The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design

Introduction. Design, the Cold War, and West German Culture

INTRODUCTION Design, the Cold War, and West German Culture Even the humblest material artefact, which is the product and symbol of a particular civilization, is an emissary of the culture out of which it comes. T. S. Eliot, Notes Toward the Definition of Culture Philip Rosenthal, the longtime director of the world-renowned design firm Rosenthal AG and then-president of the German Design Council, offered the following comment in a 1978 interview about the cultural importance of West German industrial design: “If we consider what Bauhaus achievements and Braun design policies have done to offset the image abroad of the ‘despised German’ bent on war and economic power with that of the ‘good German,’ then we should enlist more monies and manpower to help continue this cultural foreign policy, especially since everyone already knows Goethe and Mozart.”1 At first glance, such an opinion may seem nothing more than unmeasured enthusiasm from a well-known entrepreneur and design publicist interested in pitching his country’s wares. Never mind that Mozart was Austrian, nor need one linger over what Rosenthal meant by “everyone already knows” these great luminaries past. What is so striking about the passage is his casual assumption about the elective affinity of industrial design and the rehabilitation of the “good German.” Rosenthal’s remark prompts several questions: What exactly did industrial design have to do with West Germany’s “cultural foreign policy”? What was so special about the modernist idioms of Bauhaus and Braun that they acquired such transformative cultural power? Or, more broadly, what were the imagined connections among commodity styling, cultural progress, and national identity? 1 This book is an attempt to tackle these questions. It seeks to uncover how and why industrial design emerged as a primary site for fronting a new West German cultural order. Rosenthal was by no means alone in his conviction about the political windfall of design. Similar views were shared by many of his generation, particularly among those West Germans involved in the business of building a shiny new industrial culture atop the charred remains of the past. To the extent that modern design was seen as practically synonymous with starting afresh, this project went far beyond simply converting design into lucrative export revenues. Indeed , the postwar period gave rise to a unique West German “design culture ” comprising a vast network of diverse interests, including the state and industry, architects and designers, consumer groups and museums, and educators and women’s organizations. What united them all was the identification of design as a vital means of domestic recovery, cultural reform, and even moral regeneration. The soaring idealism surrounding design mainly derived from its “everydayness” and thus its ability to affect the daily lives of all West Germans. Poised at the crossroads of commerce and culture, of industry and aesthetics, as well as of production and consumption, industrial design played host to a panoply of dreams about what a new and progressive West German material culture might look like. To be clear, this study hardly pretends to cover all of the industrial design of the period. It does not deal directly with urban planning, residential architecture, or vehicle design; nor does it take on postwar arts and crafts, clothing, advertising, or graphic design. It focuses instead on everyday household objects—lamps, china, glassware, consumer electronics, and furniture. But unlike other design studies, this book is no detailed monograph on any one of these object groups. Of uppermost concern here is why these commonplace wares assumed such heightened cultural significance in the 1950s. For many observers, it almost goes without saying that West Germany is linked with high-quality design goods—be they automobiles, audiovisual equipment, lighting, glassware, furniture, or kitchen appliances. But relatively little attention has been paid to the role of these goods in general cultural history.2 After all, West German culture is usually associated with the revival of literature, painting, film, architecture , music, and theater after the war. Even the most cursory glance through the vast historiography on post-1945 German culture indicates the extent to which design—not unlike kindred second-class subdisciplines such as fashion, television, pop music, and advertising—has been routinely ignored. Only recently have scholars begun to acknowledge that 2 Introduction if the 1950s and 1960s marked the genuine emergence of broadly based consumer cultures, then the history of the so-called low arts as both cause...