The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism)
Paul Betts
Language: English
Pages: 366
ISBN: B003FGWPN6
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From the Werkbund to the Bauhaus to Braun, from furniture to automobiles to consumer appliances, twentieth-century industrial design is closely associated with Germany. In this pathbreaking study, Paul Betts brings to light the crucial role that design played in building a progressive West German industrial culture atop the charred remains of the past. The Authority of Everyday Objects details how the postwar period gave rise to a new design culture comprising a sprawling network of diverse interest groups—including the state and industry, architects and designers, consumer groups and museums, as well as publicists and women's organizations—who all identified industrial design as a vital means of economic recovery, social reform, and even moral regeneration. These cultural battles took on heightened importance precisely because the stakes were nothing less than the very shape and significance of West German domestic modernity. Betts tells the rich and far-reaching story of how and why commodity aesthetics became a focal point for fashioning a certain West German cultural identity. This book is situated at the very crossroads of German industry and aesthetics, Cold War politics and international modernism, institutional life and visual culture.
these didactic rooms were emblematic of a more enlightened domestic culture based on a firm rejection of the irrational allures of advertising and the marketplace. They were seen as remedies to overstocked shops and department stores, which only “confuse and distort” the consumer.107 The display rooms thus were alternative social spaces that advanced the cause 99 The Conscience of the Nation of modern design as a “cultural good,” and even held the possibility of unalienated consumption. That
histories and monographs, they have often done so at the expense of comparative analysis. Unwittingly, then, the Ulm literature has tended to reflect the school’s own geographical isolation atop Ulm’s Kuhberg Mountain.2 This chapter is mainly devoted to addressing some of these 139 140 Chapter Four neglected issues. In particular it examines the Ulm Institute as a case study in the Cold War construction of West German modernism. Nowhere else were the imagined postwar connections among
practical. . . . If we intend to go further at Ulm than they did at Dessau this is because postwar requirements clearly postulate the necessity for certain additions to the curriculum. For instance, we mean to give still greater prominence to the design of ordinary things in everyday use; to foster the widest possible development of town and regional planning; and to bring visual design up to the standard which the latest technical advances have now made possible.63 For Bill, then, the school
genius,” much as the Nazis themselves had 12 Introduction expunged the socialist language suffusing Weimar design a generation earlier. But this was not enough. A new positive language of modern design needed to be invented, not least because most of the exemplary design objects (at least until the mid-1950s) were essentially the same. This was why West Germany’s design culture insisted on grounding design in humanist morality, since this was certainly one ideology that the Nazis disdainfully
culture, Meyer’s tenure at Dessau was consistently marginalized and/or purged from West German Bauhaus historiography. At the 1950 Painters at the Bauhaus exhibition, for example, Meyer was portrayed as an “ideologue of doctrinaire materialism” who perverted the gospel of Gropius and sabotaged the Bauhaus’s mission by interpreting “the concept of function too literally and mechanically, while suppressing the centrality of art.”125 Gropius himself often used the Meyer directorship to deflect any