From Competition to Cooperation

This chapter looks at the influence of Cold War diplomacy on German design. Within the bipolarity of the Cold War, the political significance of aesthetics in everyday objects was well established. Taking the focus of the superpowers to interrogate the specifically German cultural politics behind the aestheticization of separate identities—proletarian in the East and cosmopolitan in the West—highlights German interests in the global Cold War. It is in the operationalization of industrial design for diplomatic purposes, in which economic culture and foreign policy directly connect. In order to show how material culture emerged as a recognizable language in the intra-German relationship and what functions it served, this chapter integrates the material with the diplomatic ambitions of the two German states. In this way, East and West German cultural-political strategies that sought to negotiate a German-German modus vivendi through the medium of domestic culture can be connected to the complex history of Cold War German diplomacy within the framework of international industrial design exhibitions, international design organizations, and direct German-German cultural exchanges. At the center stands the question of how both Germanys turned a competitive situation, the aestheticization of their respective political orders, into a diplomatic tool for rapprochement.

Introduction

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the history presented in this book. As the Introduction states, the text seeks to offer a narrative that, as historian Konrad Jarausch describes, “break[s] out of the strait-jacket of parallel stories” and instead it hopes to look at mutual influence and internal relationships without losing sight of ideological differences. Addressing the Cold War from the German perspective, a focus on trade and design offers a detailed look at instances of exchange and even cooperation in Europe across the Cold War divide.

Form Follows Function

This chapter looks at immediate postwar economic culture in both East and West Germany. It starts by looking at German modoernism in the postwar period. Historical scholarship on German industrial design has established that aesthetics did not change very much from 1925 to 1965. The chapter looks then at the different developments in culture and aesthetics in the East compared to the West. It considers the rise and crisis of functionalism and how German design reacted to this.

Intra-German Trade and the Aesthetic Dialectic of European Integration

This chapter looks at the clashes when East meets West as they deal with the postwar change of economic policy from reconstruction to trade. This change pitted the two economic systems directly against each other in a competition for economic superiority. At the same time the interconnected economic infrastructure glossed over the Cold War division. This chapter presents an examination of West German attempts at balancing European integration with the German Question to bring into focus aesthetic convergence of East and West German design in the Mittelstand furniture industry.

Conclusion

The Conclusion looks towards the end of the period in this book's discussion, the end of the 1980s. By the late 1980s,the dynamics of German-German economic competition in the realm of living standards had created an unsustainable situation for the GDR. The high costs of the promised socialist consumer society under Honecker's Unity of Economic and Social Policy program had incurred mounting debts, a strategy that relied on short-term borrowing from the West to patch holes in domestic consumer good production. This entanglement with the Federal Republic opened up the possibility of rethinking the German-German relationship.

Conservative Modernity

This chapter focuses on the role of functionalism on living space in East and West Germany. Implementation of modernization in everyday life happened gradually in the postwar German countries and there were a host of reasons for this. Thee analysis in this chapter suggests that functionalist discourse diffused German society, yet not with the consistency that the disciples of modernism would have liked. It was a conservative modernity that showed widespread awareness of the right materials, the wrong embellishments, and the need for the emotional comfort of traditions and social relations. The population accepted the practicality of functionalism's clear lines and rectangular shapes for small apartments. However, it did not accept the emotional emptiness of the functionalist extreme.

Producing Modern German Homes

This chapter considers the idea of nation branding. The term nation branding describes a branding effort at the national level that substantially follows the logics that develop the specific properties of a product brand. Such branding evolved in the postwar period in Germany from simply harnessing firm reputation to employing symbolic values, such as cultural or historical factors. On both sides, coherent communication was crucial for the success of branding. To reinvigorate the “Made in Germany” brand, a network of designers and producers created a narrative of political signifcance around their products. Similar to a product brand, the products of national domestic culture were intended to offer both German populations a sense of identity as well as promote their cultural achievements abroad.