D.he black-and-white photos almost look like something out of a furniture catalog. They show German living rooms in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and it is not immediately possible to tell whether they were taken in East or West Germany. In any case, the tastes of the majority hardly differed at the time, regardless of the social system. Wall units, sofas and rubber trees were important components of living in the Federal Republic and the GDR. At most, the names of the photographers, Sibylle Bergemann and Herlinde Koelbl, should give connoisseurs an initial indication of the origin. But the latter is not supposed to play a major role in the exhibition “German Design 1949–1989”, which was created in a collaboration between the Kunstgewerbemuseum der Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden and the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein.
“It’s about German-German design history at eye level,” says Marion Ackermann, director of the Dresden collections, and she particularly emphasizes eye level. “We did not choose a comparative approach, only the quality is in the foreground.” How much of it there is still to be discovered on the east side is also explained by Mateo Kries, head of the Vitra Design Museum, in which the show is already in spring, but only due to the pandemic briefly, was seen. “To this day, our view of German design between 1949 and 1989 has been shaped by antagonisms between East and West and related clichés,” says Kries.
Retro plastic goods are considered a feature of GDR design, while their counterparts in the old Federal Republic are seen as an expression of the functionalist aesthetics of the Ulm School. But, as is so often the case, the reality is more complex here. The thirtieth anniversary of reunification last year made him, whose house inevitably houses a very westernized collection, aware of how little consideration has been given to the common origins of the designers in East and West.
The conditions in the East were undoubtedly more difficult, and yet in the GDR pioneering shaping or shaping emerged, as they said at the time – in both parts of Germany. How could it be otherwise, since the common origins are largely the Bauhaus and the German Werkbund, whose graduates taught and worked in both German states after the war. An example of this is the stacking jug designed by Margarete Jahny in 1950 at the University of Fine Arts in Dresden, from which a few years later, together with Erich Müller, the catering tableware series “Rationell” was created, which was used throughout the GDR and in the West “TC 100” hotel stacking dishes with a very similar appearance, developed by Hans Roericht in the 1950s, which in turn was very widespread in the Federal Republic of Germany.
Also produced for the West German market
The organizers of the exhibition have compiled around four hundred cleverly chosen exhibits from four decades, which they present in three chronological thematic areas: the years after the war, the time after the building of the Berlin Wall and the 1980s as a formative phase in both countries of protest, crisis and the search for Alternatives. Starting with the years of reconstruction, they show how design institutions and universities of design (re) opened in East and West, traditional companies like Jenaer Glas now established themselves at two locations (in this case Jena and Mainz) and, inspired by the Legacy of pre-war modernism, now producing similar products on both sides of the border. They were all united by the desire to help build a new society with useful and practically designed everyday objects. You can see furniture, radios, crockery, which can only be identified as being of East or West German origin by means of discreet notices.
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