Lotte Reimers

Lotte Maria Reimers was born on 23 April 1932 in Hamburg. She took her Abitur in 1952 in Bad Gandersheim in Lower Saxony. She was set on a career in art and at first wanted to be a painter, applying to the Landeskunstschule, the state art school, in her home city of Hamburg.

At around 19 she visited the touring exhibition Handwerkliche Webereien und Töpfereien, handmade weaving and pottery, organised by the ceramics champion Jakob Wilhelm Hinder, who was trying to save the dying craft of pottery. The visit was a turning point. She withdrew her art school application and joined Hinder as his assistant.

For ten years Reimers travelled with Hinder and his exhibition to 91 places across West Germany. In 1961 the pair settled in Deidesheim on the German Wine Route, having found a house through an advertisement in the local newspaper, and founded a museum for modern ceramics there. Over the following decades the small town became a centre for ceramic art well beyond the region.

From 1965 Reimers created her own ceramic vessels and objects. She drew on materials from the Palatinate, including ash from Deidesheim vines, limestone from the Deidesheimer Kalkofen vineyard, clay from Eisenberg and malachite from a cave on the Donnersberg. She was also known for her photography and textile work.

After Hinder died suddenly in 1976 she ran the museum on her own, adding to the collection and organising exhibitions, talks and tours that brought German and international ceramic artists to the Stadtmauergasse. When the work grew too much for her, the collection of 1,587 objects passed to the state of Rhineland-Palatinate as the Hinder/Reimers collection of twentieth century modern ceramics, which has been displayed at Villa Ludwigshöhe in Edenkoben since 2005. The proceeds allowed her to return to making pottery herself, and her own work was later shown there in special exhibitions. In 2016 the Städtisches Museum Braunschweig presented a retrospective of fifty years of her ceramics.

Reimers was the life and working partner of Jakob Wilhelm Hinder from the early 1950s until his death in 1976. She lived in Deidesheim from 1961 for the rest of her life. Alongside ceramics she built up a large collection of craft objects, from knives to hats, which in later years she gave to museums including the Pfalzgalerie in Kaiserslautern. In 1996 she founded the Lotte Reimers Foundation to support ceramic art.

Lotte Reimers died on 5 November 2026 at the age of 94. Her death was announced by the town of Deidesheim and in a notice in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung signed by the foundation, the friends of the Hinder/Reimers collection and her circle of collectors. The funeral and burial were set for 17 November 2026 at the cemetery in Deidesheim, with donations requested for the Lotte Reimers Foundation in place of flowers.

Reimers is remembered as a potter, collector, patron and teacher of taste who helped keep modern studio ceramics alive in Germany. The Hinder/Reimers collection she built with her partner remains a state collection at Villa Ludwigshöhe, and her foundation continues to promote the art form. Her honours included the Rhineland-Palatinate State Prize (1976), the Order of Merit of Rhineland-Palatinate (1992), the Federal Cross of Merit on ribbon (1999), the Barbarossa Seal of the city of Kaiserslautern (2004), the lifetime achievement Pfalzpreis for craft (2014), the prize of the Ike and Berthold Roland Foundation (2017) and the Hannah Höch honour of the city of Gotha (2019).