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

1. Auflage 2008
ISBN: 978-0-520-25384-1
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, Band 34, 361 Seiten, Trade Paperback, Format (B × H): 154 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 494 g

Reihe: Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism

From the Werkbund to the Bauhaus to Braun, from furniture to automobiles to consumer appliances, twentieth-century industrial design is closely associated with Germany. In this pathbreaking study, Paul Betts brings to light the crucial role that design played in building a progressive West German industrial culture atop the charred remains of the past. The Authority of Everyday Objects details how the postwar period gave rise to a new design culture comprising a sprawling network of diverse interest groups—including the state and industry, architects and designers, consumer groups and museums, as well as publicists and women's organizations—who all identified industrial design as a vital means of economic recovery, social reform, and even moral regeneration. These cultural battles took on heightened importance precisely because the stakes were nothing less than the very shape and significance of West German domestic modernity. Betts tells the rich and far-reaching story of how and why commodity aesthetics became a focal point for fashioning a certain West German cultural identity. This book is situated at the very crossroads of German industry and aesthetics, Cold War politics and international modernism, institutional life and visual culture.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Betts, Paul

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Design Produktdesign, Industriedesign

Inhaltsverzeichnis

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction. Design, the Cold War, and West German Culture
1. Re-Enchanting the Commodity: Nazi Modernism Reconsidered
2. The Conscience of the Nation: The New German Werkbund
3. The Nierentisch Nemesis: The Promise and Peril of Organic Design
4. Design and Its Discontents: The Ulm Institute of Design
5. Design, Liberalism, and the State: The German Design Council
6. Coming in from the Cold: Design and Domesticity
Conclusion. Memory and Materialism: The Return of History as Design

Notes
Bibliography
Index

Über Autor(innen)

Paul Betts is Lecturer in Modern German History at the University of Sussex in Brighton, England. He is the coeditor of Pain and Prosperity: Reconsidering Twentieth-Century German History (2003).