- Cold War Kitchen: Americanization, Technology, and European Users
The 1959 kitchen debate between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev is the point of departure of this important collection of essays. Editors Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann tell us that this exchange was not what has often been claimed, i.e., the opening salvo in a battle over whether the American or Soviet model could best satisfy the needs and desires of consumers, a battle whose outcome was supposedly a foregone conclusion from the start. By putting an American model home on display in Moscow in 1959, U.S. business and political leaders as well as private American citizens (according to Cristina Carbone) hoped to counter Soviet claims of economic and technological superiority, based on the launching of Sputnik and Soviet industrial might. The shift of East–West rivalry from production to consumption was genuinely advantageous for the United States. However, what has been forgotten are the European and (at least partially) socialist roots of the modern kitchen as well as European alternatives to the American "technokitchen."
The kitchen had been a central focus of reformist zeal in Europe and the United States since the nineteenth century but particularly the 1920s. Science was brought to bear in attempts to make housework more rational and therefore less burdensome for women, who increasingly worked outside the home. A marriage of Taylorist visions [End Page 421] of an efficient kitchen and the functionalism of modern architecture, the modern kitchen came to full fruition in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, when socialist-influenced welfare states took on the responsibility of alleviating the miserable housing situation of the working class. The "Frankfurt kitchen" of socialist architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky (discussed by Martina Heßler in Chapter 7) was incorporated into public housing in pre-Nazi Germany and proved to be quite influential in Northern and Western Europe. The kitchen also played a central role in government attempts to provide decent housing after the deprivations of the Second World War.
Rejecting the German and socialist roots of the modern European kitchen, Western Europeans longed to have an American kitchen after 1945. And Americans presented themselves abroad as the representatives of modernism par excellence. However, the reality was that most European kitchens thought to be American were in fact the descendents of the Frankfurt kitchen and other European models. The British, discussed in Chapter 10 by Julian Holder, enthusiastically embraced what they considered the "American kitchens" (and bathrooms) built into the prefabricated houses built for returning war veterans. However, the kitchens' Taylorist design owed much to the Frankfurt kitchen. Similar small but efficient kitchens were to be found in public housing (a very large segment of housing in the post-war period) across Northern Europe. These kitchens differed profoundly from futuristic American kitchens displayed across Europe (like the "atomic kitchen" in Irene Cieraad's chapter), large kitchens filled with appliances, with built-in electric stoves and large refrigerators. The reality of kitchens in mass housing built after the war in the United States was much more austere, as the kitchens in Levittown houses attest.
The vitality of the European kitchen as an alternative model was rooted in the "consumption junction," a concept formulated by Ruth Schwarz Cohen, meaning a realm in which consumers influenced the development of technologies. Many of the "mediators" who claimed to represent the interests of consumers—for instance, home economists and housewives' representatives on government commissions—were women. In Germany, architects had considerable power to do what they wanted, but residents rebelled against modernist asceticism by tearing down walls, filling kitchens with knick knacks, and even eating or sleeping in kitchens (considered a horror by architects). A sort of "user emancipation" (p. 225) took place in the Netherlands, according to Liesbeth Bervoets. Housewives' representatives and women in government advisory positions had a good deal of input into the design of kitchens for public housing. They gave not only women but also foreigners and single people a voice. [End Page 422] The...