The Journal of Modern Craft ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfmc20 Cleanliness, Clarity – and Craft: Material Politics in German Design, 1919–1939 Freyja Hartzell To cite this article: Freyja Hartzell (2020) Cleanliness, Clarity – and Craft: Material Politics in German Design, 1919–1939, The Journal of Modern Craft, 13:3, 247-269, DOI: 10.1080/17496772.2020.1843787 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/17496772.2020.1843787 Published online: 25 Dec 2020. Submit your article to this journal View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rfmc20 The Journal of – Modern Craft Cleanliness, Clarity Volume 13—Issue 3 and Craft: Material November 2020 pp. 247–269 Politics in German DOI: 10.1080/17496772.2020.1843787 Design, 1919–1939 Reprints available directly from the publishers Freyja Hartzell Photocopying permitted by license only Freyja Hartzell is Assistant Professor of Modern Design, © 2020 Informa UK Limited, Architecture, and Art at Bard Graduate Center in New York City. trading as Taylor & Francis She received her PhD in the History of Art from Yale University and Group her MA in Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture from Bard Graduate Center. She is currently completing her first book, Living Things: Richard Riemerschmid and the Modernist Object, and is engaged in research for a second book on glass, transparency, and modernity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Abstract This essay juxtaposes modern German design with cultural politics from 1919 to 1939, demonstrating the interlocking relationship of craft and industry during this pivotal period. Rejecting conventionally opposing categories of “hand” and “machine,” it reveals instead how material properties and technical processes became charged with political meaning. While the Nazis exploited modern handcraft (like the early, earthy ceramics from the Weimar Bauhaus) in service of their populist nationalism, they also deployed “clean,” progressive, industrial design (like Bauhaus-trained Wilhelm Wagenfeld’s sleek, transparent glassware) as visual and material propaganda, creating the illusion of a modern regime deeply invested in providing German citizens with cutting-edge conveniences in the latest style. Why did the Nazis appropriate an aesthetic rhetoric of transparency for their political agenda, which was so dependent on secrecy, hypocrisy, and opacity? The pages that follow explore how and why modern German design – and transparent glass objects in particular – slipped so easily into enemy hands. The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 13—Issue 3—November 2020, pp. 247–269 248 Material Politics in German Design Freyja Hartzell Keywords: Bauhaus, German design, the mists of the past and the mechanisms of glass, modernism, national socialism, technological reproduction to touch another transparency, Weimar, human hand, their fingers meeting in indexical Wilhelm Wagenfeld comradeship on the vessel’s gritty skin. If ambivalence towards the touch and the trace characterized the development of mod- During the first years of the twentieth cen- ern design in Germany before the First tury, German design reformers struggled to World War, it is the material of clay that perpetuate a sense of handcrafted quality most completely embodies this ambivalence within increasingly industrialized practices of through the complexities of its design and modern design. While the modern wooden manufacture. But after the Great War, chair, for example, became simpler overall – ambivalence towards the vestiges of human cheaper to fabricate thanks to powered tools, presence in design shifted gradually, but con- quicker to assemble by virtue of standardized sistently, towards outright rejection. By the designs, and stripped of what reformers 1930s, this new resistance to touch and dis- “ ”– understood as applied ornament the pat- dain for its evidence – traces – was mounted tern and strokable texture of woodgrain by another material: glass. In his 1933 article, began to stand in for what had been stripped “Experience and Poverty,” German cultural away, and offered a visible, tangible link to “ 1 critic Walter Benjamin writes, [i]t is no coin- vernacular traditions of craft. In the case of cidence that glass is such a hard, smooth – – another material clay this industrial sleight material to which nothing can be fixed. A of hand was perhaps even more deft: at the cold and sober material into the bargain. turn of the century and with the help of Objects made of glass have no ‘aura.’ Glass is, progressive, modern designers, the German in general, the enemy of secrets. It is also the stoneware industry found a way both to enemy of possession.”3 incorporate and to disseminate the singular, Benjamin contrasts this stark, modernist ’ indelible touch of the potter s fingers through image by revisiting one of his pet critiques, technologically advanced, serially produced which centers around Bertolt Brecht’s 2 tablewares. Despite their production in employment of the “trace.”4 Benjamin writes, almost identical multiples, each ceramic vessel “If you enter a bourgeois room in the still delivered an experience of uniqueness, 1880s … there is no spot in which the conveyed directly through the sensation of owner has not left his mark – the ornaments touch: a permanent imprint on the clay sur- on the mantelpiece, the antimacassars on the face, connecting the user not merely to an armchairs, the transparencies in the windows, individual (if nameless) craftsman, but to a the screen in front of the fire. A neat phrase now inaccessible past. Modern techniques of by Brecht helps us out here: ‘Erase the industrial replication, while generally threaten- traces!’”5 To meet this demand, Benjamin ing to sever connections with historical peri- looks to the Bauhaus school –“with its steel” ods and cultural epochs, actually enabled – – and to expressionist science fiction writer for German salt-glazed stoneware – the Paul Scheerbart’s prophetic 1914 work, Glass transfer of history’s traces to the modern Architecture, as models for the creation of household. A human hand reached through modern rooms “in which it is hard to leave The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 13—Issue 3—November 2020, pp. 247–269 Freyja Hartzell Material Politics in German Design 249 Fig 1 Walter Gropius, Bauhaus, Dessau, c.1925. Photograph by author (2003). # 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn. traces.”6 Benjamin invokes Scheerbart’s uto- assigns its anti-bourgeois agency – made it pian vision of a “culture of glass,” which the “enemy of secrets.” It was the essential Scheerbart himself describes as a “new glass material trait of modern glass – its transpar- milieu that will transform humanity utterly … ency – that endowed it with the liberating it remains only to be wished,” he concludes, (and terrifying) power to expose and reveal. “that the new glass-architecture will not Glass, in this context, was political: it was not encounter too many enemies.”7 just an enemy, it had the capacity to make In 1933, then, glass takes a distinct stance. enemies, as well. No pliant surface awaiting human imprint, When Benjamin identified glass as the nor passive object of human use, it becomes “enemy of secrets,” the National Socialist instead a subject – an enemy, not simply of German Workers’ Party had already taken an the domestic dust and grime that Benjamin actively adversarial position towards what associates with nineteenth-century plush-lined was, even then, a modern glass icon rooms, but of bourgeois conservatism itself: (Figure 1). In September of 1932, the personal possession, private conspiracy – Nazi-dominated city council of Dessau had dirty secrets. But neither the coldness, nor forced the closure of Walter Gropius’s the smoothness, nor the resistance of glass – brazenly transparent steel-and-glass Bauhaus the hygienic properties to which Benjamin (along with the progressive workshops that The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 13—Issue 3—November 2020, pp. 247–269 250 Material Politics in German Design Freyja Hartzell Fig 2 Wilhelm Wagenfeld, Kubus storage containers, c.1938. Vereinigte Lausitzer Glaswerke, AG. 1. Museum Associates/LACMA/Art Resource, NY # 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild- Kunst, Bonn. occupied it) through funding cuts. The coun- The same transparency that Benjamin (and cil’s antagonism to the school was driven by the Bauh€ausler) hailed as social and political lib- fear of its ties with Soviet artists and move- eration, the Nazis decried as “un-German,” ments, as well as the school’s overall leanings “Bolshevik,” and “degenerate.”9 Despite their towards the political left. The rights to all pat- real and symbolic opposition to both Bauhaus ents, equipment, and even the Bauhaus organization and building, however, the Nazi trademark were put in the hands of architect government continued throughout the Third Mies van der Rohe, who had in 1930 Reich to support and exhibit the work of sev- assumed directorship from the openly social- eral Bauhaus artists, among them the glass ist Hannes Meyer, director of the Bauhaus, in designer Wilhelm Wagenfeld. In 1938, his turn, since 1928 – the year of Gropius’s Wagenfeld designed a set of stackable food ser- departure. Mies reopened the Bauhaus as a vice and storage cubes, whose manufacture private institution in Berlin in late October of from cheap pressed borosilicate glass enabled 1932, but even the school’s new private sta- them to travel smoothly from table to refriger- tus failed to shield it for long. While it ator in households across the Reich during the appears that Mies did seek accommodation Second World War (Figure 2). But these mass- for a short period with the government in produced Kubus containers bore an ironic regard to the Bauhaus faculty, he finally dis- resemblance to the quintessential Bauhaus solved the school in August of 1933 as a object. Wagenfeld’s cubic vessels, their con- result of Nazi pressure.8 tents laid bare by clear glass walls, mimicked – The Journal of Modern Craft Volume 13—Issue 3—November 2020, pp.