Counterpoints
Claudia Skoda’s Fruits knitwear, ca. 1978 (image: courtesy of Vitra Design Museum).
German Design 1949-1989: Two Countries, One History is an exhibition curated by Erika Pinner, for the Vitra Design Museum, and Klára Němečková, for the Kunstgewerbemuseum. Fortunately for those, including myself, unable to travel under current restrictions, a 320-page catalogue has also been produced, recording key exhibits alongside some 20 essays by design historians that develop its themes.
The exhibition’s co-curation through and movement between two German institutions – one in the former Federal Republic of Germany (FRG, West Germany), the other in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR, East Germany) – reflects the project’s aim to restore balance to the historiography of German design during the period of the country’s division. The book and, I gather from it, the exhibition explore differences, commonalities and exchanges between the two countries on a variety of levels, from product typologies and approaches to design pedagogy, to the politically freighted discourses on what was, and was not, considered “good design”. The structure of presentation is chronological, broken into three periods – 1949-1960, 1961 (the year of the construction of the Berlin Wall) -1972, and 1973-1989 (the year of the wall’s removal) – and each section concludes with a selection of exhibited works. Just before the 1961- 1972 section, the flow is broken by a series of black-and-white photographs made at the time of wall’s construction, presented wall-like across 12 consecutive, full-bleed double spreads.
Dieter Rams and Hans Gugelot’s SK 6 Stereo-Phonosuper, 1956/60.
In terms of its result, much like its subject matter, this is a divided project. By far the stronger part is its scholarship in working through the post-war reception of interwar modernism and, in particular, the German fate of the Bauhaus functionalist tradition. This analysis is fascinating in its detail and also serves as a useful corrective to commonplace assumptions that, lacking a design culture, the GDR was capable only of producing cheap and colourful plastic tat. Connected to this is an also useful negation of the notion that the GDR itself was suspended for some 40 years in a historical limbo, awaiting readmittance to the flow of meaningful events. Instead, a rather more complex picture appears of a modernist design tradition in both countries that first adapted to, and then withered under, a complex set of cultural, economic and political conditions. There is valuable research here, and the curators have done well to preserve narrative and thematic continuity across the assembled writings. More problematic, however, is the curatorial purpose of framing this history in terms of Germanness in design, and on that basis to recast the period 1949- 1989 as a unified and, thereby, unifying object of cultural memory.
Many writings collected in the first two sections of the book touch on different points in the so-called “formalism debate”. Whilst modernism in a functionalist mode was promoted as a plank of Western official culture, in the East it was denounced as a “weapon of imperialism” – a formal contrivance of no social value – and suppressed in favour of the contorted optimism of socialist realism. But as many of the essays show, the stark opposition was only apparent. With a common intellectual formation under the influence of the Bauhaus, designers in both countries were rather more aligned. And, it turns out that throughout the period of partition, East and West were economically enmeshed to a far greater extent than the rhetoric may have suggested.
Horst Giese and Jürgen Peters’s Alex television set, 1957/58.
In the first section, 1949-1960, Siegfreid Gronert gives a fascinating account of parallel developments in design education between the two German states up to the 1970s. His condensed history shows that the legacy of the Bauhaus, albeit in different ways, provided a point of tension for both states. In the Federal Republic, the “Werkkunstschulen”, in many cases under the directorship of Bauhaus alumni, were built on a model provided by the school’s preliminary course that had aimed at a holistic training. In the East meanwhile, whilst functionalism was initially suppressed by official doctrine, Gronert shows that the Bauhaus influence gradually surfaced as a practical expedient at the level of curricula – a unity of art and technology under the imperatives of the planned economy. The two sides of this history converge in the 1970s, when the elements of Bauhaus pedagogy, connected to the utopian, qualitative purpose of design, were eventually blocked in both states by the scientific-technical requirements of training for commercial industrial production.
Under the unassuming title ‘Plastics, Design, and Socialism in East Germany’, Eli Rubin develops a gripping account of the hallucinatory fusion of chemical science and communist world-building, in which Bauhaus-inspired industrial technofunctionalism combined with the intuition of an inevitable unfolding of human mastery over the material world that verged on the cosmic. Plastic’s infinite malleability seemed to recommend it as the ideal building material of the socialist future, “not worse but better – from a socialist standpoint – than ‘althergebrachte’ (authentic or traditional) materials”. Plastic cities under plastic domes, in Siberia and on other planets, could be expected as the culmination of human history in the epoch of plastic. In the event, other realities encroached on the dream. By the 1980s, the Soviet Union restricted the supply of petroleum to the GDR, which struggled to suppress the environmental and human degradation caused by plastics production. Eventually, as Rubin describes, the disappointments of socialist plastic joined the swell of popular discontent that finally led to the collapse of so-called “actually existing socialism”.
Ilse Decho’s 5100 teapot, 1963.
Katrin Schreiter’s informative contribution observes the resolution of the formalism debate from the standpoint of an international struggle over the title “German” conducted through industrial design. Initially, the Werkbund-Bauhaus tradition of functionalism was pitted against faux-folk socialist realism in a competition for “guardianship of the national heritage”. As Gronert shows in the field of education, the cultural tension was resolved at the level of economics. For, while the FRG refused to recognise the legitimacy of the GDR as a political entity, the two German states, remained closely linked through trade. As consumer taste in the West shifted towards modernist design, production in the East had little choice but to follow. Official GDR policy eventually recognised functionalism as the most effective means to both efficient production and international recognition, seeking, as Schreiter writes, “to secure a greater market share for GDR products by competing with the FRG over the modernist heritage of the interwar years, marked by the Bauhaus and Werkbund traditions”. From 1970, the GDR promoted its own brand of “humane” functionalism, exemplified in Margarete Jahny and Erich Müller’s elegant system of cylindrical glass containers, Europa. As an emblem of functionalism’s political rehabilitation in the East, the Bauhaus Dessau building was renovated and reopened in 1976, described in the speeches as “an integral part of the national socialist building culture in the GDR”.
It’s tempting to speculate on how this socialist-backed extension of the Bauhaus tradition might have developed in the East, at a time when the West, now enthralled by consumer-capitalist baubles, was beginning to regard functionalism as boring. Schreiter notes, however, the suspicion of FRG design commentators that, confined to international-tradeshow displays, the GDR’s commitment to “humane” design was more strategic rhetorical posturing than representative of the reality of its industrial effort. In fact, judged by the quality of goods on the shelves, the standards attained by GDR design by 1989 were, according to Katharina Pfützner, “lamentable”. Her engaging essay in the 1973-1989 section details the retreat of many GDR designers from formal industrial positions during the 1970s and 80s, circumstances being such that it was almost impossible for socially committed industrial designers, educated in the Bauhaus tradition, to practise with any sense of rationality, let alone professional dignity. Pfützner describes a situation of rising national debt, interest rates and prices for raw materials, in which the GDR found itself increasingly dependent on export sales of low-price knockoffs to fulfil its own domestic needs, requiring limited input from industrial designers. Combined with demoralising working conditions, this prompted an exodus of designers – some to adjacent, more craft-based occupations in which they could exert more control over their activity, others from the country altogether.
Otl Aicher’s pictogram 0605 for the 1972 Munich Olympics.
As an account of the fate of modernist design in the two opposed yet linked German states, German Design provides a useful and accessible guide. Scholarship aside, however, there is another aspect to the project, apparent in the curators’ framing essay as well as in the statements of the two associated museum directors and functionaries of the supporting bodies, which proves rather more problematic. The intended operation is first to show that design practices in the GDR and FRG during the period 1949-1989 were not only German in the trivial geographic sense, but also disclose Germanness of a more profound cultural kind. This presentation of the underlying cultural coherence of the two German states is, then, to form the basis of a reconfigured historical memory that substitutes unity for division.
As the curators acknowledge, the Bauhaus presents something of a problem for a notion of specifically German design, being at once a fundamental historical switching point, routing the major currents of the country’s design tradition from the 19th through the 20th centuries, while also being in certain key respects emphatically non-German. The international character of the influences flowing through the school – English arts and crafts, Dutch De Stijl, Russian constructivism, in addition to the German Werkbund – was matched by the cosmopolitan composition of its central protagonists – Breuer, Kandinsky, Moholy-Nagy, Itten, Klee, Meyer, etc., not to mention that of its student body. Those factors combine with the internationalist – even world-historical, practical horizon of the Bauhaus in its own self-understanding – to render specifically national claims for its significance at best paradoxical. Far from critically destabilising the concept of national design, placing “German Design” in quotation marks and extending the category to include non-Germans educated at the Bauhaus, as well as German designers working in the Bauhaus tradition outside the country for non-German companies, tends to exaggerate it.
If the Bauhaus was too international in composition to ground a strong concept of specifically German national design during the period when the school’s influence still held sway (broadly to the end of the 60s), the difficulty in maintaining the notion of any national design from the 70s onwards lies in the increasingly international character of the field of practice. This, too, is partially acknowledged by the curators. They write: “most accounts of German design history generally lose direction after the 1960s. Whilst German modernism faded from the forefront of public consciousness, other, more colourful national design identities gained traction, leaving little space for German narratives of the 1970s and ’80s.” However, the framing of these conditions in terms of the eclipse of a German design culture by other (Italian?) “national design identities” is as unhelpful as it is inaccurate. For the process of internationalisation, or perhaps better, transnationalisation already well under way by the 1970s, was not principally a matter of rivalry between national units, so much as the formation, across national boundaries, of a system of exchange in which the transmission of information (culture) followed the ever-increasing material flows of goods, capital and peoples. This is why the categories of 70s and 80s alternative West German design practices (alternative to an increasingly homogenous global commercial-design culture) surveyed by Petra Eisele in the book’s third section, also reflect oppositional positions taken up throughout the industrialised world: critical design, humane environments, ecological design, recycling and DIY design. Even the nationally specific “New German Design” has a ring of the universally cynical playfulness of postmodernism, as does the movement’s breathless confusion of design discourse with marketing publicity, repeated uncritically in Eisele’s hyperbolic commentary, where raw industrial materials are said to have appeared in hitherto “inconceivable and unprecedented combinations”. In the final analysis, neither the functionalist tradition nor the variety of its postmodern successors provide sufficiently stable footing for a strong concept of German design.
Margarete Jahny and Erich Müller’s Europa glass series, 1964.
In a section consisting of a transcribed interview between Vitra Design Museum director Mateo Kries and Dieter Rams, Kries invites the designer to identify his well-known list of design principles as being quintessentially German: “If we look at your ten principles of good design, they contain notions that could be traced back to typical German design concepts: the simplicity, the honesty, staying true to the material.” Arguably, these might be described as typical international modernist design concepts. But the specificity of Rams’s correction is informative: “I put them on paper because Braun was changing at the time – with the increasing international influence of Gillette and others – and I wanted to create a counterpoint to this development.” The source of the “international influence” that Rams refers to – the American multinational, Gillette – had acquired a controlling interest in Braun in 1967. By the time Rams felt compelled to set out his principles of good design in the mid-70s, a logic of strategic calculation and economic rationalisation, transmitted to Kronberg from Cincinnati, was in his view threatening to deform the output of the Braun design department altogether. In this encounter we can glimpse a moment of that broad late-20th-century shift, in which the modernist tradition gradually became engulfed by a process of development, the global expansion of capitalist relations of exchange, whose subject was not the human being but merely capital itself. Since the 1970s, the contradiction between the logic of the market and human ends has only intensified, as has the need to posit appropriate “counterpoints”, to use Rams’s term.
The ascendance of the economic over the human, and the question of counterpoints, brings us to the contemporary relevance of German Design 1949-1989 and the notion of cultural memory towards which its dubious demonstration of German design is directed. It isn’t at first clear what the contemporary relevance of the project could be, since the year 1989 that defines the limit of the project also marks the very beginning of the contemporary – that broad set of conditions that define our present. However dysfunctional they may have been, the existence of communist states in pre-1989 Europe and Russia indirectly served to sustain the possibility of Western social democracy by demonstrating the real possibility of social forms other than capitalism. The threat was held at bay through a settlement between labour and capital in the form of regulatory constraints on the expansion of capital and a welfare state (necessary in a Europe lacking America’s fanatical commitment to the bootstrapping “dream” of individual self-realisation). Following 1989, however, the settlement was swiftly revoked, as capitalisms, from neoliberal to Chinese state, interlocked on a planetary scale. Through the subsequent dissolution of traditional institutions of social solidarity, crises of democratic representation, unprecedented concentrations of wealth amidst atomisation and insecurity, the social consequences of the new arrangement have come to define the contours of contemporary experience in the industrially developed countries of the former East and West.
Also noteworthy is the general state of dazed bewilderment as to the causes of these consequences of globalisation amongst those populations worst affected by them, feeding the re-emergence of ethnic nationalism and populist right demagoguery. Thomas Geisler, director of the Dresden Kunstgewerbermuseum, remarks that “German society is still struggling with the process of reunification 30 years after the fall of the wall.” One symptom of this “struggle” is that the extreme-right Alternative für Deutschland claims a quarter of the popular vote in half of the states formerly belonging to the GDR. Unable to get to grips with this phenomenon, the condescending explanations of the establishment echo earlier highhanded dismissals of GDR design: East Germans, whose outlooks have been formed under a totalitarian regime, lack the cultural maturity for democratic thought. This is the contemporary political terrain on which German Design stages its intervention, seeking to overcome social division in a representation of East German culture as part of, and not an opposite to, the German whole. The project is an act of historical recollection with the aim of providing what the curators refer to as an “extension of cultural memory”, an act of political and cultural (re-)enfranchisement: “German Design 1949-1989 ultimately asks readers to reconsider a broadened understanding of German design in the post-war period as a means by which to reconnect the two halves that make up Germany today.”
An advertising image for the Trabant 601 Universal, 1965.
Viewed in this way, the gap between pre-1989 Germany and its present provides the basis for the contemporary relevance of German Design 1949-1989 as historical recollection. It is also this gap, however, that limits what such salutary memories of national unity can hope to achieve. In her contribution to the book’s prologue, Jana Scholze cautions against Ostalgie, nostalgia for the former East. The danger of this longing, Scholze writes, is that it “moves the difficult process of transformation and adaptation exclusively into the sphere of sentimentality and emotional reaction.[…] What the term prevents, or even prohibits, is a constructive critique of the process of reunification as an integration into a preferential and presumed-stronger political, economic, and social system.” This assessment seems entirely correct to me, but I would extend Scholze’s critique of the political limitations of romantic longing to encompass the discourse of historical memory more broadly. The issue here is not so much the mode of attention – whether it is feeling or critique – but where attention is placed. The focal point of historical recollection is an image of the past, not the present, which, indeed, as the site of projection, is structurally excluded from the operation. This, in the words of philosopher Peter Osborne, inevitably “turns memory into a form of forgetting”. What falls into the gap between past and present is the possibility of engaging with the past, not as a healing image, but rather as an ongoing process – one in which history is grasped in a critical mode as a web of forces active and effective within the present. The difference is that between consolation and the possibility of change.
Because it promises remedies to pressing problems without any of the awkwardness of engaging critically with the present, everyone can safely get behind the discourse of historical memory. Perhaps for this reason, historical memory is currently a prevalent, if not institutionally dominant, curatorial trope. Supported by the Federal Ministry for Foreign Affairs, pandemic permitting, the exhibition German Design 1949-1989 will embark on an “ambitious journey around the globe”, during which its appeal for national unity is bound to be understood as clearly as its economically pertinent claims for the continued excellence (and coherence) of German design. Reading again Walter Gropius’s hopes for a Bauhaus that would “one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith”, I am struck less by the extravagance of his utopianism than by the fact that he had faith in the future at all. I have to admit that I’m not sure what kind of practice, or practices, might articulate historical resources of the kind presented by the Bauhaus as part of project to create a future meaningfully different from the present. German Design 1949 – 1989, however, is not that “counterpoint”.
Words Peter Kapos
German Design 1949 – 1989 is published by Vitra Design Museum, price €59.90.
This article was originally published in Disegno #30. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.