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Technology and Culture 43.1 (2002) 73-99



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A Socialist Consumption Junction
Debating the Mechanization of Housework in East Germany, 1956-1957

Karin Zachmann

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"The first, difficult postwar years have been overcome, the years in which people bought clothing simply to have something to wear, without too much consideration of appearances, the years in which people were glad to possess a few cups and plates of varied origin. The times have passed in which windows were hung with old air-raid curtains and people were satisfied with furniture put together after any fashion with a few pieces of wood. Today's consumer buys clothing, household goods, and other items primarily in order to decorate himself and his home." 1 Thus wrote the journalist Hans Aust in the first issue of Form und Zweck (Form and purpose), a journal published by the Institute for Applied Art in East Berlin, commenting on the tremendous popular success of a 1956 exhibition on consumer goods at the institute. Visitors responded excitedly to the designs of the institute artists. Their reaction marked a change in East Germany, as the effects of the dawn of consumer society in Western Europe began to be felt on the other side of the Iron Curtain. 2 Ten years after the end of the Second [End Page 73] World War, the people of the German Democratic Republic had overcome the extreme deprivation of the immediate postwar years. Now they set out to fulfill other desires.

Visitors were deeply frustrated when they learned that the beautifully designed goods on display at the exhibition were not available in shops, and they conveyed their displeasure in the visitor's book. One entry read:

This and similar exhibitions that the Institute for Applied Art has presented over the years appear to be based on the honest intention of achieving or contributing to a transformation away from the production of kitsch and of sensitizing the public to tasteful and elegantly designed furnishings and other everyday objects. Experience shows, however, that only one success has been achieved. . . . namely, to arouse the indignation of the visitors to this exhibition, who view the exhibition as a diversionary tactic since industry does not allow itself to be influenced in the slightest in its production of kitsch, and there is no responsible institution in sight to induce the formation of good taste in industry. As a result, raw materials and working hours continue to be wasted on goods that are not acceptable and whose production damages our economy--quite apart from the fact that these hideous objects on sale in the shops create an inferior impression of the cultural level of the manufacturers and buyers. 3

The author of this entry called attention to the conflictual relationship of producers and users. That he talked about waste in the national economy instead of losses by individual manufacturers points to the system-specific context of that conflict. In a nationalized economy, a central planning office decided the allocation of resources. The responsibility for producing badly designed or poorly made goods thus lay not with individual manufacturers but with the central planners. Since resources were allocated centrally but decisions about consumption were made by individuals, communication among planners, producers, retailers, and users became a crucial problem for the smooth functioning of the economy.

The issue highlighted by that visitor to the Institute for Applied Art in 1956 has become central to the work of historians of technology, who no longer restrict their attention to production but place the use of technology on the research agenda as well. Contextualizing technology, they have begun to make users' agency in technological change an assumption, raising questions concerning the institutions that mediate between producers [End Page 74] and users and about the interaction of production and consumption in different historical and political contexts.

A number of historians have tackled these questions in varying ways. Ruth Schwartz Cowan focused on the consumption junction, which she defined as "the place and the time at which the consumer makes choices between competing technologies...

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