA SCHNEE: Wow.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: I think Christ-Janer got to be head of the Ringling School of Design in Sarasota. It was he or his brother. I don’t –

ANITA SCHNEE: And is he the one who’s giving you a teaching position?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Well, I did get –

ANITA SCHNEE: Oh, you did before.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: – teaching – no, just this year I got – it’s still on my desk, the teaching contract.

ANITA SCHNEE: With Ringling?

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: With Ringling, but Christ-Janer is no longer the head of the school.

ANITA SCHNEE: Okay. Well, that’s it for the tape pretty much. It looks like we’ve got a minute. Anything else quick about RISD? One minute, go!

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Can you stop it so I can think about it?

ANITA SCHNEE: Sure. Okay. I think we’re recording, Mom, so you can go right ahead and start with the Raymond Loewy year, few months. You got there in a few months after you graduated from RISD, summer of ‘45, and you worked – my dates are a little unclear, Mom. Was it May ‘45? What is it, I’ve got May and fall of ‘45.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: I worked from I think May to fall of ‘45.

ANITA SCHNEE: Oh, that’s what I meant, just those few months.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: But I think they were important months, because, number one, I made all these connections, people that I value, whose designs I value, and also New York is a fabulous place to be and especially when you’re young and you’re open to new ideas. I got myself a room in an apartment on Riverside Drive. It was in close proximity to Columbia University. I enjoyed the international teas every Sunday. I was involved in some of their lectures. It was just a very inspiring time.

As far as my work was concerned, Mr. Loewy was of considerable stature. He had a certain style that I thought was incredible, wonderful, with foulard neck pieces and so forth and so on, and spats to the office, but also my work with Yamasaki was interesting. As I mentioned before, he was designing the Meyer Emporium. We were both. He was doing the architectural work, and I was doing the finishing materials. One day, Mr. Loewy came around with the client, Mr. Meyer, and Meyer was a fairly stout man. He leaned over, and Yami was a very slim Oriental type. Meyer sort of overpowered him and leaned over his drawing table and asked him to take the drawing off. It had not been sprayed with fixative; it was in conte crayon. So Meyer took that drawing, which was on onion skin, and folded it, much like you would fold a handkerchief into maybe a size five by seven square and subsequently put it into his vest pocket.

Well, Yami’s eyes turned from slitty to round – because he had been working two weeks on that drawing. It had not been fixed with fixative. It was just a sketch. It certainly would have been destroyed in Mr. Meyer’s coat pocket.

And the interesting thing here is that years later, many years later when our son Jeremy gave a conference in Dallas – one of the participants was a Meyer from Sydney, Australia. I approached him and I thought it was possibly the son of the person that I had met at Raymond Loewy’s office. It turned to be the grandson. I said to him, “Did you ever build that building?” He said, “Absolutely we built that building, and many more.” So that sort of brought it around full circle for me.

When I was in New York, really starving, I was making $27 a week and existing on crackers and cheese and not much else, except the dates that I had with young men who would treat me to dinner, and also the teas at the International House at Columbia. Then came that wire from the Cranbrook Academy of Art [Bloomfield Hills, Michigan]. I had submitted my portfolio, after my graduation from RISD, to Wally Mitchell at Cranbrook, the entrance registrar.

ANITA SCHNEE: Mom, before you get to Cranbrook, just say a few words about who Yami was and Warren Platner. I think you said Warren was the Knoll designer but say a little bit about Yami.

RUTH ADLER SCHNEE: Yami was later hired by Smith, Hinchman & Grylls here in Detroit – to be the head of their architectural department. His great chagrin was, and they had not told him that when he was hired, at l