AA chair can also write history. Even if it arose in the workers’ and farmers’ state. 33 years of change have just been celebrated and it has once again been noted that the East is still disadvantaged in many ways. This also applies to its design, which is just as unknown (not only in the West) as its key designers. Who knows Horst Heyder, one of the most important furniture designers in the GDR? He lived to see the fall of the Berlin Wall and died in 2000. Heyder designed a chair that, produced millions of times, can still be found in many East German households today: the EW 1192.
EW stands for the Waldheim design office (of the GDR furniture industry), which Heyder headed for many years. Not only was furniture designed there, including “special projects” such as those for the Berlin Palace of the Republic. Furniture was also standardized. An interview that Heyder gave in 1979 to the only specialist magazine for industrial design in the GDR, “form + funktion”, when the EW had existed for 25 years, is revealing.
The “daring seating furniture”
As late as 1960, there were around 1,300 different types of upholstered furniture and 300 chair models in the GDR, “an enormous size that filled the market, but did not meet the real needs of the population, because the products only differed in minor differences in the details – and the national economy was put under unnecessary strain.” That had to be changed, which explains, among other things, the success of his EW 1192. Because, says Heyder: What new can you bring to a chair? “Four legs, sometimes just a support, back and seat surfaces, also armrests, that’s all.”
One person who knows a lot about chairs is Jacob Strobel. He is a trained carpenter, like Horst Heyder, and also a designer. Strobel, who was born in Würzburg in 1978, is also a professor of wood design at the Faculty of Applied Arts in Schneeberg in the Erzgebirgskreis in Saxony. Strobel also came across the EW 1192 by chance at a flea market. Suddenly he saw the “daring seating furniture” everywhere.
Now he and his wife Martha have dedicated an exhibition to “probably the most popular, but certainly most common kitchen chair in the GDR”. Part of it are stories and portraits of current users of the chair. Many of them responded to an article in the Chemnitz “Freie Presse” when their design classic, which had previously received little attention, was presented in the newspaper.
Klaus Peter Schröter also shares his memories in the exhibition. He was once a carpenter, later a master craftsman and production manager at the VEB Stuhlfabrik Benneckenstein in the Harz district in what is now Saxony-Anhalt. There he helped set up the production of the EW 1192 and even rationalized it, in keeping with the spirit of the GDR regime. “In the heyday, we made 300 chairs a day,” says Schröter.
After the fall of the Wall, he and a partner took over one of the production sites and founded the Benneckenstein chair factory, which he sold in 2021. Today he no longer gives the EW 1192, which he sees as a design classic, a chance. Too complex to produce, demand too low. The exhibition in the German Chair Making Museum Rabenau in Saxony also addresses this. “Shaping the future” is the name of the part of the show, which also deals with prototypes and a potential new edition.
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