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

Paul Betts traces shifts in the relationship between people and artifacts in postwar Germany. Although he is only marginally concerned with technology, this relationship is an overarching question for historians of technology, and they may find ideas about problems with which they are grappling as well. In seeking to uncover the connections between styling and national identity, Betts assigns a leading role to the industrial designer, who mediates between commerce and culture, industry and aesthetics, production and consumption. The task of imbuing objects with meaning makes the designer not only a choreographer of the interaction between people and artifacts, but also a philosopher on the material substratum of culture.

Betts's underlying theme concerns the ways in which designers from all political camps conceptualized the aesthetics of everyday objects as means of domestic recovery, cultural reform, and moral regeneration. To this end, he has studied a great range of material and has organized his narrative around the popular Nierentisch design world of the 1950s and an inspection of the domestic sphere. But his first chapter goes back into the Nazi period. Looking at the agendas of three key design organizations—the German Werkbund, Albert Speer's Beauty of Labor Bureau, and the "Art Service"—Betts shows how everyday wares that were designed in a softened Bauhaus modernism and thus differed only slightly from the avant-garde Weimar products attained a completely different meaning. Robbed of the Bauhaus dream of social justice, these objects were reconceptualized as markers of belonging to the racially defined "people's community." What changed was not so much actual design, but rather the purpose of aesthetics. It was now deployed to supplant rational politics of civic participation with emotional and sensual approval of a dictatorship.

Just as the Nazis had perverted the aesthetics of functionalism and robbed the Werkbund of classic concepts such as "quality" or "joy of work," the postwar reconstitution of a liberal culture of industrial design entailed more than a mere revival of the Weimar tradition. In his second chapter, Betts shows how the Werkbund reorganized its identity. Abandoning both its pure utility-value functionalism of the 1920s and the cozy functionalism of the Nazi period, the Werkbund turned now towards a spiritual modern design serving truth, beauty, and morality. The "denazification" of design through spiritualization was seemingly to function in the same way as the denazification of science by its "humanization." For Werkbund designers, good form as the key concept of spiritual functionalism set it apart from Nazi "irrationalism," but also from American commercialism.

The moral or spiritual functionalism of good form was, however, much less popular than the Nierentisch design. In his third chapter, Betts derives the success of Nierentisch modernism from its opposition to functionalism. Its fresh lines and bright colors not only captured the mood of the "economic miracle," they also domesticated abstract expressionism. Just as the reproduction of ancient and classicist motives on Wedgewood vases and Dresden china cups launched the era of bourgeois consumption, the ubiquity of abstract art as everyday design wares now paved the way into the era of mass consumption.

Despite the popularity of the antifunctional Nierentisch modernism, however, it was highly contested as a symbol of consumer hedonism. Some of the most influential critics were representatives of a third West German design caste whose flagship was the Institute of Design in Ulm, to which Betts devotes his fourth chapter. Founded with the help of the American High Command, it was dedicated to reviving the Bauhaus tradition and sought a scientification of design based on a semiotic theory of aesthetics. The main aim was to reconceptualize aesthetic production in order to pay tribute to "technical civilization," with its ability to copy, reproduce, diffuse, and thereby disembody the cultural artifact. The rational approach to a scientistic design theory still entailed an ethical dimension, since it aimed at dethroning market research as a commercially driven epistemology...