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4. Design and Its Discontents: The Ulm Institute of Design
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CHAPTER FOUR Design and Its Discontents The Ulm Institute of Design In the larger narrative of twentieth-century German design, the Ulm Institute of Design (Hochschule für Gestaltung) continues to enjoy a powerful status. Given both its ambitious design program and its star-studded roster of instructors, which included not only the principal cast of Inge Scholl, Otl Aicher, Max Bill, and Tomás Maldonado, but also highpro file cultural figures such as the poet and critic Hans Magnus Enzensberger , the writer Martin Walser, and the filmmaker Alexander Kluge, it was obvious that this was no ordinary design school. Its well-publicized christening as the “New Bauhaus” in 1955 illustrated the extent to which the Ulm Institute was born of noble pedigree. Indeed, both the American High Command and the West German government jointly underwrote the Ulm project in an effort to revive the once-demonized heritage of Bauhaus Modernism as a guiding polestar of West German culture. For this reason the Ulm school has been celebrated in the annals of cultural history as a blessed aerie of heroic modernism perched high above the otherwise crass commercialism and cultural reaction that supposedly dominated postwar life and society below.1 But there has been surprisingly little interest in grounding the design school’s colorful history within a wider context. Most of the attention has instead been directed toward recounting the doctrinal schisms and palace revolutions of the school’s tumultuous if illustrious career. While some of these chroniclers have produced impressive documentary 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 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 antifascism, modern design , and social reform so pronounced or so seriously investigated. In particular, I will explore how the school devised a new science of design based on sociology, semiotics, and political engagement; differentiated its design philosophy from the perceived dangers of both the Werkbund and Nierentisch “perversions”; and rethought the social meaning of both aesthetics and design in modern industrial society. Its story thus neatly exposes the contradictions attending the larger postfascist renegotiation of aesthetics and politics. Antifascism and the “Cartesian Cloister” From the very outset, the Ulm project was shaped by a soaring vision of cultural regeneration and political reform. The original inspiration for the institute came from Inge Scholl, who wanted to establish a new school of democratic education in honor of her brother and sister, Hans and Sophie Scholl, both of whom were killed in 1943 as members of the antiNazi “White Rose” resistance group.3 In 1946, together with a fellow Nazi resister, the graphic artist Otl Aicher, Scholl founded a new community college (Volkshochschule) in the small south German town of Ulm, dedicated to preserving the resistance spirit of her slain siblings.4 That her father, Robert Scholl, had been installed as Ulm’s provisional mayor by the American military command in June 1945 greatly helped her gain of- ficial support for the school proposal. The Ulm college was, however, also part of a widespread postwar movement to create new reform-oriented community colleges throughout Germany.5 Devoted to the cause of radical political reform and progressive pedagogy, Scholl and Aicher’s school was to be a center of “true democracy” aimed at eradicating German nationalism and militarism by providing postwar youth with badly needed cultural ideals and moral direction.6 Convinced that the so-called German catastrophe was a direct result of “false thinking” and “narrowminded overspecialization,” the founders wished to develop a new type of humanist education based on “the practical, the honest, and the true.”7 Like other postwar reformers, Scholl and Aicher thought this would be the best way to usher in “the dawning of a new culture” of democratic socialism. But theirs was less a “mission of the propertyless” than an attempt to rehabilitate a denationalized German Kultur as an antidote 140 Chapter Four [54.167.52.238] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:36 GMT) against the “violent powers” of technology and Zivilisation.8 For Scholl, the school was designed to reconcile the spheres of technological civilization and German culture, where Kultur itself was to be transformed from the...