Designing Modern Germany Jeremy Aynsley

DESIGNING MODERN GERMANY JEREMY AYNSLEY Designing Modern Germany Designing Modern Germany Jeremy Aynsley reaktion books For Sarah Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33 Great Sutton Street London ec1v 0dx, uk www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2009 Copyright © Jeremy Aynsley 2009 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in China by C&C Offset Printing Co., Ltd British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Aynsley, Jeremy Designing modern Germany 1. Design – Germany – History – 20th century I. Title 745.4’0943’0904 isbn: 978 1 86189 401 4 Contents Introduction: The Culture of Design in Germany 7 1 Design Ideals, Design Reform, Design Professions, 1870–1914 25 2 Experiment and Tradition in Design, 1917–33 69 3 Politics and Design: Reaction and Consolidation, 1933–45 113 4 Reconstruction and the Tale of Two Germanys, 1945–75 145 5 Reunification: Design in a Global Context, 1975–2005 187 Conclusion 222 References 225 Select Bibliography 238 Acknowledgements 245 Photo Acknowledgements 246 Index 247 Introduction: The Culture of Design in Germany Reference to design in Germany can evoke strong, contrasting and even contradictory images. Design is understandably one of the leading cultural contributions for which the country has a deserved reputation. When we use the term ‘German design’, however, we must do so with caution. Immediately we need to qualify what we mean: when, where, who or what? To construct a history of the culture of design by nation is a naturally com- plex and to some extent artificial process for any country and all the more so for one with so many conflicting ideas of national identity. In particular, Germany had a turbulent political history during the twentieth century, encompassing two world wars and the ideological division into the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Democratic Republic in the second half of the century. National identities can depend on stereotype, and on one level at least, Germany and its design traditions have been associated with a tendency towards organization, system and planning – ‘rectangular and reliable’ as one recent commentator suggested.1 This is only reinforced if we contrast our immediate reactions to the term ‘German design’ to those to ‘Italian design’, with its hallmarks of flair, culture and style, or ‘Scandinavian design’, with its Ernst Böhm, cover design associations with the democratic, ergonomic and natural. At a popular level, for Die Künstlerische Formgebung des Reichs such German dependence on the reliability of technology was parodied for a (The Artistic Design of British audience in the television advertising campaign to promote Audi cars the Reich), published by Dr Erwin Redslob, during the 1980s and ’90s under the strap-line ‘Vorsprung durch Technik’ – the State Art Minister advancement through technology. In this much remarked upon series, (Reichskunstwart) in 1926. The book considered the emphasis was placed on the highly developed ‘German’ technical strengths design of flags, currency, of the company’s reputation, leaving other aspects of design, among them postage stamps and all 2 manner of official works. styling, unmentioned. 7 Two maps of Germany from 1937 and 1957 show the changing borders of the country before . But perhaps this stress on technology and modern design should be qualified. For if, on the one hand, Germany certainly has indeed been a site of a continuing and serious engagement with the implications of Modernism for design and its rationalist concepts of providing a well-considered envi- ronment for the benefit of a large proportion of the population, on the other hand, at significant moments in the country’s history, anti-modern senti- ments and forces have come to the fore, challenging the idea that continued progress towards a modern ideal could be achieved or should indeed be the ultimate goal. Most notably, on the coming to power of the Third Reich in the early 1930s, at the level of rhetoric at least, the ‘rectangular and reliable’, as we shall see, were perceived to be insufficient, if not at times antithetical to the National Socialists’ extreme promotion of the ‘German’ soul. And in a rather different way, in the 1980s, another reaction against the rational, problem-solving version of design came under duress in the attempt to sus- tain the German Democratic Republic. The relatively sudden collapse of the gdr suggested that ordinary people’s resistance to a political regime could be expressed by, among other things, consumer forces, driven in part by desire and ordinary pleasure in material goods. In so doing, they overthrew the planned, rational and ordered society that its leaders professed to have achieved. As this book explores, throughout the century, even within Modernist circles, there were those who argued against this too-easy dichotomy – stressing that the rational should be balanced by the spiritual, the machine-made by the handmade, and the artificial by the natural. 8 Designing Modern Germany . and after the Second World War. The black zone shows the Federal Republic of Germany, the vertical striped zone indicates the German Democratic Republic with Berlin as an island within it. Other zones show parts of Poland and East Prussia that ceased to be German territory at the end of the war. The particular character of German design, its tendencies and dis- courses, is the extended subject of this book. By way of premise, we can suggest that, for many, Germany is a country associated with leading the way in terms of promoting a modern understanding of the word ‘design’. For although the English word ‘design’ only entered the German language in the post-war period, when it became adopted as part of a recognized international terminology for many branches of the field (as in Grafikdesign or Industriedesign), design had been recognized as an important cultural, industrial and commercial factor much earlier on. The historical terminology was varied in the German language, but within the period covered by this book, it evolved from Kunstgewerbe (Arts and Crafts), as informed by William Morris and the generation of the 1880s, as considered in chapter One, to Gestaltung (shaping) and Formgebung (form-giving) of the 1920s, discussed in chapter Three, and eventually to ‘Design’.3 As has been commented, the concept of design acknowledges a level of self-consciousness in the relationship between people and things. At its most basic, design involves the arrangement of everyday life – and in this sense, anyone can be said to be a designer, and it is also possible to write about design before ‘design’, or at least without professional design.4 The emphasis of this study, however, is on the history of a specialist activity called design, very often taught in art and design schools, and practised by specialists known as ‘designers’ who develop ideas and products, helping to shape and form them, often in relation to the manufacturer and potential Introduction: The Culture of Design in Germany 9 retailer, and sometimes also the consumer. As used to describe a self-con- scious discipline, this understanding of the word has a relatively recent history: many of the structures that shape design – the dedicated schools, museums, specialist publications and organizations – were in fact formed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and were symptomatic of the particular organization of culture under a democracy, which is still dominant today. Although histories of design need not only be about designers, German design history is peppered with a number of ‘stars’ – what Nikolaus Pevsner, one of the first to write a design history of early modern design, called ‘pioneers’ in his extremely influential study of 1936, Pioneers of the Modern Movement from William Morris to Walter Gropius (later published as Pioneers of Modern Design. In this account, Pevsner identified figures from the first generation of Arts and Crafts reformers who were influential in defining how design might be conceived in the 1880s and ’90s. Pevsner suggested that many of the ideas developed in Belgium, Britain and France, and reached their culmination immediately after the First World War in Germany, since the country’s particular circumstances of relatively late industrialization and state formation after 1870 allowed it to become an important seedbed for design innovation. Of the famous architect and director of the Bauhaus, Pevsner wrote: Gropius regards himself as a follower of Ruskin and Morris, of van de Velde and of the Werkbund. So the circle is complete. The history of artistic theory between 1890 and the First World War proves the assertion on which the present work is based, namely, that the phase between Morris and Gropius is an historical unit. Morris laid the foundation of the modern style; with Gropius its character was ulti- mately determined.5 Along with the individual German designers who have claimed the world stage over the past century – among others Peter Behrens, Marianne Brandt, Bruno Paul, Wilhelm Wagenfeld, Dieter Rams, Jil Sander and Ingo Maurer – a sense of German design culture needs to be built up by looking at cultural institutions and the methods by which design was defined, taught, promoted and exhibited. In the late twentieth century dis- cussion within the design press, for example, stressed how Germany seemed consciously to choose not to be a ‘land of stars’.6 Unlike the United States and other mature industrial cultures, the country seemed to resist promotion of its designers as celebrity individuals; its strength lay rather 10 Designing Modern Germany in a long-standing tradition of considering design professionalism, educa- tion and philosophy seriously and with continuity. This serious promotion of design spans the entire twentieth century at least.

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